Webinar Best Practices: 5 Things We Learnt From ON24's Webinar Series

It's no secret that the use of webinars has accelerated in the past year, as many businesses had to adapt to a new virtual approach, in order to communicate with potential customers.

With nearly 70% of B2B buyers preferring to research online on their own, and an expected 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers to occur through digital channels by 2025, it's never been more important to ensure your digital tactics and communications such as webinars, are optimised for success.

We recently attended a webinar by ON24, the digital experience platform, which delved into the results of a recent study they had undertaken to understand the best practices and current benchmarks for hosting webinars. Analysing 100,482 webinars held by companies between January-December 2020 across Europe and the US, the study aimed to discover webinar best practices and benchmarks for success.

In this blog, I'll explore the top five things we learnt from the webinar and best practices to consider in the future.

A Webinar is an Experience

With the capabilities of digital platforms continually expanding, companies now have the option to provide more than just a traditional PowerPoint webinar. Webinars can be anything we make of them, and although the primary focus is to generate leads, it can offer many more additional opportunities.

Over the last year, webinars have become more approachable, with content that is interactive and provides a multi-touch experience. Webinars are no longer a tactic that can just be used for top of the funnel activities. Instead, they now have the capabilities to provide your potential customers with a positive experience throughout each stage of the sales funnel. They can be used as a top of the funnel tactic, but also as a bottom of the funnel tactic, by providing content such as product demos.

Long Term Promotion isn't as Important as it Seems

ON24's study revealed that there is a change in the notice needed to attend a webinar. Instead of long term promotion, it seems there is the immediacy of 'now', with 45% of companies finding that when promotion takes place 1-7 days before the event, they achieved more registrations, compared to the 20% of companies that promoted more than 15 days before the webinar, resulting in fewer registration sign-ups.

As a 12% increase from 2019, this was an interesting finding, offering companies the option to be more flexible with the promotion plans they put in place, and in fact, suggesting the tactic to do a 'big push' of promotion closer to the date of the webinar.

Tuesday and Wednesdays were revealed to be the best days to send promotional emails, sitting at 22% and 21% respectively, followed closely by Thursday at 20% and surprisingly Monday, with 18% of companies voting for this as the best day.

There's Flexibility to the 'Right' Day to Hold a Webinar

The study revealed some interesting results for when best to hold a webinar. Although Wednesday and Thursday were revealed to be the clear winners of when to host webinars, there was also a surprising increase in people wanting to watch webinars on Monday and Friday. This can almost directly be related to the shift of working from home we've all undergone the last year, especially Friday, which previously never would have been a feasible option.

Reassuringly attention spans for webinars have also increased since last year, with 57 minutes being the average viewing time in 2020.

Steady Increase of Engagement Tools and Videos

With the expectation for a webinar to be engaging and interactive, it was not surprising to see that there has been a steady increase in the use of engagement tools and videos. 86% of companies used Q&A throughout their webinar, (remember to encourage engagement you can do Q&A in the middle and end) with 70% uploading resources within the platform for listeners to download while watching the webinar.

There are several opportunities for customers to use engagement tools to their advantage. 43% of companies used surveys to generate content for their presentation, whilst only 22% used polling as a tactic to integrate their audience and start conversations throughout the webinar.

Several companies also missed the trick to include links to their socials within the webinars, with only 22% ensuring they did this. Unsurprisingly, video has become a key tactic, with 66% of all webinars in 2020 featuring some type of video.

On-Demand is the Future

Although encouraging registrations for a 'live' webinar is extremely important, it's also vital that an on-demand version is made available.

The study revealed that an average of 53% of registrations watched the webinars live, with 43% of registrations watching the same webinars on-demand. The stats show that the gap between live and on-demand is close, proving that your content can still be significantly valuable once the live webinar is over.

On-demand webinars can be used to link to similar content by personas type or industry, or to create snackable content that can be used on social media channels. Surprisingly a low 29% of respondents shared that they integrate their webinars into personalized landing pages, while only 43% are currently using on-demand webinar hubs to promote webinars after the live event is over.

Conclusion

With 89% of respondents believing that webinars outperform other channels in creating qualified leads, and 66% of respondents sayings their sales teams prioritise leads that come from webinars, it's clear to see the impact webinars can have on the sales funnel. In fact, 72% of respondents said that webinars directly impacted their revenue and pipeline!

At Napier, we run our own webinar series, and we've taken note of where we can improve to ensure we are optimizing our webinars for success. If you have any questions regarding tactics you can implement to make your own webinars successful, why not get in touch with us? We have extensive experience in helping our clients generate high-quality leads via webinars.


Elettronica AV and Elettronica Tech Websites Now Available in English

The Italian publications Elettronica AV and Elettronica Tech have officially launched English versions of their websites, providing visitors with the option to swap between Italian and English with a language button on the left-hand side of the main website menu.

It's great to see publications continuing to make enhancements to their sites, and this new feature certainly widens the net for the target audience, encouraging more English-speaking users to the websites.

 


Microchip Awarded Certificate of Excellence for Online Banner Marketing

Congratulations to our client Microchip, who has been awarded a Certificate of Excellence for online banner marketing 2020 by Electronics Weekly.

The certificate was awarded in recognition of outstanding performance and engagement by achieving the highest in-read video click-through rates, and the highest welcome ad total number of clicks.

Each year, Electronics Weekly awards the companies with the highest performing campaigns, which are identified via an annual analysis of the advertising effectiveness for every ad unit, the volume of traffic and CTR deployed throughout the year.

With the Napier team having worked closely with Microchip to develop successful digital campaigns, we are delighted that they have received this recognition.

 

 


4 Email Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2021

I recently came across an email marketing trends report from Smart Insights, a publisher and online learning platform. The report was part of their email marketing and marketing automation toolkit, which focussed on the email marketing trends we can expect to see in 2021, based on insights from surveys and 10 email marketing experts who gave their views and examples of the future of email marketing.

With email marketing remaining one of the most effective techniques for marketers, keeping up to date with the latest trends, best practices techniques and email marketing technology remains important.  This blog will explore 4 key trends marketers need to watch out for in 2021 as shared in the Smart Insights report.

Emails will become more interactive

As technology continues to evolve, more companies are adapting and looking to make more elements of their emails animated or interactive. As recipients are becoming increasingly used to some kind of animation or interaction functionality, more and more marketers are using EDPs (email service providers) or AMP technology to include some form of interaction, whether this is surveys, carousels or rollovers, to engage customers throughout their decision-making process.

Whatever the functionality may be, this is certainly something that will increase in use and that marketers should consider to make their email stand out in their target accounts inbox.

Intelligent Personalization will be more utilized

Email personalization has been possible for a long time, but in fact, is something that many marketers do not utilize. Moving to intelligent personalization lies within reviewing your segmentation. Your database consists of several different kinds of people, with different interests, profiles and behaviours, and who all deserve to receive personalized emails based on their interests and needs.

Many marketing automation systems have the capability to provide automated emails to contacts that are tailored and triggered to send based on the pages they visit, the forms they fill in, as well as products they have bought before. This provides the opportunity for marketers to use this data to automatically send emails that could feature 'money off' vouchers for specific products, encouraging customers to re-engage and buy additional products.

Emails will focus on customer experience

Marketers have long lost patience with brand-centric messages, and often demanding more meaningful, relevant and personalized experiences from the emails they receive. We now live in a world of customer experience marketing, which is a newfound focus on the customer and ensuring that companies are truly responding to their customers' needs, wants, and current situation.

A/B testing which has always been necessary for a successful email marketing strategy will be a big part of this. Its important marketers can understand what is truly resonating with their customers, and tools such as our Napier A/B Test Analyser calculator can help you understand what data you can pull valuable insights from. This testing can also help you uncover insights to inform your marketing strategies across all other channels, as you can get insight into your customer thinking and motivation.

The use of AI will increase

Many email marketing and automation providers now include AI features within their platforms to improve personalization, with the aims of improving relevance, engagement and response.  AI can be used to create automation of product recommendations, using the data available from the subscriber to predict which products and content are most likely to be interesting. AI also provides marketers with the opportunity to remove the need for rules-based manual configuration of email campaigns and instead evaluates historical interactions and responses to generate insights for future communications, allowing marketers to improve relevance and messaging of campaigns to generate a higher quality of results.

Although AI is certainly something that is being used by marketers already, we suspect that many more will be looking to take advantage of this technology. With several tools available, marketers don't need to invest big parts of their budget in order to use AI to their advantage. In fact, there are several low-cost AI tools that can help marketers optimize their campaigns without breaking the bank. You can read more about this in our Truth about AI in Marketing blog. 

 

To read the full report and to find out more about the trends expected in email marketing for 2021, please click here. 


Electronic Specifier Announces Webinar Summit

Electronic Specifier has announced a webinar summit, to be held on 1st September 2021. As a one-day event, the Electronic Specifier publishing team has unified their experiences with other virtual shows, conferences and exhibitions to create a unique virtual event for electronics engineers globally.

Due to some mixed reactions regarding the recreation of exhibition halls in the form of virtual booths, the Electronic Specifier webinar summit will take place without the 'lobby' or 'booths; and will instead focus purely on the content.

The event will focus on providing companies with a platform where they can discuss industry trends in electronics, and the latest products and technologies in sectors from Automotive to Wireless; focusing on topics that readers are finding the most valuable from Electronic Specifier's online shows.

The collection of live webinars which are part of the summit will be promoted separately and will be relevant to electronics engineers around the world.
Here at Napier, we think it's great to see more virtual events taking place, with a focus on ensuring high-quality content, and we look forward to hearing what we are sure will be positive feedback from the event.

If you are interested in participating in the event, please contact ben.price@electronicspecifier.com for further information.


all-electronics.de Launches New Website Design

The all-electronics.de website has been re-launched with a new design, offering users a number of new and improved functions.

With a new clean and clear layout, the website has been designed to allow visitors to more easily search for sector-specific information, and now features a company directory, offering users the opportunity to quickly and easily get information about relevant companies.

The website has also been optimized for mobile device users, to address the steadily increasing number of visitors who access all-electronics content via mobile devices. This optimization has prioritized a responsive design, ensuring the all-electronics portal is user-friendly across all devices.

We think it's great to see all-electronics.de making these changes to optimize its website for a digital world. With the new version of the website now live, visitors can explore the new features at all-electronics.de.

 


Electronic Component Show Rescheduled for May 2022

The Electronic Component show (ECS) has been rescheduled to May 2022. With the original show scheduled to take place in 2020, and postponed to 2021 back in April last year; the decision for this latest postponement has been taken due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation.

The new date for ECS will provide exhibitors with the opportunity to meet more visitors at the show in a relaxed environment, with reduced restrictions. With many other electronics or manufacturing events moving trade shows to the last quarter of 2021, this move will allow ECS to host their show without fear of clashing with any other exhibitions.

With the pandemic having affected exhibitions for over a year now, we are looking forward to seeing the return of 'in-person' trade shows, and what these might look like in the 'new' normal.  Further information about the 2022 event is due to be released soon, and you can stay up to date, by visiting the ECS webpage. 


EETech Media Releases Electrical Engineering Study

EETech Media has released an Electrical Engineering Study, which provides insights into how engineers behave during the design process, as well as the challenges engineers find to be the most pressing, and how they view open source solutions.

Based on research conducted across the past four years, in partnership with Wilson Research Group, the report analyzes data from industry professionals around the world.  Key questions that are addressed include:

  • What skills do Electrical Engineers want to pursue?
  • What types of content do they turn to for information during the design process
  • How has COVID-19 affected engineers and their companies
  • What emerging types of content do engineers prefer when learning about our industry

At Napier, we are always interested when a new report is released, especially when it's one that provides some critical insights on the inner thinkings of engineers. With the aim to help the industry understand the information needs of the engineering audience, this report provides some fantastic insights into relevant and timely topics such as COVID, to assist companies with their marketing plans in 2021.

To find out more about what the research has revealed, please sign up for the on-demand webinar by EETech, by clicking here. 


Hardware Pioneers Max 2021 Postponed to September

Hardware Pioneers Max 2021 has been postponed to 23rd September 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aimed at connecting technology and service providers operating in the IoT development sector, the event was due to take place on the 3rd June 2021 at the Business Design Centre in London.

Due to the roadmap of restrictions being lifted in the UK, the new date should allow technical decision-makers and entrepreneurs working in IoT to network and attend the event in person.

With more details due to be released shortly, we will look forward to seeing the return of 'physical' events, and the response from the industry.

For more information on the event and how you can attend, please click here.  


Growth Acumen Podcast Interview: B2B Sales and Marketing Trends in 2021

Napier's Managing Director Mike recently sat down with Steven Norman, owner and host of the Growth Acumen podcast, which aims to help B2B sales leaders upgrade their knowledge and skills.

In the podcast interview, Mike and Steven discuss marketing campaigns that deliver a sale advantage, and how Napier strives to align the sales and marketing functions in order to drive targeted, high-value results.

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.


Elettronica TECH and The IoT Radar Join Forces for New Video Channel

The Italian web community Elettronica TECH has announced a new publishing partnership with Wisse Hettinga, producer of The IoT Radar, an independent video production company with a strong focus on the Internet of Things and related technologies such as Edge Computing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Consisting of a series of weekly video interviews, The IoT Radar is hosted on the Elettronica TECH website, with the aim of informing and engaging electronics engineers, and hardware and software developers. With videos no longer than five minutes per interview, the series provides 'first-hand' information to help professionals in the IoT ecosystem from design, production and integration through to research, and educational companies and publishers.

It's always interesting when a publication takes a unique approach when interacting with their readers, and here at Napier, we think its great to see Elettronica TECH use The IoT Radar to educate and inform their readers.

To find out more about The IoT Radar series, and to watch the interviews that are already live, please click here. 


Electronics Weekly Releases Advertising in a Crisis Whitepaper

Electronics Weekly has released an 'Advertising in Crisis' whitepaper which focusses on understanding whether advertising in a crisis is truly worthwhile. The whitepaper explores the impact on both immediate and longer-term companies' decisions to either cut, freeze or increase their marketing spend due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, by analysing the performance of campaigns across numerous sectors.

The analysis provides some interesting results, finding that there was a significant impact on website performance when reducing marketing spend, as 'company A' chose to cut their advertising spend by 90% for the rest of the year. This resulted in seeing the number of total users being 84% less than in 2020 compared to 2019.

When comparing company A to company B, which chose not to reduce their advertising spend, Electronics Weekly has found that company B increased its market share in 2020; and whilst company A retained just over 16% market share, Company B soared over 80%.

The whitepaper reveals some intriguing results, presenting a clear correlation between reducing marketing spend and seeing an immediate impact on results. It's also interesting to see that the decision to reduce marketing spend can actually provide competitors with an advantage, which is why its vital to maintain momentum and visibility even during a crisis.

To read the full report for yourself, please click here. 

 


Publishing House Fiera Milano Media Acquired by the LSWR Group

Publishing House Fiera Milano Media has been acquired by the LSWR Group, an Italian leader in scientific and professional knowledge, through the Quine publishing house. 

Providing the latest updates and news for engineers, technologists, and IT specialists, the acquisition allows Quine to expand its range of information and professional training, due to Fiera Milano Media's speciality in technical publishing, B2B communication, managerial training, and digital services. The media house's publications in Industrial Automation, Mechanical, Electronics, and ICT sectors will all move to Quine from the 1st March 2020.

The acquisition of the Fiera Milano Media magazines further extends the LSWR Group's activities led by Giorgio Albonetti, which strengthens the group's leadership position in the engineering sector. Giorgio Albonetti, President of LSWR Group commented "The pandemic crisis has accelerated the transformation and evolution of professional skills. The report, 'Future of Jobs by the World Economic Forum' at the end of 2020 reveals that 50% of all employees will need to retrain by 2025 following an increase in technologies, the economic impact of the pandemic, and the increasing in automation. These are the reasons why we believe it is essential to increase training, updating, and quality professional information right away; we believe it is essential to increase our commitment to the evolution of people's professional skills. The skills and assets acquired by Fiera Milano Media help to consolidate Quine's role as a cultural reference in the field of new technologies and technical knowledge".

Marco Zani, CEO of Quine added "Quine constantly increases its commitment to training and communication in the professional field, also qualitatively, with this new acquisition. The portals and magazines expand the already rich offer provided by Quine with products in the Tech, Construction, industrial production, Ho.Re.Ca., and information and communication technologies; the goal is to continue the work done so far by offering increasingly useful and increasingly interesting content to effectively respond to the challenges that the pandemic crisis and digital transformation impose".

Here at Napier, we are always supportive of an acquisition, and we are looking forward to seeing the direction Quine will take the Fiera Milano Media publications in.

 

 


PCIM Europe 2021 Confirmed as Digital Event

PCIM Europe has been confirmed as a digital event for 2021. Having originally been postponed to the late summer, organizers have now made the decision for the event to be fully digital, due to the ongoing challenges faced by the current pandemic, with the industry reluctant to commit to an on-site event.

PCIM Europe 'digital days' will take place in an online format, across five days from the 3rd-7th May 2021, and will offer suppliers and users the opportunity to expand their knowledge on key developments, and connect with other professionals.

In addition to exhibitor profiles, the conference program will provide a mix of live and on-demand presentations, followed by discussions with the speakers.

Although this is an unsurprising move from organisers, with the future of the pandemic still unclear, it's great to see that a virtual event will go ahead, especially considering that the first PCIM Digital Days last year, was very successful.

To find out more information on the event and how you can attend, please click here. 


MachineBuilding.net Welcomes New Editor

Last year, we shared the news of MachineBuilding.Net 's new ownership, and so we were delighted to receive an announcement from the MachineBuilding.Net's team who are welcoming Brian Wall as their new editor.

Known by many in the industrial sector, Brian began his career as a 'classically trained' journalist before moving into technical and engineering publishing. He has been an editor and feature writer across a number of leading titles including Transport Engineer, Engineering Designer (published on behalf of the Institution of Engineering Designers) and FAST Magazine.

With Google analytics revealing that visitor traffic at the website has more than doubled, and sales revenues having also leapt significantly since the acquisition, it's clear to see it's an exciting time for the publication, and we wish Brian the best of luck in his new role.

 


Electronic Specifier to Host 'The Electronics Industry, COVID, Brexit - what will 2021 Hold?' Webinar

Electronic Specifier has announced a new webinar titled 'The Electronics Industry, COVID, Brexit - what will 2021 hold?'. Due to be held on the 24th March 2021, 2pm GMT, the webinar addresses the unprecedented year we all faced in 2020 and will feature industry experts who will offer their perspective from three different areas of the industry. The experts will take a look back on the last year and how it affected the electronics industry, as well as providing insight into 2021 and what the future may hold. Speakers will include:

  • Adam Fletcher, Chairman of the Electronic Components Supply Network (ECSN) who will provide the perspective of the electronics industry as a whole.
  • Rob Rospedzihowski, President of Sales EMEA of Farnell an Avnet Company who will provide insight from the world of distribution.
  • Mark Davies, Global Head of Sales at Harwin who will provide the point of view of the manufacturer.

At Napier, we are looking forward to what will be a really interesting webinar, and what we are sure will reveal some fantastic perspectives into the current shape of the electronics industry.

To register for the webinar, please click here. 


The Energyst Launches Modern Fleet Publication

The Energyst publication has recently announced the launch of its new EV magazine, Modern Fleet.

With the EV market growing rapidly, Modern Fleet aims to address the issues businesses face in the energy management sphere. With a focus on targeting those responsible for managing fleet and energy infrastructure within an organisation, the publication addresses energy problems that were once a side issue for fleet managers, but which have now come to the fore due to the UK target to have Net Zero emissions by 2050.

The magazine is split into three core areas and covers:

  • The latest electric cars, and development in fuel cell vehicle technology
  • News on charging infrastructure, covering the latest charging kit, apps, maps and standardisation and battery management
  • Energy management including V2G, onsite generation, grid connection and hydrogen supply

At Napier, we are always delighted to receive an announcement of a new publication, and it's great to see that Modern Fleet will address relevant and important issues within the EV market.

To find out more information, and to read the first edition of the magazine, please click here. 


Business Built Freedom Podcast Interview: Tips to Reach Your Target Audience

The Business Built Freedom Podcast, hosted by Joshua Lewis, invites listeners who are business owners, to discover how they can build a vehicle of wealth and freedom, as Joshua interviews a wide range of experts.

In one of their most recent podcast episodes, Joshua interviews Mike, Napier’s Managing Director, who shares how marketers can break through the virtual barrier and ensure they are reaching the right audience at home.

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.


Guest Blog Post - Ian Poole - 10 Top Tips to Get the Most Views for Your Videos

With video now becoming a key tactic within B2B marketing strategies, we were delighted to receive a guest blog post from Ian Poole, Editor of Electronics Notes, who shares his top 10 tips for getting the most views for your videos. 

Video content is becoming an ever more popular method of reaching readers and viewers. It can be a very powerful method of connecting with people on the Internet.

Whilst video is a really powerful and useful means of reaching people, it is also very expensive and time consuming to make good videos.

Accordingly, it is absolutely essential that any video that is made has the best chance of reaching as many people as possible. Here we give you ten top tips for enabling your video to gain as many views as possible. These are aimed at videos on YouTube as this is the largest platform, and as it is normally the "Go To" place for video, it is sensible to use it.

As just putting a video onto YouTube does not mean that you will get lots of views - it is necessary to plan the video and make sure that all the right attributes are in place to give it the best chance of succeeding.

Here are a few tips that have worked for me.

Pick the right topic

One of the first decisions in making a video, or even writing a web page is to decide what it is to be about. It is always best to select a topic that people will be interested in - a topic that people will be searching for. If people are not searching for it, then few people will find it.

When trying to push your company agenda, ask yourself how many people will be searching on that - very few is my guess. Instead, think of a topic they will be interested in and subtly add your message into the video. That way you will get very many more views and increase your authority on the web.

My experience is that companies that just push their message are known for that. Whilst you do need to put your company's message over, it can be done in a way that helps the audience rather than one in which it is just marketing. Whilst there are times for marketing only material, if you want to reach more people, it is not often the way to achieve it.

 Use the right keywords

Keywords are still very important on the Internet. It is important to select the right keywords for the topic you want to make the video on. It is possible to use the Google Ad Planner keyword tool to gauge the popularity of the keyword or keyword strong that you are thinking of. The beauty of the Ad Planner Tool is that it suggests other options as well. It is worth spending a little time selecting the right keyword string - looking at what could get good traffic and whether this is the right topic for the video.

Remember that if you opt for something with a very high level of searches, there is likely to be a lot of competition, and you may not rank well. The trick is to select keywords for which there are reasonably high levels of traffic, but little competition. Not easy, but after a little while, it is possible to get a feel for what will work.

The keyword tool is easy to locate - simply search on Google for "Google Ad Planner Keyword Tool."

Make an engaging title

Selecting the title is very important. It should include the keyword string, but still be engaging. Remember that of the keywords that are left, most in the string will have the highest weighting. It can sometimes be a balance between making the title engaging and making it more interesting.

For example, a video looking at Phase-Locked Loops could have a variety of titles. "Understanding Phase-Locked Loops" could be good because it is more approachable than just "Phase Locked Loops", but the word understanding pushes the main keywords slightly away from the left.

A title like "Phase Locked Loop Primer" keeps the main keywords to the left, but makes the title more engaging than just Phase-Locked Loops.

These are very simple examples, but show what can be done.

Have a striking thumbnail

When uploading a video to YouTube, a thumbnail will be created - in fact three are generated and it is possible to select the best. However, it is also possible to upload your own. This is the best option because you can have a "House Style" one. It can be designed to stand out, and also show what the video is about. Although the Electronics Notes video channel is not perfect, we have tried to make the video thumbnails be striking and enticing.

Ensure the video file name includes the keywords

In just the same way that webpages should include the title or at least the keywords, so too should the video filename include the title or keywords.

Some video editing programmes may have their own default filename, but this should be changed to reflect the topic of the video. As the filename is not normally seen, the way it looks is not too important, but placing the keywords in it is important.

Write a good description

Within YouTube there is a space for a written description of the video. This is a great opportunity to give a good description of the video. Although it is difficult to verify exactly, most informed sources recommend a good, well-written description of the video using the main keywords, and having a length of at least 200 to 300 words.

The description is also a good area to include additional links for places where additional information can be found, including, for example, your website homepage and the page where more data can be found on your website.

This will not only drive some traffic to the website, but it also helps by giving inbound links which is good for SEO

Link back to your channel name

In the same way that links to the website and pages on the website are important, the description can similarly be used to promote your video channel. It all helps more people to subscribe to your channel and also look at other videos. Add the link in the description area, possibly after the written description of the video giving a link to the channel name.

Link from your website

It helps to embed the video into a webpage. This will not only get it more views because people viewing the page will want to click on the video, but it will also help raise the ranking of the video. This is quite important when it is first launched. It certainly seems to help the ranking if the video gets a good number of views after it is launched.

Share on social media

Sharing the video immediately it is launched will make a good difference to the ranking of the video and the number of views. Normally it is not possible to spend all day sharing on multiple social media platforms, but select the ones that are most applicable, and share the video URL on them to engage with as many people as possible.

Add end links, etc

One of the capabilities that YouTube has introduced is a capability called "End Links." Using these it is possible to provide links to other videos and also to subscribe to your YouTube channel. It is always good to be able to use these.

If you are going to use end links, it is worth remembering to leave time and space at the end of the video so that these can be incorporated onto the video. When going back to put these on old videos, I have had to cover up some of the graphics, and there was not always sufficient time at the end to show them. It is worth planning this when you make and edit the video.

 

It is hoped that some of these tips will help gain you considerably more views for your videos. A little planning always helps anyway, and the steps taken here should not add much if any, additional time to the creation of the video, and they should certainly help to gain more views.


Elektronik & Data Celebrates 30th Anniversary

Congratulations to Elektronik & Data, who celebrated its 30th year of delivering content to the electronics industry in Autumn this year. The publication has continued to grow over the years, increasing readership levels, as well as its digital offerings.

Having originally launched its customized newsletters back in 2012,  we were delighted to hear that Elektronik & Data now have over 5200 newsletter subscribers, one of the largest newsletters in Scandinavia, which receives an average open rate of 22.9%, indicating a clear interest from the electronics industry on receiving this format of updates.

We wish Elektronik & Data the best of luck for its future, and may their success continue!


Svet Elektronike to Publish 300th Issue October 2021

Svet Elektronike has begun preparing a special edition of the magazine, ready to be distributed in October 2021 to mark the celebration of its 300th issue.

Similar to its 200th issue, the magazine will publish this special edition with hardback covers, filled with interesting articles and content from the industry.

It's great to see Svet Elektronike marking this fantastic achievement, especially with a hardback edition that is sure to stay on readers shelves for some time.

Svet Elektronike is currently offering special discounts to advertisers who would like to participate in this special edition. To take advantage of the offers and find out more please email jure04@svet-el.si or contact Napier.


Arnaud Pavlik Replaces Didier Girault at ElectroniqueS

Arnaud Pavlik has been appointed as Editor of ElectroniqueS, specifically for the subcontracting and distribution sections of the magazine, replacing Didier Girault who has left the publication to retire.

We look forward to seeing the direction Arnaud will take within the subcontracting and distribution sections of the magazine, and wish Didier a happy retirement.

 


A Napier Podcast: Interview with Chris Dickey CEO of Visably

We are delighted to share the latest interview from Napier's Marketing B2B Technology Podcast.

In our latest episode, Mike, Managing Director of Napier, interviews Chris Dickey, PR veteran, founder and CEO of Visably, a new SaaS start-up. Chris shares his insights into the strategy of Search Engine Visibility, and how he helps his clients maximise the likelihood of discovery on the first page via brand visibility, media and leveraging other people’s websites.

To listen to the interview and to stay up to date when a new episode is live, click one of the below links to subscribe:

Transcript: Interview with Chris Dickey - Visably

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Chris Dickey

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've got Chris Dickey from visibly as my guest. Welcome to the podcast, Chris.

Chris: Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike: So I'm Chris, you used to be in PR, and now you're actually moving into developing search engine optimization software. So that sounds like a big change to me.

Chris: Yeah, it absolutely has, no question. I can tell you in all honesty, I'd never in my wildest dreams thought I would be a tech entrepreneur. But here I am. I know for the last 17 years I've been a PR professional, mostly working in agencies. The last 11 years I've been managing operating my own agency called purple orange brand communications. We're located in the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. We recognised several years ago that are, that are the most influential PR heads that we could acquire for our clients were the ones that were showing up at the top of search results. In this was happening by and large, just it was just fortuitous. We there was no strategy behind it at the time.

But you know, just to compare and contrast, we at the same time, we were still winning kind of the big national splashy PR awards and PR mentions in major United States publications. And what we what we saw was the most productive hits the hits that our clients would kind of come back to us on and say, hey, what's going on here, or we saw this massive uptick in our website and tonnes of sales coming to this, you know, this one PR hit? It was always the hits that were showing up the top of search. And the funny thing is, is it wasn't the media outlets that you would typically expect it was, you know, the most kind of I think crystallising moment for me was we went out we won this huge award from a huge national publication for one of our clients. And it was kind of the pinnacle award in its category for the entire year. And we kind of checked back with the client after a few months on that particular product launch and we said hey, you know, how's it going tell us how like your sales are coming along. And they're like, it's it's pretty mediocre, it really hasn't picked up a whole lot. And I was kind of like scratching my head and thinking Gosh, like we won what was like the pinnacle award in the in the, in the space for this one client in having kind of huge reach extensively in what's going on. So I just happened to kind of open up my browser and I typed in the words best sleeping bag 2017, which was what we were marketing, a sleeping bag launch was for an outdoor brand. And sure enough, the endorsement or the award from this particular publication was showing up on the second page of search. And on the first page of search was a bunch of stuff that we hadn't worked on, or we hadn't really focused on. In at that moment, I realised my God, that's what's going on like the if the if the PR hit that we acquire does not live beyond the flicker of the moment that it's published, it has incredibly limited value for our audience, or for our clients. And, you know, think about the customer journey from the point where you know, you're looking for a sleeping bag to buy and you don't know where to start, I would say 95% of us are going to start with search, at least from the perspective of just some top line research. And that's where the customer comes is search in within the search engine landscape, you have a very predictable click-through rate, it starts very, very high at the top of the organic results, something like 30% for the very first organic result. And then it drops down to nearly 1% at the bottom of the first page. It's only 10 results there. And then there's almost no traffic on the second page to search. And so when you look when you step back and you look at it, there's 70% of all the clicks for any given keyword are going to land within the first five organic results, which is very limited amount of real estate to make a splash or have an impact with the customer. And when you and you know I think from a marketers perspective, you have to think about what are all the different ways that I can create brand visibility within this top very kind of elite tier of a websites and search in it. could be your own website, there's a, there's a there's this, there's a potential however small for you to rank your own website within that top five organic results. More likely, however it might be through a media hit, it might be through a result, you know a review that you've set up as a PR practitioner, it might be one of your e commerce partners that is that has featured you on their landing page is one of the recommended products, but they're, you know, thing that someone's looking for. It might be an advertisement, you know, so there's all these potential touchpoints. And that's, that's what I call search engine visibility, how do you maximise the likelihood of discovery on the first page of search?

Mike: So that's pretty interesting, because what you're actually saying is, unlike conventional SEO, which aims to improve the ranking of your own website, what you're trying to do is surface other websites where your products could appear, and then be at the top of particular Google search results.

Chris: I think I think it's the whole thing, you know, in all, in an aggregate, if you will, but yes, like, I think there's a huge underleveraged opportunity, leveraging other people's websites, other people's domain authorities, and this is publishing, right? Like, this is what we do with publishing, this is why we, as PR practitioners go out and we work with publishers, because they have a bigger voice than us, they have a bigger audience than us, they have a more influential website than us, we're going to use their platform to tell our story. And that's, that's a huge industry right there. It's, it's kind of crazy that people haven't taken that jump from the PR industry of leveraging this, this these third party platforms, and looked at it through the lens of search, which is where customers actually start a lot of their product journeys. So you know, do you go to your favourite, you know, I don't know, magazine website, when you want to go buy like a new gadget? No, you probably start on search. And if you're, if that if that trusted media source happens to be there are another one that you recognise, you'll, you're more likely to click on it, and see what they have to say about it. But, you know, the fact of the matter is, is that that that, that very specific customer who's looking for the widget that you have to sell, they almost always start their journey on search.

Mike: Interesting. So you're almost ranking, if you like the publications you're targeting, by their performance in certain search results.

Chris: We absolutely are. And this and my agency has been doing this for several years now. And so this kind of, you know, inter visibly, which is this company that like I this software company that I have been working on for the last year and a half. So the idea that we decided to start essentially building media lists based on Google search results, Google does a fantastic job of elevating the most relevant media or journalism or content at any given subject. Right. And, and not only are they elevating the most relevant publications, but also the writers and the people who are covering these different beats. I think the one of the biggest challenges for any PR team is identify who are the right people to talk to, when it comes to our media rage, like who's writing about this subject. And so, you know, here, here, we have a very sophisticated search engine, elevating the best content the world and there's no way to really mine that data, there's really no way to kind of pull that out. I said, I'm doing it manually. And that's what we were doing as an agency. So we were actually identifying these keywords that we felt were very high likelihood to be used by our clients, customers to find their products or brands, non branded keywords, if you will. So what we're interested in is people not people who are typing in the name of their branding keyword in Google search, but people who are typing in product characteristics, so say like, like I said, best sleeping bag, instead of saying Beth, North base sleeping bag or something like that. It's it's really somebody who is not brand loyal, who's looking for recommendations. And that's, that's the ideal customer that we're trying to get in front of here. And that's, that's where, who PR is typically trying to reach is that kind of very top of funnel person to create brand awareness. So it really does fit together quite nicely. But anyways, you put you put this, you get your keywords together, and you kind of identify what are the keywords that we need to be using, or we need to be focused on and once you identify those keywords, you pop them into search, and you see what shows up. And then what's really interesting is that there's a good likelihood that there's a lot of conversation around your brand and search, but you would have no idea that it exists or no idea you know that it's there. Unless your own website was showing up on the first page of search, or you had an ad on that page, otherwise, there's no way to kind of footprint your brand presence on the first page search and identify all the different like, like I said earlier, what's the likelihood of discovery within any given keyword search. And so that's really what visibly is trying to automate is that we go through and we look at the content, and we don't we look at every single link on the first page of search, and not just the link, but the content on the other side of that link. We look for positive brand matches, and then we organise it in some kind of unique ways.

And so another thing that we recognised as a PR agency, it wasn't, it wasn't valuable, just to identify where your brand existed, you really needed to also segment the search results by channel, right, because there's so much stuff that's irrelevant to the PR practitioner or the whatever, you know, marketing is so siloed in these various channels, like we have PR teams, we have e-commerce teams, and we have digital advertising teams, and we have our SEO teams. And unfortunately, they don't talk to each other as much as they should, you know, they all kind of go off and do their own thing in different directions. Yet, when you look at search, it's like this big, multi-channel sandbox where they're all playing together, they're all kind of competing for the same cliques. And yet, there's not really a unified strategy being put forward here. So that's what we're trying to solve. We're trying to get these teams together, we think there's, you know, there's an opportunity to look and say, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna optimise organically for this keyword, we're gonna bid cost per click, you know, for this keyword, because we have lower visibility here. There's a lot of e-commerce opportunity for this keyword, so on and so forth, until you really understand what these various landscapes look like, and how to build smart strategies to improve brand visibility within each keyword.

Mike: Interesting, so Visably is actually going out and looking at what's on the pages for each of the top 10 or the first page search results. And then it's telling you whether your brand is on the page or not on the page

Chris: Yeah. And then we segment it. Yeah. So what we're doing is, we're identifying Is it an earned media result? Or PR journalism hit? Or is it e-commerce? Or is it brand owned? Or is it something else. And the nice thing about that is then you can cleanly extract all the PR hits, and you can cleanly extract all the e-commerce hits. And you can also see, I think the other most a really important piece of this is is that the visibly shows you your blind spots shows you the areas that maybe you weren't thinking about very critically, that you should be

Mike: Interesting. So you can actually pull out a list of the earned media that publications and identify those where you're not actually appearing. So you can identify effectively PR opportunities, is that what you're saying?

Chris: Yeah, and I think the other opportunity, the other kind of big third party opportunity here is with an e-commerce. And so in the United States, like we have these really huge kind of e-commerce giants like Amazon, and Best Buy, and maybe Home Depot and things like that. And within those stores, they're like their own ecosystem, so thousands of products. And it's if you can merchandise, well create visibility within those stores, you can do quite well as a brand. What I think is missing from that equation is that these that these big e-commerce properties do really well in organic search, they're showing up in the in the top three top five search positions over and over again, for these really high volume keywords. That's part of the reason that they're maintaining their dominance is because they make it really easy for people to click through and buy. In, you know, I think people's search behaviour or purchase behaviour is very similar to how it is in search. It's like they either click through on that landing page that is at home at Home Depot or Best Buy or something, and they and they see those recommended products in if they'll probably make a decision right away. Which of those products are right for them or not right for them. If they have to dig much deeper, they're gonna probably miss, they're not gonna they're not gonna find it. So there's an opportunity right there for brands to go back to their e-commerce partners and say, Well, these are a bunch of keywords that we're not on your landing page for. How can we change that these are all merchandising opportunities for these brands as well.

Mike: Interesting so it can apply to PR but also to even channel strategy as well in terms of getting usability. Absolutely. And I mean, you've talked a lot about consumer, which is obviously, you know, the area that you've been very focused in. But is this applicable across a wide range of markets? A lot of our clients, for example, on consumer, in fact, we're very focused on business to business technology. So does this apply equally to b2b? Or is it a consumer phenomenon?

Chris: I think it can do both for sure. You know, Visably, is a b2b SaaS solution. So and when we were doing our research in the category, very, you know, looking for software solutions, is there's tremendous amount of PR around that, you know, and blogs and, and writers and influencers and things like that. And so, again, search dredges up the most relevant shared content and for any given category, and it gives you a shortlist of Like, who do I need to talk to who I need to reach out to, which are the writers, you know, for the SAS industry. So especially for SEO, in PR, it's like, you know, you start doing this keyword researching like, oh, best free SEO tools, boom, like that keyword, right there has a tonne of traffic. And there's, it's all PR hits on the top page. And it lays out this roadmap for us as a company, a young company that just launched to say, oh, here's who we need to talk to you to go out. And here's how our customers are looking at the space because we know because this volume, is there, this search this monthly search volume. And then we can go out and hopefully try to get, you know, build some visibility for ourselves doing a strategy like that.

Mike: That's really interesting. So you're applying the tool to actually building the business, which is, which is great to hear.

Chris: We're trying to walk our own walk. Yeah.

Mike: I'm, I guess, I've got to ask, you know, you've obviously moved from a PR background into, you know, as a SEO Software startup, that that's a big jump. I mean, how hard was it to develop a software as a service product?

Chris: It was just, I mean, I have to say, it's been really exciting. It's, it's a bit of a jump, for sure. But up until now, for the last, you know, 17 years of my career, I've been very focused on helping other people sell their stuff. And this is the first time ever, that I'm actually doing it for myself. So I have to say it's, it's just kind of thrilling to be in charge of, yeah, your marketing for a product that you own.

Mike: And in terms of pulling the data in you literally calculating stuff yourself for you. I mean, presumably, you look at the Google search page, and then go and look at the pages. And I also noticed you have some scores and values on the results that you get, I mean, how do you calculate those?

Chris: It's, it's an amalgam of a lot of different stuff. It is there is a waterfall of technology that happens a second, you press Search on visibly.com. And some of it is our proprietary technology. And some of it we're relying on third party vendors for but the majority of it is ours at this point. And we're moving toward a model where it will be all of ours hundred percent ours within the next year. So

Mike: Amazing, because, I mean, one of the things that it actually does is it gives you an equivalent add value for the clicks you're supposed to drive, which is something I found very interesting, because it's getting close to giving a value for PR.

Chris: Yeah, and it's actually I think the equivalent advice that we're giving is much more relevant than what the PR industry has used in the past. You know, in the past, I've had a real tough time with equivalent ad value, because it's never truly equivalent, right? Like it's, it's the size of the ads versus the size of the PR placements never the same. ads are something that are there's no fixed price on a you know, on an ad and like newspaper or magazine, it's always like kind of wheeling and dealing that that that that price. So the thing about cost per click is that it's a very consistent metric that's played out across. You know, it's like this is how much you pay for a click on Google period. And this and we can tell you very precisely what the estimated clicks were for your content within any given search. And so we have a we have a very precise estimate of this is the equivalent ad value that you just acquired for your customer. Like if they had to pay for this many clicks for this keyword, they would have had to pay this much. And I'll tell you right now, Mike, something that your audience will be excited about and you'll be excited about is that we are rolling out probably next week. Search locations specific data. So you'll be able to search I think, I think the I think the, the software that you probably checked out, just pulled up generic USA search address. But what we are rolling out is you'll be able to search anywhere in the world or any kind of key cities in the world.

Mike: So not just by country, but by city as well.

Chris: Not every city, but we do have all the big ones. Yep.

Mike: Oh, amazing. And presumably, the Visably technology also works with multiple languages, because you're just looking for a brand.

Chris: It does. Yeah, it does work for multiple languages, although I will caveat it saying that our channel segmentation technology or identification technology is strongest within the English speaking language. So we do have some international sites, we have a handful of international sites, we have about seven and a half million sites total categorised at this point. And we find that that actually, you know, we're dealing with a smaller landscape, because we're really exclusively interested in the first page of search, because that's where all the traffic and all the magic happens. But for sites that don't show up with the first page of search, we're less interested in trying to categorise them. And sometimes there, there's, there's so many sites out there, I'll give you a quick anecdote that it's kind of interesting. We, we acquired a list of over 100 and 1 million sites in the United States that were that were registered, it was every single site that was registered, you know, in the United States for the last, you know, since like 2014, or something. And we, we did all this analysis on the audit, and we whittled it down without a doubt. And we found that almost 95% of those sites on the hundred and 1 million list, even more, I think, was like 98%, they were part they weren't even real sites, people, people, people had just bought the web domains, and we're just sitting on them. It's like real estate, you know, people buy these URLs. So I think, you know, the world, the world of like active sites is showing up in the on the top of search, it's actually not as large as we might think it is. The amount of energy that it takes to get a top search position is quite a lot. And I think it actually stands to reason that that that universe would be smaller than we might imagine, and that it would be

Mike: Presumably you're categorising the sites based upon an algorithm. You're not having some era

Chris: Yeah. And sites and work well, it's a, it's a little bit about the mean, I mean, it's machine learning, and it's AI. But you anyone who's ever done any AI in the past, know that you have to start with a data, you have to start with the training data set. So what you do is you build this data set, and then you give it to the machine and you teach the machine in that. And then the machine teaches itself how to how to understand these correlations between like what is earned media and what is owed to media and so on and so forth. But it has to start somewhere. You have to you have to tell it what is earned media and own media at the beginning. And so we did that by hand at the beginning. And we did some of it with us, some of it with people who we hired as temp kind of employees. And then we actually ended up hiring a group of people who were dedicated to doing it like 180 hours a week for several months. And we ended up going through and categorising and know something in the neighborhood of 60 or 70,000 domains by hand, and then that became our data set that we then trained machine to do the rest.

Mike: So it makes it tough for someone to come in because they've got to create that data set themselves.

Chris: Yeah, and the data set is only as accurate as your humans are. And we found that our you know, in the beginning or humans weren't that accurate. They, they were making some mistakes. And so yeah, you go through and you do constant refinement. And so coming up with a really strong training data set is actually quite a challenge.

Mike: Interesting. So, I mean, one of the things I think that that always worries, particularly PR professionals is that SEO can be very complex and technical if somebody was using Visably. I mean, how difficult is it to start getting value from the tool straightaway?

Chris: Oh, it's it's so easy. And it's so it's kind of fun to I think because it shows you right away like what your footprint looks like within any given search result. And sometimes, you know, especially for young brands, like their footprints can be pretty light. But for more established brands say it was like Unilever or something like that, and they would they be all over the place, but there's no way to track that information. There's no way to see who's having that conversation about their brand online? And so all of a sudden, we kind of like show what's going on there. We also show this kind of this structural breakdown of how the SERP is I think what, what what SEO is will kind of recognise is that search results end up being either transactional in nature or informational in nature. And what I mean by that is that people rather, you know, the search engine has to make a determination when you type in, like, like a very broad term, like, like running shoes, to say, am I gonna? Is this person looking to buy a pair of running shoes? Are they looking to learn about running shoes? And that's something that at least Google does every single time you type in a keyword and they have to make this determination? Is this is this a transactional search intent? Or is it informational in nature, and the informational stuff is what has a tonne of value for the PR industry? And there's a lot of it, there's a lot of information. There's a lot of like, people asking questions and people getting recommendations, and it's all PR. And so I feel like if we harness our tools, and we start looking at how do we how do we do a better job focusing our PR efforts around search? It's it's a really straightforward ROI for clients, because it's really quite easy reporting. And we actually provide that on visibly, as well as just how can you do better reporting and show impact and show and show actual customers qualified customers, not just like audience numbers, but qualified customers? I think that's a big difference. And then that equivalent add value. It's like, you know, I think any marketing teams who say, oh, wow, like, we do spend a lot of money at Google every single month, and you just acquired this much equivalent add value for us that that makes sense that that clicks, so no pun intended. But anyways, yeah, it's, I think the other the other piece about visibly, that is really useful for PR pros is that it provides this really useful roadmap about who to contact, and it's a, it's also a list building tool. So, you know, we allow you to download a spreadsheet with the results. And with it within that spreadsheet, every single outlet is tagged as as as earned media or something else. And then you can just kind of store it and grab all the earned media hits, and then pop that in, and that that becomes your media.

Mike: Fantastic. I mean, it's, it's a fairly new tool, I mean, how long is Visably been live and available for people to use?

Chris: Well, we, we rolled it out for the first time in closed beta this past winter, early, early 2020. And then it wasn't until this summer that we kind of released an open beta version of it. And so right now, what we have is entirely free, there's an either, there's no place to even put it into credit card. So don't even worry about that, we're not gonna charge you at all for for using it, we're looking for feedback, we are rolling out a pro version of the tool, which will be much more robust. And what what the pro version will allow you to do is set up campaigns with with dozens or hundreds or even thousands of keywords, and then monitor much larger kind of data sets, and how your search visibility is performing and much larger data sets. And then I think the other really powerful thing about the pro tool is that it will allow you to extract all the PR hits out of a, you know, extensively thousands of search results. And so you'll get these really huge media lists that you can build out of them.

Mike: So you could look at all the keywords that client cares about and understand which publications are on the first page for across all those keywords in one go.

Chris: Exactly. And I think like I said before, it exposes your blind spots. And I think that as an agency owner, that was really helpful for us to identify, wow, like, we were we don't we, you know, we thought we had the relationships with everyone who mattered. But then we looked in search. And we did this analysis, and we realised there were a whole lot of people who we didn't have relationships with who we didn't know very well. And so it kind of showed a spotlight and a whole lot of people who we we needed to do a better job with. And so that was really valuable for us. And then what we would do as well as agencies, we would kind of benchmark our success, we'd say okay, here's where you are in q1 of this year. Then after we worked on this keyword for a few months, here's where you are in q3 or q2. And you could show this progression of like dominance across the page, like pretty much any, any, any any result in the page you would click on would say buy our clients product. And not only does that are you getting in front of a lot of customers there but you're typically focusing on keywords are the most competitive keywords out there. And from a client's perspective, they have the least likelihood of ever ranking their website for this keyword. So you're creating visibility in places that they can't reach organically, which they really appreciate.

Mike: Fascinating. So you can do things that the SEO guys can't achieve, which I think our pros would love to hear that.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, you know, PR pros already know this, like, from advertising, it's like, you know, we're able to get earned media hits in big publications that might be more too expensive for our clients to advertise. And yet we're building visibility through the publication of their own pages, it's the same thing for the internet, we're able to use the domain authority, if you will, of these large publishers to get the top of search. And that top of search position can be a very, very powerful, powerful place to be. Definitely.

Mike: So how's it going with Visably at the moment? I mean, how many people do you have using the tool?

Chris: We're brand new, I don't want to share about numbers right now. We'd love for more people to come check it out. So we've only really been promoting that we exist since the beginning of July. So just this month, honestly, and, and you know, what, what, we don't even have anything to sell yet. So we're, we're still quite early on. I think for us, it was really important that our technology was working right before we told people that we existed. And that, you know, there's like I said, at the beginning of every station, there's this huge waterfall of technology, that has to happen very, very quickly. For once you press that search button, I can tell you right now that the majority of solutions, software solutions in this space, none of them do it live, we are pulling live search results. And we are we're scraping a lot of websites, for every single time you do that. And there's a natural latency that happens with every single website that you're scraping. So you know, it just takes a little bit longer. And when I say it takes a bit longer, it probably takes like eight to 10 seconds to get a result back from from Visably, whereas you might be used to getting resolved back in like two to three seconds on their platform. The other platform, what they're doing is they're caching their results. And so you're seeing results that they that they scraped, and then they put into a database. And they might be as it might be as old as a month old, you know, so it's not really very fresh data. And with visibly, we're just making sure that you guys are seeing what's what's happening right now at the moment that you're doing it. Yeah,

Mike: I mean, when I played with it, that to be honest, I don't think it was even a 10 second delay. It was very quick.

Chris: Well, thank you. That's, that's great to hear. Makes me it makes me very, very pleased to hear that.

Mike: Brilliant. So if your plan to have a free version available forever. Is that is that the goal? And then have a free tool?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So we, we I have, we have no plans of ever making what's currently available behind a paywall. That's pretty much our kind of our trial version. And people can kind of could do go on there and do some research and kind of see how it works and see if they like it, and then this and then this pro version will be much more robust and will be I'll allow you to track these things over time automatically and do much, much larger campaigns that way.

Mike: So the pro version will be able to show you how your visibility for certain search terms improves over time.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'll give you a better example. So for these for these brands, especially consumer brands that operate in different verticals, in you know, say like, say, say visibly, for instance, even like we're a b2b company, we have multiple potential customers like this is a multi channel tool. So we have, we've ecommerce teams that may want to use this. And we have PR teams that may want to use this, we have SEO teams that may want to use this and so on. In each one of them, what what we might want to do is put together say like, anywhere from 20 to 30, keywords that are all around SEO, and then we'll start monitoring that as like a campaign, then we'll put in 20 to 30 keywords around, you know, PR software, most are monitoring that as a campaign. So once you kind of, you know, start to segment, you know, your users, that's essentially what a campaign is. And then you can kind of see how you're doing across that landscape. And then you can also do all this lunch, all this link building or sorry, not link building, but list building. Link Building is important too. But list building is kind of what as PR professionals, we do a lot of that.

Mike: Fascinating. When do you think the pro version will be launched?

Chris: Well, our hope is this fall. So we're looking at an October timeframe.

Mike: So pretty soon then. So pressure.

Chris: Yeah. pressures on pressure has been on for a while. Yeah. pressures on to make some money. And we're spending a lot of it right now.

Mike: It sounds like there's been a lot of investment in development and technology that obviously at the moment, you know, you're not getting any money back for so I guess the question is, you know, people listening to the podcast, how do they get to try visibly and take advantage of the free version?

Chris: Totally, yeah. So just come check us out, were visibly Visably.com. And it's a very simple signup form, and then you're in we don't, we don't limit the amount of searches you can do. And feel free to check it out. And like I said, I think starting as soon as next week, we will actually probably this weekend, we will have, you'll be able to search, specifically anywhere in the world, especially in the UK.

Mike: Amazing that that will be great. I mean, I've certainly had a play with it. And it's very, very user friendly, very easy to use. So I'd recommend everybody tries it. I also noticed you had a fabulous white paper as well on the website, talking about search engine optimization, or search optimization for PR pros.

Chris: Yeah, so that's, that's also free. And it's at the top of the navbar, you'll see white paper and we have a fairly in depth. It's pretty dense, but it pretty useful. Kind of white paper on the intersection of PR and SEO.

Mike: Cool. That's brilliant. And if people want to get in contact with you personally, what is the best way to reach you?

Chris: The best way to reach me is Visibly SEO at twitter. I'm at LinkedIn under Chris Dickey, or you can go to the Visably website and just reach out to info@visably.com email address, and that will make it to my inbox.

Mike: Awesome. Well, that's great. I mean, I really appreciate your time, Chris, having played with Visably, it is certainly the most straightforward and most relevant PR approach to SEO I've ever seen. And a very different take on SEO where we're not just looking at the website but looking at where we get coverage. So I found this fascinating, and we'll certainly be using visibly going forward.

Chris: Well, thanks so much, Mike. I'm excited to hear more of your thoughts as you integrate it into your campaigns.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

 


A Napier Webinar: The 7 Marketing Automation Campaigns that Should get you Promoted

It’s no secret that when used right, marketing automation platforms can produce fantastic results; and the key to success is to implement campaigns that find the balance between only scratching the surface and over-engineering the activities for little or no additional return.

Without the right campaigns, marketing automation platforms can easily become overly complex and difficult to manage. But if you get the campaigns right, you will quickly see the fantastic results marketing automation platforms can deliver.

Napier recently held a webinar 'The 7 Marketing Automation Campaigns that Should get you Promoted', which provides a great overview of the campaigns you can implement for specific situations. We address:

  • Why simple campaigns are often the most effective
  • A walkthrough of 7 marketing automation campaigns that should get you promoted
  • An overview of some other great campaigns for specific situations
  • Why the campaigns you create, and not the tool you use, really matters

Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know if our insight helped you.

Napier Webinar: ‘The 7 Marketing Automation Campaigns that Should get you Promoted’ Transcript

Speakers: Mike Maynard

Good afternoon and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. And this webinar is entitled The seven marketing automation campaigns that should get you promoted. Obviously, we do have a complete money back guarantee. So anything you've paid to attend the webinar will be refunded if you do follow the advice and don't get promoted. And the first thing to say is, if you do have any questions, please put them into chat. And we will definitely answer those at the end of the webinar. So, at any time, just put them into chat, and we'll cover them at the end.

So, what am I talking about today? Well, we're going to start off and talk about why often simple campaigns are the most effective. And this is one of the messages you will see throughout the webinar is that overthinking things can often be a bad idea, keeping things simple, can be a lot better. We'll then talk about these magic seven marketing automation campaigns. To give you some examples of some of the campaigns, we've seen that work really well. And will also give you a couple of additional bonus ideas, or ideas for specific situations, particularly people in e commerce. And finally, we'll have a quick review of one of the tools that people are using. One of the things we do believe here at Napier is that the tool you use for market automation actually isn't the most important thing. And in fact, many different tools can achieve the same goals. So it's not all about the tools, for sure, it's more about your campaigns, and your creativity, rather than necessarily the technology.

So in terms of introduction, at Napier, we think there are only three sorts of market automation users. There are people who overthink marketing automation and they make things way too complicated. And there's people who use market automation tools, but really only scratched the surface so they don't really get the full benefit. And finally, the third type. And the type we want you to be is those people who can use marketing automation tools to create results that feel almost magic. So, these incredibly good results that some companies get from marketing automation. Our belief is that the people who create magic, their key to success is creating simple campaigns that are also very effective. So we'll talk a little bit about that going forward.

Now before we start, I want to talk a little bit about personalization. People discuss personalization a lot when they talk about marketing information. And it's absolutely the case that personalization is incredibly important. But as you'll see from the slide here, not everything that's personalised is necessarily good. News bills are very, very personalised. And frankly, I don't get particularly excited opening any bill that lands on my doormat in the morning. So the important thing about personalization with market automation is the amount of data that you can gather about a prospect, the information gather about you know, what they need to achieve, what they're interested in, and what their problems or pain points are. And if you address those to your audience and personalise the content, based around those items, you'll find your campaigns are very, very effective. And simply just getting the right name in the top line of an email is not going to make a huge amount of difference. In fact, most of the people who send me bills do it and I still don't love them. So it's very much all about, you know, meeting people's needs, and helping them solve their problems. So we're going to have a look at some of the marketing campaigns. And I think the interesting thing is when we put this together, we were thinking that, you know, for each campaign, we'd be giving examples of emails and workflows, and maybe some lists and lots of technology. Actually, when we put the presentation together, we realised that most of this was irrelevant and should be fairly straightforward. So what we want to do is, you know, really focus on what makes the difference.

So the first campaign is following up a form for whether this is someone who's downloaded content or asked for information, or you know, perhaps signed up for an event. You know, this is one of the most basic automation campaigns, but one of the most important. So send at least one email in response to someone doing this and preferably send a sequence. But the most important thing is make sure that sequence adds value. And you add value by sending relevant information, so information that's related to the reason they filled in the form, because that gives you a good indication of the topics they're interested in, and maybe even the problems they're facing in their role. Now, at Napier, we have a really strong view that you've got to focus on moving the prospect along the customer journey or through the funnel. So each email should also have an objective to try and move people from one stage to the next. Whether that be from awareness to interest, interest to desire or ultimately desire to action. So it's all about moving people through that funnel. And typically, people do that by making an offer. So making a follow up offer, which is generally some content that is more suited for people who've moved a little bit further along the customer journey, and a little bit closer to making a decision.

Um, so people ask us a lot about timing. Well, the first thing is, is don't use automation, to replace real responses if people contact you. And what you want to do is get back to them, make sure you get back to them in person as quickly as possible. So automation shouldn't be an excuse for delaying responses. There's been numerous studies about the effectiveness of picking up the phone to people who have just downloaded white papers or other contents. And the timescales are frighteningly short. And there's a huge difference between calling someone within five minutes of downloading and calling someone a day later in terms of the results. So definitely make sure you have a timely response. People also ask about the speed that you send emails to follow up. What we see typically amongst our clients is that the workflows tend to space the emails out too much. Marketers imagine that anyone who fills in a form and downloads a white paper is going to be examining every word on that white paper for the next five weeks, that's just not the case. So don't be afraid to have relatively short intervals between your follow up emails. And the only way to really know what the right interval is, is to do A/B testing, so to test shorter and longer intervals between emails and see which get the best response.

So here's an example of a very simple follow up email. And they don't have to be laid out as complex HTML emails, they can be very simple and straightforward like this. And here we have someone who's downloaded a b2b social media ebook, so a very general bit of content, on b2b, b2b, social media. What we're trying to do with this email is find out or start finding out which platforms these people who've downloaded the content are interested in? Are they interested in Facebook? Or are they interested in LinkedIn? So the first thing we do is offer them a Facebook marketing report, if they start downloading, engaging with Facebook content, it probably suggests that they're interested in Facebook activities. If they don't download like this but download a follow up email that talks about LinkedIn, then clearly, they're much more interested in LinkedIn. So we're always building information about the people who we're interacting with, using our marketing automation platform, and building up that profile, purely for the reason of being able to better give them more targeted and more relevant information going forward. So the more we understand them, the more relevant the content that we can send them.

The other step as well as to keep moving people through the funnel, as I said before, and obviously to people typically look at fairly broad stages in funnel. So you know, here's a typical one that looks at awareness, consideration, purchase, and then people becoming buyers. And within the awareness and consideration, there's multiple sub steps. And as you can see, with the previous email went from having a general interest in b2b social media, to really trying to understand specifically what the person is trying to achieve. So we're offering very similar content, we might have that similar content that's much more specific. There's maybe a different format such as you know, if someone downloads a white paper, then we could offer them a webinar. If they download an E book, we might offer them a video and at some point, we will always recommend including a candidate Mail, which is a particular type of nurturing email that I'll talk about later on in the presentation. The goal is always to move people down through this funnel or along their customer journey. But if you do find that people aren't responding to the content, then it's always worth having an automation that goes back and tries again, a little bit further up the funnel, just to understand the level at which your particular contact is working. So if they're purely in the consideration phase, so looking at different options, so perhaps you offer, for example, a microcontroller. And they're just trying to gather information about microcontrollers, they won't respond to, for example, an offer of an evaluation board to start programming that microcontroller. So if you're not seeing a response to something that moves them down the funnel, go back, because it's likely that they'll be interested in content that's back at that stage that they were when they engage with you initially.

So this is how you create the follow up to, to form fills. So very simple process considering, you know, what would be the next step for your typical customer. After filling in the form would it be, you know, to get more information, or would it be to, for example, evaluate a product, or maybe it would be to even get some pricing. So it's very much about trying to understand and then trying to move that customer or potential customer through their journey to become one of your buyers. However, sometimes this doesn't work. So often your work with a response to someone filling in a form and getting nothing back from them, you're try going back up to a higher level in the funnel or earlier stage in the journey, you still won't get anything, eventually the lead goes cold, and quite clearly, you, you're going to have to stop emailing them and give it a bit of a break. But this usually means that we have clients with large numbers of contacts in their database that aren't really actively engaging. And so the second campaign, the campaign that can be really effective is to reengage a cold lead. So here we have our poor lead out in the cold walking through the snow. And we've got to think about what we're trying to do well, the first thing to say is we're not necessarily trying to get them to click on an email. The goal is to find out if the content is contact is relevant, maybe that they're not currently working on projects that would use your products or services, to find out if they're still interested, and maybe find out if they're worth keeping on the database. And, you know, when I talk to clients, I'm always very keen to avoid talking too much about database size and number of contacts, it's very easy to build up very large databases, with a vast majority of contacts are completely inactive, and you have no idea whether these people are actually still working. Or maybe they've retired or perhaps they've just sent all your emails to spam and will never buy from you again, none of those people are going to be useful to have on your database. So the goal with any kind of reengagement is to try and find out if the contact is relevant, interested and worth keeping as a contact on your database.

So there's lots of different ways to do this. And, you know, I've given a few examples here, anyone from Starbucks, to HubSpot, and Duolingo. And it's all about trying to get some sort of response that shows that the prospect is still interesting, interested. Sometimes that's very simple that your lingo simply asks if they're if you're still interested. And other times, you might, for example, give people the option to be taken off the list to show that they're no longer interested. And then sometimes you either give them a content offer, or as in the case of Starbucks, they're actually giving a chance for you to enter your birthday. And so you get birthday rewards so to see if people are interested, obviously, you're unlikely to send a gift Starbucks your birthday, if you don't like coffee and aren't interested in getting any vouchers from them. So all of this is about trying to understand whether that contact is relevant and interested. There's also something which is generally called by marketers the breakup email often you see this with a cheesy subject lines, I've had emails, you know, that have subject lines like it's me, not you, or time to part ways and one very good trick is to Have an email, where you just say, Look literally just replies with one, two or three, you know, where are you? And we've actually used this email with quite a lot of success, to find out if people are still interested. And, you know, number two is I want to talk, let's schedule a time to talk. This certainly is not the majority of your cold leads are going to come back and say, Yes, I want a conversation. But believe it or not, we do get responses coming back with number two. And clients or contacts we thought had lost interest, actually are then ready to talk. So the idea of having this breakup email is one to say, you know, look, if, if you're really not interested, let me know. But, you know, let's have one last chance. And the last chance creates that feeling of scarcity, which obviously is critical in a lot of marketing activities, and can often trigger some action from the contact. So in terms of re engaging contacts, this this, what I've seen called as the market is Hail Mary, of the breakup email is always a good way to, you know, have one last go at trying to get people to engage.

Campaign three is newsletters. Now, I think a lot of people are going to be surprised that newsletters can get you promoted. I think personally, newsletters have a pretty bad rap. Generally, a lot of people think that newsletters are rather outdated and uninteresting. But actually, if we look here at Napier, for example, one of our biggest sources of news new clients is actually our newsletter, where we have inquiries coming back from sending the newsletter out. There's very simple rules with newsletters. And that really is a great content means a great newsletter. And I find it interesting that, you know, we still see companies who will advertise on publications, newsletters, but not invest in their own. And I think, you know, if we look here, this is a newsletter from the electronics industry. It's not the most beautiful email you've ever seen, for sure. But actually, this newsletter works pretty well. And we know our clients have got pretty good results from it. And the reason is, is because the newsletter includes relevant content to those engineers, they've got a good database, and they're sending them content they're interested in. So if you can create a newsletter, which requires a frequent supply of really good, strong, engaging content, that absolutely say that's one of the campaign's that could get you promoted.

The next campaign is event follow up. I always think that follow up after events is a bit of a dirty secret between marketers and engineers. Because everyone knows, it's never as good as you imagined it will be as you're setting up the booth for the event. So this is my favourite sales, quote, you know, I love my sales job. It's just the work I hate. And I think most sales people quite like being sales people, but most of them absolutely hate the cold follow up after trade shows, particularly if they've not met the individual they're contacting. Not only that, I mean, salespeople are incredibly busy after events, they've taken time out for the event. They spent time, you know, meeting people already knew and often finding opportunities that way, they've almost certainly got what they believe is the great hot lead and far better than anything else you can give them. And so the fact is, they will not call all the leads. So one of the most important things is to have a mechanism to follow up automatically. And marketing automation is a great way to do that, where you can at least follow up with a couple of emails thanking people for visiting the stand, and just trying to see if anyone has an immediate requirement. And if people do and they come back to you from this, this engagement email after the event, it's a great way to then grab the salespersons attention rather than giving them a long list of all these people waiting in line to get to a trade show of which you know, most probably won't have an immediate requirement. And so it's about finding out those contacts who are willing and ready to talk.

Campaign five is the sales connect email, I find it quite surprising. This is one of the emails that a lot of people seem to forget about when they use marketing automation tools. And I think it's because people tend to come from bulk email tools. So the kind of tools that are there to distribute mass emails, they move to market automation, they're obviously continuing to run things like newsletters which are absolutely bulk emails and making them look Like marketing emails. However, don't underestimate the value of creating emails that look nothing like marketing emails. So I'm gonna give an example from HubSpot, where they actually send out emails that look like their personal emails from a salesperson. They don't need to be HTML. And in fact, other than the fact that in the signature, there's an image and some formatted text, this could almost be an email that was in plain text, it's not about the look, it's about making it feel personal. And there's a there's a couple of things that HubSpot recommend here. So you know, the first thing is to personalise the first name, so obviously call the person by their name, they didn't quite manage it with this example. It's then to make sure that you immediately personalise with the salespersons name. Now, this does require sometimes some quite complex logic in the back end of marketing automation systems to make sure that every contact that gets entered into your database gets allocated to the right person. So they get an email from the salesperson that is going to work with them going forward. But it's definitely worth it. And writing an email like this gets much, much higher response rates than sending a standard marketing email. And it's also important to make sure it's very easy for the recipients to schedule a meeting or schedule a conversation, if that's what they want. There's a lot of scheduling tools you can use, most market automation systems will offer one. And if not, there's other services that will allow you to effectively put the power into your potential customers hand and let them schedule the meeting. So making it easy for the recipient is really important. And then finally, the signature that really personalises the email, and makes it feel that it's not an email from, you know, marketing at or sales that it really is from an individual person. And HubSpot. Obviously, they they're very focused on also including images of the person as well. So it feels even more personal when you see the image of the person that's supposed to be sending the email. It goes without saying that Sophia has absolutely no idea who's receiving these emails, it's all done automatically. And it's all about making sure that you get as many outbound contacts as possible. That's then going to give Sophia as many conversations and opportunities to sell as possible.

Okay, so campaign six it is is a different tack. So you don't just have to use marketing automation tools to send emails to the contacts on the database. Sometimes it's really important to send internal emails. So one of the things we do at Napier is we have a list of potential customers we really care about. And so these are companies that maybe we're pitching for, or perhaps they're companies that we just really want to work with. And if this, what we do here is we have an email that actually tracks those people. And if they visit the website, will get an email like this, which says the contact for your target list has visited the website and looked at and we'll have a URL there. It will give their name the company, the country and also the lead owner. The reason we do this is actually this email goes out to multiple people so we know who has to take action. And if it's not us, we're certainly on the ball chasing whoever owns the lead to make sure they take action. It's a really good email and it can often trigger a great conversation with a potential customer you really care about. HubSpot do a very similar thing as well, and what they do in addition to highlighting it to salespeople is they will also actually send out another Connect email. Now, different industries and different companies have a range of views on whether or not it's creepy to send out an email based upon activity on the website. HubSpot has the benefit that they're basically selling to marketers and the marketers are looking to buy marketing automation so they understand what HubSpot is capable of. So the barrier for being creepy is much much lower. But in many industries, people will choose not to send an email and certainly not to reference pages that they know the prospect is viewed, simply because it just feels wrong, it doesn't feel right for the relationship. So I would always, you know, be keen to inform people internally when your key prospects hit the website, I would definitely look at what you believe is right for your brand as to whether you send follow ups directly to the customer or not based upon their website browsing activity.

So the last campaign is onboarding. So this is people who've either just started working with you, and getting them up to speed with what you do, which is something that you know, someone who's more service base might do. Or perhaps it's a customer who's bought a new tool or a new product, and it's to give them some degree of confidence, they've done the right thing. So it's really to avoid any chance of buyer's remorse. So if we have a look, this is an interesting study that was done by copy hackers. And so they were asked to create onboarding emails. I think probably most people will be familiar with Wistia, and copy hackers did a number of things that ultimately resulted in a three and a half times increase in the number of conversions Wistia got for people moving from trial to a paid programme. So this means that every lead was three and a half times more likely to actually turn into a paying customer a massive increase. And the thing I find very interesting is, predominantly what they did was they increased the volume of content. And you can see, you know, the left hand side email, to brand or not to brand, this is a little bit light-hearted. And it's really talking about how you can brand your Wistia videos. But what copy hackers did was not only did they change the headline, but they include a huge amount of information for people to read. And they know that whoever they're sending the email to is interesting Wistia because they've signed up for a free trial. And actually, it turned out that all this extra information, increased engagement, and made it a much more successful campaign. And if anyone's interested, there is a link on the presentation that lets you see exactly what they did. And some of the other tricks they used as well as creating longer emails. So where people either download a software tool or buy a hardware development, but board, or perhaps even just purchase a product for the first time, these onboarding emails can be very, very useful, increasing engagement. And my view is they're massively underestimated. In b2b, they're very frequently not part of the campaign, I strongly recommend thinking about onboarding emails where it makes sense.

So those were our seven core ideas, we have a couple of additional ideas that I just like to run over. So the first one is to make your salespeople love you, unfortunately, your sales team on necessarily going to promote you. But they can certainly make your life difficult. So what we recommend is what we call it a time-waster automation. And it's all about minimising the effort for a salesperson to say, this lead is not a lead, I want to follow up so rejecting a lead. And there can be a couple of things you do with that. So we literally have a drop down for every lead that we generate internally. And within that drop down, we can reject that lead very quickly, just by selecting the appropriate option. And that could be for example, that we've had an inquiry from a competitive agency who are just trying to check up on us and see what we're doing. And there's no point in US following up that lead. So we want to be able to remove it from our processes very quickly. Or it could be someone that we know is tied into another agency and is never going to move. And again, we just want to make it easy to to skip through to the next lead which hopefully is going to be more valuable when you have one of these time waster automation. And there's two options, I mean, one is simply just to delete the contact, take them off the database, and the other is to create what I call a sales suppression list. So this would be a list of people who have been marked as time wasters to make sure they don't go back into the sales lead flow. And either way you choose to do this whether you choose to delete or put on suppression list. You know both are good approaches. And it will depend upon how you work with your sales team. But the key to this is making it as easy and as quick as possible for sales to move on to the next lead, and spend their time on the valuable contacts, rather than spend their time on the less valuable time wasting contacts.

The other thing we wanted to talk about was simple, but effective e-commerce, emails. And there are two emails that I think you know, pretty much everybody uses. One is an abandoned cart email. And I did try and get an example of an abandoned cart, email and abandoned a couple of cards and didn't get any email responses. So clearly, it's not as widely used as perhaps it should be. But quite often, for anybody who sells online, this is, you know, the email that gets the biggest return on investment. The one thing I would say is a lot of people do what pro flowers do, which is offer a discount. So you know, you've got things that you started to check out with you stopped, when you have a discount, you can have 10% off if you buy these products. Of course, the problem with that is is that people very quickly catch on. And they'll always abandon their cart to get that 10% discount voucher. So don't train customers to expect discounts. The other email that is always very effective is people who bought this book that type emails, we ran a campaign for a client, with these emails, that generated over a million pounds in additional sales. So hugely effective emails, there can be some issues. So this is an email I got recently, which offered me the Scottish flag, the Welsh flag and actually the Italian flag as well. The reason I got this is some while ago, I bought a union jack, but I bought union jack to actually go to sporting events. And being English, I'm very unlikely to want a Scottish or Welsh or indeed an Italian flag at a sporting event. So I mean, be careful of algorithms. Obviously, Amazon has got an algorithm that says, you know, people buy one flag quite often buy another. But in this case, it's clearly not worked very well. So even Amazon, with all their resources, don't always get it right with the people who bought this product are likely to buy those algorithms. Although I do have to say Amazon has made a fair bit of money out of me with the emails they send recommending products that are related to things I've bought.

 

Finally, we want to talk about campaigns. It really is about the campaigns, it's not about the technology. A lot of what we talked about today have been very, very simple email campaigns that can be used in almost any marketing automation system. So almost any micro motion platform will deliver great campaigns. So think about the content, not the technology. And always look to simplify workflows, I think the worst thing you can do is find a feature or a capability on a marketing automation platform, and then try and build a campaign around that capability. It's far better to, you know, start with what you want to achieve, and then work out how you're going to do it. And this rather sexist quotes from Maslow, I think it's very good, you know, the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail. And indeed, the lady only has a hammer, everything she encounters might look like a nail as well. So don't just think of your marketing automation platform as a tool that you must use in a particular way. Think of it as a tool that's going to enable you to create the campaigns you want to create.

Um, finally, you know, to kind of emphasise this, you know, Napier is a certified SharpSpring, and certified HubSpot partner. But actually, we work across all marketing automation platforms. And we are not interested in pushing clients down particular platforms. There are reasons that we have that clients have chosen Marketo pardot, Eloqua, SharpSpring, HubSpot or act on or any of the others. But our ability to use these campaigns really stems from this approach of building the ideas and the concepts first, and then doing implementation second. And this means we can very quickly move and transform campaigns from one platform to another. And really, you know, ultimately the goal that everyone should be aiming for, is looking at return on investment, and where you can track sales all the way back. Looking at what the contact did, right when you first acquire that person Contact, which is possible. Certainly, if you have online purchasing, then I would absolutely recommend doing that.

So that's completed the slides. Obviously, I'd like to answer any questions, I think there's already some questions that have been asked. So just give me a second, I'm just going to have a look for them.

Okay, so the first question is about receiving a business card or visiting card and exhibition. So is it allowed to contact a lead after getting the visiting card and exhibition? This is a very difficult question, actually. So GDPR requires that you have certain policies about how you handle data. And within that you can decide whether you're going to adopt a policy of legitimate use or a policy of pure opt in. So if you build your GDPR strategy around purely opting in, then the answer is no, probably just taking a business card and exhibition isn't enough to justify an opt in. However, GDPR allows the use of legitimate interest within the b2b sector. And legitimate interest says, My business has a legitimate reason for contacting this person. And if somebody gives you a business card and exhibition, quite clearly, you have a legitimate reason for doing that. And if you're following legitimate interest as your GDPR policy, then absolutely, you can definitely add that person to your database, and process that data. As another thing as well, um, GDPR doesn't actually technically cover, I'm sending emails as such, it covers processing data. And processing data also includes processing data on paper. So once you start processing that, that business card, whether it's by simply reviewing it, or storing it in a file, and you're already impacted by GDPR. And our advice to clients is, unless you have a particular reason, absolutely, taking a legitimate interest approach is always the best way to do things.

And a second question I've got, which is a great question, which is how do you know who has visited your website? So this is an excellent question. And the answer is, this is what your marketing automation platform will do automatically. The way they do it is by putting a cookie on every browser that visits your website, and then trying to associate that cookie with a particular individual. So one way they can do that is if you fill in a form on the website, so if the person comes to your website, fills in a form, they can then associate the date of the entry in that form to the cookie. But also, if you send someone an email through your marketing automation tool, and they click through to the website, they'll actually have some coding on that link that will allow a marketing automation tool to associate the records that contains that person's information with the cookie on their browser, so then they know who that person is. And every time they return to the website, they will know who that is. And obviously, with market automation, the vast majority of visitors are anonymous. So you haven't actually been able to associate the cookie to an individual. And this is why with moderation, it is important to be very proactive with email campaigns, because that's what places that cookie and Associates it with an individual is by people clicking through and emails. So it's really important to to do that. So you can associate people with the activity on your website, there are a few systems and some market automation systems also do this, they will do something called IP lookup. So what it will do is it will look at the IP address of visit your website. And it will try and work out which company they're from. And large companies tend to have static IP addresses that are registered to them. So quite often it's easy to associate a particular visit with a particular company. There's some major downsides with this. In particular, it tends to only work with large companies. And if you've got a large number of people you're targeting within that particular company. Say for example, you're looking at an engineering company and trying to target engineers and you really have no idea which person that is. So you can understand that someone from particular companies visit your website, but you really can't do anything with it because it could be one of thousands of engineers at the site. So you can, you can sometimes take a guess, if you have very specific campaigns to specific individuals. And you can use IP lookup, but generally speaking, it's through people clicking on emails and filling in forms the lecture associate an individual with a website visit.

Well, thank you very much, everybody. I think I've covered all the questions I just checked, there's nothing else. So I think I've covered all the questions. I really appreciate your time with this webinar. And look forward to talking with you when we present the next webinar. And if anyone's got any feedback, please do let us know what you think of the webinar. And if anyone has any questions that they think of later on, please do contact me. My email address is Mike@napierb2b.com. Thanks very much, everyone.


Not Another Marketing Podcast Interview: Marketing Automation. The Good, the Bad & the Chat Bot

The Not Another Marketing podcast, hosted by Jon Tromans, provides listeners from small and medium-sized businesses, with advice and knowledge from experts on several topics, including content marketing, SEO, social media and email marketing.

In their most recent podcast episode, Jon interviews Mike, Napier's Managing Director, who discusses the good and the bad about marketing automation, and his opinion on chatbots and the future.

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.