Editor Greg Blackman Makes a Career Change
Greg Blackman, Editor of Imaging and Machine Vision Europe, Electro Optics and Laser Systems Europe, has announced that he will be leaving the industry after nearly 15 years, to focus on a career in horticulture.
Publishing house Europa Science are yet to name a replacement for Greg, but we know he will be missed by several members of the industry.
We wish Greg the best of luck in his new career.
A Napier Webinar: Developing a Marketing Strategy for Growth: Planning for 2023
Strategy development is the foundation of great campaigns, but it can be difficult to connect your marketing strategy to your planning and execution, ensuring you focus your resources on activities that deliver results and drive growth, eliminating the unnecessary and ineffective.
Watch our on-demand webinar 'Developing a Marketing Strategy for Growth: Planning for 2023', and discover:
- How to align your marketing strategy and business goals
- Tools to analyse the situation and help you plan
- Why you need to understand the audience
- Creating a framework for measurement
- How to prioritize when budget is limited
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Developing a Marketing Strategy for Growth: Planning for 2023’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Good afternoon, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. Today I'm going to be talking about developing a marketing strategy for growth. So this is really a webinar to talk about how you can start planning for next year for 2023. And explain what we can do, and how we can approach creating and delivering a webinar. So, the first thing to do is to explain what the objective is. And for us today, the objective is going to be to help you create a better, more effective marketing plan for next year. And I think you know, as you see by the picture, we're all used to the the, the plans that sit at the bottom of a pile, they get rid of the start of the year, at the end of the year, they only get produced, just so you can have a look and see what you want to write for the year coming up. So what we want to do is produce a plan that's going to be useful, something that you're actually going to get benefit from, and you'll be using and looking at throughout the year. So, quick overview of our agenda. I mean, the first thing is planning is never perfect. We'll talk about you know, some of the reasons why planning actually is so difficult. We'll discuss the biggest mistakes people make. And then we'll talk about models and processes. And really, I think it's about understanding processes as the way to improve your planning. And we'll talk about why processes are important. And how you can create a process that really works. Well put it all together, explain how to build a marketing plan, using a funnel model that we use a lot at Napier. And at the end, I'll invite you to ask some questions. So if you do have questions that you think of as we go through the presentation, please do just put them directly into the chat. And then what we'll do is we'll take a look at the chat at the end of the presentation. And we'll take any of your questions and answer them then.
So as we go through, please ask questions in the chat. So planning isn't perfect, I think it was Mike Tyson, who said everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. And planning really is a challenge. There's lots of reasons for this. I mean, you know, some of them are your budget is going to be fixed by a lot of factors, you know, quite often by the finance team. And then you'll have your boss who might be the VP of Sales and Marketing come along, unless the number of demands that marketing has got to you know, achieve certain results that are completely impossible within the budget, or at least feel impossible at the time. So you've got this issue that you don't necessarily have control the budget, you don't necessarily have control of the high level goals. So it's really tough to create a plan when you've got that little level of control. But what we can do is we can implement a good planning process that will take what we've got the high level goals that we have to achieve, and also the budget and the constraints we have to work within, and will let us build a campaign that is gonna produce the best possible results at the end of the day, that's really what we want to do is achieve the best possible results from our campaign. Now, I think some of you listening to the webinar, or clients will know that I'm actually an engineer, I love process. And I think you know, a lot of people when they start marketing plans, they try and look for, you know, marketing plan, templates and things like that. That's not necessarily the best way to do it, I think the best way to do it is to have a sequence of steps, you follow that then generate the plan. So process is really, really important. And if we look at, you know, different processes, hopefully you'll see how they can actually help you not only generate a really effective and comprehensive marketing plan, but also generate better strategies and better tactics. And ultimately, those are the foundations on which your marketing plan is going to be built. There's certainly not one right way to plan campaigns, though.
So as I say, we've got some approaches that we'd like to talk about. But there are no right ways. If you look at, you know, the Google search of steps to create a marketing plan. I love this. The suggested searches are what are the seven steps? What are the 10 steps? What are the five steps? What are the six steps? Nobody can agree on? How many steps are even Google in terms of the searches. So there's no magic number of steps. There's actually no magic answer in terms of the best process. But there is some academic research that actually is really useful to see that will help you understand how to build plans, and the kind of a sequence you need to go for But of course, having said there's no right way to build a marketing plan, there are wrong ways. And interestingly, if you search for marketing plan mistakes, Google has over 56 million matches. So one of the things we're going to try and do with this webinar is we're going to try to make sure that we're going to help you avoid making those marketing mistakes, when you're building your plan. And the biggest mistake, the thing that we see an awful lot of is not thinking strategically, it's really common. And the reason is, it's really easy to jump straight into what we're going to do, rather than actually having, you know, a time to think about where we are, what the situation is, and what we want to try and achieve. So we quite often see people doing, you know, little or no situation analysis, perhaps not looking into the audiences they're trying to target. And quite often, it's because people just want to get these numbers done and get them back to finance. And so the budgets done.
And so you end up effectively doing what you did last year, plus a couple of changes. Now, we're not suggesting you throw everything away from previous years. But certainly just assuming that last year was the right answer is probably not the best thing to do. And that's particularly the case, because last year, probably you did the same as the previous year and the previous year, it's it's mistakes that are being compounded that you need to address. And so what you need to do is put work in upfront before you actually jump into developing what you're going to do. And that is difficult. I mean, I get that, you know, as we approach the end of the year, we're looking to planning now, or maybe you're looking you know, in January and February to plan for a April to March financial year, it's hard to find the time to put that effort in. But if you can put the time in, it definitely makes the rest of the year much easier. And here's where I'm gonna put a plug in for agencies, I promise, this is the only sales bit of the webinar. You know, if you've got an agency and agency can often help you enormously with strategic planning, not only in terms of, you know, helping you do the work, that's going to take time, the research, and, you know, building models and things like that, to understand where you are in terms of the situation, and the audience. But agencies can also help you with generating ideas and things they've seen from other clients. So often, it's not just you that has to sit there creating the plan, get a team involved, and, you know, make what is a big project, you know, slightly less challenging. Okay, so we talked about processes. There's a guy called Ronald Smith, who literally wrote the book on strategic planning for public relations. And he produced what's generally used in academia, as the seven steps of marketing planning. I feel now, you know, it's important to say sure, what he what he felt there were only three steps to heaven.
But clearly, marketing is a lot more complicated. And there's seven steps, according to Mr. Smith. Now, he put those steps in two phases. And the first phase is around research. He called it the formative research, and it's looking at the situation, looking at your organisation, and also looking at the audience. So you're really trying to find out where you are. The next step is strategy. And that's around selecting goals, determining your action and response strategies, and developing the messaging strategy. And we'll talk a little bit about action response strategies in a second. The third phase is tactics, this is what you're going to do. So you pick what you're going to do, and you actually do it. And then the fourth phase is evaluation. And that's really evaluating the plan, did you succeed, did you not what worked, what didn't, and that's going to give you information to then bring through to your plan for the following year. So I think this is, you know, really interesting. The steps are quite detailed. And they also don't always work, we find that this is, you know, somewhat idealistic, because actually, what you're doing is you're not really selecting budget, the tactics until phase three. So there's some issues around doing this. And also actually, you know, a lot of the work in terms of time actually is around this research stage.
So at Napier, we use a version of this seven step process, we simplified it down to four steps. So the first step is determine which is your situation analysis. So that matches the analysing the situation analysing the organisation. We also set goals typically at this stage. Now this is interesting because the academics will say, Well, you got to do all the research, look at the audience you know, before you start setting goals, but in reality once you analyse the organisation, once you know what your company needs, you're then very, very quickly understand what the goals are. So typically, we find goals are set, you know, pretty early on in most campaigns and most marketing plans that we work on. The next step is focus. And that's about analysing the audience. And this is about, you know, looking at not only who you're talking to, but also what you need to do to get the audience to engage and respond in the way you want them to respond. And within that, you're also setting the messaging strategy, what you say to them to actually generate those responses. The next stage is deliver, that's like find the tactics and implement the plan very much again, like the seven step process, and the last stage is enhance now, what we tend to do at Napier is we tend to try and find metrics that we can measure during the campaign, rather than leaving all the evaluation until after the campaign is complete.
And the reason for that is, and particularly when you're looking at things like digital campaigns, but this also can apply to things like PR as well. If you can continuously evaluate whether what you're doing is actually generating the results you look for, you can actually make changes and course corrections mid campaign, if you can cause correct mid campaign, and you're just missing, you know, the optimum campaign by a little bit, a slight course correction can generate significantly better results. So we strongly recommend where you can setting metrics that can be measured in real time, rather than those that could just be measured at the end of the campaign. So we're going to have a look at some of the different steps and talk through them. So the first step is determine here, it's really interesting. So with a determined phase, what we find is that actually, there's a lot of tools you can use, that are really helpful. If you've done a marketing degree, you might have covered things like SWOT or Porter's five forces or pesto pesto, or perceptual maps, there's many different tools you can use to understand the situation. And it's amazing when you use these tools as sort of frameworks to write down where you are it things become much clearer. And so quite often this is, you know, a really, really helpful thing. I actually sat in on a webinar this morning, that was amazing talking about and promoting agencies.
And they produced a perceptual map. So this is literally, you know, it looks like a graph, it's got two axes. And in this case, one axes was what makes the agency different. And one axis was what matters to clients. And the simple message was, you know, if you want to promote an agency, you want to talk about what makes you different, and that benefits clients. So you want to talk about things that not only are your differentiators, but things that are actually useful to clients? Well, it sounds really obvious. But when you start expressing it like that, a lot of the things that maybe are perhaps really interesting, exciting to you as an agency, but really don't impact clients then become very clear. So perceptual maps are great. And typically in b2b, you know, the classic perceptual map was price performance, you know, how much it cost, how much performance deliver today, I think, you know, things have moved on, particularly in technology. And so now, it's not just price performance, it's about the whole offering. So you might be looking at things like performance against ease of use, and things like that building those perceptual maps is really useful. We also need to understand what requirements are being dictated you know, I mean, most CEOs want to double sales in five minutes, right.
But actually, you know, maybe the CEO does have a real sales goal, they want to get a certain sales increase in a certain time period. If that's a very short term goal, then that's going to impact how you plan your marketing for the next year, because focusing on awareness and top of the funnel activities, is not going to generate the results that you need in the timescale you've got. So maybe you want to focus on things that are all around, converting the people already interested and engaged. And that'd be more bottom of the funnel. So we often find requirements dictated. But normally, we can not only clarify those organisational requirements, but we can also clarify goals as well. And so, you know, an organisational requirement might be sales, a goal might, for example, be number of leads that you generate to drive those sales. And clearly there if you're asked for a certain number of leads, we need to clarify, you know, whether it's a marketing qualified or a sales qualified lead, and what marketing qualified and sales qualified means, you know, how do you define whether someone's ready to engage with sales? One of the things we find really, really useful and this is a really simple tip is just to break down the goal. So let's say your CEO, has relaxed and said they don't want to double sales in five minutes. They're happy to double sales over the next year. Then you've got to start thinking about some questions that are going to break this down to make it easier to create marketing KPIs that you can use to show that you're moving Moving towards this ultimate goal.
So, you know, one question might be a prospects easy to convert if prospects are very difficult to convert, sales might need help, you might actually, as a marketing team, you spend time on what might be more often regarded as sales enablement, to help sales close a deal. You know, we could ask whether we got enough prospects, if we don't have enough prospects to double the sales, we need to drive more prospects. If we need to drive more prospects, how are we going to generate those leads? And if you're going to generate leads, and you've got a lead generation tactic, do you have enough people are actually aware of your company and you're offering and have, you know, reasonably positive perception, so they're likely to respond to a lead gen campaign. So you can start working back up the customer journey on the marketing funnel, to find you know, what you need to do. And at each stage, you can then set objectives. And it lets you generate these marketing metrics that show that you're moving towards achieving your goal. And generally speaking, when we talk about goals and moving people through, we talk about funnels. You know, this is the classic marketing funnel, people now, I think, you know, have a more sophisticated view, and they start talking about marketing journeys, rather than funnels. But actually, the funnel model can be very helpful. And the reason is, is because people do go through certain phases. Now, they may not flow through quite as linearly as we'd like. And they may, you know, take diversions and, you know, move around. And I think it was Forrester that produced an amazing collection of pipes instead of a marketing funnel to show how complex it is. But generally speaking, people need awareness of a product before they become interested. They need to be interested before they actually want the product and have desire and then ultimately, they will take action if they want the product. So awareness, Interest, Desire actions, that is probably one of the simplest customer journeys or funnel models you can get. It's interesting, there's also many other funnel models as well.
So we see awareness evaluation purchase delight, we see what HubSpot used to love, which was top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. And they used to love their tofu, Mofu and Bofu. Or you could talk about awareness, consideration and conversion. So there's lots of different ways to look at these stages. Ideally, what you'll do is you'll build proper customer journeys, and look at moving people from one stage to the next. But you know, in times where everyone is pushed for time, maybe just simply looking at and trying to understand, when you do a situation analysis, do you have enough people aware of your product? You know, is that the problem? Or have you got lots of people, you know, moving through this customer journey, or moving through the funnel, and is it all about closing sales, creating people who are interested and want the product to have desire, and creating them to causing them sorry, to take action, and actually become customers. So marketing funnel models can be very, very helpful. And then one of the things we very often do is create models around funnels. And they're really interesting, because what you can do is you can build a model that shows what you need to do at each stage. And here you can see in the slides, we're working from a number of Google searches that we're doing Google ads against, we're getting a click through rate, in this case, 4% that's generating website visitors are those visitors 10% are converting to become leads, they're filling in a form of those 40 leads, maybe half a potential customers and half, you know what used to be called Time Wasters in my time in sales, but people who maybe aren't likely customers YT prospects. So we might create. So these 50% generate 20 marketing qualified leads potential customers that meet requirements. So for example, we might take out students who wouldn't buy a b2b product at this stage.
Once we've got our marketing qualified customers, some of those will be ready to buy, some of them might not be ready to buy, they just bought from a competitor, or they're not into, you know, if you're selling a component, they're not starting a new design cycle. Or if you're selling a you know, large system, for example, a baggage handling system, they're not building an airport at the time, so many of them won't be ready to buy. Let's say it's 50%. So now our 20 marketing qualified leads become 10 sales qualified leads. Once we got sales qualified leads, it's down to the salespeople to convert, let's say they can get 50% to actually buy that will produce five sales. And in our example, we're saying our average customer value is 1000 pounds, leading to 5000 pounds that is generated. So obviously, if we can run our Google ads, and generate 400 clicks, and make it profitable, then that's going to sorry, that's going to mean it's a profitable campaign. Of course, what we tend to do with this is we don't tend to run from the top of the funnel backwards, we tend to run from The bottom of the funnel upwards. So we've got a sales target, we know a customer value, we can then work out the number of customers, we know how many people sales can convert from a sales qualified lead to an actual customer. So that's the conversion rate. And again, we step back up the funnel.
And then that will give us the number of Google searches that we need. And that will drive you know things like how much we're going to spend. It could also be, you know, for example, the number of display ads, we put on a trade publication, or it could be the number of LinkedIn ads, again, all of this is very, very similar. And where you have a process that is predominantly online, you can actually get quite an easy step by step conversion, and very clearly measure each step. Once you're running the campaign, you'll then see whether your conversion rates at each step, actually match your targets when you started. And if they don't, it's then that real time feedback, you know, did you set the wrong goal? In which case, is the budget wrong? And we'd spend more money? Or maybe if we're doing better, less money?
Or alternatively, are we doing something wrong on the landing page, which means that visitors aren't registering. So we've built this model. And we've also been able to estimate a budget to some extent, we then talk about, you know, the audience and the messaging, this is our focus stage. And here's where we really, really dig down deep. So, you know, we've looked at maybe you know, how funnel model might work. We said, Yeah, roughly, we need to do this, this and this. But we haven't done anything about, you know, how do we persuade the customer, for example, when they come to a landing page to fill in a form, you know, what's the messaging, what's the content offer. And so this is where the audience and the messaging analysis becomes really important. And in this stage, we focus a lot on personas.
So building buyer personas, and customer journeys. And obviously, the messaging should be built upon how we intend to change behaviour. And changing behaviour is from the academic world was referred to as an action and response strategy. So you do something that creates a response in the audience. So that might be a brand ambassador, advertising, technical literature, something like that. And typically, what you're doing is you're looking at your persona, for your potential customers. And you're looking at the motivators, the drivers that make them do things. So what do they care about? What makes them look good? What are they worried about a work. And I think the biggest indication of how to do this is Kim Kardashian.
So you know, here I am revealing myself a massive Kim fan, she's actually created a venture capital company, she's able to create a venture capital company, because it's a very simple action response strategy. And if Kim says a beauty product works on social media, lots of people go out and buy it very simple brand ambassador recommending a product then causes a response in the audience. And that is so powerful, that she's actually been able to build a venture capital company, targeting beauty companies, that we'll help startups grow and will grow them very quickly. Because she's got this, you know, ultimately powerful action and response strategy. We could see other things so we can see, you know, customer journeys example, customer journeys, and typically, they're quite complicated. So let's say I was looking for a new car.
And I see some TV adverts for companies, one of them might be cinch this is a company that sells used cars in the UK, I might go to the Isle of Wight Festival and see cinch because they sponsor the Isle of Wight Festival. I actually love cricket, you know, England is sponsored by cinch. So, you know, I see that I may have an England cricket show that even advertises this company. I think on the internet, and maybe search, you know, look for it, see some Trustpilot reviews? And then, you know, click on Google and click through and find cinch and go by car. You can see this is very difficult. It's very difficult to track. How do you know I went to the Isle of Wight first? And the answer is you don't. And this is one of the challenges of marketing. We're talking a little bit later about attribution. But typically, during a journey, some things have to be judged based upon whether you feel they're making a difference or not. It's very hard to know, for example, whether sponsorship, whether it be music, or of sports is going to make a difference to your sales, the only way you can do it is run some sponsorship and then stop, and then see if stopping actually causes sales to fall. However, at the same time, we might have entered a recession, the price of secondhand cars may have changed.
So all of this can kind of impact things. It's very, very, very difficult to actually determine whether something makes an incremental improvement or not. And this is something we'll talk about later when we talk about planning it because ultimately your marketing plan is going to rely on a lot of data that you produce and some of your intuition as well and really having intuition and understanding how your customers behave. That's great personas and great customer journey. He is going to help you make better marketing plans and better campaigns in the next year. delivers pretty simple. It's selecting tactics, you need to make sure that they're selected to achieve the goals. They will determine your budget allocation, not say your total budget amount, but where you spend the budget. And, obviously, it's important that things should work together. You know, and a great example might be that sports and music sponsorship we spoke about before, you know, if someone sees cinch at a music festival, or you know, at an England cricket game, they're much more likely to click on a Google ad for cinch when they're searching for a used car.
So the deliver stages is pretty straightforward. And hopefully, selecting the tactics becomes clearer, because you've built this model, not only of the situation and what you want to change, but also the model of how the audience, your customers, will move through their journey to become purchases.
So a couple of considerations, really, really simple stuff, you know, I mean, firstly, make sure your tactics effective, make sure it works for your particular goal. You know, a great example would be if all you're focused on in a year is lead generation, perhaps PR is not the right place to be. You know, it's great for awareness, it's not great for lead gen. Think about whether your tactic will reach your audience. I mean, CEOs of large enterprises, they quite often have other people reading their emails, they have assistants sending marketing emails, almost certainly are not going to reach CEOs. Equally junior engineers got very small networks on LinkedIn may not be that active at the other end of career. And then finally, you've got to make sure that your tactic engages the audience at the right time. And of course, this is why Google search ads are so powerful, is because there's a level of intent being shown, you know, someone's searching for something, they probably want to buy it. So if your tactic can engage you and at the right time, that's crucial. So you need the audience in the right mindset. And you need them to be thinking about purchasing. And that is a very tricky thing to do. And something I think we could maybe cover in a future webinar. We then get to enhance.
Now, I've talked a little bit about you know how the journey can be complicated and hard to monitor. I think a lot of people feel once you get to digital marketing, it's really easy to get all this data, the data has got to be accurate, you know, but it doesn't necessarily provide the information you need. And there's lots of metrics that, frankly, are vanity metrics. If we look at what's happening today, for example, in the world of email marketing, there's a whole range of different reasons why your email will appeal. It's open when it's not, not least if somebody's on Apple Mail, then Apple hides whether people open the email or not, by effectively opening all the emails. And also we see a lot of bot clicks on emails, typically around anti malware bots, checking out to make sure the links are safe. But both opens and clicks on emails have very unreliable statistics. So be very careful about these fairly simple, easy to retain, but frankly, ultimately vanity metrics. And the important thing to say is that attribution is not incrementality. I think this is probably something I'd say, you know, when I was lecturing to impress students, it's actually a very simple thing, just because you allocate some value from a sale, or an action, somebody's taken maybe an email newsletter sign up. That doesn't mean you've increased sales. So incrementality is increasing of sales.
So I don't know if people are sports fans here. But if you look at certain stats, you'll get very interesting results. So Mike, bossy was clearly a better ice hockey player than Wayne Gretzky because Mike scored more goals per game than Wayne. In fact, Wayne actually was very poor in terms of his goals to assist average, but actually happened to be the greatest ice hockey player ever. Lionel Messi, you know, generally regarded the greatest Soccer Soccer player at the moment, actually isn't the highest scoring international player. And he died from Iran is the International with the most goals. And a lot of that is driven because Iran play very different level teams to the level that Messi is playing. And if you're American, quite clearly, Jerry Rice couldn't have been a good wide receiver because the 40 yard dash which, you know, seems to be beloved of American football fans, Jerry Rice did in about 4.8 seconds, which wouldn't have even got him close to the top 20 for this year's draft. So, you know, you can look at different stats. And stats are always useful. You know, if you look at American football, how fast you run 40 yards when you're wide receiver is important, but it's not the only thing.
So attributing everything to one action is normally a very bad idea because most customer journeys are much more complex. If you remember our customer journey, let's imagine I clicked on a Google ad, when I put cinch cards into Google, because all the other activities I'd done that had, you know, created this positive perception about cinch, we're not trackable 100% of the value of any purchase, I make a cinch will be allocated at Google ad. That's completely wrong. And I think you gather from our discussion of sport, you know, the most important thing is probably the England sponsorship. But it's almost unmeasurable. So attribution is not incrementality. So we're about 30 minutes, I think it's time to wrap up. If anyone does have any questions, then please do, let me know. But let's put it all together. You know, let's have a look at you know, something we're doing. Let's say, for example, we've got a client that's looking to sell development kits for a new processor, that's now means we're better than competitor x. And the biggest lack of of a biggest problem, sorry, is a lack of awareness. Because nobody has actually seen the press release that we issued, that talked about the new product. So we've got a problem to overcome.
And we've also got two audiences, current customers and non customers. So if we built something together, we might take this very simple funnel model and say, well, awareness is the problem. Sorry, we might firstly say we've got current customers. And so we can email the current customers and tell them about the new products, and therefore they're using old products, they probably love to use a new product, we can then look at the awareness issue. And we can say we're going to do PR, we're going to trade out media advertising, we're going to raise awareness. And that's quite useful, because we can actually look at things like searches and web traffic that will help us measure that. So we've got some measurable activities, we might you exhibit at trade shows, you know, let's assume this as an automotive product, then we can exhibit a automotive shows this will generate leads, salespeople will have, you know, either MQLs, or even sales qualified leads direct from the exhibition. So that would jump a number of stages very quickly, we might run Google ads against the competitors brand searches. So if they were, you know, selling processor A, we could run a campaign recommending our processor, processor, B. And that could generate leads as well. And we could perhaps work with channel partners if we're in a situation where we sell through a channel and generate sales, qualified leads, and maybe even customers. So this is all the different things we could do. Now, where do we spend our money. And this is a really interesting challenge. Because we've got two things to do, we know we need to spend quite a bit of money at the top end, because awareness is really a problem. And if awareness is low, it's like the cop channel with a co op campaign with channel partners won't be very effective.
But there's some realities, PR is quite expensive. Trade media is really expensive to have the impact. So if we're going to spend money, we need to allocate a large amount of budget to trade media. Trade shows can be extremely expensive, particularly if you do them well. And particularly if you take into account the time that's involved. So again, there's no point saying trade metre is going to be a second tier tactic, if you're gonna go for it, you have to spend a large amount of money so that you can't just scale money up for each tactic. Google ads, on the other hand, if it's against competitor brand searches, you know, even if it's quite a, you know, a well known brand is probably not going to cost a lot of money. Because Google ads are relatively cheap. So there is actually a limit as to how much you can spend on that Google ads campaign. Because ultimately, you're saturate the people who are actually searching for the competitor's brand because they want to buy. And you'll end up having some spurious searches that maybe feel like they're close to the competitors brand, but actually aren't going to influence your sales.
You know, come up campaigns, that's typically quite scalable, depending on the tactics, but then emailing current customers, actually, that might be your single most effective way to sell this new product. But you can only allocate a relatively small amount of money to it, because you can only run a limited number of emails to your database. Otherwise, you'll end up with your database, just getting swamped with emails, feeling spammed and opting out. It'll be counterproductive. So this is really interesting. You know, we've talked about you know, the importance of different things modelling, what influences each step of the funnel, but then actually, when it comes to allocating budget, you have to allocate budget, both on the importance and also on the inherent cost of the activity. So you can't just allocate the majority of the budget to the most effective tactics sometimes because if that's emailing current customers, that's probably not going to be something you can scale indefinitely. So in summary, I mean, the most important thing is strategy thinking about strategy thinking in advance of what you're going to do. While this is Situation is what you want to change, and who you want to change whose mindset you want to change. So that's our determine and focus stages.
And you know, at this stage frameworks, tools and models are very, very useful. Funnel models are, you know, to be honest, very simple, but they can actually really help in terms of determining investment and where you put money, and also how much you need to spend on the campaign as a whole. But ultimately, the problem is, is reality is very complex. It's not a simple model. And even Google with a, you know, infinite number of services that appears, they can't accurately determine whether the Google ad for cinch was the most important, or the least important factor in me deciding to buy a car from them. So there's many different factors, it's almost impossible to attribute revenue accurately. And, you know, different tactics have different costs. So you may not necessarily have the same cost per value.
For different tactics, you may decide you need to do advertising, because you need to raise awareness, otherwise, nothing else will work. And you have to put a disproportionate amount of funds in there. So thank you very much for listening. I now open it up. I don't know if anyone has any questions that I'd welcome if you just type them into the chat bar. And we'll go ahead and start answering them. Okay, so the first question I've got is asking about the model was I mentioned I talked about perceptual maps, and SWOT and it's asking that says, I know what a SWOT is, but I don't know what a perceptual map is. And we do we have some information to explain. The answer to that is perceptual maps. As I said, as a simple to access model, what we might do actually going forward is run at a another webinar, and we'll talk about some of these models. And so you can understand how to use some of the models. And we'll work through some examples to show you how to use them.
So maybe that's the best way to answer that question. And I'm just checking if we've got anything else. So either I've been very clear, or everyone has now gone to sleep because I don't have any other questions. So I'll finish off by saying, Thank you very much for listening. We will be putting a copy of the webinar up as an on demand copy. So if you want to review the webinar, or if you've got, you know, anybody you'd like to share it with we very much welcome that. And I hope you find this useful if you have any questions you think of. After we finished the session, please do feel free to email me. My email is on the slide Mike at Napier b2b dot com. I'd be really help. Happy to answer the question and help you. Thank you very much for your time this afternoon and have a great rest of your day everyone.
A Napier Webinar: Avoid the Biggest International Marketing Mistakes
International marketing requires a lot more than simply reaching an audience in another country. Culture, language and convention are potential minefields, leading to many international campaigns failing or even damaging the organisation.
Napier recently held a webinar titled 'Avoid the Biggest International Marketing Mistakes' which explored the most common international marketing mistakes and strategies to ensure marketers avoid them. We covered:
- Common mistakes (with some amusing examples)
- Culture and language barriers
- Strategies to overcome challenges
- How to expand your campaigns into new territories successfully
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Avoid the Biggest International Marketing Mistakes’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Mike: Good afternoon. Welcome to the latest Napier webinar. I'm gonna give it another minute or so before I start. So if you want to get yourself a coffee or something that would be perfect, and we'll start in about a minute. Okay, welcome to the latest Napier webinar. Today we're going to be talking about international marketing mistakes. This is always a great topic because it's always easy to find examples where people have run international campaigns, and those campaigns haven't quite been targeted. Just right, we are going to focus quite a lot on the differences between the US and Europe as a whole. And particularly the UK one of the reasons for that is it's easy to compare because the language is normally the same. But we'll also talk quite a bit about some of the differences within Europe too.
So in terms of what we're going to do, we're going to try and help you avoid those nightmares of international marketing, where you run a campaign that isn't quite right for the target audience. So the topics we're going to cover, we're going to start off with some examples of where things did go badly wrong for actually very large companies just to prove that everyone can make mistakes in international marketing, we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about language is incredibly important, particularly where you've got the written word, it really makes a difference in terms of whether you communicate well or not. We'll then look at some of the other differences, particularly cultural differences between different countries.
We've got two sections talking about the media and content. So a couple of slides to discuss, you know how the media differences differs and publications in one country may not behave the same way as publications in others. We'll talk about localising content and some of the pitfalls there. And lastly, a couple of tips on avoiding mistakes. So let's get into it. And let's start with some other people's nightmares. So some things that went very badly wrong.
You'd be amazed at the stories around the automotive industry and I think my personal favourite is the Toyota MR. To Toyota didn't sell these cars in France, they started to try and sell them. And it took a little while until someone explained that Mr to in French sounds very much like poo in French or an equally bad term. And nobody wanted to be driving the poo car. So Toyota then had to withdraw the MR to they didn't even rebrand it because they'd already launched it with the name. And so they actually had withdrawn entire product from France because of that issue. And there's always issues around rude words. I mean, if you're struggling with a cold, you might have used Vic's if you're in America or UK. Unfortunately, launching that in Germany is not very good because the way it's pronounced sounds very close to another rude word, because the V is pronounced like an F. So you've got to be very careful about pronunciation and how things actually said in different countries.
We can look outside Europe as well and we can look at you know, places like China. So, KFC obviously, you know, everyone in the West knows KFC is finger licking good. Unfortunately, the initial attempts at translating finger licking good. were described as Chinese by Chinese people as being pretty close to eat your fingers off, which wasn't quite so appetising as being finger licking good. But, you know, clearly KFC actually made recovering KFC is now a very strong brand in China. So it is definitely possible to go from these mistakes and recover but clearly, the first thing you need to do is try and avoid the mistakes and make sure you don't get into trouble. And this is all down to nuances. have language. And it's not even that we're going to say Americans are particularly vulnerable to do that doing this coming to Europe. Winston Churchill was very astute in saying that America and the UK were two countries separated by the same language. Some advice that the marketers in Electrolux might have used, because apparently products that suck aren't always a good thing. And in America, generally speaking, sucking is a bad thing. And Electrolux ran such an incredibly successful campaign in Europe, using the tagline nothing sucks, like Electrolux, they actually ran it in America without testing it. And of course, Electrolux then became the vacuum that sucks and nobody wanted to buy in the States.
It's not all about disaster stories, though. Some of it is about really subtle nuances. And if we look at words, I mean, words can have very different meanings in different countries. So we worked with a client for a long time in the IT sector. And we were trying to explain, you know, how their particular product, made things more efficient, make things faster, make things more effective. And we had a couple of campaigns in Germany that were kind of okay, and not great. And then we started talking about how the product improved proves your workflow. And this massively resonated in with the German audience. The journalist is obviously very process driven. Which means that they do think about things like workflow. But in this particular sector, workflow was incredibly important as a term, not something you'd use in an English or American context in the same market. But something hugely important. So sometimes tweaking, you know, even English words with English campaigns, running other countries can make a huge difference to how campaigns run. So it doesn't have to be disasters making things go wrong. It can sometimes be small changes that actually deliver significant upticks in terms of campaign performance. One thing to mention, whilst we're talking about this, is idioms are particularly difficult to translate.
So I remember working for a company once that had pairing what's next as its tagline. And we were informed by the Dutch translator that actually, they'd given up, they couldn't translate it in a way that really made sense. And so quite often, you will see companies using short taglines or idioms in English, even when the rest of the marketing material is in local language. And that's to try and protect the meaning of what you're trying to say. And of course, that's ultimately what we're trying to do. We're trying to communicate meaning we're not trying to communicate specific words. Having said that, people you know, tend to hold idioms and taglines in English, you do need to translate. And if you look at Europe, there is an amazing spread of speakers who don't have English as their first language. In fact, English is the fifth most common first language in Europe. Russian is the biggest, obviously, at the moment with sanctions, that's much less of a concern for most people.
Because there's very little business being done with Russia. But there's 97 million people who speak German as a first language. It's not just Germans, that's people in Austria, and also many of the Swiss. French is next with over 70 million Italian next with 65 million as a first language. And English only has 63 million speaking as a first language. So this shows the importance of translation. And clearly, if you want to convey emotion, as well as meaning, it's so much more effective to be talking in the person's first language than it is to try and convey emotion in a second language is always much more difficult. So it's absolutely important to make sure you translate and as the sign clearly says, that's the route to success. So if you've checked the dictionary, you've done the translation. Now what what are the other differences other than language issues? Well, I mean, one of the main things is that we actually care about quite different things. In Europe, football is not played with an egg shaped bowl, and we don't wear pads. Football is soccer over here, and people really care about it. And it's really, really important. And so, you know, sport is very different. But it's not just you know, the football example that's continually given. Cycling for example, is an incredibly popular sport, not only in terms of people taking part but in terms of spectators and watching it I'm particularly on the continent in Europe. And you see a lot of people interested in cycling as a professional sport, particularly in Italy and France. And that's, you know, kind of different to maybe how you'd see cycling in the States, where it's much less seen as a professional sport, and indeed, much less important in the UK. And of course, in the UK, we also have our own specific sports as well. If you want to get people excited in the UK, then you have to start talking about cricket.
And clearly, it's way beyond me to explain cricket within the context of this webinar, but it's something that's absolutely built into a lot of people's psyche in the UK, and incredibly important. It may be important in the UK, in India, it's pretty much a religion. And actually one of the most interesting things is that the second most valuable sport in the world, for TV rights is cricket. And that's because of the league in India called the Indian Premier League. And that generates more TV revenue than anything else in the world, other than the NFL. But the important thing to say is it generates that revenue in the space of a little over two months. So it's a very, very short season, in the IPL generating vast amounts of money. And if you're not familiar with cricket, and even if you're English, and you're not into cricket, you probably don't understand the impact that some of these sports can have in different countries. So being very aware of, you know, things in particularly sporting context, when you want to use sporting analogies is very important.
One of the things we have, when we're talking to Americans, is not just talking about sports, and having Americans trying to work out what on earth is going on in a cricket match, but also discussing history. And in America, history is very different to Europe. And I've seen, you know, established companies that have been established for 10 years being something that, you know, Americans see as being a long time. In the UK, you know, this is old. Stonehenge is about four to 5000 years old. But this, this is what qualifies as old. And traditions don't really start unless you've been doing them 100 years. So I think be very careful about talking about things that are traditional, or long standing, if you're an American, and trying to market into Europe. And in Europe, we're very focused on our views of what different countries are, we don't see Europe as being one country, we actually see Europe as being lots of different countries, and lots of different cultures. And ultimately, what matters is brand origin. And brand origin is hugely, hugely important.
So if we look at, for example, the automotive industry, being a German brand, BMW is a great example, is a really valuable thing. Because that conveys messages of technology, quality, reliability, it's really, really good. If you look at something like fashion, then having an Italian brand origin is really where you want to be, and everybody wants to appear Italian. But interestingly, things can change. So the Italians, their beer industry, a one point was almost a joke, their wine industry absolutely fabulous. But they never really focused on beer. More recently, we've seen Italian brewers actually become very cool and very trendy, across basically most of the western world. And it's been an amazing shift that we've seen that whilst brand origin matters. Sometimes you can educate consumers to believe that your brand is conveying something different and clearly, you know, with Italian brewing, it's conveying something very different to German brewing, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not as good. So I think thinking about company, about the company brand, and how that fits into the country that you're based in is super important. If we look at you know, the brand origin of companies in America, they're generally seen as being innovative and leaders in technology. In Europe, I think, though, you know, people would often see European brands as being higher quality, and it's something you need to think about in terms of how you communicate your brand story and where your company comes from. The next thing to say is when not one Europe, actually, it's really important to get local websites for each country. It's not just about trying to communicate local offices, or local language. But if you really want to be successful, building local websites for each country really gives those customers the feeling that you know and care about them. The reality is for a lot of our clients, that's never going to happen because it is prohibitively expensive. But it's important to remember that a single website for Europe is not the solution. And sometimes, it can always be better have one website for the world in English, than trying to have a European website that's in English, and assume that's going to cover Europe better than your Global website.
So think about how you talk to each of those countries, each those countries typically are quite proud. And local really is local. So if you want to communicate things about case studies, for example, and you want to communicate case studies to Germany, you really want to try and find German customers to talk about. There's always a perception that within Europe, companies in different countries have slightly different requirements, slightly different needs, and maybe what works for in Germany might not work in the UK. You know, Germany is a great example of a country that invests a lot in process, and also invest a lot in equipment within the business sector. The UK is a very different situation, where traditionally, the UK has invested much less in terms of investing in capital expenditure, and also tends to be maybe a little bit more haphazard in terms of planning. And you'll see that sometimes in the case studies. So it is really important to try and identify case studies that are local and very relevant to the audience you're trying to reach. Another example about this is if you look at how people treat issues, and maybe the biggest issue at the moment is the environment. And I'm sure you're all familiar with Greta, you know, very much a global personality talking about the environment. But because she's from Europe, it doesn't mean Europe has consistent views.
So yes, it's true that Scandinavians have massively increased uses of trains, and do tend to, you know, think a lot about their carbon footprint. But equally, it's true that the Germans are not giving up their big powerful cars either. And they're not giving up the opportunity to drive. It's what most Germans now look, regretfully at being only 155 miles an hour down the Autobahn because most cars are limited. So that again, you know, don't think Europe has the same view when it comes to things like sustainability. Europe doesn't Europe has very different views from different countries. And of course, Europe as a whole does tend to be more sustainability focused on the US, for example. But again, that's certainly not the case. And I'm sure that anyone from the states listening to this will say, Well, absolutely, there's a very different view about sustainability if you're in Texas, compared to if you're living in Cal in Northern California, for example.
So lots of different views. It's all about understanding, you know, the way people think, and the way they approach things differently from country to country. On top of that, people actually communicate differently. And in Germany, it's really common to address people as Mr. or Mrs. And then their their surnames are here for hour, and then their surname whilst at work. And for people outside of Germany, it's kind of strange, because as soon as colleagues go out for maybe a meal or drinks after work, they all revert to first names. But during working hours, it tends to be quite formal. And quite often, if you're running campaigns into Germany, it's really important to think about how you address people, whether you use their first name or not.
And in particular, where you have a relationship between sales and the customer, then it can become very important to actually consider whether you're using first name or surname and reflecting what the sales team are doing. It's on the face of it quite simple. But in reality, trying to understand whether you're using first names or surnames can be very tricky, particularly amongst, you know, things like marketing automation tools, which won't have any kind of measure of formality in terms of the way you address people. So understanding how you work those marketing automation tools in Germany can be very challenging. There's also different approaches to hours of work. Don't have a breakfast meeting in the UK. I think that's the best advice I could probably give people. Nobody in the UK is racing to have breakfast before they go to work. It's a very cultural thing. And asking for a breakfast meeting is normally not a great way to do it. And that's generally true.
Across Europe, I mean, generally speaking, Europeans don't have breasts breakfast meetings in the same way that you do in the States. I would say particularly journalists have a reputation for never doing early morning meetings. And also, another important thing for to know about journalists, is that Friday afternoons are kind of off limits for work. So asking journalists, particularly in the UK, to have time on a Friday afternoon is generally a no, no, it's the run into the weekend. And it's often the day where people will leave a little bit early as journalists and lengthen out that weekend. So try and avoid those Friday afternoons and definitely avoid the breakfast meetings. It's not that we're lazy, though, it's really a cultural difference. And so one of the things that happens in Europe, and particularly in Germany and the Netherlands, is that people like going out to trade shows and meeting face to face. And I think understanding the trade show culture is incredibly important.
And it's amazing that, you know, when I talk to, you know, people in the UK, or maybe the US, you know, there were real questions about how would COVID impact on trade shows, and would trade shows even come back after COVID. If you look on the continent, and as I say, particularly in those trade show strongholds of the Netherlands and Germany, there never was any doubt that people would go back to trade shows. And absolutely, we've already seen trade shows restarting and being remarkably successful, even though we're not quite out of COVID. yet.
So trade shows are an important way of doing business, in countries in Europe. And understanding that is really key that meeting face to face at a show is absolutely an important part of how those people do business. And, of course, how you do business is, is governed by local laws as well. And in particular, there are lots of laws around misleading adverts and comparative advertising in Europe that you need to be very careful of. And the the implications of breaking those rules and regulations can be very different. So in the UK, if you publish a misleading adverts, you basically get told off, you basically get a message saying you got to stop running that ad and you shouldn't do it again. And that's it, it's a warning. In Germany, you can be asked to pay damages. So if the court decides that your advert was misleading and damaged a competitor, you can be told to pay money to that competitor. And then in Belgium, if you place an ad, that's misleading, you can actually be told to place other ads that correct the misleading ad. And clearly that can be very painful for your brand, because you're not only admitting you've got something wrong, but you're also effectively promoting competitors. So marketing regulations really matter.
And you will often hear the, you know, people quoting Well, you can't do comparative advertising in Europe. That's actually not true. You can do comparative advertising. But comparative advertising gets very difficult in certain countries countries, because the costs of getting it wrong are so high, that it's almost prohibitively risky. So don't believe people when they say there's an absolute ban on comparative advertising, there are limits. But there's there's no absolute ban. Having said that, you've got to be extremely careful. And it's an area that I'd be very wary of. We also have GDPR GDPR is, to me one of the most interesting regulations, and I think there's still a lot of things playing out in terms of the GDPR regulation.
The interesting thing is, is that GDPR is very much driven by how the company or the organisation chooses to interpret it. And there are a lot of interpretations of GDPR that we see today. They're incredibly restrictive, and actually very much limit how much marketing organisations can do. And one of the things I urge is to not view GDPR as this, you can't do this, you can't do this. But really understand what GDPR means a GDPR is very much about being open and transparent about what you're going to do. I mean, yes, you have to allow opt outs in b2b. And consumers even tighter and you need to have opt ins, but in b2b opt out is absolutely fine is absolutely GDPR compliance. But the important thing is you communicate exactly how you're using the data. And that's really the key thing. And if you're open and honest about how you use the data, you'll actually find you can do a lot more and your marketing campaigns will be more successful. So that's covered the main areas of you know some of the cultural differences, some of the things we see.
We're now going to move on to the media. Now, the media in Europe is is very intro Testing. And I think the UK has one of the more interesting areas, although we'll see on the right hand side of this slide, some content from Germany where we have men in leather shorts, drinking beer in an Electronics Magazine, not something we'd see, I think outside of Central Europe. But, you know, this is something where the publication, it's electronic is probably the leading publication in Germany for, you know, in depth technology. And it actually publishes photos from the summer event they have, where, you know, people are openly drinking beer, wearing national dress, and, you know, maybe not looking how you'd expect engineers and other people in the electronics industry to look at the same time the same publication is, of course, incredibly technical, as you'll see on the next page, towards the middle, where, you know, they'll publish code and detailed information about products.
So it's very interesting to see that contrast, you probably wouldn't see either extreme in the UK. But you will see in the UK, for example, the newspapers being very, very different. And to imagine that any campaign on business press that you run in the US is going to transfer to UK newspapers, is just fanciful, it does not happen. The approach of newspapers is very different. And you have to build campaigns for those newspapers. And this literally is the front page of newspaper, The Daily Star from yesterday, where apparently, we've got to worry about drunk German wasps in the UK, which is an unbelievably mind blowing headline on so many levels. And actually, we've seen publications try and replicate that UK sense of fun in, in technology. And the register was famous for it for many years, although it's very much toned down when it does. But I can assure you that Parnassus did not call their technology dodgy file tart up when they were promoting it. So the journalist, but register for a long while love these headlines. And indeed, we still see some fun headlines in the UK. So what are the rules of thumb? I mean, how can we, you know, understand the differences? Well, in general, if you're looking at b2b technology, in particular, if you're looking at trade press, there's some rules that you can follow that are going to help you generate content that is going to be more attractive to European journalists. The first thing to say is that in general, and this is particularly compared to the state's content needs to be more technical and less promotional.
And that's particularly true for Germany, but also true to a large extent for Europe as a whole. Europeans also tend to be quite focused on being very practical in terms of their publication content. So it's less blue sky more about what's going to help an engineer tomorrow. We've talked about local people. We've talked about formality. And actually, usually, the language is more formal in Europe than it is in the US. Generally speaking, longer articles referred in Europe again. And there are publications that are exceptions to this. But certainly not being afraid to generate longer articles is important. And certainly in Germany, we see publications taking 2000 word articles. So very long articles are preferred. Of course, don't forget that when you do translate, your content will get longer as well. So anything written in English translated into German or French, is typically longer. When we look at the way the journalists work, you know, the company is often treated as subject matter experts, there's less cynicism about the company having knowledge.
And it's normally not important to build up credibility and only a trust, if you're in a certain role. You're, you're definitely the right person. Sometimes we are just different, though. And sometimes, you know, journalists will come out and they will try and make a point. And we've had a few character journalists, and still do have character journalists in Europe. So don't imagine that the stereotype of a, you know, maybe more nerdy, more focused, you know, perhaps quieter journalist over here is always the case. There's always some characters too. I'm sure my American colleagues will say says the same in America. But you know, don't expect journalists to read every email and respond to every email that just doesn't happen. And actually, if they get emails and not interested in they're almost all just always ignore them rather than respond.
And this is because journalists are very busy. And in Europe, and particularly in the UK. It's very common to have multiple editorial roles. So rather than writing for just one publication, you will have a journalist writing for multiple publications. I remember I was talking to a journalist So he works in a data storage publication. He said, Yeah, I'm busy, because I've got this issue of my Windows magazine to get out. And I said, I didn't realise you did consumer stuff. He said, No, no, no, it's not not windows for PCs, it's Windows for houses. That's what I write about. So journalists can have very, very different roles as well. And then lastly, the way that journalists Express cynicism in Europe, and particularly UK is generally fairly quietly, quite often, you'll see, particularly in the US a more confrontational approach with journalists. And you'll have a spokesperson come to Europe, they'll present the journalist when so anything that goes absolutely fantastic, you know, we had no questions. I created a great pitch. It's like, no, the guy basically didn't ask you questions, because he didn't think much of your pitch, and he just wasn't interested in engaging. So beware that quiet cynicism at the end with Yeah, thanks, that's really helpful, and no engagement, no questions. And that can often mean that the pitch hasn't hit the mark.
Obviously, contents important as well. And if we look at content, again, we can look at some very crude rules of thumb. And those content rules are very similar for white papers and things as they would be for dealing with content for the press. So usually, the writing style is more formal and less promotional. Generally speaking, Europeans want more facts to back up claims and less hype. And as I mentioned before, Germans love technical details. And in white papers, you've really got to go to town on the actual details and the facts and the figures. Another thing as well as design is important. And generally speaking, Europeans are more likely to engage with content that is very well designed, looks good, and is easy to scan and read. So don't underestimate the importance of design in Europe, that definitely makes a difference in the amount of engagement with content. And lastly, too much hype is never a good thing.
And that's particularly in Germany. So don't use headlines to oversell the content, it's only going to damage your brand, make sure that everything is very clear, very direct. And as I say, just maybe a little bit more formal than you do in the States. Having said that, there are similarities. And here you can see the start of an NFL game that's being held in the UK. So we do actually have NFL games over here we have a number as I'm sure you're aware, holding the UK and there are some metal American football fans.
So talking about American football isn't necessarily a problem in Europe. The only problem we do have in Europe for any football fans who are listening is that we think the Jacksonville Jaguars are the only team in the league because they seem to be the only team who plays every single season in the UK. But certainly, you know, we do understand. So question your local teams. And question with both in terms of whether you need to make changes, whether you've done enough, or whether you've done too much. And quite often, local teams will just want to change to localise because that's the way they feel it should be there. They're playing marketeer. They're not playing advisor for the local market. And that can be a very big mistake, because quite often you're talking to salespeople, and those salespeople are trying to do something that's not their core expertise.
So if our sales team says we need to change this for Germany, or for UK or whatever, I would absolutely say always question why that needs to be the case. Because quite often, it doesn't need to be the case. And quite often you can find that some of the changes people feel need to be made, actually a completely unnecessary amaze and make the campaign less effective. Obviously, what we're trying to do is we're trying to communicate the same meaning globally, we're trying to communicate the same action, so to say, of course, the same actions globally. And we're basically trying to make sure that we have as much consistency so we might change the actual words, but hopefully the meaning and to a large extent the imagery can be the same, which means that when people go to your website, they can then see something reflects the overall campaign.
And lastly, in terms of my last top tip, obviously use experts and Napier has spent a long time working with clients in terms of localising translating trends creating content. So definitely come and ask us if you have any questions. Thank you very much for listening to the webinar. I hope everyone's found it useful. If you have any questions, please do feel free to put some in the chat. And I'll be more than happy to answer them. Okay, so I've got one question in the chat, which is, actually it's a really good question.
So the question here is when we're translating, is it possible to use machine translation? You know, obviously things like Google Translate. And now very, very good. The unfortunately, the simple answer to this is no. The machine translation tools are very good. And they're certainly excellent in terms of giving you the meaning, and the gist of what's supposed to be in there. But machine translation tools don't read, like, somebody who was a native would translate. And so the problem is, is once you go beyond a couple of sentences, it starts becoming very obvious that the translation is not done by human, it's being done by machine. And that can be very negative to your brand. Because if I'm working in Germany, say, and you're my first language is German, and I feel you're not bothering to translate, you're just running it through Google, that sends me a message that you don't value Germany as a market.
So although people will get the meaning, and they'll be able to understand what you're trying to say, in the local language, it's not the same as translating, and in fact, can be a bad thing and can damage your brand. So be very careful about machine translation. And particularly, as I say, once you go beyond a few sentences, it can be a real issue. The other thing to say as well as machine translation, whilst it can work for very short pieces, it can also make some mistakes as well. So when you get to, you know, very short phrases, then again, there can be issues there.
So be very careful about machine translation. If you're running Google Ads campaigns, it can absolutely help. And quite often, we can see, or we have seen translators using machine translation as a first pass and then doing edits. So that can speed things up sometimes. But you have to be very careful because everyone will see the error and no one will take notice of the 10 things that you got right with machine translation.
Okay, I don't think I've got any other questions. I really appreciate your time. On the webinar today. We will be producing an on demand webinar so you'll be able to listen to this or Share this if you want to share it with someone else in the future. And thank you very much for listening. Goodbye.
A 'Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know IT Engineer Patryk Duda
In this instalment of our 'Napier Nine' video series, we introduce you to Patryk Duda, IT Engineer at Napier.
Learn about Patryk’s secret skill, his favourite saying, and the fictional place he would most likely visit, as he answers his nine questions…
Missed the other ‘Napier Nine’ Videos in our Series? Watch them Now!
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Managing Director Mike Maynard
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Media Analyst Rachael Penfold
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Business Development Manager Hannah Kelly
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Suzy Kenyon
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Dave Ingle
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PR Specialist Clare Reader
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PA and HR Manager Debbie McIntosh
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video.. Get to Know Account Administration Executive Danielle Robertshaw
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video…Get to Know Marketing Specialist Natasha Websdale
- A’ Napier Nine’ Video…Get to Know Director Clive Over
- A ‘ Napier Nine’ Video…Get to Know Marketing Specialist Ivy Silverton
- A ‘Napier’ Nine Video…Get to Know Account Director Chris Corfield
- A Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Associate Director Ed Neale
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video…Get to Know Digital Marketing Specialist Hayden Reader
A 'Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know Digital Marketing Specialist Hayden Reader
In our ‘Napier Nine’ video series, we’ve been taking the time to learn more about the team. In this instalment, we introduce you to Hayden Reader, Digital Marketing Specialist at Napier.
Learn about Hayden's strongest quality, his favourite saying, and the four words he would use to describe himself, as he answers his nine questions…
Missed the other ‘Napier Nine’ Videos in our Series? Watch them Now!
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Managing Director Mike Maynard
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Media Analyst Rachael Penfold
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Business Development Manager Hannah Kelly
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Suzy Kenyon
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Dave Ingle
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PR Specialist Clare Reader
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PA and HR Manager Debbie McIntosh
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video.. Get to Know Account Administration Executive Danielle Robertshaw
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video…Get to Know Marketing Specialist Natasha Websdale
- A’ Napier Nine’ Video…Get to Know Director Clive Over
- A ‘ Napier Nine’ Video…Get to Know Marketing Specialist Ivy Silverton
- A ‘Napier’ Nine Video…Get to Know Account Director Chris Corfield
- A Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Associate Director Ed Neale
A Napier Podcast: Interview with Tim Langley - CANDDi
In this podcast episode, we interview Tim Langley, CEO and Founder at CANDDi, a digital intelligence tracking platform.
Tim shares his journey to founding CANDDi, and how the platform can help B2B marketers be more proactive by gathering data which allows them to engage with leads both at the top and bottom of the sales funnel.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Tim Langley - CANDDi
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Tim Langley
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 the latest episode of marketing b2b technology from Napier. Today, I've got Tim Langley, who's described himself as the founder, the CEO and chief dogsbody at CANDDi. Welcome to the podcast, Tim.
Tim: Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me.
Mike: So, Tim, I mean, I mean, the first thing is, you know, how do you get a career that lets you end up with Chief dogs by the CANDDi? Yeah. How did you get to this point?
Tim: Oh, you know, I think that's, I think that's a very easy question to answer. So I grew up and studied maths at university, did a year working for a for a startup, and then decided, You know what, I think it'd be fun to be running my own business. That was nearly 20 years ago. And how'd you get how'd you get a title like, Chief dog's body? Like anything? Isn't it? The joy of running a business is you keep every title until someone else wants it. And in 20 years, no one's wants to take that one from me yet.
Mike: Yeah, I must admit, last week, I found out how many employees it took to change a light bulb. And the answer was only one they asked me and then I do the light bulb changing. So I totally understand.
Tim: It's like the classic computer science joke, isn't it? How many? How many software engineers to take change a light bulb? Not it's a hardware problem. They don't, they don't they don't get any better. I'm afraid.
Mike: I was gonna say I think you now qualify as having the best software engineer joke on the podcast. So congratulations for that. I'm, I'm interested. I mean, you mentioned having to do a lot of CANDDi but you're actually also involved in a couple of other companies. Can you tell us a bit about that as well?
Tim: Yeah, all sorts of CANDDi now is is 13 years old. And we have we've always prided ourselves as kind of being like the innovators in the space so we're 20 strong person business 50 Universal we're developers. So very very thin on the ground for sales marketing business, very much innovation development building things.
And first business I've got involved first spin out business and all of them all of these are spin out businesses from CANDDi but two and a half years ago, I met a chap called Adam Herbert who was very experienced within the data industry we started a business together called go live data go is the it's the UK is best source of b2b marketing lists marketing data we start from UK companies house and then find the online profiles and all the all the thermographic data around the around the organisation so so that's that's that's go and then I also started a business called comply and comply is very similar to go but with a financial crimes lash and anti money laundering hat on so comply has been very very busy over the last four and a half months while a number of our larger customers have started to ask us Can you guarantee there's no Russians involved in our customer base so yes, life is exciting with with those two strands but but no cat candies always been my baby so And fortunately, fortunately should be some fun things to talk about the CANDDi as well.
And everything around data which I think is really interesting
it's all it's all around data that's been it's been my passion for say for 20 odd years now has been data and then specifically people and marketing data.
Mike: Cool. So CANDDi is spelt ca n DD I guess the the most important questions is why CANDDi is it a lot of sweets?
Tim: We get all things really in fact, we have a we have a number of American customers and they struggle with the word CANDDi we often get is that see and die it's actually got a funny little story really. So just before starting CANDDi I've had, as I mentioned, I've been been running businesses 20 years, I had a couple of businesses that went well. I had a couple of businesses that didn't go so well.
Just before starting CANDDi, I was consulting for a actually a digital agency in Manchester as was at the time, which is a company called and digital and, and started pitching to and basically looking at the stuff they were doing and they had an awful lot of trying to pull together different data sets very manually, and so started pitching to them around. I reckon if we did a bit of less than a bit of this and a bit of this, we could build a product out of this. And they went Tim That sounds amazing. We'd love to be your first investors. I wasn't even looking for investors but sounds amazing. They said there's one criteria though. The company name has to include the words and digital. It's just kind of one of the things they did.
So the real name of a company is campaign and digital intelligence limited. But that's such a mouthful, but we then went okay, what can we really call it? But But do you know what? I love the name CANDDi, I wouldn't change it for the world. But if I had to do it again, I wouldn't call it CANDDi. The number of iterations of the name I own ca n ddi.com C A N N di.com ca n d i. serwotka. It's like an SEO nightmare trying to trying to get the word. The word CANDDi.
Mike: Okay, so a memorable but rather hard to spell name? By the sounds of it. So I mean, can you tell us what problem CANDDi solves.
Tim: So the core of CANDDi, we want to be putting a name and a face against an otherwise anonymous website visitor. So when I first started, and actually when we demoed the software to people, we start with this slide that's got this big black hole in the middle, and all kinds of different marketing channels around the edge. So be it SEO bit PPC, the email marketing vs. Social. But the fact of the matter is, there's a billion different ways to get people to come onto your website, which is great. And within reason, they all work. And you then have traditional, I call them traditional, but traditional tools such as Google Analytics, which can give you like the aggregate numbers.
So yesterday, you had 100 visitors onto your website, 20 of them came from SEO, and 30 of them came from an email campaign you run. And you know what, that's for a lot of art for a lot of our b2b customers. That's not a bad kind of scenario. The problem is, and this is a bit and this is a bit misses of if you like the hypothesis statement that started the business, but the problem is, you can see what's getting people to the website. But then the thing we hear time and time again, they land on the website, it's like this black hole, you know, people are there. But it's like having a shop window and just you can see people walking by. But unless you can reach out unless you can engage with them unless you ultimately unless you know who they are. It's very, very little you can do from a sales perspective, you just have to hope and pray they fill in a form on the website.
And in many instances for b2b, especially especially growing and sales focused b2b businesses, they want to be a bit more proactive, but just wait and hope somebody comes and fills the form. And so so what we do, we integrate him with all of our digital marketing channels via SEO via email marketing, we integrate him with them, we use those to pick up signals, and then either identify the company, or potentially identify danger, the actual named individual, and be able to say, it's not just a random visitor, this is Mike Maynard, from Napier, he's a really high prospect.
Mike: That's fascinating. So I mean, particularly, what you're trying to do is catch people between arriving at the website and filling in the form, which is where a lot of people disappear. So that that makes a lot of sense.
Tim: There's two bits really so.
So there's one bit which is, and if you look through the whole aid or awareness, model, awareness, interest decision action, crikey, I nearly forgot it. So one piece, one piece, which is a piece you just alluded to there, Mike is the very top of the funnel, capturing people went between arriving on the website and filling the form, when they're still in that kind of role.
Do I know who you are? Am I interested enough. And we in that gives that gives, that gives our customers that gives our people use our software, the opportunity to try and get involved with people who might otherwise disappear.
The second piece though, which is actually equally as valuable, often we'll find that that prospects will come to the website, they'll fill in a form to download a lead magnet or to get a piece of content, etc. But they're not yet ready to buy. They've expressed interest, but they're not ready for the decision or the action phase. And so so then what happens is they'll then come back to a website or number and actually sorry, just to jump in, but but if if you jump down their throat too fast when they're just at the interest phase, you ended up turning them off rather than turning them on because well I'm not I'm not ready yet. Just give me a break.
So so the second bit were canned is really useless because we're tracking computers because we're watching the activity that people do on the website. We can say look, this person, they filled in a form, but probably not quite ready for a really a really full on conversation. Drop them an email back, don't bother making a phone call to them yet. What then happens is they come And back to your website a month, a week, six months, a year later, they don't necessarily fill in a form again. But CANDDi goes, that's interesting. I've seen this person, I've seen this computer. And so we can then give this much richer picture for the people who've already filled in forms and give you an indication of when the right time to engage might be. So kind of hits both sides, both the very top of the funnel, but also the people who are getting hotter starting to get closer towards being able to make that decision and take action.
Mike: That's interesting. So that that towards the bottom of the funnel, I think you're acting quite like a marketing automation platform might do in terms of tracking people, and understanding where they're visiting and potentially, you know, driving actions from that. Would that be right?
Tim: Yes, so, so can the marketing automation is always been an interesting space for us. And it's not something we have yet. I use that carefully. But it's not something we've yet wandered into, we integrate with. So when we when we look at when we look at the whole space of people in a similar position to CANDDi bars, there are a number of organisations a number of competitors who do company level IP tracking, we can talk about that in the future. But that's, that's really about identifying the company based on the IP address that someone's coming from.
There's also a number of organisations which which you mentioned the HubSpot bit eloquent bit my calf, so the the full service marketing automation plays, who do everything for you. And one of the things we've always said they are great pieces technology, if you're going to put everything into their stack. It's interesting, but a number of our larger customers, one of the things they get out of CANDDi, they use marketing automation platforms, for the automation, as it says, but they they actually what you discover is they use multiple different platforms. And each platform tracks and identifies its people. But they don't have that holistic view goes okay. And especially when people are using third parties as well. So they might use a third party to do their data send. And then they use their own platform to do their nurturing. And then the salespeople send their own emails and, and they end up with all these little pots of data. One of the pieces can do those as pull all of that together to give this slightly more holistic, almost a customer data platform or CDP. So yeah, marketing automation is a really unlock much automation has been a very interestingly growth space over the last 13 years, as a CANDDi, we've we've kind of cut this interesting place that goes on one hand, providing the providing a lightweight marketing type platform, and the other hand providing stdp and provide the actual the data the pulling it all together for for the larger organisations.
Mike: That's interesting. I mean, the other thing as well is when I use CANDDi, and just so people know, we actually are a CANDDi customer at Napier. So we are CANDDi users. When I use it, it feels much more sales focused than any kind of marketing automation platform. I know clients when they've tried to get sales teams to use the marketing automation platforms. It's it's fraught with difficulty. It's not what sales teams like it's hard enough to get them to use the CRM. So I mean, is that another benefit that it's a more sales friendly presenting activity?
Tim: You took You took the words right out of my mouth? We you're absolutely right. Once one time we used to we used to describe it the keys in the name, isn't it? It's marketing automation. And with a joke, you almost don't want your sales team to be going into it because you want them focused on what do I need to do today. And then one of the pieces we have in CANDDi is very focused lists off here are people that were on your website yesterday, here are people are taking action today. So from a sales side, it's very great. I need to tick these boxes versus let me go and wander around and have a look at all of the all of the reasons why not to be making not not to be making sales or not to be making the contact or calls. Yes, CANDDi came from a very sales focused background rather than rather than this more generic marketing piece.
Mike: Definitely, no, I think it's really helpful to sales teams. I want to step back, you briefly mentioned the identification of anonymous visitors. So working out which company people are from, can you explain a little bit more about what CANDDi does to work out which company people are from?
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. So let's start by talking about how the industry does it and then then I'll talk about some of the additional pieces which CANDDi does. So the core the core of company identification has always been IP tracking and using IP addresses. So as I'm as I'm sure majority of your listeners know, Mike, when anytime you connect to the internet, your computer gets given an IP address and that's how Have a server knows how to communicate with your computer and your computer to communicate the server. And servers or technology like CANDDi can capture these IP addresses and go, Okay, here's an IP address 81 point 27.1 to four point 17, etc, etc, etc.
Now every every IP address is registered to an organisation. Most IP addresses are registered to internet service providers, so Virgin Media, British Telecom, etc. But for medium and larger businesses, they generally have their own, what would be called a static IP address. So this would be an IP address registered in the name of that company. And if a visitor comes from behind that company's IP address, you can say somebody from Napier was on your website yesterday. And that can be useful. There's a number of problems with just relying on IP addresses. So one problem is that when when all you have is IP addresses, you've got no way to know whether it was one person coming 10 times, or 10 people coming once. If you if you imagine an office full of people, you also don't know who it was that was coming from from behind the IP address. Sometimes Sometimes that can be okay. So with as an organisation, you're very, very focused in who you who you market to who you sell to, you can go general, on balance of probability, the only person who's going to be coming on our website is going to be the CFO, or is going to be the facilities manager, etc. But actually, it might just as well be, but it was one of them, it was one of their managers, or even it was the office intern who was tasked with doing the research.
The second the second problem, if you like with with IPS is, and again, go back to when CANDDi started 13 years ago, everybody browse the internet or predominantly browse the internet from behind their work desktop computer. These days, I don't know about you and me but it's the iPad, it's the phone, it's the coffee shop, it's the whilst whilst commuting to and from London, etc, etc, etc. Those are the times I'm more often do my awareness interest. And in those instances, very rarely will someone show up as coming from behind a static IP address. Generally, they'll be on a on a mobile connection or on a home broadband. So that's the IP tracking piece. Now we do a few bits deeper than that in CANDDi. So CANDDi, CANDDi uses cookies to track rather than IPs. So we drop the first we can talk about cookies, I'm sure privacy will come up in a second, but we drop a first party cookie on the device. So that means we can track when that computer comes back to that specific website. We don't follow you around the internet, we only track you on that single single company's properties. But because we do this, we can pick up when a visitor comes from behind multiple IPs. So if you use the computer in work, at home, on the train, on the coffee shop, we would see that as the same computer across multiple different IP addresses. And then we can plug into other types of data to go, who's this person likely to be?
Mike: So what you're doing is you're you're almost looking to see when this cookie gets associated with the company. And then you know, that person obviously works for that company because they're behind the firewall.
Tim: Yes, number one is we look for when that cookie gets associated with the company. And then number two, if we're really lucky when that cookie gets associated with a named individual. So if Eva fill a form and click an email, connect through LinkedIn, in that instance, we go up. And now it's not just about the company, it's about the actual person after company.
Mike: Perfect. Okay, so how do people use this data? I'm interested, particularly in the anonymous data, you refer to the fact of there could be a challenge and knowing who from the company visited the site? You know, do you find people who have value, you know, suddenly seeing a particular customer increase activity? Or how else do people use this data?
Tim: So we spoke earlier about the difference between or some of the differences between sales and marketing. And we very definitely have two different types of users. So for the Sales User, even the company level data can be useful. We've built over over the last period of time, we've built a number of plugins to try to help identify otherwise anonymous people. So we have we have the ability to see who the key employees at the company are. So you see somebody from Napier communications, we go okay, that's kind of intro and then we got kind of interesting here of a key people that work at that organisation.
So you can go we have Have a plugin for Outlook and a plug in for Gmail. So if you actually know somebody's applicant or know people at the company, you can send them a one to one individually email. And obviously, as I'm sure you know, one to one emails have far higher open rates far higher click through far higher engagement, we have a plug in for LinkedIn so often are so often our Sales Users that they'll go okay, somebody from this company, let's go on to LinkedIn, let's see who's at that company? Who am I already connected to? Who could I connect with, make the connections? And then when people are when their connections start to engage, we can then identify them on the website. That's kind of a sales side. With the marketing side, it's much more around, is our message going out to the right kind of people? If we're building a message aimed at UK businesses? Do we tend to see UK businesses coming onto the site? Or actually, is it American businesses or Canadian businesses or, or so we've our marketing teams, we give them that bit more of a generic, but actually drilled down to the company in the thermographic details. I don't know you're aiming for large businesses, but it seems most of the stuffs being read by smaller businesses, okay, maybe allows you to rethink where rethink the type of content and rethink the information you're putting out there.
Mike: That's really interesting. And presumably, if, if I'm running an Account Based Marketing Campaign, I can actually measure the impact on traffic from the accounts I'm targeting, in CANDDi to see to see the move.
Tim: Do you know what Account Based Marketing campaigns marketing has probably been one of the biggest buzzwords over the last few years?
Mike: It's certainly one of our biggest certainly our fastest growing service, actually, it's definitely working. And I think one of the things we found is, of course, when you start an Account Based Marketing Campaign, you don't necessarily run it as a lead gen campaign. And so it's quite hard to get those results. And certainly seeing the data in CANDDi definitely helps.
Tim: It often gives that tangible are slightly more tangible. We know we're doing the right thing, whilst it might take a number of months to actually see the the lead numbers actually tick through. So yes,
Mike: Definitely. So I mean, Kenny is obviously pulling in a lot of data, both personal and also firmographic. You mentioned before, I mean, there's always the GDPR question, what's the privacy implications on what you do? What are marketers need to be aware of?
Tim: You know, what is? The $64,000 question, isn't it about privacy these days, and it's also changing and evolving so much both. It's both a legal perspective, but also a technical perspective, and everything that's going on under the covers, so, so few pieces, and let's let's go through and try and get some these time. But please feel free to ask about any of the any bits that go through. So piece number one, obviously, is the GDPR. Ankle, so let's just talk about that.
So CANDDi only captures data from people coming on to our customers sites, but that's where we build our datasets from. So we rely on the fact that our customers have a legal basis for holding that data. And CANDDi, simply a data processor of the data our customers control.
What I mean, say there's, we don't own any of the data from your site. It's your data, you get to choose or you get to make requests as to what you want to do with that. Now, for most of our customers, they rely on legitimate interests as their as their legal basis. And in a b2b world, that makes a lot of sense, I would not use CANDDi, I would not use technology like CANDDi in any in any form of high risk data or very, very, very, very personal data. So if you're doing anything with children, or if you're doing anything with medical records, this wouldn't be the right type of tool to be using. But if you're a b2b business, if you're if you're selling to other other b2b companies, or other other b2b organisations, then the legitimate interests, the ability to say, look, we saw someone came onto our website, they are a genuine prospect for us. That's why we're tracking them. That's why we're that's why we're doing this. The second side, which which I touched on the beginning, is about cookies, and about first party but versus third party. So this is this is whereas GDPR was the buzzword of of 2018 2019. That buzz word of 2020 2223. Almost certainly is going to be the fact that if you read all the articles, cookies are dying, they're going away. No one's ever going to accept cookies anymore, etc, etc, etc. And the truth of matter is, in the same way that GDPR made us think carefully about what we were doing with marketing data. But it didn't stop marketing. Unit didn't destroy the industry and all of the above, the same is going to be true with with the first party versus third party cookies.
So third party cookies effectively are cookies that follow you around the internet. This is where you go and look at a dishwasher. And then you go and read a news article and it says buy this dishwasher. Now that's driven off of third party cookie, first party cookies, or just a bite, they only collect data on that one website on that one company's on that one company's property. So that much more about, and we've said this for years, and candidates are technology. And the best way to use this technology is to help. We help companies build relationships with people and organisations who want to have relationships with them. If if you think about it from sales perspective, at the end of the day, even if I come onto your website, if I don't want to have a relationship with your business, it's pointless trying to force me to because nobody wins. Or what happens is you waste marketing money, you waste sales time. Whereas if it's just that I do, but I just don't quite know how to get started. Well, that's a great prospect for you. I feel like I'm getting it does any of this make sense? Certainly, I can talk about privacy till the cows come home. So
Mike: I think it's very important that the differential you made about first party and third party cookies, and that's quite technical. But you know, it really is at the heart of the new regulations are impacting third party.
Tim: Correct. We in fact, actually going back a number of years, we coined a we coined that Scripture, we call it the pub landlord conversation, if you've got a couple of minutes, but so the public landlord conversation says, and by the way, candies were based in Manchester, we're in the centre of it, we're in fact, within the Northern Quarter, if anyone knows those Manchester well, but so for the last five years, I've been going on a Friday night finish work, obviously, COVID notwithstanding both, so I would go to the same pub on a Friday night with a team in CANDDi, and we'd sit down, we'd have a beer, just let off steam at the end of the for long week. And, and obviously over time, I'd start to build a relationship with the pub landlord. And, and so I'd go in there once in one day. And he goes, and it must have been a really bad week, because you could read on my face as a bad place. And he says, Timmy says some, you look like you've had a tough week, why don't you sit down, there's a pint of Guinness, he knows I drink Guinness, there's a pint of Guinness, just it's on the house, have a few minutes, just get get stress off. And then when you're ready, we'll have a proper conversation. And I went, you know what, that's really, really good. But the landlord recognised who I was he new or like drinking Guinness, he saw us in a bad mood. That's a great relationship, and the fact that I want to have a relationship with him. So I go, brilliant, that's great customer service. That's a good analogy, if you like have a first party tracking, where we want to have a relationship.
Now the counter to that is maybe I jump on a train to London and I walk into work into a bar in the middle of Shoreditch. And the landlord goes, You're Tim Langley, I've seen you on the internet. I'm going to run a mile party. Obviously, everybody has their own definitions of what they feel comfortable sharing and what they view as, as personal and private. And except for but that to me is the distinction between the two, I get to choose and I get to I get to choose who I want to have a relationship with. And on the assumption they want to have a relationship with me. We have a beautiful, beautiful situation. The one where they pull together data, but I'm not necessarily aware of. That's uncomfortable. That's not something that's not something that's good for me as an individual. It's not something that's good for a business either.
Mike: I love that explanation. That's That's fantastic, really clear differentiation there. And absolutely, I think everyone would run a mile to finally have a stalker, it's, it's scary.
Tim: It's a very English analogy, though it doesn't translate so well across the pond.
Mike: So, I mean, I'm mindful of the time here. I mean, just looking at installing can do it. Obviously, there's quite a lot is it does that mean it's complicated to instal and manage?
Tim: It's super well. It's super simple to instal and manage. It's literally put one line of code on your website, we take care of everything else, where, where it can be more complex, maybe complex as the wrong word. But where it can be more more challenging is sometimes it involves sales teams and sales people starting to change their behaviours and think a bit more about how they actually want to engage and how they actually have a go about contacting for days. I think it's fair to say the days of cold calling, picking up the phone and just go Hey Mike, you want to speak You now are probably passed, it's definitely a much more subtle approach. And so we, when we start working with clients, we have a very strong customer success team. And they work very closely with people trialling CANDDi, and very closely with our customers to help them think about how to best use this within their business. So technically, it's simple, but, but sometimes, sometimes we dive a lot deeper with customers to really help them get the best out of it.
Mike: That's really interesting.
Tim: So I mean, presumably people, they look at the data, and they might go back and see if somebody already care about somebody or you know, suddenly, it's an instant, this is perfect, I can understand, oh, when they look at these products, I didn't know this customer is interested these products, that that must be a great feeling. But sometimes it requires a bit more time and effort to dig deep to find that the information that matters.
And sometimes it requires a bit of, as you said, then a bit more lateral thinking. So we've had times we've had times when we've had people say, Well, I know these people already, why do I need to know they're on our website. And actually, they'll then spread it out to the wider team. And maybe it's the account manager who goes, you might already know those people, Mr. salesperson, but my goodness, I really want to know, another one. Another one we find is sometimes we'll see people go. And they'll see customers looking at their terms and conditions or their contract terms. And you go, Whoa, that's a red flag, you might want to know about that. If your best customer is looking at terms and conditions, that's a good indication, it might be time to start touching base and say, Hi, how are you again? So yes, that's kind of the wider picture thinking. But when people are thinking very linearly, sometimes they don't always doesn't always jump out as immediate benefits.
Mike: No, absolutely. I mean, we have, you know, in marketing, running a marketing agency, if people look at the client's page, or they look at the People page, or they look at both, it's a real indication that they're interested. So I totally understand that.
Tim: Exactly. Yeah. So if somebody wanted to try CANDDi, I mean, it's a line of code on the website. That sounds simple.
Mike: But is it easy to get a trial? How do you how do you, you know, let people test the product?
Tim: Yeah, so we, as with many SAS businesses, we are a free trial first business CANDDi.com/register. Or just go to WWE did we CANDDi.com. And there's plenty of ways to to register from there. When we work with people, we do a 30 day free trial to get started. And during that free trial, our customer success team are regularly reaching out touching base, just trying to make sure that we can give you the best possible experience of software to hand. So very, very, very simple, very, very easy to get started. We We love having new people on board.
Mike: Brilliant, so So just go to CANDDi ca n ddi.com, or one of the other versions you've got. And and try it out. That's a great message. I mean, it's been really great talking to you, if people are, are interested in finding out more or maybe have a question, is there a way they can get ahold of you on the internet?
Tim: There's 100 ways to get ahold of me on the internet. But so tim@CANDDi.com or reach out to me, Tim Langley on LinkedIn. I, in fact, it is it's the joy of growing, building a growing businesses is there are more and more people in the team to work to take over stuff. But actually, I really enjoy when people reach out and ask me questions. And it's sometimes it's just really nice to actually touch base and understand the kinds of things people are actually interested in asking about. So we're more than happy to answer any questions.
Mike: Perfect. And I mean, that's brilliant. You know, if people are interested in a software product, they've got the email address to the CEO. That's, that's a pretty compelling.
Tim: I told you, we were kind of different in that space, but
Mike: awesome. Well, I really appreciate this. It's been such a good conversation not just about CANDDi, but about cookies, about privacy, about all sorts of things. Thank you so much for being on the podcast him.
Tim: Thanks very much for having me, Mike.
Mike: Thanks very much. Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast: Interview with Sarah Bond - Lucky Orange
In this podcast episode, we interview Sarah Bond, Vice President of Marketing at Lucky Orange, a website conversion optimization tool.
Sarah shares her career journey on how she got into marketing, and how Lucky Orange helps B2B marketers understand website visitor behaviour. She explains the different tools available such as heat maps, session recordings, and live chat; and how these tools help understand visitors' behaviours in aggregate but also at an individual user level.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Sarah Bond - Lucky Orange
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sarah Bond
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 the latest episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Sarah bond. Sarah is the Vice President of Marketing at Lucky Orange. Welcome to the podcast, Sarah.
Sarah: Thanks, Mike. Excited to be here with you today.
Mike: It's great to have you here. So, I mean, the way we normally start is asking a little bit about career history. So can you tell us a little bit about your career and how you've ended up at Lucky Orange?
Sarah: Absolutely. So I actually have a little bit of a secret. Although I'm vice president of marketing. Now, I'm actually not a marketer, by background or education. My career has led me into marketing. But I actually got my start in graduated from college with a degree in public relations and advertising. And as soon as I graduated from college, I, my first job was serving as a leadership consultant. And from there, I jumped into actually doing journalism, and was writing for a weekly newspaper for a while, you know, I love writing, it's one of my passion areas. So I did that. And then after I got done doing writing, I said, you know, I really, really want to get into public relations. And so my next job was doing agency side public relations, and did that for a while and then moved over into the corporate world, doing PR for a fortune 500 healthcare technology company. And it was while I was doing PR that my manager at the time came to me with an interesting opportunity to move over to the marketing side doing digital marketing. And it was real leap of faith. For me, I think at the time, I knew what HTML stood for. But I had no idea what online marketing was what paid search was, I didn't know anything about websites other than publishing news releases to websites, and my role is PR. But I kind of made that leap of faith. And I learned that I really enjoyed the digital marketing side of things. And from there, just kind of use that as a jumping off point to do a variety of different marketing and comms tasks and have led internal communications teams, I've led brand strategy and brand identity, as well as in house creative services team. So graphic designers, video production, and all sorts of different marketing, ranging from Product Marketing focused on go to marketing strategies, and just really the gamut of anything and everything marketing, to even doing some civic engagement strategies. And all of that kind of broad marketing career led me to Lucky Orange a great opportunity to get in with a smaller company than where I was at when I left the company that I had previously been at. It was about 22,000 people. And so I made the jump to a company of less than 20 people and absolutely love it, and couldn't be happier than where I'm at, at Lucky Orange where I get to do a little bit of anything and everything marketing and communications related.
Mike: That's, that's great. That sounds like a fascinating career, and probably not something you had like this 1020 year career plan. It sounds like it was very dynamic.
Sarah: It definitely was, it was one of those, say yes to the opportunity when it arises, type of strategies. And if you had asked me when I first got started my career, I would have told you, I'm going to be doing public relations for my whole career and would continue on with that. But really, when the different opportunities presented themselves, I jumped at it because I love learning new skills and new tasks. And it is what really keeps me energised and excited about my career and being able to dive in and get my hands dirty and marketing. I just really I love that opportunity and have been fortunate to have a career that's given me a lot of opportunities to continue to grow and stretch my skills.
Mike; Oh, that. That's awesome. That sounds great. Right? So before we dive into the company and what you do, I've got to ask what you must get asked all the time. Why the name Lucky Orange.
Sarah: It's an interesting name, isn't it? It's definitely not one that you can infer what we do just based on the name. But that's a little bit by design. When our founders were coming up with the name for the company. They wanted something that was interesting and differentiated in the market space and that would allow them to grab people's attention and they really landed on Lucky Orange and we've kind of embraced it from there and incorporate it in everything that we do.
Mike: That's great. So I mean, it's certainly memorable. I guess that you know, the things that have asked that is, so you're Lucky Orange, I've got no idea from the name, what you do, can you tell us what you do?
Sarah: Absolutely, really at the core of what we do is we help people who have a website, understand what people are doing on their site, so that they can improve their conversions on that site, whether it's an E commerce site that's looking to grow sales, or a b2b site that's looking to generate more leads. And we offer a suite of tools that help people understand website visitor behaviour. So from heat maps and session recordings that let you see the most popular parts of your site to drilling down into what a very individual user is doing to surveys and live chat that allow you to engage directly with a person who's on your site to ask them firsthand what they're struggling with, or what they're interested in, to really get that into in the understanding of the customer so that when you understand them better, you can create better experiences, you know, if you're a user experience designer using Lucky Orange tools, you can not only create a really beautiful website experience, but one that's also highly functional. And that converts to someone who's a solo entrepreneur who's trying to understand why they're getting all this traffic, but why it's not converting and turning into sales or leads.
Mike: Right sounds like there's a lot of things there. So I mean, you're packaging different tools up, I mean, maybe we can just go and explore some of those products kind of unpack the the tools first. So I think the first thing you talked about was understanding recording user sessions. So, you know, this is a technology where you're watching what people do on the website. I mean, can you give me some examples of what marketers might do with that data? How they might use it?
Sarah: Sure. And like you said, Mike, it, it is for those who are unfamiliar with what a session recording does, it really is like watching a playback of what someone did on your website. So with a session recording, you can see the pages that they navigated to, you can see where they clicked on those pages, where they scroll down a page, maybe where they hesitated where they move their mouse. So it really is a helpful tool to let you see what they're doing. And, you know, we as a marketing team, at Lucky Orange, use our own tools on our website to understand what people are doing. And there are several different ways you as a marketer might use them. Let's say you just launched a paid advertising campaign, and you want to see what people from that campaign are doing? Well, you can filter by source, you can filter by any UTM parameter. And you can see, okay, my people coming on my Google PPC ads that are coming to my site from those ads, I want to watch and see if they're going through my page and scrolling through my page. And one of the things that we found very helpful, particularly when we have landing pages created for a specific campaign is to see just how much of the content people are consuming. And one of the things that we found after we launched our new website is that we have a very large video block on some of our pages, and that some people just scroll right past that.
So we've used that information to try and recreate the hierarchy of information to put other information that we think is more compelling on those landing pages to the top so that we can optimise that page to increase the odds that people will hit that call to action. So it can be very helpful in that regard as a marketer to do that. And also, if you're very content heavy site in our content marketing team likes to use our session recordings to see just how far down the page somebody's reading into their content. You know, there's, you can look at Google Analytics and see time on page, but you don't know if they just opened up that browser and they're sitting there. But with a session recording, you can actually see, okay, someone is actively reading my content and making it all the way down to the bottom of the page. And there's another tool that when we we switch to talk about heat maps, that can be really helpful from that perspective, too. But it's really great to let you see kind of the the guts behind what you might surface up in Google Analytics of highly traffic pages, high time on site, but what are they really doing when they're on that page? That's what a session recording can help you understand?
Mike: And with those session recordings, you're effectively looking at individual users. Is that right? That's right. Yep. So you're playing through individual users now. You just mentioned heatmap. So explain that. To me, that sounds like what you're doing is aggregating those individual users to try and give an indication of what's interesting. Is that is that as a good understanding of what it does,
Sarah: yeah, we should have you on the marketing team. Yeah, I mean, you explained it very well. A where session recording allows you to see what an individual person on your site is doing. A heatmap gives you the aggregate view of what people are doing on your site. So it lets you get a feel for those areas of your site that are getting a lot of engagement, or conversely, no engagement, which can be really, really helpful. Because in my past life as a digital marketer, for a very big company working on website redesigns, you kind of get into this design by committee process where every single line of business is going to tell you they need to be in the top navigation of the website, because they are the most important thing. And they are absolutely what's drawing people into your site, because everyone's looking for their content. Well, a heat map can actually prove or disprove some of those internal stakeholders, because it can show you well actually, on our main navigation, we get the most clicks on these lines of business, or these subjects or these topics. And we're not getting a lot of clicks here. So as a marketer, you can use that to refine what you're actually showing, and hopefully get people to the content that's most meaningful to them, so that they stay longer on their site. And there are some other ways that you can use heat maps to there's a version of a heat map that's called a scroll heat map, that instead of showing you chunks of the site, you know, clip clickable elements where people might be clicking on this will show you how far down the page a person, the majority of people scrolled.
And on a scroll heatmap, you have what's called the effective fold, which, you know, if you're thinking of it in terms like a newspaper, it's that point where 50% of the people are falling off. So it's effectively where the fold is that on your website. And when you're thinking about something like blog content, or even a product page, where you're maybe listing out a lot of features, a scroll heatmap will show you how far down the page most people are making it. So if people are stopping reading before they're getting to your calls to action, or if you're looking at it as a content marketer and saying, Man, I put all this time and energy and hours of work into creating these long form blog posts, but nobody's reading them. What a gift is that to be able to go back and say, I don't need to waste my time on these long posts anymore. Maybe I can write shorter, concise content that gets people there quickly and gets consumed all the way through. So they're really great analytics tools for marketers to be able to have to understand visitor behaviour on your site in aggregate, but also at the individual user level when you want to dive in deeper.
Mike: Awesome. I mean, in terms of making these recordings, so you're not watching people's eyes? Are you tracking the mouse? How do you understand what people are focusing on?
Sarah: Right? So a heat map is capturing where people, there are several different types. So it clicks heat map will capture where a user is clicking, so wherever they click their mouse, and you can see some interesting behaviour from that if you dive in and start studying heat maps, because, of course, you expect to see people clicking on things that are clickable, but a lot of people will also click as they move down the screen where you might see clicks in random areas. Or you might uncover issues on your site where people are clicking things that they think aren't that should be clickable that actually aren't. So that's something great that you can pass on to your user experience or development teams. But there are also moves heat maps that allow you to see where someone moves their mouse across the screen. So it's not capturing the click, but it's actually following that mouse movement. And there are some common things that you'll see user experience designers are familiar with an F shaped pattern, when it comes to consuming content on a website. And you'll see a lot of users will move their mouse as they read that content. And so if you're trying to kind of break out of some of those I hate here, people consuming this an F shaped patterns, you can study one of those mouse movement heat maps to really understand that. So that's, that's really what we're tracking is the movement of the mouse across the page. And you know, some things that we also capture. Lucky Orange allows you to see events within the system that happen like when someone highlights text will trigger an event that shows you someone as actually paying really close attention to this text. They found it very interesting. You know, I I like to think of it kind of how if you read on a Kindle, where when you have those popular areas that people read that kind of shows up in your Kindle text is underlined. It's sort of like that, where you can see people found this text really interesting enough so that they highlighted it. So we do capture things like that. And also things like rage clicks when someone clicks on an element quickly and repeatedly. We surface that up so that you can quickly find some of these pain points that people are experiencing on your site without having to sit and watch through a lot of recordings individually.
Mike: As fascinating. I'm interested because a couple of years ago this recording of user sessions got a quite a lot of bad publicity but To clean I think Europe around confidentiality, privacy and GDPR. I mean, what's the situation now? What do you do to ensure privacy?
Sarah: Absolutely. And I think that's a great and very important question. And it's one we take very seriously because our tools are designed to help people who have websites create better experiences on behalf of the user. And that's really our goal. And with the user, the end user in mind, whether it's a b2b customer, or it's an E commerce shopper, which is the reason why we are GDPR and CCPA compliant. But we also take steps to ensure that we're really focused on the behaviour on the site and not the information that's being entered into the site. So we automatically block the recording of any keystrokes. So when a visitor to a website is typing information and on a site, you won't actually be able to see in that recording, if they're typing in their username or their password, instead, you just see Asterix reflected in the recording, because we really do value that privacy of the person visiting the website, we also have tools where we allow our customers to surface up to their website visitors, here's the information that we're recording on you, here's how to manage that. And here's how you can opt out of that if you don't want that information recorded. Because it really should be a diagnostics and an understanding tool. It's not about gaining the visitors information. So we really do take that seriously. And we also offer a layer of protection above that where people who are managing their websites can say, I don't want this information to come through. So I want to scramble the text. So instead of saying, You seeing on our website recording where it says click here, you can actually choose to have that text randomly scrambled so that you can still do all of the diagnostics, things that you would be able to do. But you're not capturing that in a recording, which financial institutions, for example, find very helpful because they may have someone who's coming in and helping audit the site or do some troubleshooting. And they don't necessarily want the person watching the recording to see that information. So they can use tech scrambling features so that you can still understand if there's an issue on a site where maybe there was a button error, you can still see that without seeing the actual information. And you can designate parts of the site as sensitive data collection. So if it's something that wouldn't normally be flagged, you can go above and beyond by designating CSS classes as sensitive and we won't capture that information.
Mike: That's really cool to know that you've got that protection. I think, particularly for users, it's important to know that protective protection exists for sure. So I'd like to move on and talk about some of the other features in Lucky Orange. We've talked about, you know, recording user sessions. And we've talked about heat maps, you know, to quite technical web design things. You know, the next thing I've seen on your website is live chat, which is just completely different. So explain how that fits into a, you know, a package of products. That includes a very technical products. Why Why did you go to live chat?
Sarah: Absolutely. So I think a lot of people do look at that, especially when they compare Lucky Orange to our competitors who don't have live chat and you say, why is live chat tucked in there? Well, at the end of the day, when our founders created Lucky Orange, what they were really trying to do is create software that allowed them to better understand people who are coming to their website, and recordings and heat maps and form analytics are great tools to allow you to retro actively go in and study that. But when you couple our Live View tool, which lets you see what people are doing on your site, right now, with something like live chat, you have the opportunity to see people who are struggling on your site and reach out to them and say, Hey, how can I help you? Is there something you're looking for. Or if you see a technical issue happen when you're using that live view to cobrowse with a customer, you can go in and chat with them and resolve it so that you're not only trying to optimise for conversions, but you're really saving the sale are saving the lead before you lose that lead, which we think is really critical.
And there have been studies that have shown when you couple live chat with live view that people have an close to 90% higher satisfaction rate than they did on sites where they don't have that opportunity to chat and to cobrowse with a support agent. And we just feel like it's a really great opportunity to not only help customers when and where they need it. But when you pair it with a tool like surveys where you can proactively reach out to people where you think maybe they're having an issue or maybe you've watched session recordings and you think I see a lot of people getting hung up on my shipping and return policies page. I wonder if there's a problem there. Well You can trigger a live chat to engage people when they land on that shipping policies page. Or you could have a survey, which we offer within Lucky Orange to ask people, do you have any questions? Do you need more information that we're not providing and get some of that firsthand feedback so that it's not just one directional, but you really to understand that customer experience, have the opportunity to study what they did, but also to engage with them while they're on your site, which we feel like is a really important part of that sort of closed loop ability to understand customers better.
Mike: And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you mentioned something, I think it'll be quite interesting to our b2b audience, which is form analytics. I mean, a lot of b2b websites, it's all about generating leads, capturing leads, I'm really interested, you have some examples of how people have used those form analytics to improve conversion rates?
Sarah: Yeah, I certainly do. And I can tell you, as a b2b marketer, myself, when I came to Lucky Orange, this was one of the tools that, you know, my jaw kind of hit the floor, because as a marketer, in a b2b organisation, you really want to generate those leads. And that's what you're handing off to your sales team. And that's, you know, how you get business done at the end of the day. And when I learned that there was a tool that allow you to see which fields people were abandoning, I just couldn't believe that this wasn't more used throughout the industry, because it is really powerful. I mean, if you've got a form, and a lot of times, you know, when marketing's working with sales, they're like, Okay, what is all of the information, we need to populate every single form in our CRM, so you get these really long fields. And this is where form analytics can come in. And be very handy because it helps you understand where people are dropping off. And one of the examples that we've seen is that when people are filling out a form on a website, they don't want to talk to a person on the phone. So when you ask for that phone number, a lot of people will abandon the form at that field, because they don't want to give their phone number. So that is one really great piece of insight that we've seen for b2b marketers is, if you don't need that phone number, if you can build the relationship first with them via email, do that. And then once you've gained their trust, once they show further signs of engagement, then you can ask for that phone number down the line. Another thing to look for on forum analytics is fields that get repeated because this is often a sign that your field may be confusing, or it may need some more instruction. So if you can do some of that inline description within your form fields, you know, we've all seen that in forms where it asks for a phone number, but it has very specific expectations. Or if it asks for an address, if you're trying to get that information, and it wants it in a very specific format that people if you don't explain what that format is, then people will have to continue to repeat that field. And oftentimes, they'll abandon because they just get frustrated with the form fields.
Mike: That's, that's fascinating. So you can actually see in those analytics, where people are submitting the form, getting an error and then having to reenter it. So you get to see those and always live those problems with users. That's awesome. So you've got all these tools? I mean, one of the things one of the other features you've got is conversion funnels, which I guess is, you know, is ultimately what we're trying to do, you're trying to make the website more effective at converting visitors to become customers or leads. There's lots of different conversion funnel tools from you know, Google Analytics all the way up. Can you tell me a little bit about what Lucky Orange does and how you differ from some of the other suppliers?
Sarah: Sure. So you can look at a conversion funnel and other tools like Google Analytics. And for those who aren't familiar with conversion funnels, it's essentially a predefined set of steps that walks you through the pages that you expect someone to visit on their way to conversion. And a conversion funnel will show you as they go from page to page or step to step on your website, where they're dropping off. And we're lucky orange is different than a tool like Google Analytics is that let's say you've got a four step conversion funnel. And you see that when people get to that third step, they drop off. Well, you can dial into that third step, and you can watch a session recording from there to see and understand exactly why someone's dropping off. And you simply can't do that in a tool like Google Analytics, because they don't have that capability. And so you not only know where people are dropping off, but you have the opportunity to watch some of those recordings and see, is it a technical issue that they're encountering? Maybe that's preventing them from getting to the next step? Or is there something that you can infer from while everybody's looking at this stuff? Shouldn't when I look at this page and I study these session recordings, it seems like everyone's hovering over the price or hovering over this piece of information.
And then they're abandoning. So that could be an indicator to you there. And you can take that information, if you know that people are abandoning on that third step on that third page, right before they convert, you can set up a survey, or you can trigger a live chat so that when people get there, you can ask them for more information, is there anything I can help you with today? So you can take that hypothesis that you formulated by watching those session recordings, and then do some first person research with those people who are coming to your website to, you know, either do a survey that you can have running when you're not available, or use that live chat when you are available to trigger on that specific page to try and get a better understanding of why people aren't converting?
Mike: Oh, that's awesome. I mean, there's other features as well, we haven't had time to cover. I mean, one of the things I have to admit is I do this podcast for selfish reasons, I want to learn things. So I'm gonna take advantage of the opportunity. You know, there's so many different tools you've got there for optimising websites. If I was looking to optimise a Napier website, I mean, where would I start? How would I begin?
Sarah: Yeah, that is a great question. And it's one that we get a lot from people. And I would say the best place to start is really going in and looking at those pages where you have a high conversion probability. And starting there and study those and figure out look at some session recordings on the pages that you know, are critical to conversions and see if you can uncover why people aren't converting there. And then as a marketer, I would go in and analyse those campaigns where I'm spending the most money to get people to my site and see what I can glean from those.
Mike: That's great. And you've got all these tools available for when you actually need to use them once you've done some investigation. I mean, perhaps, you know, one of the things we need to talk about is price, it sounds like this should be a very expensive package having all these different tools together. I mean, is it inexpensive product.
Sarah: It you know, for us Lucky Orange is a tool that we created as something to help us solve problems for our own small businesses that we had. And that's something that we keep in mind from a pricing standpoint is that we certainly know there are a lot of our competitors out there who charge enterprise prices, and you won't find those enterprise prices on their website. And that's something that we keep in mind, when we're pricing our products is that we do want to help small businesses, because that is how we got our start. And we certainly scale up to enterprise customers, we have fortune 500 companies who use our products and international businesses, Shopify Plus customers, big household name brands, who would recognise but we also have a lot of customers who are in that Shopify piece of the market, or who are just getting started, who desperately need analytical tools like this. And so that is something that that we do think about, and that we do factor in and we want to be affordable to those companies who, you know, are core to why we started Lucky Orange in the first place who, you know, we really want to help them succeed and thrive. And we don't want Lucky Orange to be a tool that a small business owner can't afford, because we really do believe these tools have the potential to help them grow and unlock their business.
Mike: That's perfect and really good to hear. So, I mean, we're coming to the, to the end of our time now. So I'm interested in anything we should have covered. Are there any secret features we've missed out or anything else that you feel you should tell us?
Sarah: Yeah, you know, I think the key to conversion rate optimization, which is what you use lucky, orange tools to do as a marketer is you have to be programmatic about it, you have to constantly go in and study the data, and that the insights that you gain and learn about your site on one day and the changes that you make that may be working, maybe need may need to be revisited in you know, a month or two months or three months and that it's not a let me do it once and then I'm done with it. As behaviour changes on the on the internet as people's consumption patterns change as what they are interested in, you know, popularity trends and fads changes. Conversion Rate Optimization is an ongoing process. And it's something that if you are looking to do more of or to get started with I encourage you to think about the time that you'll have to commit to it on a weekly basis and block out some time because it is something you know, studying data, anyone who dives in on the analytics, you know, you have to make time for it. And it is something the more programmatic you can be about it the more that you can dedicate time and resources, the better results that you'll have because you've committed to going in and learning and under See any more about your visitors so you can make those more impactful experiences with your website?
Mike: That's great advice. Thank you. So I'm sure you know, everyone's excited and interested. I mean, everyone wants to increase conversion rates on websites. So if people have questions, or maybe they want to try the product, how can people go about, you know, either getting hold of you or testing the product for themselves?
Sarah: Sure, the easiest way to do that is just to go to Lucky orange.com. You can sign up for a free trial, you get seven days to test out the tool. And there are also free plans available. So if you try it out for seven days, and you want to keep going with it and want to play around with it a little longer than you can trial, a free plan on Lucky Orange. And that's really the easiest and the best way to go in and learn more about it. And from our website. If you have more questions. Our support team is always available through our website, or via an email at support at Lucky Orange. And they're an awesome group of people who love helping our customers. And it doesn't matter if you're on a free trial, or a free plan or a paid plan. We help all of our customers and support them equally.
Mike: Oh, that's perfect. I'm sure people listening to podcasts will want to try it. I mean, Sarah has been really interesting talking to you about the tools and about how people can improve conversion rates. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being on the podcast.
Sarah: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Mike. Thank you.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Pass the Secret Sauce Podcast: Build and Track Your Customer’s Journey
Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier featured on the Pass the Secret Sauce Podcast, to share his thoughts on how B2B marketers can build and track their customer journey, and tactics to reach their target audiences effectively.
Listen to the full interview here, or via your favourite podcast app, and don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know your thoughts.
A Napier Webinar: Don't Get Left Behind: Next-Generation B2B Content Tools
Content marketing is continuously evolving, and the format of content is no exception. New B2B content tools are now available offering marketers an interactive, and engaging format to break away from traditional PDFs, and have access to in-depth analytics on the performance of each content piece.
Napier recently held a webinar 'Don't Get Left Behind: Next Generation B2B Content Tools' and explored:
- The importance of content marketing
- Why today's solutions don't work
- Why PDFs suck
- The route to success with engaging formats and great analytics
- Introduction to Turtl
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Don't Get Left Behind: Next Generation B2B Content Tools’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining the latest Napier webinar. This is quite exciting, this webinar is going to be talking about next generation content tools. So it combines two things I really care about. One is content for marketing purposes. And the other is technology. So I mean, for me, this is a really exciting webinar. Because there's a lot we can do from this, that's going to be actionable. And I'm going to present the webinar and then we'll obviously invite any questions you have after the webinar. So if you do have anything you'd like to ask, feel free to put it into the chat. And I'll try and cover any questions we get at the end.
So to start with, this is all about not getting left behind. It's about the next generation of content tools that are really starting to have an impact on b2b marketing. And when we look at content, what do we want to do? Well, we want to have tools that are great for creating content, tools that engage the audience. And we also need tools that actually gather data that's actionable, that lets you feed back into your next steps either to optimise your campaigns generally, or alternatively, to optimise your campaigns on a personal basis with personalization. So this is what we're looking for. But what do we have today? Well, today, pretty much a lot of our content goes out as PDF. And I don't really want to skew the debate, but I hate PDFs. Let's be honest, when PDFs came out, they were pretty amazing. But this was 25 years ago, maybe 30 years ago. And PDFs are fundamentally based on the print publishing model. You create something and then you distribute it to a lot of people. I mean, this model is 400 years old, why are we still creating PDFs, that are based upon a really old model and using that for most of our content? You know, PDFs? Yes, they do ensure things look consistent. And that was a big deal. At the time they first came out, but they're rigid. They're very hard to personalise. And they tell me nothing about what the person who received the PDF found interesting. In fact, they don't even tell me if the person who received the PDF, actually open the document. And so PDFs really have had their day. And I'm looking for an opportunity to find content generation tools and content platforms that are going to provide a much better experience both for me as a marketer, and also for the audience's I'm trying to reach.
So how do we get here, I mean, I referenced the introduction of PDFs, I think it's important to know where we are now and the expectations of the audience's that we're trying to target in b2b technology in terms of the content they want. So back in the 1990s, it was really the offline era, it's when PDFs came in and started to really be very common. And what was happening was, typically, we weren't emailing either PDFs or PowerPoints or Word documents. So we were sending content, but it was relatively low tech, it certainly wasn't in any way engaged. And at the turn of the century, we moved into a broadcast area. So we started having things like content management systems, and also customer relationship management systems, and email tools that actually made it easier to broadcast content. So we started being able to get content more easily out to people, rather than just simply, you know, emailing on a one to one basis, a PDF or a PowerPoint. We move forward 10 years to 2010s. And that became the customer that this was really the decade of people understanding the importance of personas. And so here, in the last 10 years, we've really been focused on creating content that's optimised around a group of people or a persona. It creates much better engagement, and is a really effective way to improve our content. But it's still fundamentally a broadcast approach. However, now in the 2020s, I think the world has changed. And we're now in what Accenture called in the Harvard Business Review the relationship era. And we're now at a point where really to be effective in marketing, you have to be able to create one to one relationships digitally. And that means you have to personalise on a one to one on an individual basis. And this is certainly something where the PDF really can't go any further. I'm creating Seeing you know, personalised PDFs is very difficult. distributing them is also difficult. And so we need a new and better solution. But the important thing is, we're all busy.
So we need to look at what the trade off is between effectiveness and efforts. And here's a really simple graph, comparing the effectiveness of content to the amount of effort required to create it. So if we look on the left hand side, we've got things like Word documents, PowerPoints, PDFs, static kind of content, it's not personalised, it's not customised. It's generally less effective. But it's super easy to create. We all love creating PowerPoints, you know, and probably we all create too many. So I think, you know, it's easy, but less effective. And we move beyond the document format to the middle of the screen, and we start looking at, you know, marketing tools, which could be things like content management systems on your website. It could be interactive content, maybe in some email tools. And they certainly are more effective because they become more personalised. And they're also more engaging, people have more of an opportunity to pick the content they like. But they are becoming quite hard to create. And then today, if we look at marketing automation, marketing automation platforms can be very, very effective, you can create highly personalised, highly engaged content through marketing automation. But it's fundamentally a specialist job to create that content. And so marketing automation tools are typically hard to use, it's hard to create that content.
What we really want is we want the best of both worlds, we want something that's designed to create very engaging, effective content. But it's also easy to use and doesn't require specialist knowledge or training. And what we're going to talk about today is a product called turtle turtle is a content automation platform. So it's been designed specifically to create content that is used in marketing campaigns. And what we're going to talk about is why a content automation platform is different from a standard document or marketing tools, or even marketing automation platforms, and what the benefits are, and why you should be looking to use content automation platforms in the future, rather than relying on some of the legacy tools that frankly, have kind of, you know, run out of steam with the demands for more and more personalization. So, content automation platforms, they're the alternative to PDFs, the thing we need to do clearly, is we need to look at the impact of a content automation tool, versus using a standard PDF.
And there's been some research that's been done. And here's some research produced by turtle, where they found that when you send a document using turtle rather than a PDF, people spend 1,000%, or 10 times more time engaging with the content on turtle versus using a marketing brochure as a PDF. It's slightly less of an impact on mobile, but it's still over seven times the amount of time. So just imagine getting your target audience to increase the time they spend looking at content by a factor of seven. That's incredible. That's a huge change. And so just changing the format can give you a real benefit in terms of engagement from your audience. And the other thing is that when readers were asked about their perception of brands, and readers receiving the turtle document, were actually five times more likely to perceive a brand in a positive light than just receiving a PDF. I mean, the truth is our audiences, they also don't like PDFs, PDFs are old. They're antiquated. They're inflexible, they don't make it easy for people to pick out the content that's relevant. And so actually, we're doing our readers a favour by sending them a more effective format. And if you want to summarise this, basically, you lose 90% of the engagement on desktop, when you're sending a PDF, as opposed to using a more modern format. That is a huge impact and something I think that we all want to try and avoid. Now, I mentioned this earlier, but it's not just content and turtles been designed. And we'll talk a little bit about the turtle platform specifically, and some of its features in a minute. It's been designed to provide content that is in gauging that gap grabs the reader's attention. But to me, that's not really the most exciting thing, the most exciting thing is the data you get. You know, we're all in marketing, we all understand the importance of data. And the tracking and analytics provided by turtle are incredible. And the value they provide can actually transform how you approach marketing campaigns.
So turtle offers you the capability to actually keep track of almost every interaction from an individual user. So if we look at what's happening there and your user, we know, when they turn a page, that means we know how long they spend looking at a page. We know when they look at the contents menu, we know when they fill in a form, we know when they watch a video, we know when they listen to audio. And we can map this all down. And we can map this on both an individual and also on a general aggregate level. So we can understand what individuals are doing. And we can also optimise the content to appeal to the majority of the audience. This is something we can't even begin to do when we look at PDF, because we have none of this data. And so we can personalise and personalization is really important. I mean, I think, you know, we all understand that personalization is key. Hopefully the Accenture report I presented earlier gives you an idea of the importance of personalization. Research says that 74% of people are frustrated when they get generic content. It's not personalised and not relevant. And we know this, we know three quarters of our audience want personalised content, because actually, when you ask marketers 98% of marketers say that they believe customers expect personalised experiences. And that really matters. And it matters in terms of the bottom line as well.
So some research by McKinsey actually found that personalization of content ultimately drives an increase in sales. And McKinsey found that by personalising content, you can increase sales revenue by five to 15%. That's a big jump in the number of sales you get, just by doing marketing in a more personalised way by using modern marketing tools. So to create personalization, and to make use of the data, we need platforms that can actually process the data. And obviously, one of the key areas we're going to process marketing data is in our marketing automation platforms. So a typical marketing automation platform has maybe five elements to it. So companies that are using marketing automation, they want to have better targeting. They obviously want automation to save time. They want analytics. They need scalability, and they want to create engagement. Now initially, you might say, well, turtle, it's a content automation platform that's staying in the engagement sector. But that's not true. If we look at modern content platforms, they can help you across the whole range of areas, that market automation adds value, from the ability to provide data over what your audience is looking at, and therefore what they're interested in. And therefore how you can target them all the way through to offering a scalable platform that can generate personalised content for large number of people without needing a lot of manual efforts. And so, having a content automation platform is really key as part of a marketing automation strategy. A turtle, they've run some tests, they use HubSpot as their marketing automation. And they've seen almost a 60% increase in opening rate of content. And over a doubling in terms of click throughs. When using marketing that is based upon a content automation platform, so a much more modern format. So what we can do is we can add to total personalization to any marketing stack. So any marketing technology stack. And turtle is really interesting because it offers a number of ways to drive that personalization engine. And this is great because it means there's not one size fits all. So sometimes you're going to want self service personalization. So as an example, someone comes they watch, they find a turtle document, they select a few things within a form inside the turtle document and that will then serve them slightly different content based upon what they say their interests are. So self service personalization. batch file personalization is very simple. That's up loading of a spreadsheet to create a large number of versions of a document each one personalised to the individual. Or if you're using the marking automation tool, you can actually do that all automatically through the API. And finally, Turtle also offers functionality that will allow people to personalise the document before they enter it. So answer a couple of questions. And they will then receive a personalised virtual document. And it's important to say with turtle is, we're not looking at personalization in the way of just putting a company name or a logo, or an individual's name on a document. I mean, yes, absolutely. The technology exists to do that. But the personalization goes way beyond that. It's all about what content you include. And it's whether you add or remove certain topics. And indeed, which order you want to serve those topics up. So you can have complete flexibility in how that documents built, again, something that's incredibly difficult to do if you're building content as a PDF. So how does this all impact our workflow? We've we've got this ability to create content, we've got this ability to personalise content. But what does it mean in terms of our campaigns? Well, this is what we're going to talk about next. And typically, we see something like this as a workflow.
So what will happen is we've got a Contact Relationship Management System CRM, we've got a bunch of contacts, or it could be a marketing automation system, we want to run a campaign to them, we already know a little bit about that individual, you know, not least, we probably know their name, we probably know their company name. But we might also know job titles, or, you know, other demographic information, very simple stuff, that's going to point us to the kind of topics that a particular person will be interested in. So as an example, I might be running a campaign for a technology product. And I might be tight trying to target an engineering department, and also the C suite, those two audiences would need very different content. But I can do is I can pull the data from CRM, I can personalise the document, using the turtle personalization engine, and that can either be automatic through the API, or by uploading a spreadsheet. And so you can have things like the company name for sure. But also you can show, you know, for example, financial information to the C suite. Whereas for the engineers, you might want to show technical information, we then run a campaign, the campaign goes out to our audience, and the audience interacts with the document. And we already know from the research, the audience is going to interact more than they would do with a PDF. But we will know from the analytics, which pages they looked at who looked at which page, how long they spent, and so we start getting more information about our contacts. So we might find, for example, that we have, you know, a group of engineering managers who actually look at financial information more than they look at technical. And then perhaps the lower level engineers are more focused on technical features, rather than financial. So we start pulling that in. And that's amazing, because we take that data, and we can do two things. One is we can actually learn from that and build better campaigns next time.
But also, we can feed the information about what interests each individual back into our CRM or our marketing automation system, so that our next campaign is going to be even more personalised. And he you see an overview in the table of some of the things you can do, from you know, segmenting the contacts in the CRM, all the way through to applying personalised emails based upon what people did when they interacted with the turkey documents. So what does this mean? Well, what it means is that if we are creating a campaign, and we're using a modern document format, we're actually creating a much more effective campaign, integrating it with our marketing technology stack, we'll be able to understand who's engaged who's in market Who's ready for outreach, this is the ultimate and lead qualification today, if you look at marketing automation, a lot of lead qualification is done on either email clicks or form fills. And they're both very, very crude metrics. I mean, they're absolutely better than not having anything. But what we can sell is we can sell not only who spends time looking at a document looking at content using a modern platform, but we can also look at whether people are looking at information that is more top of the funnel, or more towards the bottom of the funnel, where for whereby they're in market ready to buy, and they're the people we need to talk to. It's much easier to do that, sending them a document and then analysing their engagement with a document than it is to try and do a sequence of emails, each one targeting a different stage of the funnel and then trying to To judge engagement from that. So it makes it very simple to understand where people are in the customer journey. I've mentioned about gathering data. And this is absolutely important not only at the personal level, but also the general level. So we can actually gain insight that's going to let us understand what's the best channel and the best messaging that resonates with our audience. For every campaign, we go forward. So every time we run campaigns like this, our marketing gets more intelligent and more effective. And finally, by understanding the customer journey more and getting more actionable data on who's ready to buy, and who's merely looking, and probably some way off, we can actually help not only integrate marketing and sales, but make that whole process more predictable. And that will also help in terms of identifying outcomes, or identifying who's at the bottom of the funnel, it's going to make it much easier for us to assess the likely return on investment, as we move that campaign, from the initial outreach with content through to trying to close with the sales team.
So I'm just going to talk a little bit about turtle now. I mean, obviously, we've talked about content. And there are a number of content automation platforms available. We personally believe that turtle is a long way ahead of the others. And that's why Napier has signed up with a partnership. So hopefully, you'll excuse the promotion of turtle, although a lot of the features are available on some of the other systems. So turtle basically has four elements. And these are the four elements you need in the Content Automation system, you need something that provides a great format for reading and engaging with content, you need a tool that makes it easy to create that content. So the content production needs to be easy. We've talked about personalization, personalization is really hard. And if a tool is not designed to personalise at scale, then it's not going to work. And so a rapid personalization engine is crucial. And lastly, you need the insight from the behaviour. So you need to better understand the behaviour of everybody on the different documents, and then gain insight from what they've done. So we'll look at each of these in turn, the reading format has, you know, three key elements. It's highly visual. It's explorative. So the reader actually chooses their own journey. And it's interactive.
All three of these things are based on psychological research, that not only determines what's going to cause the greatest engagement, but also what's going to cause the highest level of recall. So by creating something that's visual that people can choose their journey through. And that involves some degree of clicking and engagement, you're going to get generate content that is much more effective than simply sending a PDF and having a passive reading experience. So the reading format has been designed specifically to optimise the results. content production has been designed to simplify the process. So perhaps most important is the control of the brand. Like many content systems, Turtle actually basically gives you training wheels, so you're creating content, but turtle is guiding you to make sure that everything is on brand, whether that be fonts or colours, or layout or anything else. So it makes it very easy to design stuff on brand. And the contents modular, we can pull modules in from one document to another, which is incredibly useful. Because quite often there are typically pages that we want to reuse in different documents makes it very quick to generate new content. And turtles always up to date. I mean, one of the challenges with PDF is it tends to be something that is sent to a reader. And then they may hang on to it, whether that's an email or whether they've downloaded it. And any updates we make subsequently will not impact the PDF that's on any of our audiences PCs.
However, Turtle by being natively online will always be up to date. And that's not only in terms of what you're having in the content, but also in terms of the brand and you can actually automate brand updates through circle. So all documents get updated without needing any kind of manual intervention. And it removes that really painful process when a brand is changed or logos modified. And you have to go through and recreate all those PDFs. And ultimately, turtles research has found that content production costs can drop by up to 90%. And content is produced 80% faster. So huge benefits in terms of generating content. I've talked a lot about personalization and personalization really, really matters. And so we can do one to one personalization either forms within the document, or forms prior to opening the document that allow people to select, you know, anything. And this form can be completely flexible. So it could be based upon the industry or in the location you are, or something that's purely individual. And that will allow the document to be customised. And as I say, it could be anything from company name, all the way through to the actual content of the document and the order of the pages appear. We can actually create large outbound campaigns by creating customised content at scale from a spreadsheet, or we can actually automate that completely by integrating our marketing stack or a marketing automation platform with turtle to automatically send out customised documents. So customization becomes very, very easy and very quick. And then the insights and this, to me is the most valuable part of turtle is understanding what parts of your content have actually generated a response from your audience.
And what parts frankly, they're bored with. So you can do this on different levels. So you can look at individuals, and you can actually follow an individual through a reading journey you could look at, you know which pages they looked at, and how long they spent looking at the pages. You can see the sections and the interest readers as well as the content they skip. And you can pull this all together. So you can actually plan future campaigns or future messaging. Because you know, what it resonates with your audience, you know, what they care about, you know, what they spend time reading. And so it gives you far more intelligence to create better campaigns in the future. And the structure of turtle and you'll probably have noticed this is a turtle document is that you have the main page called a surf page, which highlights a topic. And then you have pages they call immerse pages, where you go into details, this is obviously a most page. So you can look at who clicks through from the surf page to the immerse pages to find more information. And you can look at who looks at a topic title, and just skip through it because it is relevant. So it gives you data at a really granular level. And what this does is it changes the way we generate content. And so when you first use a new content automation platform, you're initially going to have benefits of a more engaging format. PDF is not engaging, it's very functional. And certainly there's lots of engineers that are still going to be reading PDF data sheets in 10 years time, I've got no doubt. But for marketing content, PDF is not very effective, and tends to be fairly unengaging. And so your your benefit on day one is more engaging content. But what happens is, is that data that you get takes you through different stages. And we work with clients to go from this, you know, initial stage of more engagement through to being able to generate strategies based on data. And then personalised content, and then actually trying to converge and looking at what content is driving the results. So we start doing a data driven approach toward content. And ultimately, you can even have a fully automated system, where your marketing automation is driving the creation of highly customised and highly personalised content based upon a library of pages.
And so you can move from a situation where you start with just a more engaging format, and you end up delivering content, that is exactly what the reader wants. And he knows exactly what the reader wants, because you've driven that content through data and analysis, and not through, you know, marketing guesswork. So, in summary, I would say there's a huge opportunity for people, you know, but what we need to do is we all need to think about a better way to do things. PDF, yes, it's probably still gonna stay for things like technical data sheets. But in terms of marketing, let's make content better. And let's actually make our readers enjoy reading our marketing content more than they do at the moment. It's getting them more engaged, and ultimately, let's generate better results. So that's an overview of turtle and where we see content going.
If anyone's got any questions, I'd be really happy to ask them. So feel free to put questions into the chat. Okay, I think I've only got one question at the moment, which is regarding the cost of turtle. And the answer to that is it's actually quite a complex answer. So turtles starts off, literally at a low hundreds of pounds a month as a content automation platform, but then there's more and more features that are available. And as you scale up, turtle will then become, you know, more expensive, particularly as you use more enterprise level features. But at the low level, the introductory level, and you can create 10s of concept of turtle documents, you can use those widely. And you also get things like the data and some personalization features. So, Turtle actually is not an expensive tool to start off with. And it's really only when you want highly complex API integrations, that you're going to start seeing it taking a significant part of your marketing budget. So thank you for that question. I don't think there are any more questions in the chat. If anybody has any questions, please, please feel free to contact me. And I think most people know, my email is Mike at Napier b2b dot com. Send me an email with a question or if you'd like to see circle, inaction and how it can help you obviously we'd be more than happy to do that. Thanks very much for your time. I really appreciate it and I look forward to seeing your questions.
A Napier Podcast: Interview with Carolin Bink - 1plusX
In this podcast episode, we interview Carolin Bink, VP of Customer Success at 1plusX, an AI-driven data management platform.
Carolin shares what makes 1plusX different to other data management platforms, how their AI-first approach helps both publishers and marketers to utilize data, and what the impact is for marketers with third party cookies going away.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Carolin Bink - 1plusX
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Carolin Bink
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 the latest episode of marketing b2b technology that podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Carolin Bink, who's the VP of Customer Success at one plus x. Welcome to the podcast, Carolin.
Carolin: Hi, nice to meet you. And happy to be here.
Mike: It's great to have you on now. I mean, I've been really keen about this interview, because I looked at your LinkedIn profile. And it seems to me that you were a customer of one plus x and then joined the company. I mean, was it really a case of joining a company that you were using and love so much, you felt you had to work for that?
Carolin: Yeah, basically, it was pretty much like that, to be honest. So I was searching in 2016, DMP back when for the publisher in the sales house. But I worked at Axel Springer holes owns a lot of classified. So I also got into contact with a lot of markets classified data. And yeah, basically, I found this Swiss exotic looking startup that didn't do any marketing and just had engineers as employees and started working with them. And then yeah, really enjoyed it. And yeah, then I got this opportunity to, to do what I what I love the most full time consulting publishers and marketers worldwide about data strategies, and that's why I moved to work with the technic technology, I introduced this.
Mike: Well, and a big change in terms of company size from Axel Springer, which is huge. To a start up.
Carolin: Yeah, yeah, indeed. But I had the lack of Axel Springer to be kind of in start up environment like data strategy was always Yeah, it was an innovation hub. So yes, it's a change. But it was mainly changed in terms of people engineers knowledge. And also, for me a really high learning curve to learn more about AI. And really what's going on in the backend? Yes.
Mike: Awesome. So, I mean, one plus x is a data management platform. I mean, there are no end of data management platforms to help publishers and marketers. So can you just explain a little bit about what you do? And what makes you different in this market?
Carolin: Yeah, so I think what makes us different is that we always had this AI first approach. And this was something that I felt also extremely attractive when I chose one plus excessive DMP back then. Because, yeah, frankly, we had another technology before. And there were so many high expectations on using this technology. And I just remember, like a really concrete case of classifieds page that was offering a price comparison. And then people were so excited, yeah, we can finally use, people are searching for washing machines and directly sell them to washing machine providers. And yeah, obviously, the washing machine providers were quite excited about those news. And then in the end turned out like, there may be five kg of people interested in Germany in buying a washing machine, visiting a price comparison site. And still, the media currency was CPM. So basically, there was a lot of back and forth a lot of emails, a lot of high expectations.
And in the end, the marketer couldn't spend budget because there was simply no reach and the cost and the publisher was obviously also frustrated, because there was also no money coming in. And so, this is the this was the setup that I was used to when I was searching for companies that have this AI first approach like how can we utilise the data that is coming in and predict on top of the seat said users that make sense to Target and I think that made us a little bit different because this was the approach for us from day one on and for the customers that are marketers particularly, we prepare to cleanroom product that is mixing both best of both worlds where you can upload as a marketer your data set set and then you can use the publishers embedded spaced like a publisher database, obviously, privacy compliant to do expansion based on your own seat set. So we have this best of two worlds approach, which I would say is also different towards other cleanroom solution, which I personally fear or going back towards the situation that I faced in 2016. When I tried to sell Yeah, a washing machine intend to campaign to washing machine marketers to be honest.
Mike: That's true. The interesting I mean, you've used a couple of technical terms that might be be worth just explaining to people listening. So you talk about a cleanroom. What What do you mean by that? When, when you're referring to advertising?
Carolin: Sure. So yeah, obviously, right now, because of GDPR, because of CCPA. It's not easy to match data, right. So you can't just, you know, use the third party cookie that you used to use like couple of years ago, and match your users in your publishers database. So if you would like to use your CRM data, or any kind of data source that you own your first party data, and you would like to find those users into an in the publisher audience, you need a cleanroom, which is making sure that you're doing this matching privacy compliant.
Mike: Okay. So the cleanroom is, is making sure that you're meeting those requirements from GDPR. And the other regulations around the world. Yep. And obviously, that's hugely important. Because if you're not doing that, then then clearly any products are not going to be able to be sold. So it's an interesting term there. So what you're trying to do is use AI to understand how people are thinking, so whether they're considering it, in your example, buying washing machines or not, what is the benefit of AI? For the marketers who want to use that data as compared to using something simple? Is it just reach as you talked about? Or are there other benefits?
Carolin: I think, obviously, reach is part of it. So if you aren't just referring or if you're just using this technology that you always use, you will be always fishing in the same pond, more or less, especially as the internet goes blind, your opponent is drying out a little bit. So there will be less and less fish to target. And obviously, yeah, kind of it's kind of getting harder and harder for you to find your right audience or retarget your audience. So AI is helping marketers significantly to keep reach up, and also reach, let's say qualified leads, right instead of just random audiences. And yeah, I think that's also a concept that is highly known, right? If you are uploading your email addresses to go or Facebook, or you're uploading your audiences based on device IDs, and then you click on Generate look alike, audience. So I think this approach now is just getting more wider, wide. So we're also trying to have similar strategies for the open web. So I think one clear benefit for the marketer is to use AI, to increase a, let's say, qualified audience group. It's, yeah, hopefully, also, or should be also still precise, right. So it's not about just reach. But obviously, it's about this holy grail of meeting that say, the sweet spot between reach and quality. And if the internet goes blind, if the third party cookie goes away, it's also the only way I think, to at least try to have this more or less transparent customer journey tracking, maybe need to call it this way. Because, yeah, obviously, it's getting harder and harder for you to know, with whom you were already in contact on which platform platforms are fragmented. So I think these are really big benefits also, for marketers to step into the game.
Mike: I love your use of the term, the internet going blind. And maybe it's worth you just explaining that a little bit about what the the impact of the third party cookie going away means for marketers, and why that that means the internet then appears a bit blind to marketers.
Carolin: Okay, so yeah, basically, data is, I would say, also still really dominated by the demand side, if it's not by the marketers directly than it is by the agency world. I just remember a world where, you know, group had a pixel and each and every publisher page worldwide to retarget, to user they were in contact with. So they knew like I users, they have seen, I think programmatic media buying is only based on audiences that you know, already, right, you don't buy unknown traffic. But this is all based on third party cookies. And if the third party cookie is going away, because Google decided to restrict it as well and Firefox, it's already blocked on safari, it's already blogged, then it's getting harder and harder for you to identify the user in front of the page. And this is what I mean when I say the internet goes blind. So the measurability and the matching of users is what is missing, but it's still a basic concept on how programmatic works
Mike: That's, that's such a good, good explanation of what's happening. And so what you're doing is you're bringing more intelligence, presumably so that publishers can understand, you know, or predict who's likely to buy without having to track people all the way across the internet. So, so how are these publishers using this AI to generate products that they can then sell to marketers?
Carolin: Yeah, I really like this question, because that's really where I put a lot of, you know, brain power in in the last couple of years. So I think that publishers have an amazing database. So I think, if you would like to understand this, this concept of marketing with AI, you need to have both, you need to have a really good database that you can use for predictions. And you could, you also need a seed set that this really high quality that you can use as a seed for your prediction. And I think the publishers are really good and having we call this the embedded space. But what is an abandoned space embedded space is basically your database. And on the publisher page, publishers see, or it's the publishers I work with, they see the users nearly daily on two pages. So they know exactly what the user is interested in. And the users have a lot of different interest, right. So you can also check Google knows where a user is what he's intending to buy, Facebook knows exactly the relationship starters. And where what the people do in their private life, by publishers really know what people are interested in, right, and what they're frequently reading, and which sports club they support.
And if it's more about celebrity news, if it's about local politicians, if it's about global economics, so they really know what users are interested in. And they have this tonnes of data points that they can use to build up really, let's say, differentiated models, and that they can then use to, yeah, predict how these users who would I don't know, squat towards a specific seat audiences if they have likelihood to be interested in this specific product or not. And that's, this is the superpower that publishers to have that they can now use for marketers. And that's obviously what they do already now. So with their classified data, with their looking data from the subscribers, that they use the seed set, and then they're expanding those users towards a specific likelihood. The second thing that the publishers can also do is that they can use this data and enrich their assets. So the publishers basically have two superpowers, they have, on the one hand, the users, but they also have the assets. So what does this mean? It basically means that you can say I have a likelihood of 85%, this user is male. But I think I can say at the same time, I have a likelihood that this article is read by 85% male audience. And then even without knowing exactly that the person in front of the camera, or in front of the page is is male, you have this likelihood per asset that you can use to identify, which could be the right audience, even on the first impression, and that's the second superpower that publishers have.
Mike: Fantastic. I love the idea of having two superpowers. And publishers cleaner clearly have a lot to add. I mean, if we look at the first superpower, I mean, what you're doing is you're actually saying that publishers have the ability to look at a group of people your seed set, as you say, understand what they're interested in. And then what you're doing is pulling in people with similar interests. Is that right?
Carolin: Yeah, definitely based on this, this behavioural data and all the data that you can collect from the publisher. Exactly. That's what we do. We predict the likelihood for somebody to be in a specific segment based on all of this data interactions that we can collect.
Mike: And that's great. But that is a little bit as you said, like the Google audience tools where you can have look alike audiences. The other superpower you said was was really interesting, which was around knowing who reads each page or who looks at the assets. See, can you talk to me a little bit about how you help the publishers understand, you know, who's being targeted by each particular story on their website, so that they can then deliver ads that are even more relevant.
Carolin: Yes, sure. So, basically, again, you can do two things like you can crawl the the content, you can use the semantic understanding, you can identify interest out of the article itself. But you can also use the audience that you are that you are allowed to use. For example, you can use your subscribers and check them out and see how their interact with a specific article or video. And then you can make, again, a prediction and then you can use both information sources just to make a really complete prediction on the user itself, and then use this again, for users that you see for the first time that you're not able to track anything about just to personalise your, the feeling of the user, this can be an ad, but this could also be, for example, personalise the page itself.
Mike: And presumably, also, there's a benefit for publishers in terms of personalising the page because they can recommend content that the visitors more likely to read next. That's, that's great. So I'm really interested, you know, how do marketers approach publishers about this? Because that, you know, one of the things I see is a lot of the time it feels like publishers want to work with only their very biggest customers on the exciting stuff. And some of the smaller advertisers maybe don't seem to get as much attention is, do you think there's a way that more marketers can work more effectively with publishers and help them sell better services?
Carolin: Clearly, so I think, first, there is, I think, right now, there's a huge demand for trying out this new partnerships, as Google postpone the decline of the third party cookies. So everybody's still working in the old environment. But now, they really talk about alliances, Id alliances, for example, they talk about cleanroom setups. So I think, for smaller advertisers, there's also always this possibility, I mean, obviously, you need to have an automated version of the solution. So I think, especially for smaller advertisers, if publishers need to do a lot of things manually, then it's getting unattractive for them. But this needs to be the goal for the cleanroom providers to have like a 100% optimised data onboarding setup, that is allowing the publishers just to do this with a lot of advertisers, and not waste time on this 101 data transfers that are indeed unattractive for smaller advertisers. So I think, right now, the whole tech ecosystem is heavily investing in automating all of these setups. And obviously, we do as well. But I think in the future, this is exactly how it's going to work. So publishers, will this just have plugged into their system, and then advertisers can use it for matching, and then for expansion purposes without the need to go to the publisher, and, you know, do something by hand on their side.
Mike: And certainly, I think that's, that's a really good point, reflecting a lot of marketing, if you can't automate it, it's very difficult and very expensive. When you've got a tool that can automate the process, it becomes much more accessible to you know, pretty much everybody. So yeah, I love that idea. I mean, one of the challenges I see, particularly with with your solution at one plus x is it's obviously very heavily reliant on artificial intelligence and machine learning. And realistically, none of the marketers or the publishers are experts in this technology. So how do you have a conversation with your publisher or a marketer about this technology, when you don't have a deep understanding of how it works?
Carolin: I think you don't necessarily need to have a good understanding on how it works in the backend. I also honestly didn't happen before I joined one plus six. So you just need to trust us that we are really experienced and exactly that. And besides that, the rest is only onboarding, which is quite lean, and not so complicated to do. I think in I think, in general, it's just important to be open and open minded, because I also see in the industry, some people are just afraid whenever there's AI on something, they're like, Okay, I'm not going to understand it anyway. So I'm not going to try it out. And obviously there are also the people that are still really focused on their gut feeling. Because that's something I need to admit right if you would like to. If you would like to use AI, you need to trust the AI. You need to say this is my seat set. And now I find the right users for me, if you keep saying but they need to be male, they need to be between 35 and 45. And they need to have high interest in in buying cars, but only convertibles then it's not really needed us, then you can still use the standard segmentation that is offered somewhere, right? So I think this openness is something even if you don't need to understand how it works, but you need to trust this algorithm and you need to be open to tested. And that's something that I face quite often that there's still this personas going around that the market research institutes created, that the media agencies can only try to rebuild based on data. And it can be first party data, second party data. But yeah, if you really would like to try out this cleanroom approach, you need to be open, that you don't know exactly before you run the campaign, how other people look like that you're targeting, because whom you were targeted, is not defined by your gut feeling, or your research is defined by AI.
Mike: I love that. And I think that's, that's such a good indication of how marketing is changing. You know, previously, people used to create an ad, for example, an ad everybody decided they loved it, they ran it in printed publications, nobody really knew whether it was effective. But if everybody liked it, that was great. And we're moving to the situation where, you know, Google on Google ads will tell you which headlines work and which headlines don't. And it doesn't matter what you think you'll know which ones work and which don't. And, you know, it's very humbling to be wrong. And I've certainly been wrong on that. But, you know, with with products, like one plus x, you're actually helping the market or defining for the market or a lot of the audience. And that is another, you know, step for a marketer to trust technology to deliver the audience rather than to define it themselves. That's, that's fascinating. I mean, I think, you know, there isn't obvious questions. Well, there's been quite a lot of products that have hyped their use of AI, both in marketing and other areas, that actually have been very disappointing when people have tried them. So I mean, why do you think some of these AI products have failed, particularly in marketing? And what are you doing at one plus x to make sure that it's not just applying technology, but it's generating a real benefit for marketers and publishers?
Carolin: I need to say the real differentiator is the consulting, I can give you a really concrete example where I failed, to be honest. And maybe that's also something that not companies talk so open about, but I will just do because I think it's important. So I had a customer, it was a really nice customer, and they had a portal where you could buy tickets, and they had a lot of amazing ground truth data, they had like 3 million Lockton users. But the problem was that the specific tickets you could buy, obviously, it was a transportation provider. So there are differences if you're travelling with kids, if you're travelling business related. But in the end, everybody is booking a ticket the same way. So even if you have a lot of data, all data sets look the same. And we started to try out the algorithm, like our algorithms and their database, and then the machine learning expert came to my place. And he said, you know, what the seed set is shit. And I was like, No, this can't be the case. I'm 100% sure the seed set is amazing. It's locked in users, they are verified, so no way. And then I started digging deeper.
And then what we found out is it was simply not working for this particular marketer, because he had a lot of data. But the data was so similar that you could not predict any patterns that made sense. And this was the moment it's already like quite some time ago, when we thought, okay, we need to pivot. You know, we need to, we need to bring those two worlds together. Because publishers are really suffering from, let's say, seats, it's a lot of people are anomalous, a lot of people will never buy a subscription, especially in specific age groups, right? It's a, it's really a bummer. But it's the status quo. And the marketers, sometimes they have a lot of data. But if it's a platform that is not a, I would say, an online store, or if it's not a classifieds side, where you can really see differentiation, and it's going to be hard to use AI. And even the best trend algorithm is not able to do anything that makes sense with this data set. So I think a lot of products failed also because of this missing consultant and dismissing reality check. And that's also why we came up with this connect idea to connect the the strength of two sides to build something new on top of that. And I think that's one of the reasons why consulting is really the differentiator like not just accepting what the AI is telling you, like the data set is shipped but really go there and understand why is this the outcome and what can we do to change it and then be open to pivot and yeah, just go completely change your system towards a new architecture in case it's needed.
Mike: That that's amazing. Because I think, you know, sometimes people think, well, there's some technology, we just apply it, it's gonna work. And, you know, it's great to see that, actually, you do need good data, that's gonna work and you've made the point with, with audiences, the audiences need to look different. If they look the same, then there's nothing to say. So I think that's great. So it's about understanding the data, and that needs experts that needs people to come and provide that consultancy. So I love that as an explanation. That's fantastic. So, I guess if people are excited, they believe that AI absolutely can help them. I mean, how do they get started? You know, is it best to rush in? Should they be talking to a provider? Like you? I mean, how should people start adding AI to their marketing? Do you have any advice for them?
Carolin: Yeah, I think screen what's in the market? Like maybe do some basic checks, like I just told you, like, do you have enough data? Do you how many data sources do you have? How big is your data? Silo right now? Do you think that you alone with your own data will be able to have prediction that makes sense? And if yes, then try out some some some tools. If not, then search for solutions that will help you, for example, that are allowing you to run your own train your algorithms in I don't know better environments for more precise outcomes. Obviously, a cleanroom, I think has a, like the solution like that one that I just explained where publishers and advertisers meet, there's a relatively low entry, because you just need to find one publisher who is open to do it with you, you need to try it out, you will have like one test campaign, you can a B test, do it now, now that you still have a third party cookie just to check if it works, right. Because now you can really do a B testing in terms of performance. Don't shy away the first moment the first campaign might not have the results you were desiring because they're always you need to add optimization, you need to add some more brainpower. But I think it's not so complicated to start, if you are searching for tools that might help you to overcome your personal challenges. And this doesn't, I think that the biggest problem a lot of companies in enterprise have that they think, Oh, I'm building this all on my own. I'm I have such a great tech team, I have such a great Data Silo, I would just build everything in house and then it simply takes too long. So I think here we have again, this, tried to find like an MVP, tried to pivot your ideas and fail but fail fast. I would say this.
Mike: Yeah, I love that. Just give it a go and see what happens. And don't be worried if it doesn't work first time. That's, that's great advice. I mean, obviously, you know, with your product, it's particularly around serving ads and marketing content that way, but how do people really understand that the system is working? So do you integrate with other parts of the marketing technology stack to help people measure performance? Or is it very much an independent product?
Carolin: No, like obviously, you use your data audiences in your in your activation channels, like whatever activation channels you have from obviously from from media buying to email marketing everywhere where you you can utilise that. Furthermore, a lot of our publishers particularly are challenging our machine learning algorithm again, market research panels, and as the third party cookies to their so we're getting challenged a lot against nears and for example. So we are really used to getting this external feedback, and are really proud of us there because, yeah, this is really our bread and butter business. But in general, yes, we are completely integrated in this in this edtech system. We are also completely I think one of the biggest or I say one of the biggest advisors or most important things for tech providers is not to be a standalone solution, right. But to fit in perfectly as a puzzle piece and most of the mahr tech stacks that companies use. And we hopefully we are with our API's and raw data access and all this touristry provide hope that we are fitting seamlessly in most of the martec ecosystems and stacks that the customers are choosing.
Mike: Awesome as that sounds great. That sounds like you've really thought that one through. And this has been fascinating. It's been really interesting. I've actually feel I've learned a lot about AI as well which is great or a lot about what you need to think about when you're using is AI? Is there anything else you think we should have covered in this discussion?
Carolin: Yeah, no, I think we covered it quite well, I think trying it out now, while the third party cookie is still there, to have this ability to see, the potential new world in the still existing world is like, I would say, this is a luxury, we will not have in a couple of months. So I think for the marketers, the, you should now urgently move towards this kind of directions, because you will learn so much, right now. As soon as the third party cookie is gone, we will rely on all those cleanroom solutions matching partners. And that's just maybe too late, right, because you would like to see the before and after effect yourself and your own data. This is one thing. And the second thing is obviously it cleanroom is also dependent on identifiers. And you should invest in ID alliances or check where you can join alliances in general, which IDs you can provide. Because if you have the best data set in the world, if it's not matchable, with anything else, then you will not be able to find your audience even in the most sophisticated publisher embedded space you will find. So that's maybe my second advice, I would say for marketers. Yeah, and then obviously stay open and let the AI do the magic without trying to influence the algorithm with overfitting.
Mike: Trust the technology. This has been brilliant. I mean, I'm sure people would be interested to know more about one plus x and what would be the best way for people to find out more about the product and also contact you if they've got any questions they'd like to to ask you.
Carolin: Yeah, so I think the website is a good starting point, you can always click on book a demo. And depending on what you would like to see, we can do a bit of consulting, or we will show you the platform. So just get I don't know, your our neutral view and things may be in in a little session together with us. If you have specific question to me, you can also find me obviously on LinkedIn. You could also reach us on LinkedIn as a company.
Mike: Awesome. This has been great. I really appreciate it. Carolyn, thank you so much for your time and for being on the podcast. 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 Alun Lucas - Zuko Analytics
In this podcast episode, we interview Alun Lucas, Managing Director of Zuko Analytics, a powerful form analytics platform.
Alun shares how Zuko helps businesses understand the analytics behind forms, and the why, when and where behind users not converting. He also explains how Zuko works with A/B testing tools to allow businesses to A/B test on a granular level.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Alun Lucas - Zuko Analytics
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Alun Lucas
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 the latest episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. today. I've got Adam Lucas from Zuko analytics. Welcome to the podcast, Alun.
Alun: Hi, Mike. Yes, thanks. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure and a privilege.
Mike: Great to have you on. So, I mean, before we start, I'd like to know a little bit about your career, you know, looking at your LinkedIn, you've done everything from working in venture capital to you know, a long time ago teaching English. So how did you end up at a company that does form analytics?
Alun: Well, it's an interesting one, because I like to see it at least kind of bringing all the strands of my previous experience together, because I worked for many years in, in advertising, marketing media, and in both London and Manchester, and then I kind of decided to transition from that as you do when you get into your mid to late 30s. So via an MBA and a little stint at Google, I moved into venture capital, investing in digital and creative companies around the northwest of England. From there a car kind of decided that I wanted to get my teeth into something a little bit more. So I moved into tech companies in the Manchester area. So I was working for a couple of those. And then the opportunity came up to run Zuko, which obviously with it, being a Mar tech company, suited me so it brought together the tech, the investment and the marketing piece that I'd done before. So it was kind of perfect for me at the right time as well. So it made sense to hop in and and give it a go.
Mike: It seems like Manchester has got quite a lot of marketing and marketing technology. Businesses sort of popping up is that is that the case?
Alun: Yes, definitely the case Tech Tech is booming here. Obviously text big in London. But in Manchester, we've got a lot of university. So there's a lot of talent that comes out. And a lot of company bigger companies are basing here because obviously some of the costs are much cheaper than than London. I mean, this is pre pandemic. Now obviously a lot of people working remotely anyway, so it doesn't matter quite so much. But But yeah, certainly there's a thriving tech scene here
Mike: It’s cool. It's good to hear there's there's a lot going on outside of London indeed. So you joined Zuko, but previously the company was called for mismo. So why the rebrand from a moment kind of said a little bit about what you did to something was more abstract.
Alun: It's a it's kind of a funny one. And then a lot of this is kind of predates myself but but in terms of the story, obviously we were founded as for Massimo to you know we we look and optimise forms on websites. So for me sumo kind of does what it says on the tin. We created a second generation product, which was aimed at the enterprise market. And so we were running the form smo products and the second product, which we christened Zuko Zico by for mizzima. But then I think he quickly became apparent that Zuko is so superior in every way than the original product. So why are we limiting it just enterprise clients. So Zuko then became available to all our clients. And we slowly deprecated the for mismo platform. So it kind of came partially by accident, partially by design, I think there were issues around with the name in terms of spelling pronunciation. People not finding it when they were searching for it. So there's issues there. So the team decided to go for something short, simple, memorable, Zuko it's it's hard to miss miss Christmas mispronounce Now obviously, there's a debate to be had to know is that the best way to represent our brand in terms of you know, what does the code do? Also, there's a there's an anime character called Zico, which kind of messes with our SEO as well. But we kind of are where we are at the moment not going to we, the company still is formisano to HMRC and to the accountants and to the lawyers, but we decided okay, rather than try and say Zico by for mismo, let's just be Zucco to our customers, just keep it simple. And so that convoluted story is kind of what we are where we are, as many companies kind of find themselves
Mike: it's certainly easier to spell I'll say that and it's great to hear it's great to hear a story of you know, you build a second product and he was actually so good at killed the first one and for a company to have the confidence to let that happen, I think is really good.
Alun: Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's kind of the The way it evolved, I guess it didn't start that way. But you know, rather than having two sets of tax support, and you know, two sets of instructions, stick with one.
Mike: Awesome. So, I mean, let's get into it. So you do analytics about forms? What does that mean? What does that actually do for people?
Alun: So sort of our goal, essentially, is to make the web less frustrating, one for one for my time. And so, for me, Sumo was founded because of frustration with online forms, I think we've all been to web forms and had a horrible experience, you know, you know, error messages, crashes, unclear instructions, particularly when you're using mobile phones. So there's a lot of potential to get it wrong. So sukkos say mission was based on that? How can we make things better for businesses for consumers? ourselves, so So the form analytics platform was built, obviously, for Missamma, which became Zuko just to make it easy for businesses to to identify the when the where and the why their users are dropping off. And so these are people who want to buy from you, but because of a crappy form, they're not buying. So actually, if you can, if you can solve that it's better for businesses, it's better for consumers, it's better for everyone. So that's kind of where we're at. So the analytics piece is, is the data around that. So as I said, the when the where, and the why, okay, identifying where the problems are, what the problems might be, and then providing potential solutions to fix it.
Mike: It's interesting, I mean, sounds very broad. But you mentioned that, you know, mobile is a particular problem. Is there an industry that suffers most from the problem of people dropping off halfway through a form fail? Or, you know, what pulls together the companies that have the biggest issues?
Alun: Well, I mean, I suppose it's, it's any, any company in any sector can have an issue, because obviously can have a bad fall. But in terms of ourselves, you know, there's, there's kind of three factors that drive the whether people can get value out of Zucco. One is the complexity of the form. So if you just got a contact form with three fields, well, you can still mess that up. But it's probably pretty easy to diagnose. And whereas if you've got a long complicated form, with 40 questions, over three or four pages, well, there's more opportunity to mess things up. So obviously, the more questions the more complex the questions, the more likely you are to need a product like Zuko the next two around the economics. So firstly, that the cost of customer acquisition, how, how expensive is it for you to acquire a customer, and also the customer lifetime value? You know, how valuable are they, because obviously, that determines if you invest time, in optimising your forms, you're going to get a much better return on investment. So obviously, if you if you're selling Ferraris, whatever they go for now, say 100 grand, you obviously, you your potential lifetime value is, is higher than the smaller product. And so they tend to be our clients tend to fall, have a combination of those, those three factors, ideally, all three. And so it's probably no surprise to know that basically, our biggest customer sector, by a reasonable chalk is financial services. You know, they credit cards, banks, insurance, foreign exchange, they're asking, you know, complex questions sometimes because they have to, because of regulations sometimes because they just do when they shouldn't, and so that they're messing things up, but obviously, they've also got a high customer lifetime value. So to say that they're our biggest sector, we also have, you know, every sector to be honest, but you know, other big clusters are around ecommerce, you know, the checkout getting that, right? And education, surprisingly, but, actually, is because they have complex forms, they ask lots of questions. So a lot of universities across the world users. And then online gaming, which is one that you might be surprised on, because actually a lot of their forms are relatively simple, unless there's a regulatory aspect to it. But they tend to be sort of really up on returns because they, you know, they know how valuable each player is. So they'll invest in getting it right, cuz, you know, even a half percent improvement can mean a lot of money to some of these guys.
Mike: But that's really interesting. So, I mean, the thing the thing everyone's taught, you know, when they first do online forums is the shorter, the better. And you mentioned that, obviously, some industries have to ask more questions, but some industries choose to, is it actually true, the shorter the better or can sometimes a longer form work better? Well,
Alun: yes and no, I guess The question depends what you got to think about is the motivation. So I'll give you an example. So we have an It's on our website, we benchmark across a number of number of sectors. And I think the best performing conversion rates for any sector is local government. But they have the largest number of fields on their forms. See, like, what's going on there. But actually, it's more than motivation, because they are. They have a monopoly on their services. So people slog through these forms and complete it, and they have really high completion rates. So it's kind of it's not an absolute rule, you shouldn't really be unser asking things that you don't necessarily need at this stage. But it's not. It's not always the killer that you think it might be. And you've just got, you've got to be careful. So just, you know, typically we advise, okay, what what do you need? Now, don't be afraid to ask him because sometimes, and again, it varies by sector and form purpose, some some forms, if you don't ask a question, then actually people get nervous. You know, particularly in financing, he might, he may, you may have to have to ask qualifying questions. But if it's just too simple the form then people like, well, hang on, you know, you know, are you serious? But in general, just in general, yes. strip out any fields you don't need. But it's not an absolute.
Mike: I mean, that's interesting. So what causes people to stop filling out a form? I mean, it's obviously not just boredom and the number of fields. I mean, there are some things that you can make mistakes on, that are relatively easy to fix.
Alun: Well, yeah, I mean, there's there's a lower level things which we might get into talking about, but there's probably sort of three high level areas where people go wrong, or businesses go wrong, and mess things up. The first one, probably the most common and the most visible, the most frustrating is user issues, or user experience issues. And this is frustration with the form itself. So you may have bad validation. The classic example is phone number, you put a phone number field in there, do I put the zero? Do I put the plus four four? Do I spaces dashes? No, what happens? And you know, you're causing issues for that you don't need to cause that's, that's the classic example. But there's, there's hundreds of different ways of doing it, you know, bad error messages, taking people all over the thing. So that's the form design itself. So that's area one, the second area is around is around the questions. So not so much in terms of the length that we talked about previously, but actually asking things people don't want to answer at this stage.
So an example being if you're looking for an insurance quote, so you're doing you're shopping around for insurance. What you find is if and this is an exception to the normal rules with forms where you do easy questions first and bring in slowly get people into the form. Well, if you're if you've got an insurance form, you don't want to be asking for their personal details up front, you want to go in take the broad details, you know what type of car you know what type of home insurance you want, so they can get the quotes. And they don't want to give you the personal details. If he asked for the personal details early, you'll see a big abandonment rate, which isn't the case in other types of forms. Because people have started on the journey, so it's questions they don't want to answer. And then that's the class just the classic example. Sometimes you're asking for the other example I always give for this is ecommerce. Ecommerce sites often ask for a phone number, why you asked him for my phone number, you know, you have my address, you have all my credit card details, you've got my email, if there's a problem, I'm not going to give you my phone number. You see people drop off that all the time. So but that that falls within their category, and then kind of the third areas around the area of expectation, money management. So which is about the form taking too long? Someone thinks it's a short form. And before you know it, there's no progress bar, and then how long or long is this going to take and they drop out? Or you're asking for things? They don't have to hand a driver's licence a passport, we never told me I needed this. So you know, if you're not managing expectations up front, that's one of the broader reasons why white people drop out, if that makes sense.
Mike: I mean, that's interesting. I guess from a cynical point of view, I could say, well, can people find this out simply by AV testing forms? Isn't it a fairly simple thing? Because a lot of these things, if you like negotiable or their order things, you know, they're fairly easy to test. What Why don't people do that through conventional form tools?
Alun: Well, I think there's a broader question there about experimentation and AV testing. I think the issue often with with businesses and forms is you think it should be simple, so therefore simple, they spend a lot of time around the broad the sexiest You know, the website, you know, the marketing to get people to the website. And then you know, when it comes to the shop, and they don't spend nearly as much time money resource attention, it's just like, well, how difficult is it to fill out a form. And as I say, typically, that's not the you know, the guys in the marketing department, that's not particularly sexy for them. Often, you know, the the main, the main not even be a single individual who's responsible for the form, you might fall in between the web guys and it guys, marketing digital, depending on how the company is structured. So that that's kind of often why people don't do it. But you know, to go back to your question, a B testing, absolutely, that's something you can and should do in the way we tend to advise clients is the first thing is find out the big issues.
So look at the data, see the things just fix it, you know, there's a, there's a massive drop off in this field, you know, why it's broken? You can you can change that. Or maybe you can a be tested if if you want to as well. But once you fix all the big things, it's okay, Where's, where's the next 1% coming from? And that's where you do your A B test and refine maybe if we change the error message or the validation a particular field or drop a question or change the order. That's where you can do that. And Zuko integrates with, with a lot of AV testing tools like Google optimise Optimizely converts, to allow you to do that on a granular level. So rather than it just being a black box, so knowing how many people reach a form, and how many people drop out the bottom, which is what a lot of companies now it's actually what is happening in the form, how are people flowing through your form? Where are they struggling, where they having to go back to make corrections, that sort of thing. And you can you can get the data and also push it pull your AB test variants into a tool such as ICA.
Mike: That's really interesting. I'm presuming you're giving. You're giving marketers, you know, extra information, like how long it takes to fill out each field? Is that the kind of information that they're using and working out? What slow someone down? Yeah, exactly.
Alun: So yeah, that's where people go back to correct it, whether they drop off at a particular piece, what happens after the submit button? You know, because that's often one piece of advice that we often give is, okay, what happens? Your low hanging fruit, other people who've spent a lot of time filling out your form, and then they click Submit, and they've still not successfully completed what's happened there. Most likely, there'll be one body with red light of error messages. And I'm running away from this. So you can find out exactly what's going on, which are the problem fields, those sort of things that you fix it so they don't have that issue.
Mike: Interesting. That's really cool. So I mean, I think the thing everyone wants to know is, if you use a tool, like Zuko, and you really optimise your form, what sort of improvement do people see typically?
Alun: Well, at the risk of doing the old, it depends answer. It does depend on how bad your form is in the first place. And so, you know, we have doubled conversion rates in some cases, from 30 to 60%. But typically, we aim for a 10 to 20% uplift in the volume of conversions at the same traffic levels. And that's what we will typically aim for as a as a, you know, a reasonable case scenario, sometimes the form is really good, and it might be a little lower. Sometimes it's, you know, there's some obvious issues that you can fix and get a better return. So but we say between 10 and 20%, that's kind of where we pitch in where our goal tends to be when we when a new client comes on board.
Mike: So that's a significant impact on overall campaign performance. I mean, adding 10% more visitors can be quite expensive.
Alun: Yeah, exactly. And it's, you know, something you've got control over. You can do it relatively easily when you fall, you know, having to go out and do a marketing message to convince them.
Mike: So, I mean, it sounds it sounds like a very easy sell. I mean, how many forms do people use Zuko typically have they typically uses a large number of forms, they try and optimise or they focus around one that really matters.
Alun: We have a broad gamut. So we have clients such as Capital One or credit card form, and they've gotten dozens of them. We've also got people who've just got the one form isn't ecommerce checkout, that's that the be all end all. So I'd probably say it's a roughly 5050 between people who are one, maybe two forms, and then we've got portfolio forms that they want to do, but often people will try it on water and then roll it out across other forms.
Mike: Interesting, and typically, what are people using to generate this form? So you're having to integrate to other marketing technology tools, or is it more custom coded applications had had had your customers normally work?
Alun: Most of the time they build the form themselves with HTML using standard form elements. That's the majority there are some that have off the shelf pieces like WordPress or HubSpot, or you know we have direct integrations with with suppliers jot form. Because if you take the form and put it in an iframe, then we need to have an integration. But most of the time you work straight out of the box, you just put a couple of pieces of code on your, on your form using a contact manager or whatever. And Zuko does the rest.
Mike: It sounds it sounds pretty straightforward. You mentioned earlier though, there were some more in depth technical issues, rather than the form structure issues that can cause problems. Do you want to talk a little bit about, you know, what are maybe some of those second level gotchas.
Alun: So then we will ask kind of the details, as it were the devils in the details, and I suppose a slight plug a we do have a lot of content on our website, and a full eBook Guide, which breaks down loads and loads of those. So, you know, there's lots of things about how do you optimise an email field or Name field or, or, you know, the common stuff, which we can go there. But I suppose in terms of actually, I suppose I'll flip it slightly, I'll talk about what we see as having the biggest impact, typically. Because that doesn't, there's lots of lots of potential issues. And you can you can see that in our ebook, but in terms of what we see is the biggest inputs, there's probably two things. One thing which I mentioned earlier, so I won't dwell too much is focusing around the submit button, looking at the data around what happens to these guys who just want to buy and they can't. So you know, we have specific reports that show you, okay, they're clicking Submit, and then they migrating immediately to this field.
And so actually, if you, if you look at that, that's where you get your quickest insights, and you find your your problem fields quickest. So that's sort of one, one area where then I suppose the second area is around validation. So when I say validation, that's when someone enters an input, and then you check whether it's an error message on to generate an error message, or if it's okay, or what have you. The biggest uplift we consistently see on forms is when they implement what's called inline validation. And what that essentially is, when you type in your answer to a form, you get the answer whether the input is correct, as soon as you move to the next field, though you put in your email address, and you miss out the act, tells you straightaway, doesn't wait to the click Submit, and then you get 10 or 20 error messages across the whole form. You know, that's, that's a big cortisol stress driver, and causes people to drop out. So yeah, if we see no 20, you know, there's a famous study that showed about 22% uplift from implementing inline validation on average. And we kind of see that as well, when we see it. It's such a big thing, if you think about when you fill out a form, so much less stressful. If you type it out. You obviously don't want to generate the error messages too soon. If you do too early people, you know, gets frustrating, because you just started typing, you get an error message someone, but when you move on to the next field, okay, you've you've done that. And then you get you either get told in a helpful way, helpful error message, okay, you know, you've missed out the app, you probably want to add that in, or you get a nice green tick. Yeah, that's, that's the thing more than any, any other that consistently delivers gains across all types of forms.
Mike: That's such great advice. And I think everybody's, you know, filled in a form and then got an error message, you know, half a page or a couple of scrolls back up. There's an obvious error and obvious typos. It's so frustrating that goes back to the top, find out where the error is, and then scroll down and submit again, so I can understand why that makes such a difference. Yeah, absolutely. So um, one of the things you've talked about earlier was the fact that Zuko initially started out as being a product design for enterprise and now as your effect for your your main product. So I'm just intrigued to know, you know, how expensive is it to get this kind of technology that's, that's watching people filling in forms and actually analyse is where they, they have issues.
Alun: Yeah. So we say we've structured it, so it's accessible or price points. And so the way we charge is around the number of form sessions trapped. So that's an individual going into a form, how long they spend on the form. And so it's based on that so it's based on how much traffic you essentially get to your form. So our lowest level packages is 100 pounds a month to track 10,000 form sessions, and all our subscription packages, you can turn off and on and on a monthly basis. So you have full flexibility of when you do we obviously we do have Enterprise packages still which you know, have a longer commitment, but obviously have a much lower unit price for each session track. Because in return for the volume commitment, but it's a it's it's flexible and it's affordable for, for businesses of any size, at least that's what it's designed to be.
Mike: Yeah, and you obviously don't need a huge lifetime customer value to, you know, have attempted increase in formfields. If you're, you're only paying 100 pounds for 10,000 form sessions, or sounds like that could be easy, positive ROI. Yeah,
Alun: that's definitely the main, the main thing is always is the will internal will to do something with the data. That's always the tricky bit with any with any analytics product is like, you find what's wrong, then you've got to fix it. And then you've got to prove that you've had an impact. And so it's not it's not difficult. But as we know, with companies often, you've got to get your request into whoever's looking after the form technically, and change it and spend a little bit of time analysing the data. But we do have a customer success team as well who know all I do is look at forms. So they see the common common strains of issues and can kind of get to the answer. Quickly.
Mike: You said something really quite interesting early on that there doesn't tend to be someone who's responsible for forms. And yet forms are typically the conversion point, the moment of truth is when you capture a customer or prospect. I mean, why do you think forms? I think, as you put it, where were unsexy compared to other elements of marketing?
Alun: Well, I think it's partially, you know, it is partially legacy of the offline world, you know, who likes forms. We know old days, when you got a piece of paper, I think we're both old enough to remember you got a piece of paper to fill out in triplicate and photocopy and you have to fill out I mean, it's just horrible, isn't it? And that's kind of translated, that approach has translated to the online world, and no one really wants it Okay, as it's just, you know, because in theory should be easy, you're filling out a piece of paper with your details. So I think, you know, there's, there's not many of us who are really getting into forms, and you know, that people in conversion rate optimization and experimentation of kind of love forms, or they, you know, they use it as part of their broader portfolio sale. But generally, if you're, you know, if you go to all the marketing courses in the universities, or were online or wherever, no one talks about forms, in it's a very direct response type piece, you know, again, some people but he to get me, at the higher levels of any company, getting marketing at the top table is often difficult, let alone a Nishat marketing, even though it affects your bottom line, you know, hugely so I think it's kind of it's kind of just not he's never, never managed to get it put his head above the parapet as a nice, interesting, sexy thing for people to go into. No one comes out of university. So I wanted to, I just want to do forms.
Mike: Although maybe they should, if they can make such an impact on the bottom line. That really should be the future. I remember doing an MBA and our finance lecturer said, he said, You all want to go into management, consulting and things. He said, Don't do that. There's so many people are smarter than your management consulting, you'll be average at best said, open a laundrette you'll be really smart as a laundrette over, and I think it's the same with forms, you know, do something around forms, you could be really smart, and in an area that can make a huge difference. Yeah, exactly.
Alun: And that's our goal, because they ZICO is the only specialist form analytics player out there, there are sort of brought it UX software suites out there that use forms as a bolt on, but because that's all we do, we specialise in having the most in depth reports, and obviously, the most knowledgeable team in the area. So you know, that's, that's the way we position ourselves.
Mike: I mean, that's been fascinating. Is there anything else, you know, we should be talking about in terms of forms or Zuko?
Alun: I know really covered a lot of it. I mean, we, as well as being a SaaS provider. Suppose we also offer consultancy, and we have our customer success team, which means we help all our clients out with the forms, but some, some of them like well just tell us the answer. You know, we want a written report, we want to tell us what to do. So we also kind of we do offer that as well, because it kind of is a natural extension of the service for people who have less time to sort of get to the answer. But, you know, that's not not that's not necessary, because we say we have a customer success team that can help you out. So that's probably the only thing we're not covered to say. I would recommend to go on the website. There's lots of lots of content in the blog, there's white paper, we've just launched on financial forms, but we've got a big guy with general advice for all forms as well. So even if you just look at those, you'll probably improve your forms just by reading it. And even without using Zico, so yeah, that's probably all I've got to add to that really
Mike: great. So people want to You know, get the data. I mean, can you just confirm the website address? And maybe if somebody wanted to get in contact with you, what would be the best way to ask you a question about forms?
Alun: Yeah, so www.zuiko.io And if you want to contact me, you can get me on LinkedIn is Alan al un Lucas. We can email me ln at Z Coda IO. Or you can just email support@zico.io. And one of the team will pick it up if you've got a general question as well. So more than happy to take questions for anyone who is interested in improving forms as much as we are.
Mike: That sounds great. And it does sound like some people do come out of university and want to be world experts in forms. But it sounds like Zuko is probably snapped them all up already. So anyway, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Alan, I really appreciate it. It's been fascinating. And hopefully people go away, you know, download the eBook from zuko.io and maybe try using some analytics on their forms and see if they can improve the conversion rate.
Alun: Yeah, no, that would be great.
Mike: Thanks very much.
Alun: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
elektroniknet.de Introduces Matchmaker+
WEKA FACHMEDIEN has introduced a Matchmaker+ section to its elektroniknet.de website, which provides companies and suppliers with the opportunity to develop a Matchmaker+ profile, which will share information about products, content such as editorial articles, videos and presentations, and will also provide links to the companies website and social media platforms in one place.
To generate traffic to the specific company webpages, the Matchmaker+ profiles are linked via keywords in editorial content and via logo placements in elektroniknet.de's newsletters. Readers will also be able to contact companies directly via an integrated form on the Matchmaker+ profile and the profiles will be highlighted in the supplier search.
The move to introduce Matchmaker+ profiles adds to previous digital offerings WEKA FACHMEDIEN has introduced, and it's great to see that the investments in digital alternatives continue, to maximise the use of their websites to benefit both suppliers and readers.
A 'Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know Associate Director Ian Jarrett
Ian Jarrett, Associate Director at Napier, is the latest member of the team to take part in our 'Napier Nine' video series.
Learn about Ian's strongest quality, the first concert he ever attended, and the four words he would use to describe himself, as he answers his nine questions...
Missed the other ‘Napier Nine’ Videos in our Series? Watch them Now!
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Managing Director Mike Maynard
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Media Analyst Rachael Penfold
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Business Development Manager Hannah Kelly
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Suzy Kenyon
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Dave Ingle
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PR Specialist Clare Reader
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PA and HR Manager Debbie McIntosh
- A 'Napier Nine' Video.. Get to Know Account Administration Executive Danielle Robertshaw
- A 'Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Natasha Websdale
- A' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Director Clive Over
- A ' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Ivy Silverton
- A 'Napier' Nine Video...Get to Know Account Director Chris Corfield
- A Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know Associate Director Ed Neale
A 'Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know Associate Director Ed Neale
Get to know Ed Neale, Associate Director at Napier, in the most recent instalment of our 'Napier Nine' video series.
Discover the fictional place Ed would most likely visit, his strongest quality, and the Napier project he is most proud of, as he answers his nine questions…
Missed the other ‘Napier Nine’ Videos in our Series? Watch them Now!
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Managing Director Mike Maynard
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Media Analyst Rachael Penfold
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Business Development Manager Hannah Kelly
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Suzy Kenyon
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Dave Ingle
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PR Specialist Clare Reader
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PA and HR Manager Debbie McIntosh
- A 'Napier Nine' Video.. Get to Know Account Administration Executive Danielle Robertshaw
- A 'Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Natasha Websdale
- A' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Director Clive Over
- A ' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Ivy Silverton
- A 'Napier' Nine Video...Get to Know Account Director Chris Corfield
Electronic Component Show Confirms Seminar Schedule for 2022
The Electronic Component Show (ECS), has confirmed its seminar schedule for the 2022 event.
Taking place on Thursday 19th May at the Oxford United Kassam stadium, the event provides the opportunity for industry-leading manufacturers and distributors to network with design engineers and purchasing professionals. Offering an informative dual seminar program, sessions include:
- Paul Garner, ABB - Collaborative robots offer big value in a small size
- Debbie Rowland, Charcroft – Avoiding counterfeit components with quality–led distribution
- Rhett Evans, Anders - Diagnosis of challenges that OEMs face / The tell-tale signs of successful companies who overcome design challenges
- Ken Greenwood, Rochester Electronics - Obsolescence: Not the end of the World
The show will be open from 10am-3pm, and all remaining visitors at 2.30pm will have the chance to win a selection of prizes based on a unique number on the reverse of their name badge.
As ECS moves forward with no postponements in sight, it's clear to see that the events business is starting to recover as we overcome the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. ECS joins a list of shows such as Embedded World and HANNOVER MESSE, which also plan to move forward in the summer, strengthening the positive trend of events returning to provide a safe yet more familiar environment of face to face networking.
ECS is free to attend, and registration is now open.
A Napier Podcast: Interview with Emma Valentiner - CanIRank
In this podcast episode, we interview Emma Valentiner, Director of Strategic Content at CanIRank, an SEO software platform that uses AI to provide specific action recommendations.
Emma shares how the platform supports B2B marketers with improving SEO, why it's so important to layer SEO into other marketing activities, and why small search volumes in B2B can drive valuable and qualified leads.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Emma Valentiner - CanIRank
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Emma Valentiner
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 Emma Valentiner. Emma is the director of strategic content for CanIRank. Welcome to the podcast. Emma.
Emma: Thank you very happy to be here.
Mike: Awesome. Well, great to have you to join us and tell us how we can all rank on Google. But before we get there, you know, I'm really interested, can you give us a little bit of background about your career and how you've ended up with a career in SEO?
Emma: Yeah, so, I think probably like a lot of folks in marketing, it's been a bit of a winding path, I started working in advertising and marketing in around 2004. So been hanging out for a while, I was doing copywriting. And eventually, that took me into working in marketing and startups, that took me into working for a very large corporation doing product content, and from and I was not an SEO at the time, so writing a lot of blog content and a lot of sales type content, but with no understanding of kind of where that fit into the ecosystem of SEO. Um, and then after I left that, I ended up interviewing with Kanye rank and getting this opportunity to learn kind of SEO from the ground up, they have a really great training programme for new employees coming on, you kind of learn about all the different areas of SEO, and it just was a perfect fit for everything that I was interested in and the things that I had done previously. And getting to kind of use that in a way that really helps clients get visibility.
Mike: Sounds great. But then you left and then came back to CanIRank. So tell us a little bit about what happened there and what you learnt in your little holiday from the company.
Emma: Yeah, so I was offered an opportunity to work with a startup that was based in San Diego, and they were doing some really interesting technology around AI. So kind of identifying your ideal customers using this really interesting AI software. So I was an in house SEO for them for about 10 months. And they did a bit of restructuring. And so I was, you know, on the market, again, looking for another opportunity and got in touch with a Kanye rank, folks. And it was just a perfect fit for what they needed at the time and what I thought I could bring to the table. So it was an interesting experience to go from working on the agency side of managing multiple clients and putting together different types of campaigns to doing kind of that in house work. And I think it helps me get a much better understanding of like the b2b challenges for SEO because it is a whole different animal. So I think I can come into my work with Ken, I rank clients with a lot more perspective on those specific challenges for b2b.
Mike: That's fascinating. I mean, is there? Is there something you pick out that you see, agencies or technology suppliers not doing that really would help clients?
Emma: Oh, probably a few things. Um, one big thing that I think a lot of companies struggle with is, you know, b2b, the search volumes around b2b, the the, I'm talking specifically the keywords that matter to your business that are going to drive conversions. They're tiny. So I, you know, I'm a huge fan of SEO, I think it's a really important piece of a marketing campaign. But as a b2b, you have to kind of layer that in with the other aspects that you're doing. And I think a lot of companies see those small search volumes, not realising the cost per click is massive. So they're really great for conversions, but they're like, well, it's only got 50 searches a month, or 70 searches a month, that doesn't seem worth our time. But it can actually drive really valuable and qualified traffic.
Mike: That's a great point. I think, you know, from my point of view, the other thing that a lot of people forget in b2b is you don't need huge numbers. If you look at Napier, we get you know, several 1000, over 5000 visitors a month to our website, we can only deal with about two new clients a month. So we actually care about a very small proportion of the traffic. Is that sort of typical, do you think with b2b Or do you think people just go for the big numbers? Because it sounds good.
Emma: I think that's a problem kind of industry wide in terms of SEO. It's a lot of focus on kind of those marquee keywords like oh, this has 40,000 searches a month. Yeah, but how many relevant people are going to come to your website from those 40,000 Because they're so broad, typically those kinds of keywords that you're getting a lot of traffic that actually doesn't have value for you. And I think that kind of skews your data into terms of what people are looking at on your site, what they're engaging with. And I think those smaller, more qualified, you know, visitors are going to tell you a lot more about who your target audience is and how to best speak to them.
Mike: Definitely. And actually, our websites are, you know, a case in point in that a lot of our traffic goes to a SMART goal generator that writes goals in smart, you know, the smart format. And it's like, I can tell you, virtually none of those people are ever going to be clients of Napier. And most of them are students trying to pass their their various courses. But yeah, chasing volume doesn't make a lot of sense in SEO,
Emma: You are doing good things for students and their goals. So there is a win there.
Mike: Yeah, actually, the truth is, I used to do some guest lecturing, part time lecturing, and actually produced it for the students because I got so tired of them not being able to write smart format for goals. Anyway, I think back back to your career and back to Can I rank so i You're back at Can I rank? And now I'm going to ask you the question. Aren't there enough SEO tools in the world? Why do we need another one,
Emma: I am a huge fan of can I rank all I'll put that out, I use it every day. It is filled with data. So it can feel really overwhelming when you're getting used to it. Because there's so much to look at. And I think that's in general true of marketing, there's a gazillion things that you can do to get your company's name out there and to connect with your people, or your future people. So it's one of the things I really enjoy about can I rank, they have an opportunities feed, that tells you really quickly, I have one content piece that I can do this week, what's it going to be and I can look at opportunities, feed and filter through opportunities that the machine has created for me, here's a keyword that your competitor is targeting that you don't have any content on. So you know, optimizations are also in there as well. And I'm also a big fan of that as a tactic. So I like it, because it gives me the information that I need. And I can run with it. I think a lot of SEO tools aren't quite as good as that like actionable steps, piece of the puzzle. I also frequently use sem rush a lot for the visuals, I love to share their their kind of the keyword graphs. And when I'm reporting with clients, I think it's really easy to understand and see really quickly where you're at with a campaign Moz. Of course, I use Moz. Local a lot to see kind of where brick and mortars are struggling with their internet presence. So I mean, every there are a tonne of SEO tools out there. And they all do certain things really, really well. And there are certain pieces of data that maybe I'm not getting from them.
Mike: Now, you said something really interesting about can I rank because most of the SEO tools have got complex dashboards and things. And you talked about an opportunities feed. What do you mean by that? What does that look like in practice.
Emma: So when you first sign up with CanIRank you enter your website. It also works for agencies. So you could be managing multiple sites. And you'll put in your homepage URL, you'll put in your seed keyword that you're going for probably some competitors. So once the software once that's in there, the software kind of goes and pulls all of the companies that are ranking in that general domain. So if I'm selling a software, it's going to go and pull from my competitors sites and see what keywords they're ranking for. It's going to pull from the the number one rank or the page, one rankers right now and see what they're ranking for. And it's going to score my site based on that information. So it will tell me, okay, compared to competitors, right now, this is your strength and content, this is your strength than con optimizations. This is how you rank in authority. And here's how you're doing and social. So I can tell really quickly, okay, so I'm, I haven't about the same amount of content as my competitors do. But man, they've got a tonne of backlinks, their authority is really high. And I need to focus there. So all of that information is kind of crunched behind the scenes using algorithms I do not understand. But they're magic. And it comes up with this opportunities feed. So you can filter that feed by content opportunities, promotions, opportunities, optimizations opportunities, and that'll just really quickly say, Hey, here's a great idea for a piece of content, it's going to take you roughly this amount of time and this is the keyword target that you want to aim for. And then it will tell you what the value of that is if you write this piece, you have the ability to attract X amount of people to your website a year and drive X amount of traffic value. So super easy to use, especially if you don't have a lot of time.
Mike: Okay, so you talked about three different opportunities. So content presumably is isn't new page, so a new blog post or something? And then can you just talk through the the other two optimization I think there's one other.
Emma: Optimizations and then promotions opportunities, so the optimizations people It will look at your existing rankings and give you ideas for where you can improve them. So you've got a page that's ranking on page two or page three. And with a few tweaks, you can get it over to page one. And so then it will tell you exactly what you need to do add these related terms, use your keyword, this amount of times have this much content on your page, maybe answer these frequently asked questions. So it's really robust in terms of the exact things they're telling you to do, it's not going to be broad, like, you know, use your keyword one time, and maybe use, you know, two or three of these related terms, like it's very specific, you can see in the reporting down to how many times your competitors are using any given related term. So that's really helpful. It gives you the keyword density, like, like I said, it's a lot of data. So it has that in there, it has like high potential pages. So it might be a keyword that's crazy valuable for you, it's really relevant to your your brand, but you don't have a page that's really focused on that keyword, whereas your competitors do. So that one will, it'll bump it up and say this is one that you should focus on. So that's the optimizations piece, there's a corresponding improve my rankings tool within the software that really helps you kind of dig into that. And then there's the promotions piece. And this is probably the piece that I am the least familiar with, just because I don't do a lot of promotions. But we have it connected to like journalists pitches tools. So it'll say, hey, this journalist writes a lot about laboratory software. And since your client does that, you might want to reach out to them and see if you can get, you know, feature with them. Or, you know, here's a guest post opportunity that might be a great fit for you. This corresponding tool for that is promote my content. And I think there's about 20 different strategies that are listed in there that you can pursue. So, especially for promotions, folks, I think it'll it'll be really valuable to bubble up some stuff that they might not think of otherwise.
Mike: So it's amazing. See, you've got a tool that from what it sounds like it's giving you advice based on content you should create or how to drive new backlinks. But it's specific to that keyword is looking at what competitors do. Is that Is that right?
Emma: Yeah. It's specific to the keyword like your seed keyword in your industry. I think that's one of the things that kind of sets can I rank apart from the other tools is that it's very focused on No, not only like your industry, but your website and how you compare to the other folks that are in your industry and or ranking for the terms that you're aiming for.
Mike: That's cool. So, I mean, obviously, you're working with a lot of companies and presumably talking to a lot of companies who are struggling with SEO, which is why they come to any vendor. I mean, why is it that so many companies struggle so much with SEO? Do you think?
Emma: Well, I think as an industry, we don't do a great job for ourselves, we can't, it's kind of positioned as this dark art, with a lot of verbiage that most people are just like, I don't have the time to learn another thing. Um, I think when I speak about it with, with new clients with, you know, folks that I work with on my team, I like to position it as like our job as SEOs is to help a search engine do their job better, they want to give their users the very best information for their query. So as much as we can do that provide that best information for the given query, the better we're going to rank. So like, take all of the like the Voodoo out of it, that at the end of the day, we're helping a search engine do their job.
Mike: That's a really cool way of looking at it. And I mean, you hear a lot about the challenge of ranking and the number of people investing in SEO? I mean, is it getting harder to rank?
Emma: Um, I mean, potentially, I think that there's a lot of a lot more companies are adopting SEO, there's a lot more jobs for in house SEO is I think a lot more like compared to five years ago, 10 years ago, it is as a marketer, as a digital marketer, you're expected to know, at least SEO fundamentals when you take on a job. So I think, in that aspect, we have a lot more people with expertise that are that are working for companies and working to get their companies ranking. And also, you know, SEO, it is it's challenging. Like you'll change something on a site, you'll get a page one it's very exciting, and then your competitor changes something and they take over your space. So it's like a constant, constant dance.
Mike: And I mean, one of the things also we hear about SEO is the wide range of different ways you can appear on the search results page. I mean, how does Can I rank you know, look at those different opportunities, can it pick out opportunities to appear in different places rather than just the organic list?
Emma: There isn't right now. So um, for like, if you look at sem rush, they've got it broken down by like the additional features So you've got like your featured snippet you have or position zero, you've got, you know, image links, you've got frequently asked questions. And can I rank doesn't have that yet they have built out like a Frequently Asked Questions module for that improve my rankings, which I think from a content perspective is really helpful. Especially you're looking at the blank page going, I don't know how to write about this. And that's kind of a good jumping point there. I would love to see the addition of those SERP features, because I think it's, you know, we get so focused on like, I just want to get a page one ranking, which has now become, I just want to get a top three ranking, I just want to get positioned zero ranking. And it's like, there are so many other opportunities to catch somebody's attention. And you know, the old school marketing adage, you have to be in front of somebody X amount of times before they really recognise who you are. So I think any time you can get a SERP feature is going to be valuable.
Mike: But of course, I guess once you start talking about those features, it then gets more complex for people who are perhaps less skilled in SEO.
Emma: Yeah, I would say I think one of the best, best tools that's just out there is using a search engine, like search your your target keyword, search your industry, see what kind of content people are sharing what their page titles look like, what their meta descriptions look like, if you're wondering how they got position zero, go look at their code, and just get a feel for did they format that in a certain way? Did they say that in a certain way that made Google kind of are a search engine in general, pay attention? And give them that spot?
Mike: That's, that's really cool advice. I mean, it sounds, it sounds in a way that you've got to replicate, what can I rank doesn't look at your competitors, rather than try and follow what's deemed to be common knowledge? I guess?
Emma: Yeah, I think it's one of those like, kind of fundamental easy things to do that people often forget about. We're so focused on the data and what the data is telling us. And it was like, you have like, in real time, what a search engine feels is valuable for this query. So why not take advantage of that and see what you can learn from it? Are they looking for transactional pages, informational pages? Is this? Are these all local businesses that are ranking for this query? So there's a lot of value that you can take from just doing a simple search?
Mike: And when you look at SEO, I mean, who do you see as being responsible? Is it is it responsibility of the SEO team? Is it people generating content? I mean, who do you think should be driving the SEO? Or is it or is it everybody,
Emma: I'm really biased, I work with a really great team. And we're kind of everybody has their specialty area. I think it works best when everyone is working together. So I think you know, you have your director of marketing, or your director of SEO, that setting the strategy and then you've got your technical person making sure the website is working, right? Everything looks good core web, vitals are solid, all that fun stuff. You've got your content person that saying, Okay, what content is relevant in this industry that we can create that engages people that are searching for keywords, you've got your optimizations person that's, you know, keeping track of the rankings and looking where those opportunities are? What can we do better here to engage people, and then you've got your, you know, either social or promotions, those kinds of folks that everybody is working together. So if I'm, if I'm optimising a page for sample tracking software, I've got my content person who's writing a couple of supporting blog posts on sample tracking. So what what does a lab need to know about sample tracking and 2021? And then I've got my promotions person who's going to make sure that that blog post is shared in relevant LinkedIn groups or, you know, other forums that are out there, maybe reach out to journalists and say, Hey, we're writing about sample tracking, you might be interested. So I think it works to get much better together when everybody is rowing in the same direction.
Mike: That's cool. I mean, I think one of the challenges I see particularly with our enterprise clients is everybody wants the same thing. But quite often, because of the sheer size and complexity of the website. You've got people who are not SEO professionals, generating content, maybe for blogs and things like that.
Emma: I've never seen that.
Mike: What do these people do? I mean, they're not they're not SEO experts. How can we do a better job?
Emma: I think talk with your SEO team, especially if you're building out new pages for your website. I think we've we have a tendency to silo ourselves specifically for for in house SEOs. You've got your product marketing team, you've got your design team, you've got probably some you know, corporate marketing that's wanting to make decisions and like get everybody at the table, including SEO and say okay, so we understand this is the design, we understand copy would really like this to be their h1. And here's what we're, what our data is telling us would be valuable here because I think you can have the best design in the world. But if nobody's visiting your website, doesn't you know where the value there is going to be hard to sell?
Mike: Yeah, and I think I think that's a great point is the people who are writing a lot of the content who aren't the experts, they actually really want people to read it so that they're desperate for that knowledge. Yeah. So if we go back and talk a little bit about can I rank? I mean, you talked about the different people in, you know, the SEO team? I mean, who is can I rank designed for? Is it designed for, you know, content specialists in the team? Is it designed for people with other roles, or maybe people who are who aren't perhaps SEO specialists,
Emma: It was initially designed for non SEO specialists. So a lot of like, we have a lot of DIY clients, we have a lot of like, smaller agency clients. Because we've all been trained up on it and and understand the data that we're seeing, like it is a you know, it's kind of our go to tool for everything that we do, whether whatever department that we're in, we're using Kenny rank in some format during the day. But I think it's especially for folks that are new to SEO or don't have a lot of time, I think that that's when that opportunities feed really comes into play in terms of like, here's what, what the priority is right now.
Mike: Yeah, I love the fact you sit down and the tool says, this is going to give you the best bang for the buck. I think that that's a great feature of can I rank? So, I mean, we've talked a little bit about the product. You know, it's amazing. I mean, I've had a look at it, and I think there's free trials on the website. But is it expensive?
Emma: Um, it's, I don't know, the price points offhand. I think there's three different tiers. Um, I would say compared to some other tools that I use frequently, it's on the lower end of that, I'm there, like with anything, there is a bit of a learning curve. So I would just let people know there's a Learning Centre on each tool, that's super helpful. So do take advantage of that. But I would say, you know, you'll see some SEO tools that are 100 $150 a month for a single use licence. And that this is not that you can if you're an agency, you can get your whole team on. And I think it's I want to say like 200 a month, but I could be wrong.
Mike: Oh, so actually, in terms of cost, per seat, it's really cheap.
Emma: Yeah. And you share the information. So like, for me, for my clients, we all share the same access to the client data. So because it's based on a machine learning module, like everything, every keyword search that I do, that goes out to the whole team. So even if I'm not, if I'm working on content strategy, even if I'm not talking with the optimizations person, I can see the keywords that they're looking at, and the things that they're tracking and focusing on same with promotion. So it can be really helpful, especially if you're, if you have a busy team, if you have a team that's distributed and your time zones don't quite match up, you still see what's going on in the client account in real time.
Mike: Awesome. Actually, one thing I love that you've only just mentioned, machine learning, it seems like everybody has to mention AI and machine learning when they talk about tools. And and you've not done it in the first answer, which is brilliant. I mean, obviously, there's there's some AI or learning within the tool in order to work out what's what's important. But I mean, it sounds to me, like you kind of hide that and people don't have to worry about it, it's just about getting the results,
Emma: We could probably do a better job of messaging it upfront. But yeah, I think my my focus is on SEO can be really challenging and intimidating for folks that are new to it. And they don't necessarily need to know what's going on behind the scenes or care to know what's going on behind the scenes, they want to know how they can get their website to rank and how they can start their organic traffic going. So I think it does a really great job of that kind of demystifying SEO for folks and you know, finding the like the grow my content tools, kind of our keyword research tool, great opportunities to drive organic traffic with like long tails in there. So I think that's more of the focus on like helping people feel more confident, rather than like, the amazing technology that's happening behind the scenes that does all this stuff.
Mike: I love that. I mean, the grow my content tool, so that that's all about understanding your industry and then working out what people are looking for, you know, a company like yours will be searching for.
Emma: Yeah, so that's, you know, again, if I'm selling software, it's gonna say, Okay, you're in this industry. So people are writing about cloud based software, desktop, software apps, you know, all those kinds of different things and it's gonna bubble up even those longtail terms, so like software suites for laboratory software suites for healthcare, things like that. So it's just kind of like a good brainstorming tool, but you also happen to get the search volume and the value that you might not get otherwise.
Mike: Amazing. That's great. So, I mean, looking forward, you know, I'm interested to know, what do you see as the future of SEO? Where do you think the SEO industry is going? What do people need to know to be successful in two years time,
Emma: I would say to be as focused as possible on giving site visitors the best experience. So if you're writing content for a specific query, be very clear on the information that you're sharing, there is a time to be clever. And sometimes there is a time to just give them the information. So I would say as much as possible, like increase your page engagement include a lot of internal links to other relevant content, that's something I think a lot of companies forget is there's no internal linking. So it's like, I found this great blog post, and I read it, and now I'm done, because there's nowhere for me to go. So that's something I think that that is gonna continue to be important. Um, Google tracks everything, they track your time on page, they track your bounce rate, they track your exit rate. So as much as possible, focus on how you can improve those numbers. So if you're seeing a high bounce, something's not your either your page is loading really slowly, or they're not seeing the information that they expect to see. Or maybe your site design is a little bit old and needs an update. So I think just paying as much attention to the actual user experience, and I in my belief that will bubble up the best content on search engines.
Mike: That's great. That's really good advice. And, and in terms of the content itself, um, you talked a little bit about internal linking, making sure that you give someone somewhere to go after they read the blog post or whatever. Is there any other tips that you have for people generating content, that might help them rank a bit higher?
Emma: I would say I'm a big fan of the content spec. So that's a process that we use for our clients. We'll spend about 45 minutes before before writing a single word on deciding what that keyword is going to be doing research around that keyword. So, you know, what are the page titles look like? What kinds of pages are showing up in Google what common terms are, so I say related terms. So what terms would come up naturally, if I was speaking about this, as a topic, so I mentioned basketball a lot as my example, if I'm talking about basketball, if I want to rank for that, I'm probably going to mention hoops and net, and B ball and Michael Jordan, and you know, the Boston Celtics, all these things that would naturally come up when I'm talking about the topics. So I think, you know, creating a list that content spec has a list of about 10 to 15 terms that we want to work in. And then making sure that we've got really smart headers, so H twos and H threes that are the all the content is really clearly formatted. So it's easy to read, adding images is really helpful just to kind of keep people engaged and on the page. And just think about your own search experience. When you land on a website, looking for information, and you see, you know, four pages of like 12 point, text, nobody, nobody wants to dig into that you want something that's like easy to scan and that you feel engaged with. So, you know, consider your own search habits, when you're doing content for your website.
Mike: That is brilliant advice. I really appreciate that. And we're obviously coming to the end of the session that I guess, you know, is there anything else we should have covered, or anything else you feel, you know, people should know?
Emma: I would say don't be intimidated by SEO, there's a gazillion guides out there that will make it seem really, really challenging. But SEO like there is a tonne of marketing things that you can do. But SEO is really valuable for long term organic traffic. And I know we often call it free. It isn't that it takes time and investment and resources and strategy to get there. But it will serve you for a very long time. I've got clients that i i optimise their page three years ago, it's still driving the majority of their traffic today. So there's a value there.
Mike: Definitely. And I would say you know, try some of the tools as well. I mean, if you look at Can I rank you know, I you log in, there's a free trial. And it just says do this and things will be better. I think that's an amazing tool. It just gives you a list of things that are going to improve performance. So it's amazing. This has been really good. I really appreciate your time. If people have questions what's the best way they can reach you?
Emma: I can be reached at Emma.Valentiner@canirank.com
Mike: That's great. Straight to the email.
Emma: Yeah, I'm terrible with social media. So if you blinked in me, it could be a long time before I get back.
Mike: This is has been an amazing discussion. I think it's really interesting. And a really challenging subject. I mean, lots of people struggle with SEO, particularly people who are working with it, but maybe not the professionals. So I'm sure they will appreciate it. Thank you very much for being on the podcast.
Emma: Thanks very much for having me. It's been great.
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.
HANNOVER MESSE Reschedule Dates for 2022
HANNOVER MESSE 2022, has been rescheduled and will now take place from 30th May-2nd June 2022, due to the rising numbers of COVID-19 cases.
With previous experience showing that Summer is an ideal time for face to face events, HANNOVER MESSE has chosen these dates to ensure as much safety as possible for all participants. Due to the concentration of events in the summer months, plus vacation times, the industrial fair has been reduced from five to four days for 2022 only. HANNOVER MESSE 2023 will resume its normal five-day schedule in April.
Wolfgang Weber, Chairman of the ZVEI Management Board commented "HANNOVER MESSE is the world's most important industrial showcase for our companies, so the new date is correct given the current circumstances. We are convinced that in the summer we will reach a larger audience interested in Industrie 4.0 and its contribution to sustainability. With our innovations in automation, digitalization, electrification, and energy efficiency, the electrical and digital industry is guiding the industrial transition to a climate-neutral circular economy. We want to show the broadest possible audience what this path can look like, because we can only master this challenge if we work together. HANNOVER MESSE offers the perfect setting for this".
With the trade show focusing on the topics of digitalization and sustainability, the postponement from April to June should allow several more members of the industry to arrange travel to attend the show. With no digital alternative in place, it seems organizers of trade shows are trying to move forward as normal as they can, and provide exhibitors and visitors with the pre-COVID trade show environment which has been deeply missed over the last couple of years.
We look forward to seeing the event take place, and the positive response we are sure the show will receive.
A 'Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know Account Director Chris Corfield
For the latest instalment in our ‘Napier Nine’ video series, we introduce you to Account Director Chris Corfield.
Watch the video below to learn the first concert Chris ever attended, the four words he would use to describe himself, and the job title which really reflects what he does at Napier, as he answers his nine questions…
Missed the other ‘Napier Nine’ Videos in our Series? Watch them Now!
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Managing Director Mike Maynard
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Media Analyst Rachael Penfold
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Business Development Manager Hannah Kelly
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Suzy Kenyon
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Dave Ingle
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PR Specialist Clare Reader
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PA and HR Manager Debbie McIntosh
- A 'Napier Nine' Video.. Get to Know Account Administration Executive Danielle Robertshaw
- A 'Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Natasha Websdale
- A' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Director Clive Over
- A ' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Ivy Silverton
- A 'Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know Associate Director Ed Neale
A Napier Podcast: Interview with Ike Singh - Social27
In this podcast episode, we interview Ike Singh, Co-founder and CEO at Social27, a virtual and hybrid events platform.
Ike shares how event platforms can accelerate revenue, how Social27 uses an AI recommendation engine to recommend content to the right people, and why he thinks there needs to be a change in the way we deliver content due to COVID-19.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Ike Singh - Social27
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Ike Singh
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 the latest episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Ike Singh, who's the co-founder and CEO of social 27. Welcome to the podcast Ike.
Ike: Thank you so much, Mike, for having me. It's a pleasure.
Mike: So you're into virtual and hybrid events in social 27. So if you want to give me just a quick overview of what social 27 does, and where your market is.
Ike: Certainly, Mike. So yeah, social 27. We focus on all sorts of events these days is primarily virtual events. But certainly a lot of our customers are planning for hybrid events in the very near future. Are we all provide a platform focused on providing the content, matchmaking and networking, which is powered by AI, and also a pretty robust Expo solution so that people can actually find amazing solutions and services in the ecosystem? So it's all about really connecting people, building communities and the big factor around accelerating revenue, the revenue cycle? So I mean, we'll talk more about that in just a bit. Yeah.
Mike: Fascinating. I mean, I'm intrigued to know, you know, a little bit about yourself, how you got here, what your career was like, and why you decided that events was the place to be?
Ike: Okay, certainly, Mike. So I'll go back a little bit. So I did about eight years at Microsoft, that was starting around 2000. You know, and when I was at Microsoft, I actually did a bunch of events, I used to work in the global partner marketing teams, so I would be on aeroplane every two weeks, somewhere in the world, it was a great time to see the world, but also meet lots of people. But what I found was that events certainly did not have the best ROI, you're spending a lot of money going everywhere. Sometimes you'd find like 500 people at an event and sometimes 50 people, you know, so just, you know, it was just all over the place. So I think for me, it was more around being able to build something which would bring people together, irrespective of where they were located. But also kind of be able to extend the in person events, you know, the so that if even if there's an in person event, the people who can't come there can still somehow participate. So that was what I left with it with Microsoft, you know, and then around 2012 was the first version of our virtual events platform. I'll be honest, it worked for about a year or two years or so but did not go where I wanted it to go. Just because I think the technology wasn't there yet. Streaming was really expensive. At that time, it was only the very, very big companies who could afford it. So we didn't get as much traction as I wanted. So then I kind of did a few different things. You might check them out on my LinkedIn, I've been all over the place. And then in 2019, is when we kind of came back to the board on our side and said, Look, there is a lot of advancements that have happened in from a technology perspective, streaming, as well as AI is becoming more real, we can actually use some of this stuff, you know, which is provided by the big cloud vendors. So we re architected and created a new version of our platform. And that is what is in market right now, since the last year and a half, two years. That's kind of the backstory.
Mike: And I'm really interested when you decided to go back to that business. And you know, I guess trade again, with the new technology, was there something specific that that drove you to do that? Was it something you were seeing in the market? Or was it a particular aspect of technology?
Ike: Certainly. So whenever it comes to b2b, I always think about how do we use technology and or just do stuff in our daily lives as just regular human beings, you know, so what I refer to is, as the consumerization of IT is what is kind of happening in the world right now. So a lot of the experiences that we have in our daily lives, we also want some of those same experiences at work. So what I was seeing, as a paradigm shift in the last few years was how people consume content and how people collaborate. You know, so what are events? Right? I mean, events are all about consuming content and collaboration. That's what they're all about networking. So consuming content is equal to Spotify is equal to Netflix, Amazon, you know, movies were prime. So the whole point behind some of these content consumption patterns that we see in the world right now, as in our personal lives, there's one thing which is very clear among all of these, that is that they provide us with tonnes and tonnes of content, but then they also provide us with recommendations and help us personalise our experience. So give me a lot but pay system, please understand what I want and give me exactly what I want. You know, so I don't have to waste my time, you know, just finding things right. So that was the kind of the North Star that we were going for, which was like how can I create an event perience where the event isn't in the middle, and the people are kind of like circling around it like, you know, shift from one room to the other. I think it's more about the, the human being being in the middle, and the events circling around the human being in terms of what they want, just like it happens in our daily lives with Spotify, and with everything else. And then plus the collaboration piece was more around LinkedIn for that matter, right. So think about if you could put LinkedIn from a collaboration online collaboration, perspective and networking perspective, and add some of that content consumption, aka Spotify style. That's exactly what we set out to create. And we've done that and our customers love it.
Mike: That's fascinating. It sounds like there's, I mean, there's lots of elements there in terms of the delivery of content, it says terms, one is delivery, which pretty streaming has become much easier. But you also talk about the AI in terms of being a recommendation engine, I'm, I'm really interested because historically, with physical events, we've not really had the AI recommending it. So I mean, do you see that as being your big, unique selling point for hybrid events, as well as online events?
Ike: Absolutely, Mike. So again, what the experiences that I believe in again, irrespective of our platform, right, so the whole goal is to give people the opportunity, especially in a business environment to get to what they want as fast as possible. You know, you hear things like Netflix binge, but believe me, nobody wants to binge on event, you know, b2b event videos. So the point is, you know, you have to get them to what they need to go to really, really fast. So the goal is to really understand who they are, you know, and there's lots of information available for that particular purpose. There's third party data, but in many cases in our environment, we actually create, give the opportunity to people to also self select some of those things, just like on Spotify, I'll give that example one more time. So as you go on Spotify, you choose your genres of music, that you're interested in soft rock, but I also like hip hop, okay, well, you come in there, and you choose certain categories of that you're really interested in, and then we kind of based upon that information, their actions, plus, based upon some of the information from their second party and third party data, we were able to pull together some pretty amazing recommendations. So that just really kind of helps, you know, reduce the friction, in terms of getting them to exactly what they're looking for. And as they like, start liking things in there, our algorithm starts sharpening its recommendations accordingly.
Mike: And I mean, this is kind of hard. But do you see your recommendations as like, showcasing interesting content that people might not have necessarily looked at before? Or is it more about removing the irrelevant content?
Ike: I think it is, the first one is more around giving them recommendations around what we think they might like, because it's also again, be put them into a cohort in the backend with other people who have similar profiles, you know, and it's just like, hey, this, there's 1000 other people who really liked these sessions, I think there are similar to you. So you might like this as well. So yes, and then again, the the recommendations become better as we see their actions inside. Right. So that's a starting point. But then it's also a lot to do with their own actions. So yeah, that's how that works.
Mike: Fascinating. So one of the things I've seen is that, you know, with COVID, particularly, obviously, a lot of stuffs moved online, but in general, companies have tended to go towards easier content webinars. And a lot of the event organisers have actually, you know, to some extent shut down during COVID. I mean, how do you see things coming back? Do you see events being run by large enterprises? Or do you see it going back to trade show organisers?
Ike: So I think, irrespective of who runs these events, I think what needs to happen is that there needs to be a change in how we think about delivering content. Events are just again, one more way to deliver content, right? So again, I'm just going to go a little bit broader, because I know your audience is not just events, right? They're more than that. So but delivering content. So now right now, in most cases, you're delivering content, mostly online, you know, and it will continue because people do want access to you know, content easier faster whenever they are variant of the or any device, all that fun stuff, right. So the point is, when it comes to in person events, and or virtual events I from based upon every everybody I've talked to, in my industry, as well as among the bunch of CMOS that we have from our customer side, these are companies all over the world, right? What they are telling us very clearly is that going in the into the future in the near future and onwards, every event is going to have a virtual component, you know, and yes, some of them very few of them might be in person only, but mostly everything is going to have some virtual component because people are used to it now. They want it and also the value that most corporations as well as exhibitor, exhibitor companies have found like the scale that they can achieve with, you know, some of this having a virtual component attached to it. So how we think about the world in the near future is that every event will have pre, during and after phase, in the pre phase, everyone is virtual.
And I think most organisations who are doing events, irrespective of their company or their a big event company, whatever be, they should put a bunch of that 100 level intro content online before the actual event happens. Why would you want to rent out a bunch of rooms and pay so much money for just delivering intro level PowerPoint doesn't make any sense. And nobody enjoys the nine to five on those uncomfortable chairs, looking at PowerPoint, right? So the goal is to achieve Do it fast, get it done online before the actual event happens, Spot the minds of the people, get them interested in, you know, the value of what's going to get delivered, and then also get them networking. So once you are delivering that content, people are already going to be there they meet others who are similar to them. So that once they go to the actual event, that is the question is not Oh, what do you guys do? Because that's the one question that's asked a billion times at every event, there's that's just such a waste. If they should know that intro stuff should happen pre event, during the event, rolling up your sleeves or getting deeper into the content, attending some exclusive workshops and things of that kind. You're having your side meetings with people you've already met before you go into the booths where you've already seen the demos before, right?
So it just completely changes the game. And you find a lot more value in person. And so for us, the way we think about events is let's take the events away from being email list generators, because that's what they are today. That's all you get from an event is an email list from that email list generation two more like revenue acceleration, where you actually getting business done not asking what do you do? Right? So that's all that what do you do sure happened in the in the pre event phase, and then post event is all about, you know, seeing some of the content you might have missed out on and or reconnecting some of those people and having a connection always on community until the next event happens, you know, so it's kind of like, that's our approach and strategy towards hybrid. And a lot of our customers are very aligned to that.
Mike: I love that idea of thinking a lot about before and after the event. I think that's, you know, that's something that online can give us that we really couldn't do before events were becoming hybrid. So that's great. In terms of, you know, one of the challenges of virtual events, I mean, one of the biggest complaints I hear is about networking, you mentioned there working, where, quite often it's very easy to network with people who want to sell you something very hard to network with anyone who's, you know, from your point of view, an interesting contact? I mean, have you seen this? And what do you see event organisers doing to overcome that problem?
Ike: Now, certainly a very, very valid question I, you know, I do say this many times, I'll repeat it one more time. It's not like that buyers don't want to buy, it's the process, the process of buying, especially in the upper mid market, and the enterprise is pretty tedious. I think it's tedious even feel buying, like, anything for your personal life. I mean, you go to a bunch of reviews and check out a bunch of videos. I mean, that's what people do. So it's that process that has the friction in it. Buyers want to buy it, that's what they've been given by a charter by their boss go buy me XYZ, you know, solution. It's the they have to kiss those 100 frogs to find the prince. That's where the problem is, right. So now, as the event owner, slash, you know, the platform, there is tonnes and tonnes of information that I have on both the parties, the buyers and the sellers. So I think the what I could do best for the buyer is first of all Q rate, what the kind of people I can connect them with. So we are many solutions and ways to do that. Yes, the recommendation engine certainly helps.
But then we do a further curation, where we do something called Online speed networking, in which you know, there's a, for example, you might be in the market for, you know, I'm looking for a CRM solution for healthcare. So you know, the, the event owner will find you eight or 10, so called solutions and partners who want to talk to you, and they'll be given three minutes on a quick video call. And you talk to them. And if you like someone, you continue the conversation beyond that, right. So that that's the kind of like do your pitch and then see how it goes? So curated? I think experiences for networking will certainly help. The next thing I think, from my perspective of the sellers is, well, maybe there isn't any curated stuff happening at all, networking, speed networking, what else do I do? Well, it's all about giving them an access to the information. So let's say out of those 5000 people at this event, here's the 50 people that have the highest propensity on what you're trying to sell. So basically, that is an interested party, because all they've been doing is looking at content and meeting people around that topic area. It's they love working for home solutions that are compliant with the healthcare system. Great. So that's what they're looking for. Don't send them a cybersecurity ebook, send them exactly the one pager on that solution, and it will strike. So that is the kind of information we're able to provide to both the parties where it becomes relevant in terms of having that connection. It's not a spray and pray kind of style stuff that happens mostly in events right now.
Mike: That's awesome. And I love the idea of that speed dating because I think that reflects very much an in person event where you could have two minutes talking to someone you You know whether you're a fit or not, and you either continue or you move on. I love that idea. So I'm moving on. I mean, one of the things I'm interested in is companies running their own events and how much work is involved? Because obviously, if you're looking to create the event and the pre and post event experience, do you think that the bar has been raised for what people are expecting from events in b2b now?
Ike: Yes, the bar has been raised, I will not say it's been raised, essentially, I think that the bar is a little different, you know, so it's, there's been some additions to it. So the whole point out here is that still I've seen over the last year and a half, since people have really gone in with virtual events, because of COVID. They're still doing what used to happen in E commerce back in the day, where, you know, people would take their, their catalogue book thing, and you know, just take pictures of that and put it on a website and say, Here's the phone number, call me if you want to buy something. Now, that was the beginning of E commerce, right, but then became Amazon, the recommendation engines, and you know, everything else in between. So that is where the event work needs to go as well. You cannot just take your offline content format, we're gonna do three days, I'm gonna do 50 sessions at the same time. And that's what we're going to do. Like, why would you do that? It seemed I mean, there's no, you know, there's no limit on how long you can have this thing. There's no limit on rooms that you can have, why would you bother, like, just change the thing? And next thing is around the time, it's like, oh, we'd normally do 45 minute sessions. That's what we should always do online as well. Well, nobody listens to anything 45 minutes online. I mean, yeah, if they're sitting on a chair, in your convention centre, and they are your so called captive audience, because they flew in there, and they stuck there for three days, they might do it, but they'll be on their phone for the most part. So the point is, let's understand that we have to start looking at the best practices from the digital world. We're living in the world of tick tock and Instagram right now. You know, and so the goal is, Listen, give them content, which is, which is very much in tune with the digital world.
Best example could be TED Talks. The TED talks are the best, you know, most watched content online, there's a format to it, but 15 ish minutes, not super salesy. Hardly any PowerPoints, and yes, let's do that 15 minutes session. Plus, you can also do your deep dive a one hour session, as a as a link, you know, so they, if they want to go super deep, they can go there. So those are some of the things that we just talked to our lot of our customers about. So the bar has not been raised, it's just that we have to start thinking differently, the medium is different. The ways that people are interacting and looking at all this stuff is different. And I mean, always listen to people saying using the word zoom, fatigue, and so forth. And people always say, well, people are kind of like zoom fatigue already. I don't think anybody wants to stuff anymore. And I always say to them, Have you ever heard the term tick tock fatigue, or Netflix fatigue or Instagram fatigue? No, people watch, look at their screens all day, they have no problem looking at screens, they just don't want to look at bad content. They look at they're used to looking at good content. So guys, I mean, come on, everyone, please, let's rethink this thing. And let's not be so lazy.
Okay, so the goal is, and then one more thing I want to bring up is the best thing about online is participation from the audience. Okay, so now a traditional event, or any of those kinds of events that happened as we choose, like, few people, which are roughly about two to 5% of the entire audience, and they're given the podium and 95% plus of the people just sitting there, like kindergarten kids looking at them. Right. So the point is, that's wrong? Why are we wasting the collective intelligence of this massive community. So with online and the way online works, it's all about participation. So let those chosen few speakers ignite that fire. They're just the spark, they're not the fire, the fire is the community, and so have a bunch of avenues and give the opportunity for the rest of the audience to actually chime in. And they can do their own, like small sessions in there. Right. So we have the ability, for example, in our platform for anybody to start a six person or a 30 person, mini session on any topic that they want, again, so aligned with the you know, the bigger topics or the event, you know, but the goal is that, you know, they can start their own mini sessions inside there. So now you've got, you know, hopefully more than 5% of the people contributing content, and it's coming from the community. And that is certainly more interesting. So there's two good parts about it. Number one, the you don't have to work as harder. So it's not like oh, it's online, I have to produce this whole new kind of content. No, you don't, you have to just do what you do. Do it in an online format, but give the mic back also to the audience so they can add as well. Right. And that will create an amazing event. And yes, it's not going to be a bunch of work from your side. If Instagram and or Tik Tok were supposed to create all the content themselves, they would have, I don't know a team of a billion people working there. They don't The point is, that's the new word. Let's look at that. Let's not just, you know, put our heads in the sand and pretend it's you know, 1984 it's not you know, so let's let's move on. You know, that's a That's brilliant.
Mike: I love the idea of that kind of unconference approach where, where the the delegates can actually form their own events. I mean, leading on from, you mentioned bad content. I think a lot of b2b companies over the last year and a half have really struggled with exhibitions. So where exhibitions have gone virtual. Typically the the format's are not very inspiring, and there's not very much interaction and generally speaking, the, the quality of leads is pretty poor. I mean, what do you think's going wrong? And how do you think we can fix it?
Ike: Okay, again, very good question, Mike. So quality of laser start with that, in the past, you know, both nauseous in the past, and generally traditional style events, you go there, you collect a bunch of business cards, you call them leads, and you come back home, and you put that into a Marketo, and you start dripping them. So the question is that the number of leads, so call him at a collector, maybe 100 cards with everybody you met at a coffee shop, you know, everybody met at the drinks, you know, Stan, and whoever came to your booth. Now, I've got 100 leads from there. And look at the all of them are directors and CVPs. Well, we all know how many of those people actually do a deal with you, maybe 1%, maybe five, you're really lucky, right? I mean, I've been to so many events, I know that rice representing Microsoft. So I mean, it was not too bad.
The point is, it's the way the virtual, you see those leads in front of you then in there, and you're able to measure more. So that's the reason why people are feeling this, like, oh, the Vert the leads are not great, well, just depends. I mean, brilliant. Blimey, in most cases, they were the same before. But then the best thing about works alone and or hybrid on that other side also is that, as I said earlier, the ability to create those experiences where you can curate on both sides of the audience and give them the right connections to each other. I think that is something which a lot of the event owners have to really take onus off. Again, I don't want to put people on the, you know, bid on the on point for this. But mostly in traditionally, the event owners have all been about, hey, I've got all these people coming, this 5000 People coming there, the booth is, you know, $50,000 come in, and you figure it out after that, it has no responsibility whatsoever for anything, and you just take the money, right. So the goal, I think now, because everything is so much more transparent, but digital, you can measure things better. So the point is that it's all going to come out.
So you have to have, you know, an experience that you have to work for you. Because he as the event owner, you're the only person who actually knows both the parties, you got to connect them in the best possible way using technology, right. So I think the old event owners have to step up their game just a bit, you cannot just say I have an event. So give me money, I think it's all about all MLOK more to do with giving them real value. The other thing, I think also is, from a digital perspective, I really believe in micro transactions. So for example, in the traditional event world, you would say, Okay, you got to pay me $2,500 to come in here, otherwise, you can't come and what's gonna happen there? Well, here's 10 pictures of amazing speakers, that's what's gonna happen. And the rest is up to you. You know what, now in the digital world, it's not like that, if you go somewhere, you you know, you engage a little bit you like it, you pay a little bit more, you like it more, you pay a little bit more. So I think that whole micro transaction has to come to the virtual world and hybrid events world as well, where you get access to, you know, keynotes and the basic stuff. But then if you want to indulge in some of that matchmaking, some of that, you know, speed network, and you just pay elaborate extra, you find value a little bit more extra, you know, and that way everyone feels the value. So yes, everyone, from event owner perspective will have to really be more responsible for what they're doing. And from the event, you know, attendee perspective, I mean, I think we will get a better value going forward.
Mike: That's fascinating. So it sounds like you know, one of your messages is flexibility. And the other one is around, really trying to curate things and using AI to make sure that people get the right content. So tell me, how does social 27 achieve this in practice?
Ike: Yeah, so again, we are still the platform, I don't have all the control or the content that comes in. But again, I'm very lucky to have some very amazing customers. I mean, the kinds of customers I have Microsoft, Salesforce Capgemini, you know, the UN and, and so forth. We have lots of really, really amazing customers, and most of the customers that we are dealing with are digitally advanced, because they've been doing digital for a while, you know, and so the point is, these companies already have people in their teams who understand digital. And so it is easier when we talk to them or some of these best practices, that they actually believe in them and want to do something about it. I then yes. And so I think as a as a platform, our main responsibility is to first of all Yes, provide the best possible service from a platform perspective, but then also share a lot of best practices from across our entire audience and also connect our customers to each other. You know, where they can share best practices, right?
So we do our best try to do our show at least in that particular regard, I will still say that, um, there is still a lot more work to do, you know, the tools are there. But I think people, you know, are slowly, slowly getting warmed up, you know, to this whole idea of doing things a bit differently. And not just using events as number of registrations, but after using events as how much influence did we create for revenue perspective, right. So I think events have are traditionally the highest, or the biggest line item on the marketing budget for the expense part of it, the ROI certainly isn't very clear. And the point is, in this world, where we hardly get any response on emails, so using events just for email list generation is probably not a good idea. So use the events, because that is the only place where the customer is out in the open, you know, otherwise, they're going to go back and hide behind their desk and never answer email. So the point is, they're out in the open, give them what they want, understand their needs really, really clearly give them the option of finding the right people making the right connections and do a lot more off your revenue. You know, cycle can happen in the event itself, it does not need to be just an email list, right? There's a lot more conversations demos, you know, giving them the ability to just kind of do their own thing in there, you know that I think all lot of those things will help. But yes, going back to your question, yes. Even though I have amazing customers, I think all of us are trying slowly, slowly to kind of unfold this new world.
Mike: And so I mean, you mentioned some really impressive customers there. But do you think Virsh events are just going to be the domain of these huge enterprises? Or are smaller, midsize b2b companies able to organise their own events successfully?
Ike: I think it is everyone. I mean, just I mean, again, look at the spectrum of things, right. So in reality, if you really think about it, online events, or online experience of this kind is the domain of individuals right now. It's the people on Youtubers, it's the Instagramers. And everybody else, I mean, there's a bunch of kids doing pet dog videos all day. So the thing is, it's actually the domain of the individual person, the tools are available, they're pretty cheap. I mean, they're very, they reach very far. So that I think it really comes down to is all of us embracing this new medium. I think very found some of the hesitation has been around the control that you know, a lot of the teams, a league, legal teams, and so forth, they have on every word that goes out, right, actually. So in reality, I think there's more hurdles in the upper mid market in the enterprise space, because the control on what content has to go out, versus, you know, the SMB space, I think the the small and medium businesses, well, they don't have a crazy team of lawyers sitting there, you know. So the point is, you know, I mean, learn from, you know, from what people are doing individually every day on the social media platforms, I'm even seeing so much of that happen on LinkedIn right now. There's a lot more people a lot more waster. So I think it's just all about, you know, getting out there, like the what we're doing right now, Mike, the point is, you know, just get get to get your word out there talk to people, I think there'll be, there'll be some interest, hopefully, especially from the if you make, you know, a sense to the relevant audience.
Mike: Fascinating. So, I mean, if somebody is excited by this, they want to, to launch their own event. I mean, what's the best approach? I mean, is it just sign up for the platform and build your event? Or are there better, more effective ways to make use of social 27?
Ike: As far as Social27 is concerned? I mean, yes, you know, I think the best way to be is, you know, just come to our website and just, you know, fill out a contact us form, maybe we'll do a demo, understand your needs, and then give you the right solution that works best for you. Again, we work with events that are 100 people and events that are nearly 100,000 people, you know, so it just depends upon what you're trying to do. For us, again, the goal is to have a long term relationship. So you know, all of our agreements are more or less than the you know, and we'll arrange and we find the best possible package that works for your organisation now.
Mike: Amazing. So get in contact on the website. If people have specific questions about what you've said today. I mean, is there a way for them to contact you on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, perhaps?
Ike: Absolutely. I mean, I'm on LinkedIn every day, you know. So the point is, please send me a quick message on LinkedIn more than happy to answer any questions and or discuss anything that might be of interest.
Mike: This has been great. I mean, I've really enjoyed it. I love I love the focus around improving the quality of the content and the fact that actually, it doesn't have to be more work because the expectations in terms of the length of time is probably shorter for for each presentation. So I think there's a lot there that that's really positive.
Ike: No, absolutely. Mike. I think it's the new world. And again, it was already coming. We just were dragging our feet, you know, so I think it's just a Yeah, it's here now. So let's, let's get started all of us. Yeah.
Mike: Thanks so much for being on the podcast. I've really enjoyed it.
Ike: Thank you so much, Mike. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Mixed Outlook on the Future of Trade Shows
With SPS cancelled with just a week's notice before it was meant to go ahead, it's been a stark reminder that the COVID-19 pandemic is still a threat to trade shows. With increasing infection rates in Germany resulting in tighter restrictions for events, the show had no choice but to cancel due to the new limitations put in place.
But up until this point, SPS was predicted to go ahead successfully. Events such as productronica were able to go ahead in mid-November and did see around 20,000 visitors from nearly 70 countries, which were required to either be recovered from a COVID-19 infection, be vaccinated or have a negative PCR test result. Although the number of visitors was about half from the heady days of the mid 2010s, this has shown that there is definitely still life in shows, and people are prepared to travel to them. In fact, the number of visitors was much higher than expected by the productronica events team, and visitors travelled from across Europe, with the top 10 visitor countries including Italy, France, Austria, Switzerland, Great Britain and the Netherlands.
With the outcome of productronica presenting the viewpoint that there 'is no alternative to personal contact', trade shows are making a valiant effort to ensure face to face conversations between exhibitors and visitors can go ahead once more. But with COVID rates going up for winter, there is still a huge risk around attending events, particularly as European governments introduce lockdowns as the infection rates go up. Only time will tell whether trade shows can return to their full strength once more, and we know many in the industry will be looking forward to this day.
A 'Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know Marketing Specialist Ivy Silverton
In our ‘Napier Nine’ video series, we’ve been taking the time to learn more about the team. In this instalment, we introduce you to Ivy Silverton, Marketing Specialist at Napier.
Watch the video below to find out about Ivy's secret skill, what she would spend her last £20 on and the best book series she has ever read, as she answers her nine questions…
Missed the other ‘Napier Nine’ Videos in our Series? Watch them Now!
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Managing Director Mike Maynard
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Media Analyst Rachael Penfold
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Business Development Manager Hannah Kelly
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Suzy Kenyon
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Dave Ingle
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PR Specialist Clare Reader
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PA and HR Manager Debbie McIntosh
- A 'Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Natasha Websdale
- A' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Director Clive Over
- A ‘Napier’ Nine Video…Get to Know Account Director Chris Corfield
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Associate Director Ed Neale
A 'Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know Director Clive Over
Get to Know Clive Over, Director at Napier, in the latest instalment of our 'Napier Nine' video series.
Watch the video below to find out about Clive's strongest quality, the first concert he ever attended and the four words that would best describe him, as he answers his nine questions…
Missed the other ‘Napier Nine’ Videos in our Series? Watch them Now!
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Managing Director Mike Maynard
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Media Analyst Rachael Penfold
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Business Development Manager Hannah Kelly
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Suzy Kenyon
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Dave Ingle
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PR Specialist Clare Reader
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PA and HR Manager Debbie McIntosh
- A 'Napier Nine' Video.. Get to Know Account Administration Executive Danielle Robertshaw
- A 'Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Natasha Websdale
- A' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Director Clive Over
- A ' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Ivy Silverton
- A ‘Napier’ Nine Video…Get to Know Account Director Chris Corfield
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Associate Director Ed Neale
A 'Napier Nine' Video... Get to Know Marketing Specialist Natasha Websdale
For the latest instalment in our ‘Napier Nine’ video series, we introduce you to Natasha Websdale, Marketing Specialist at Napier.
Watch the video below to find out about Natasha's secret skill, her favourite saying and the job title which would really reflect what she does at Napier, as she answers her nine questions…
Missed the other ‘Napier Nine’ Videos in our Series? Watch them Now!
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Managing Director Mike Maynard
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Media Analyst Rachael Penfold
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Business Development Manager Hannah Kelly
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Suzy Kenyon
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Director Dave Ingle
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PR Specialist Clare Reader
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know PA and HR Manager Debbie McIntosh
- A 'Napier Nine' Video.. Get to Know Account Administration Executive Danielle Robertshaw
- A' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Director Clive Over
- A ' Napier Nine' Video...Get to Know Marketing Specialist Ivy Silverton
- A ‘Napier’ Nine Video…Get to Know Account Director Chris Corfield
- A ‘Napier Nine’ Video… Get to Know Associate Director Ed Neale
New Website for Power Electronics Industry Launched
everything PE is a new website that has been launched to address the power electronics industry. Developed by the creators of everything RF, the new everything PE website sits within the network of publications such as the PCB Directory, the EMC Directory and GoPhotonics.
Developed to meet the growing demands of the power electronics industry, everything PE will aim to help solve the problems that engineers are facing, and will provide updates via the latest news, products, whitepapers and upcoming events in the industry. All content will be tagged with relevant keywords to make it easier and simpler to search on the website.
everything PE also features a parametric search tool, enabling engineers to find products from leading manufacturers in each category based on their requirements. Currently, the search tool features 15 categories, which allows users to see detailed product specifications, download datasheets, compare products and get pricing or request a quotation. The products are sorted by relevance and launch date allowing users to view the latest and the most up-to-date products that meet the requirements, and any inquiries generated via everything PE are directly routed to the sales contact at the relevant company and their distributors.
At Napier, we are always pleased when a new website is launched to address growth within the industry, and we look forward to seeing the content the new site will provide.
To find out more about the new everything PE site, please click here.
Global Industry Focus Magazine Announces First Issue
In May 2021, we reported on the launch of a new digital magazine, Global Industry Focus, launched by the same team behind What's New in Electronics (WNIE) online. So we were delighted to hear the news that the first issue of the new publication will be live at the end of September 2021.
As a bi-monthly publication, the magazine will explore new ways of connecting with its audience and readers, by evolving static editorial content and presenting it in a more engaging way. The publication will be a fully optimised digital magazine offering readers an in-depth look at companies, their people, and their unique journeys across the whole electronics sector. The magazine will be printed only for major trade shows to save on paper and postage.
Featuring guest editors from across the electronics world, Global Industry Focus will provide regular updates from industry associations and trade bodies, via news, technical articles and opinion pieces.
Kirsty Hazlewood, WNIE content creator and Global Industry Focus editor commented: "Global Industry Focus is a new digital magazine that will offer a functional and immersive editorial experience for our audience. We’re looking forward to bringing our readers extensive coverage of the whole electronics and off-board industries using a new immersive and enhanced approach.”
We look forward to seeing the first issue of Global Industry Focus, and the direction the editorial team has taken.