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.
Handling and Storage Ceases Publishing
The Handling and Storage Publication in Madrid has announced the decision to cease publishing of the print magazine and associated news portal due to the retirement of long term Director Tomás B. Abascal.
Although we are always sad to see a publication close its doors, we wish Tomas the very best in his retirement.
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.
Electronic Specifier's Podcast Continues to Grow
In May 2020, we reported on Electronic Specifier's new podcast series, which aimed to provide listeners with the latest updates and information about the current progress within the electronics industry, covering a wide range of content, including a look into the current technologies shaping the new world, and reviews from all the top electronics shows.
So we were delighted to hear that the ‘Electronic Specifier Insights’ series, is continuing to grow, with several new podcasts live, covering topics from the Women in Electronics community to the latest from Farnell.
At Napier, we think it's encouraging to see a podcast going from strength to strength, and with the UK still in lockdown, its great see Electronic Specifier continue to use its platform to provide readers and listeners with the latest updates.
Listeners can access the podcast via all major streaming services, or via their website.
SalesPOP Podcast Interview: How Account Based Marketing Helps Close Big Deals
The SalesPOP podcast hosted by John Golden, aims to educate listeners on the latest within B2B Marketing. As part of their expert insights series, they sat down with Mike, Managing Director at Napier, who discusses the benefits of ABM, and how it can help close sales. He also shares how to prepare for tackling and marketing to larger accounts, and the best ways to approach and implement ABM.
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.
Napier's Media Page: A Collection of Webinars and Podcasts
In 2020, there was an obvious growth in webinars and podcasts as channels for B2B tech marketers, and like many others, we launched our own podcast and webinar series, to provide B2B marketers with the latest guidance and insights into key marketing trends.
We are delighted to share our Napier media page, which features our full collection of webinars and podcasts, as well as several third-party podcasts featuring our Managing Director Mike, who covers integral and relevant topics to help marketers be successful in B2B marketing.
To view our full collection of webinars and podcasts, please click here, and be sure to check back regularly for new content.
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.
A Napier Webinar: Uncovering the Truth about Artificial Intelligence in Marketing
Artificial Intelligence is the latest buzzword, but to what extent does AI truly make a difference to your marketing?
Napier recently held a webinar 'Uncovering the truth about Artificial Intelligence in Marketing', which explores the true impact AI has on marketing activities. We address:
- What marketing tools vendors mean by AI
- The truth about AI in B2B marketing
- Examples of marketing tools that use AI
- How your B2B marketing campaigns can really benefit from AI
- The future: how AI will change the marketing landscape
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Uncovering the Truth about Artificial Intelligence in Marketing’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Hi, and welcome to our latest webinar from Napier, where we're going to talk about the truth about AI in b2b marketing. And so AI is obviously a very hot topic at the moment. But what we want to investigate is in reality, you know, how much impact is AI having a marketing today? And how much impact will it have in the future. So we're trying to skip past some of the marketing claims that we see from some products and look at, you know, actually, what is the real life impact. So hopefully, you'll come away from this webinar, understanding a little bit more about AI, how it can help you today and how it might change b2b marketing in the future.
If we look at the agenda today, we're really going to try and get to the you know, the bottom of what the truth is in terms of AI. So we'll start off looking at the marketing technology landscape, which is clearly a very complex and confusing landscape with lots of different vendors. We're talking about, you know, what AI actually is, and what we mean by AI, there are actually different sorts of AI. And depending on which particular type of AI you are considering, you can take away very different conclusions about how much AI is being used within b2b marketing. We'll talk about the applications of AI. And also the tools that integrate AI today, into their marketing systems will then go on and say, well, could you create your own artificial intelligence, that actually helps you directly with creating b2b campaigns. And within that section, we'll actually talk about somebody who we know who actually did that, very successfully, we'll look to the future, and to find out how AI might change the marketing landscape in the future. And finally, as always, we'll give you some top tips from Napier. This time, it'll talk about how to benefit from AI, both now and in the future.
So this is a massively complicated chart, produced by Chief Mar tech, a website that looks at the marketing technology landscape, they've been looking at the landscape for several years now. And they've gone from, you know, literally a few 100 marketing technology companies to this incredibly complex landscape with 5000 companies and 8000 solutions. So this is a massive increase. So clearly, there's a lot of companies investing a lot of time and effort to building marketing technology tools. And of these companies, very many of them actually are claiming to use AI within their different algorithms. So what we're going to do is take a look at, in reality, how many of these tools actually use AI.
But before we go ahead and talk about that, we need to be clear about our definition of AI. And it can mean very different things. And the two big areas that I'd really put AI into are Firstly, algorithms. So this could be formulae or this could be, you know, logical decision trees. And basically, it's a fixed set of rules to actually optimise a campaign or to do something else as part of your b2b marketing activities. And the key thing about these algorithms is they're programmed by a human. And they'll typically be fairly fixed, or they'll have very limited ability to develop or learn. The other side of AI is machine learning or neural networks, and machine learning is completely different. Now, if we look at machine learning, this is really computers, you know, understanding the world, and then trying to apply rules based upon the understanding they built. So the key thing about machine learning is you need to train the computer with various data sets. But once you've done that, the computer can do things and have insights that a human may not have. So potentially a computer can do more than a human. And this is certainly the most exciting part of AI, although today probably not the majority of where people think AI is being applied.
And then finally, AI can be the specialised or broad you talk about narrow or general AI. So narrow AI tend to be focused around trying to achieve a particular outcome, or perform a particular activity, whereas general AI is basically your howl in 2001. The expert computer you speak to as though it's almost another human. And of course, when we look at Mark marketing and b2b marketing, we are going to focus on narrow AI. So we're gonna focus on AI that's designed to do certain things within the marketing mix.
And if we look at Wikipedia, I mean, Wikipedia says artificial intelligence is an intelligence demonstrated by machines, but it's unlike natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals. And to me, this is interesting. So, um, it's very true that AI isn't quite like humans, animals, intelligence. If we look at you know, the algorithmic type AI formula that have been programmed in, that's not really what we think of intelligence, we think of that as applying rules. and machine learning is very different. It's really pattern matching on a, on a massively complex scale. So machine learning, it can give the impression of being intelligent like a person. But it's still is very different from the way we work. Although the structure of neural networks are somewhat modelled on the structure of the brain,but whatever we do, we're not seeing something that's going to directly replace humans, at least not in the foreseeable future. And I think that's an important point is whichever type of AI we're doing, whether it's broad or narrow, you know, today, we're a long way away from replacing people, we can certainly help people make them more efficient, make them more effective. But I think replacing people is is certainly a long way off.
So let's look at the definition we're going to, to have Oxford languages has a definition, the theory and development of computer systems, able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making, and translation between languages, we're going to actually take something somewhat like that and apply it to marketing. So our definition is a computer algorithm that can learn from data to produce insights and recommendations specific to the brand or campaign. So what we're saying with AI is that really to add value, the algorithms got to learn, it can't be a pre programmed set of rows.
And it's got to produce things that are specific. So if it's learning from the activities for a particular brand or a particular campaign, it should then be able to produce recommendations that are uniquely beneficial to that brand, or that campaign. And so we're gonna move forward, we will talk a little bit about algorithms.
But in particular, what we're going to look at is where we are today, in terms of the state of AI, as relates to marketing, from the point of view of learning from data, so this is really the machine learning the neural networks. And so our goal today is really to look into whether there's been a huge impact from machine learning on b2b marketing.
So the first thing to say is clearly there is AI in marketing. In fact, there's the marketing artificial intelligence Institute. And that is an institute dedicated to promoting the use of mark of artificial intelligence within marketing. So clearly, there's there's a lot of AI going on lots of marketing technology tools, promoting their AI functionality. And actually, the CMO survey, which has been running for over 10 years, in 2019, show that almost 60% of the respondents say they're using AI today, although the main uses of AI are in personalization of content, and predictive analytics. And in both of those areas, they tend today to be algorithmic type applications. So you might see the computer delivering different content, depending upon, for example, which persona they think somebody belongs to, or which company they belong to, if you're doing reverse IP lookup on the address, or maybe even what pages they visited, but it's a set of rules. It's not necessarily this learning machine that we talked about. So it tends to be simple algorithms today. And I think that's really important. Because although people are using machine learning, really to get on board today, the bar is not very high, to be able to use some of the the tools that are available is relatively straightforward. You know, predictive analytics can be as simple as lead scoring algorithms. So at the very simple level, I think everybody can start using AI in the most basic sense. And actually the more advanced level of machine learning level, as we'll find out, most people in general are not really using machine learning for things that are specific to their campaigns. There are areas where machine learning is being used, but it tends not to be campaign specific. So if you're not using AI today, the message is, you know, get on board, don't think it's too difficult. You can use some very simple approaches to improve your marketing campaigns to reduce the amount of time you spend working on managing the campaigns, and hopefully also to get better results. And we'll talk a little bit about this as we go through.
So let's look at some of the simple examples of AI in marketing. The first one is content creation. And one of the most common things you'll see is email subject line generators, and typically you either give it a benefit or a product or a service. click the Generate subject line and magically you get these amazing AI generated subject lines. And you can see on the right of the slide here, that we've actually tried it. And we've tried it in terms of, you know, learn about marketing, learn about AI marketing. And you can see the first subject line that is suggested actually isn't great grammar, how to take the headache out of learn about AI and marketing.
The others read pretty well. But all of them use a very simple approach where a stock phrase is put in front of whichever benefit you have. So, you know, if we look at the lazy persons way to learn about AI marketing, it could be the lazy persons way to write an email to create great email subject lines, you could put anything at the end there. So although this has been put out as AI, again, it is a very simple, very formulaic approach. And frankly, you know, if you're stuck, it's not a bad place to go for an idea for a subject line. But I can't see this sort of AI replacing copywriters anytime in the future. You know, to me, I think it's going to be sometime before we get things like subject great subject lines written by AI eyes. And one of the things you do see with AI is actually some AI tools that can grade subject lines or give you an indication of which one's likely to perform better. And that might be more useful. But still, it's the actual copywriting still needs a human to write great and innovative subject lights.
Content personalization, one of the key things that was mentioned as a use of AI today, and many tools offer content, personal personalization, that might be your marketing automation tool, it might be a content management system. Or you might have a specialist tool or a plugin that enables content personalization. And most of them are based on fairly standard fairly simple fixed set of rules. So it could be on the persona, the company, the roles, something like that. And actually, you know, from my point of view, the most important thing is the insights that are used to personalise the content, they're generated by humans, they're not generated by the machine that took the tool that you've got, the machine will automatically provide the right content. But it's got to be a human that works out why one persona needs a particular message. And another persona is a different message or a message phrased in a different way. So again, although there's some automation here, it's still very algorithmic, you know, it's very much a formula, if this person is a CEO, then talk about financial benefits. If this person is an engineer, then talk about technical benefits. So it's very different from something that's that's truly autonomously intelligent. And again, you know, it's a great way to get into AI. It's a very basic first step.
But we're still some way away from this, this idea of computers actually running your marketing campaign. And certainly, anyone who's used these content personalization tools, like Martin automation, will now how incredibly effective even the most simple personalization can be. So it's a valuable tool. Even though you know, from our earlier definition of AI being machines learning, typically, most people are not using machine learning tools.
So these are the simple thing is, why don't computers learn? And the answer is, it's actually quite hard to train a computer. If you talk to your friendly data scientist, they'll talk about, you know, building a neural network, and then building a training set. And the training set is the data that's used to basically train that, that algorithm.
And the first question everyone's gonna ask is, you know, how much data Do I need to get a computer to learn? And the answer is, Well, it depends, like many other things, it depends a lot, it depends on how complex the problem is, how much data is coming, and how many answers are coming out. And it obviously depends on how accurate you want the algorithm to be. Actually, if you look at these machine learning algorithms, they will have a certain tolerance for error.
And depending on how much error you're prepared to accept, that will affect you know, perhaps how complex your your network is, or how big your training set is, or both. So there's no real answer in terms of how much data you need. But typically, it's 1000s of data points. And so if you look at, you know, some of your marketing activities, you may not have 1000s of data points, you may not have 1000s of email subject lines you can compare to find out which one's going to be most effective for your audiences, for example, I'm making it even more complicated is that the environment changes. You know, a great example would be that, if I a year ago put the new normal into an email subject line, and that would at least be fairly unique and probably be fairly confusing to people. I mean, today
The new normal seems to be on every other email subject line I receive. And it means something it has context. Now, it didn't have the same context a year ago. So with a continually changing environment, you've got to be careful about going too far back to get the data. So things that change in the environment might be, you know, the way people speak, there might be, for example, means that come in. But also, you might produce new products, new services, or have new markets, all of which will change what works for your audience. So you've got to be very careful about going too far back. And this makes it very hard to build great training sets for b2b marketers, because it's very hard to get enough data that is of sufficient quality.
I mean, so this is the bad news. You know, computers are pretty slow learners. But the good news is, is they're much less likely to jump to the incorrect assumptions that we often make as humans. And the number of times I've seen people look at, you know, email open rates, or click through rates on Pay Per Click ads. And the human immediately jumps and says the one with the highest percentage must be performing better. Whereas the mathematicians will say, No, no, you got to look and see whether it's likely to be randomness, or it's actually likely to be because the ad is performing better. And typically, I find that most people who are not familiar with the idea of statistical significance, they'll actually jump to conclusions well before one ad, or one subject line has proved to be more effective. And quite often, you can keep running the ads for a longer time and over a much longer period, you'll find that their assumption was actually completely incorrect. And that the other subject line in the long term performs well, but the noise from randomness meant that, you know, early on in the campaign, the poorer subject line looked like it was doing better just because, you know, there's a random chance of whether or not someone will open an email. So they don't jump to conclusions. And certainly the data, scientists will make sure that they create the models and the training sets that stop computers jumping to conclusions too quickly. But they are very slow learners. And this makes it very hard to take advantage of machine learning.
And if you look at it, actually, there are a limited number of applications of AI, that really, really make a difference in marketing. And I kind of put them down to three, this this Smart Insights diagram also has kind of, you know, different areas. They look at propensity modelling how likely someone is to buy. that's fundamentally the idea of scoring leads or predictive analysis, it looks at dynamic pricing, something that actually isn't so relevant for b2b. Typically, b2b doesn't use dynamic pricing pricing is fairly consistent, and often negotiated. And finally, predictive customer service. Now, for a lot of b2b companies, they've been using predictive maintenance or predictive customer service for some time, where they're monitoring the performance of a system. And where they can see the system is potentially going to either have reliability problems, or perhaps you know, if you're thinking about a system of a certain capacity, maybe run out of capacity, then the company can preemptively phone the customer, or contact the customer and say, we can see there's going to be a problem. And here's what you need to do to avoid it actually happening. So kind of predictors customer service already exists. In reality, if we look at the applications of AI for b2b, it really forms into three key areas around marketing itself. So that's look alikes. So that's saying, you know, if I know this particular profile of customer, tends to be a good customer for me, then find me similar, similar people who might well be good customers, and people who've used Google ads, for example, would have almost certainly use look alike audiences. For example, you might want to target people who Google believes is similar to the people who visit your website. Very simple use of look alikes great use of AI and something that can be very, very effective.
You can use AI in terms of predicting intent, and that can be as simple as lead scoring. Or it can be a much more complex algorithm that learns particularly on e commerce sites, you know, who's likely to buy and if you buy one product, what other products you're likely to buy
And finally, performance prediction. So this is being able to assess whether a particular campaign is like to perform well or not. And these three areas of AI are all the things that you can actually use now that will use machine learning and help you with your campaigns. But as you can see, they're fairly small elements of the overall campaign. So today, it's very clear the AI is not taking our jobs, it's there to help us. And there's some way to go before AI takes over a whole campaign. Interestingly, marketers also use some other AI applications that are on the face of it completely unrelated to marketing. So natural language understanding is widely used in things like chatbots. And image recognition is widely used in digital asset management systems. And we'll look at some of those in a minute. In one of the next slides.
Interestingly, though, if we think about this, you know, I find that you know, things like look alike audiences or predicting intent, they're probably the least exciting forms of AI. But actually, that's where everyone's getting the biggest benefits. So although the message that AI can do everything, and it can write content, and it can optimise content, it's all true. Actually, the reality is, is very few people get benefit from those. And most people get benefit from rather simpler applications. And again, this is great news. If you've not widely used AI, it's very easy to get on board and get up to speed very quickly, the bar today is is relatively low to, you know, start using AI and benefiting from it.
So firstly, the good news, you're probably already using AI, I've mentioned this before, but pay per click advertising often uses AI. So if you're using Google ads, you might be using smart bidding, which will basically determine how much you pay for an ad, using an AI, you might be using responsive ads, which will actually determine what content is in the ad. So the headline and the description, based upon performance, that's again, using AI, you might be using look alike audiences, or you might be running the Google smart campaign. So all of these can use AI to help your campaigns work better on Google. And it's not just good. I mean, Facebook, as well as another great example that's got some powerful AI and its advertising tools. So very simple way of, you know, using AI is to get on board with Google ads, and to start using some of the ai ai functionality there. And it's interesting, Google's actually motivated to make the AI work really well. Because clearly, the better results you get, the more you're likely to spend with Google. And so it is in Google's interest to make sure these API's really deliver the greatest results, because they believe longer term that will increase your total spend. Now, of course, there is a risk of the commons being affected by this. So with a limited number of searches that are available to bid on, of course, you know, if everybody starts increasing their spend, and the cost per click is going to go up and Google is going to be even happier. They're not just getting more revenue, they get more revenue per click. But either way, you know, once Google releases this, you should be making use of it because it's optimised to give you the best results, not necessarily in the short term to give Google the best results, because Google reckons that your short term gain is their long term benefits.
Chatbots AI, another area where people might be using AI now, we all remember, I think we all call him Clippy, or I believe that Microsoft officially called the little paper clip, clip, clip it and could be used to pop up and say, all sorts of unhelpful things whilst you're trying to create a document. And it was a first attempt at a kind of chat bot, you know, you had effectively buttons to click rather than being able to answer it in natural language. But it was kind of an attempt to provide some level of AI. Now today, what we're seeing is that with web chat widely used, chat bots are becoming more and more common. A lot of enterprises are looking at chat bots. And by the end of this year, Oracle thinks 80% of enterprises will use chat bots. And the reason for this is a lot of inquiries on a website, are actually inquiries that can be dealt with fairly simple, simply, and it can be automated. But obviously what we need is we need to understand natural language. So you know, even asking for a bill for a mobile phone, for example. You know, people could ask, Where is my bill? How much is my bill? What's my bill? And so you need some intelligence to process the way people ask questions and the different ways they can ask questions. And so natural language processing is key. And that's an area where AI really excels. And of course, one of the reasons I really excels Is there a vast training sets of natural language that people can use to train API's.
So we see chat bots becoming better and better as people use them more. And actually, if we look at another big trend is that voice technology particularly Alexa is becoming more and more common and by the end of 2021 it's forecast that 40% of companies will adopt voice technology. So they'll be creating things like Alexa voice skills by the end of next year. And the great thing about this is whether you're writing a chatbot or using Alexa, you don't have to do anything to understand the question. The tool you're using the chat bot tool, or the elixir API does all the difficult work of understanding what the user is asking. And all you have to do is then create a series of simple rules based upon the kinds of questions you get. So it's very, very easy to generate these chat bots and generates voice skills. And it's something I think is going to grow rapidly over the next couple of years.
I mentioned image recognition. This is this is interesting. You know that there are huge data sets available for images. So it's relatively easy to train. AI's to understand images, not only in terms of what's in the image, you know, whether it's a for example, a ski boot, or a stiletto heel, but also to understand things like colour, and even understand facial expressions. So whether someone is happy or angry or frustrated, and the great thing is people building these generic, AI's can then have them applied to your particular image library.
So you can categorise products. And you can also look at sentiment as well in images. And one of the biggest is Google Cloud Vision API, which is an API that allows people to send images to Google, Google then gets information about it from its own AI processing, and then sends it back. A great example of this would be one of our clients censhare. They have a digital asset management system. And they will automatically add more information, more tagging, more data about an image by using the Google Cloud Vision API. So you don't have to worry so much about categorising your products or looking for colours or anything like that. It's all done automatically. And then if you want to have a picture of a blue ski boots, it's then very easy to find one in your digital asset management system. So it's a great tool. censhare, you know, is one of the companies out there doing this, there are a number of others as well. But I strongly recommend people take a look at the white paper that's on the show censhare website that talks about AI and machine learning if they're interested in learning more about AI and content management.
So we've seen some generic applications that help marketers, but ultimately, you know, we want the utopia of like some robot sat there typing into a machine to create our campaigns for us. So are there actually AI applications that really optimise marketing activities rather than more generic ones? Well, yes, there are. And so the first thing to say is that, if we look at account selection, ABM, there's a number of AI systems that really aim to help you find and target the best accounts.
So once you've got an account list, you can use a tool like bombora, this will go out and try and find intent data. So look on the public web, to find information about your target clients. And it will try and identify things that drive sales. So that could be for example, you know, if they hire new people, if they announced new sales, if they perhaps are a startup, they're getting new funding round, all of these things can can be indications of likely intent. And bombora will also look at things people post on social media as well. So you can go a little bit deeper than the very obvious things and look at, you know, what people are posting on whether the sentiment in posts, for example, is a good indicator to a company becoming likely to become a customer.
And there's automated account discovery. So this might be someone like Terminus, where you provide a list of accounts that you want to target, and the system then identify similar accounts. And there's a whole range of different tools that will do this. And depending on how complex you want it to be, you can obviously pick a you know, tool from very simple, you know, simple SIC code type analysis, I'll give you companies with the same SIC code in the same region with the same number of people all the way through to much more complex matching that's available with some of the better tools.
And finally, there's digital behaviour analysis. So and that's really taking, you know, what bombora is doing and looking at some of the contacts you're targeting, and really trying to build a picture of the company and the contacts and it's really trying to look in depth at whether, you know when would be the right time to approach that particular customer. So, the key key suppliers really in this are people like bombora and Terminus, as I mentioned, in fact, Terminus, I think has a deal to take boobers intent data. So it's a relatively small market. And it seems like there are companies really specialising in certain areas, and then partnering to get expertise and others. But this is I think, an area which is going to continue to grow as we look forward to mapping the customer journey is is is really interesting, this is a graphic on the right from a company called path factory.
And they talk about, you know, people coming to your website, first thing they get is a very long form, you have to fill it in, you then get a content asset, that content assets typically not personalised. you hoped they read it, you've then got to get sales to reach out and contact and, you know, clearly past factories view is ultimately this is not a very effective way to do things.
It certainly can work and I know a lot of companies that make it work, but it's it's hard work. So what power factory tries to do is dynamically serve content so that you know, their vision is the right content at the right time. It moves you away from serving PDFs into serving HTML. So you can track things like the time spent engaging on each part of the content, and link that to the ultimate outcome sale or no sale. So you can actually get a lot more information than offering a PDF. And, to me, one of the interesting things is a lot of people don't realise when you offer a PDF, and someone signs up for it, the only thing you know, is that the title of the PDF interested them, you really don't understand whether the content resonated where they found it useful.
Whether even you know, the content related to the the title that you gave the to the piece. So actually, you know, looking at PDFs, you get much less information. And talking to some of our clients, they've they've looked at this, and they've also found that, you know, it's really important to understand what people are looking at a simple datasheet download doesn't necessarily signify interest, there could be lots of reasons that people are downloading data sheets, you know, for example, if you think about semiconductors, people might download the datasheet, because they're doing a PCB layout, not because they're designing a product. And so with data sheets, it's actually really important to consider what part of the datasheet people are reading, in order to get an understanding of how likely they are to buy. And the only way you can do that is break your PDF datasheet up into multiple HTML pages. So this approach is starting to gain interest. And we're starting to see more and more people do it. One of the challenges, of course, is that it's relatively easy to pop up a form and have a PDF behind it, it's much more complex to split that PDF into multiple HTML pages, and then find the right time to gather contact details. So it becomes a much more complex thing to think about. And that's where companies like powerfactory come in, is they try and remove some of that complexity by automating the process. Of course, one of the issues is, is that you're going to have to have a fairly high level of traffic in order to gather data. So path factory can actually serve what's likely to be the right content, it can learn what people are interested in, and serve the content that they're likely to be interested in, content creation is, is another area and actually AI content creation is already proven. So we've seen things from baseball reports to stories about companies, financial reports, all being generated by AI's.
And there's lots and lots of AI content companies. So pasado, you know, is aiming to find out which phrases resonate, that's one of their key key claims. So they're looking to find the phrases that work for your audience. So you can then make sure you use the phrases that work the best phrase, he aims to do more in terms of actually, you know, pure AI powered copywriting. And then you also have products that actually identify content. So rasa.io is a very simple tool. And all it's looking to do is to find related content for newsletters, so you serve it, maybe two or three stories that you've written for your brand. And it finds similar stories to create a larger newsletter that focuses more broadly across the industry.
So it's it's already here, content creation, but there are many, many pitfalls. So the Amazon launch in Sweden is perhaps the the best known of these. And there has been some speculation that actually it was so bad that Amazon maybe did it deliberately to get PR but I'm not sure that's the case, what they did was they did automatic trans translation. And unfortunately, it led to some really bad translations. That might have been confusing, they might have made no sense. Or in the case of this T shirt, with an unfortunate translation of policy, it can occasionally end up with a vulgar product listing.
So it does show that, you know, even Amazon with their power and their resources, their automatic translation that had huge problems. So generating natural language is not as easy as you might hope. But there's a lot of people working on it. And it'll be interesting to see what happens moving forward, as to how quickly we can get AI generated content. To be honest, I think, you know, in the foreseeable future, that AI content will be fairly limited. So if you look at what's happening today, it's producing in natural language text, but from a very fixed input. So in terms of baseball reports, it will just simply talk about, you know, people who scored how many outs they were each, you know, each stage and things like that. So I really don't know about baseball, so I'm probably not the best person to talk about this. But the baseball score does tell you pretty much exactly what happened in terms of the major highlights. So they're just pulling data out of the baseball's score, and then putting it into natural language, to create content without that input with no structure is much, much more difficult. And there again, I think our copywriters can, you know, sit back and relax, because it's unlikely we're going to see copywriters put out of business, when it comes to, you know, writing, you know, real, genuine, innovative copy, maybe product descriptions could be written with AI in the very near future. But I think typically, you know, the kind of long form copywriting that's still going to be written by humans for the foreseeable future prospect engagement is a is a fascinating one.
And typically, this is around follow up emails. So what happens is you have someone download content, or you meet someone at a trade show, and then having to go and converse with them is really painful. If you do it manually, it's very time consuming, you can go to a market automation platform and create an automation. But again, that's quite time consuming. So now there's emerging a number of AI assistants that aim to do this to do the follow up. So they'll send emails that appear to be from real people, following up trying to get someone to respond.
And if you're interested in this, I mean, the great news is, is that you can start a free trial with products like Converse occur, Converse occur.com. And go on to the website, and simply upload contacts, and it will learn for a small data set will actually engage them and follow them up. Now don't get too excited. I mean, the interaction, particularly with a free trial of Converse occur is pretty limited. But if you just want something that's going to automatically send follow up emails, it's actually not a bad solution. So again, you know, taking a bit of the drudgery out of that follow up work by having these automated follow up automations is a really good thing
The next area is understanding engagement. And I think this is a really interesting area because fundamentally what it's doing is it's applying another layer of intelligence over your analytics data. And there's increasingly tools that offer content insights. So it looks at how and when people engage with the content, and ultimately aims to provide smart personalization. So not just personalising based upon the persona, but also maybe personalising, based upon the stage of customer journey that the system believes the website visitors at, based on what else they've looked at.
There's a number of platforms in this area. So I mean, Salesforce recently acquired engage. But also there's other platforms like dynamic yield, monetate, and platforms like that, that are all looking at how people engage with data and trying to build up potential customer journeys. by analysing the analytics of your website. It's a really interesting area. And I think this is a an area that definitely we're going to see some real benefits from in the near future. Again, it's not necessarily generating the content that people are going to engage with, but it's certainly going to help you serve the right information at the right time to visitors. And that is something that we're very close to at the moment and I think these tools are becoming you, almost the point where they can actually dynamically serve the right information. So it's an area that I would certainly watch very closely.
Email optimization is another area that people see, you know, you often hear these rules of thumb for email. So you know, you'll hear the send the email eight in the morning, or send the email just after lunch or don't send it on a Monday or anything else. But actually really optimising email frequency and time is hard, not least, because different countries will have different cultures, and the different parts of countries will have different cultures. So typically, people in the West Coast tend to start work earlier than people on the east coast in America, apart from computer programmers, who tend to start at about 11 o'clock on the west coast and completely mess things up. It's just not that simple. It's not that everybody has the same starting time. And if you want to be top of an inbox, you just need to send up one minute tonight, everyone turns their computer on, that is just not how things work. So even sending it local times is well away from optimising the email send time.
The other thing is frequency. More emails don't necessarily mean more OPT outs, we had a project a while back for a client,where we went from sending a monthly newsletter sending a newsletter every two weeks. And I have to be honest, we were kind of worried that doubling the frequency of the newsletter could actually result in more opt out. So we looked at it very carefully. The reality couldn't have been further from what we expected, though, we actually saw fewer OPT outs per month when we had double the email newsletters than we did when we had the original number. So less than half per newsletter.
So, again, you know, sometimes people actually they prefer to see things more frequently. It's really difficult to optimise this and it requires basically a machine to sit there and look at what works and what doesn't. And so we're seeing a number of tools and seven senses a well known product that aims to detect and act on engagement with email. So it's looking at things like opens, but also looking at whether those emails lead to conversions, and creases. Another important thing is people opening our emails are not necessarily representative of conversions for the email. So it's really important to try and look through that whole customer journey to see what works best when you're sending emails. And some of these tools are now able to do that.
So we've talked a lot about different products that use AI. But what about creating your own? Well, actually, it's really easy. You know, you can go to a service like Google TensorFlow. And if you've got custom data, let's say for example, you've got a custom database for design registrations, where you register every design, track it through and see if it converts, you want to find out what are what are the primary factors, that mean that one particular project is more likely to convert than another, you might need to build your own AI because there might be nothing off the shelf.
And you probably only need a relatively small number of lines of code to do that sort of analysis. So to go from, say, you know, registering a design to wins and looking at the various factors on the designs and how they impact whether or not you win that project. The problem is, although you don't need very many lines of code, you need a data scientist to write them. And you probably need a lot of data as well to do that. But we know I mean, but one client I talked to, he'd worked on a project a while ago where he looked at design registrations to try and understand, you know what meant that design registration was likely to turn into a win.
And they came out with two factors with which, you know, initially may seem a little counterintuitive, because you know, lots of people focus on pricing, and lots of people focus on registering new products and focusing on winning designs for new products. And they actually found that the newer the product, the less likely they were to win the design, and the more focus on pricing. So the more aggressive the pricing they provided, the less likely they were to win. But if you think about it, it is actually pretty obvious because people have familiarity and experience with older products. So it's much easier for them to design in. And furthermore, when you look at pricing, if the company you're working with, so the customer is not worried about pricing, it probably says that you have something unique that they really need. Whereas if they're really really concerned about pricing, then probably there are other competitors who have similar products and so it's going to be harder to win. So unless you're the price leader, probably you know low price might be an indicator that you're less likely to win a design. So it's certainly possible to create these applications. It's very complex, it does need a data scientist, there are actually now freelance data scientists around who will build your models. But you really need to have some level of expertise to know whether you're training the model with sufficient data and things like that. But there's certainly opportunities to build projects around creating AI that is designed specifically for your needs or your databases.
So we've talked a little bit about products available today. And we focus a lot on the fact that there tends to be, you know, fairly straightforward applications of AI. And you can create your own AI, as we've just said, but it's incredibly complicated. But what's the future? Well, in the short term AI isn't taking our jobs. I mean, that's the good news for all the marketeers listening to the webinar is that we've still got, you know, quite a bit of time left, where AI is not going to be able to do everything we do.
You know, ai often has limited capabilities. Sometimes there's very small datasets, that's impossible to train an AI. And so you might have to draw analogies, something a human can do something an AI today finds very difficult. And often there's no data at all, which clearly is very tricky for an AI.
Having said that, though, AI is going to help us more. And I think, you know, if we look at where people should really be focusing on AI, I certainly think the generic tools, so image and voice recognition, natural language processing for chat bots, all of these tools are now quite mature, and are really ready for you. So if you're not using those technologies for your digital asset management, or to create chat bots, now's the time to start thinking about it. Campaign optimization is another area where, you know, definitely I see people getting benefits. We talked a lot about, you know, the understanding of the journey by looking at what content people view. And by splitting out PDFs into multiple HTML pages. And this campaign optimization, I think, is an area that really is about to hit primetime, it's a real important area to look at. And you might not want to deploy it today, it's still an expensive technology. But in the next few years, I think the costs are going to come down. And we're going to see a lot more people using AI and campaign optimization, particularly in terms of dynamically serving content on the website, to drive people through their customer journey. And finally, performance insights. And I think AI's are going to be able to give indications on performance, whether that be, you know, whether you're likely to win a particular design opportunity, or whether your lead is a high score, or a low score or any of these things. So I think AI is going to help us more and more and taking advantage in these three areas. I think they're the three areas where you're most likely to see benefit in the near future. But just like our client, ABB that talks about cobots, rather than robots, and the foreseeable future, is that that tool is going to be helping not replacing us. And I think you know that the same is true to a large extent in robotics. In most manufacturing environments is acumen and robotics environment. And I think, you know, if we look at marketing, it's going to be an AI and human environment, as well for you know, certainly the next few years.
So finally, how can you take advice, take advantage of AI? You know, we like our top tips at Napier. So, here's our five top tips. And one bonus tip. So the first thing is don't feel we're being left behind. Although people are talking about AI, the actual use of AI is pretty straightforward. So you can get on board very, very quickly without needing to invest a lot in terms of data scientists. And you do need to understand the difference between different AI's between using formulas and algorithms at one end, and machine learning at the other.
I would certainly experiment with simple AI, probably the easiest way to do this is with Google ads. You know, my experience with Google Ads is sometimes the AI stuff is is awesome. It's absolutely brilliant. And you can't get close to it manually. Other times you look at it and you say well, why on earth is that doing so? You know, sometimes we see great results, sometimes not so but certainly experimenting with AI and try to understand how to get the best out of it is really important today.
Keeping up to date is very important. So certainly follow what's going on and try and understand who the new vendors are in the market. Build your data sets. We talked a lot about the need for for large amounts of data to train, machine learning models. And so build your datasets the more data you can build now, the more you'll be able to use AI as those machines learning Tools come on board.
And then finally, and here's our bonus tip. And I'll admit it's entirely self serving. But your agency should understand I should be talking about AI, your agency shouldn't be saying AI is going to replace everything that they do, because that simply isn't the case today. But an AI, an agency that uses AI is going to be a more efficient agency.
So the long and short is, you know, although few organisations are really using heavyweight marketing AI, there are real applications that can be delivered with, you know, very, very small, very reasonable budgets. So it's important not to get left behind to get on board now and start understanding how AI can benefit you.
So that's our overview of AI and b2b marketing. I think it's it's a really optimistic view. You know, already today, there are ways you can make use of simple AI to help you in your work. And looking forward, I think AI is going to become more and more of a benefit to us and more of an assistant. But at the same time, you know, there's no indication that we're all going to be put out of a job. And everyone's going to see the same kind of AI created campaigns for every company, that's just not going to happen in the foreseeable future. So I think it's a very bright future for people are prepared to engage, and to frankly, try a few things. And so now we'll move on and see if anybody has any questions
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.
The Client Catching Podcast Interview: How to Win High Value Clients with ABM
The Client Catching Podcast, hosted by Adam King, provides listeners with actionable business development and marketing strategies, ideas and tactics for growing a B2B company.
In one of their most recent podcast episodes, Adam interviews Mike, Napier’s Managing Director, who shares how companies can use ABM to win more high-value clients, and how they can replicate the success Napier has achieved with clients.
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.
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:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
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.
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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.
A Napier Podcast: Interview with Remy Gardien - Webinar Geek
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 Remy Gardien, who is the CTO at Webinar Geek. His knowledge of webinars, and experience helping the many customers at Webinar Geek, meant he was able to pass on a wealth of knowledge.
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:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
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- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Remy Gardien Webinar Geek
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Remy Gardien
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 another episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I've got Remy Gardien, Remy is the CTO of a relatively new company for us outside of the Netherlands company that offers a webinar platform. Welcome to the podcast Remy.
Remy: Thanks for having me. It's an honor.
Mike: Great to have you. I mean, we've seen a huge interest in terms of webinars across all of our clients, particularly due to people being locked down from COVID, do you think that what I can only call the webinar phenomenon is something that's going to be long term, or other is the use of webinars going to decay as people get more freedom?
Remy: I think it's going to be long term. And we've seen a slow but organic, the increase in demand in webinars is a concept of last five years or so. And last few months have been received a huge increase compared to the years before and the reason why is going to probably go into stays. For me to fold. It's one that organizations in this time where we're sort of forced to do more of our communication remotely, they see that it has added value, you see that it works, it's probably works best for many organizations as a complimentary to the, to the face to face, to face to face communication. But the other part of it is also like our audience, like our people nowadays follow way more online content and consume on online content they did before. So if I would have like a training or something in a couple of months, I would probably as an attendee, or as asked myself, why can't this be done online, so it's also something that, that your audience probably demands you or our expects you to do so. And I don't think that's gonna, that's gonna go away, it will probably be a bit more of a compromise, if you will, between the two, but I don't see it going away.
Mike: That's very reassuring. And we actually recently launched some webinars that have been, from our point of view, very, very successful. And we actually chose webinar geek. But I'm really intrigued to know what on earth possessed you guys to enter the webinar space when there's some huge players who are very, very successful in the market, such as WebEx and Citrix?
Remy: Yeah, well, we, we lost it, I think five years ago, and you always have to look for something I mean, if you start an company, and you do something that that other companies around are also doing, you have to find your own niche, but also look at what can I contribute to this space? What can I do better or different? Because there's all I mean, this whole concept of a webinar is very, very, very big, and many people are looking for different things there. And we found that we could have like, added value in user friendliness. So to make it really accessible, back when we entered the market, many of the other players were requiring for you, for instance, to for you to install extra software and streaming was Netflix not that accessible. And we thought we could make a difference there. And also in terms of support, because I mean, webinars challenging in two ways, two ways. One is and that's for many companies still the case it's new as a concept. So you have to find your way into how do I do a webinar? How can I make it successful? How can I get my message across, but there's also a technological aspect of it. And so the challenge is bigger than with something that you already are familiar with. So the way we do support is something that really makes a difference because we, we help people we are very direct, very approachable. And because we realised that a lot comes to you if you want to enter webinars as a as a user.
Mike: Okay, and I mean, in terms of that, what are the main questions you get? Are they around the technology or around actually doing the webinar?
Remy: It's actually about doing the webinar, probably we get a lot of questions around. What would your recommendation be as in how do I set up my email flow or how do I invite my attendees. How do I connect? And then the other part is how do I position my webinar tool, if you will, in my as mixed with my other tools, because many I mean webinar tool is just part of, of your of your marketing mix, often you haven't given an email to your CRM tool, maybe for webinar to when you want to position that as part of that flow, because you might want to send your own email. So you might want to grab Elisa districts and put her into your CRM system. So we get a lot of questions about that as well. And some of the questions are purely technical, how do I how do I get my webcam to work? What would your recommendation is for a weapon would be or a microphone, if you will?
Mike: Okay. Um, and I'm interested in I mean, who's using webinars, you can obviously use them for internal training, you can use them for communicating with your existing customers or trying to win new customers? Where do you see people using webinars? Is it for all three?
Remy: Yeah, you see it for all three, are, the biggest part of our customer base is using webinars for a lead generation. So we have many coaches use the platform and Netherlands, for instance, there are a lot of coaches around people that help you with being successful in in life in business or with anything basically, and they do a webinar to interest a larger group of people into a specific subjects, and try to convert them into paying customers, we have customers that take a core for take, take a more individual sessions with, with the one that's you doing webinars, so they use it very much as a as a sales tool and try to convert leads into customers, but and the other group is an E, like you say it's it's elearning and education, people that that do life with most but many of them also recorded webinars to to inform your audience about a specific case. And then our analytics help you to, for instance, see, okay, who watched actually my content and who asked all the questions correctly, stuff like that. And the third one is indeed internal, or external communication, especially now with, for instance, the bigger companies, they need a way to communicate with all their personnel, for instance, and webinars are a great tool to do such a thing. So those are the three main ones. And we've seen slowly changed me to those a lot of lead generation. And now we see it used for a lot of different things. And especially of course, due to the whole COVID period, we saw people using it to do education, like teach their students. A lot of a lot of, I would say gyms, sport lessons online, yoga, lessons online, all that sort of stuff. So it has become very, very diverse. And that's a great thing to see actually the way that that you really make a make a difference two to two people to two organisations. Yeah.
Mike: That's, that's great. I mean, it sounds like it's everything from a single person business up to the largest companies are using it. I'm intrigued to know, I mean, we've started with with a webinar programme, how should we measure how successful our webinars are?
Remy: Okay. It depends a bit on which of those use cases you have, I mean, the first case that he did, I talked about the coaches, the one of the lead generation, they measured very much on the on the scale of how much do I sell, and how much people do I reach? So you have like, maybe 100 registrations and the measurement is okay, how many of those 100 do I get to be able to do watch my webinar, either life or my recorded replay off the words. And we also have group of customers that that evaluate their webinars based on for instance, you have elevation so they send their they give a valuation form right after the webinar to all our viewers. And one of the questions is, how valuable was this webinar content for you? And and they evaluate their webinars based on how well it's rated way based on the viewers. And some yen measured by the number of contacts that they that have a longer related they get a relationship with after the after the webinar, so that's very diverse.
Mike: Okay, and in terms of number of attendees, I mean, I'm really interested to know, typically, how many people would you see attending a webinar? I mean, I'm sure it's a it's a big range, but is there kind of a sweet spot in terms of number of people to make it work? Well?
Remy: Hmm. Yeah, it's a big range. I mean, we see webinars with with as few as five to 10 people, but there's also webinars with up to 2000 people. In a way The more you have, the more people you reach, but on the other hand, the more you have to Fewer people, you can maybe reach more personal like answering questions and that sort of stuff. So, and I know the sweet spot between 50 and 100 is sort of the average average we see across the board, that seems to be sort of the sweet spot into Yeah, reaching a large audience while still being able to interact with you with with with the viewers in some way.
Mike: Great. You've mentioned this interaction, at the end answering questions or, you know, engaging after the presentation. I mean, are there is there any advice on how to approach this to, you know, for example, provide questions, but without being too demanding on your audience?
Remy: What do you mean, exactly?
Mike: So, I mean, I'd love to ask my, my audience for my webinars about 20 questions after each webinar, and I try and keep it down to just a couple. So, you know, is there an ideal number of questions or you better engaging more in a live q&a than asking questions in the feedback section afterwards?
Remy: I see, um, I would say, I mean, it depends a bit on on your, in the in the b2b people generally have more time to actually stay along for your webinar and hold on and stick with you after the webinar even to to ask their questions. And the q&a part is often something that works very well, although, and if you spend a lot of time answering questions that for a part of your viewers might not be relevant, they might drop out. So we always try to keep that part a bit short and stick it to and stick to the subject of the webinar as a whole to keep that into the scope. Because you tend sometimes to have a lot of questions that go very much in detail to Maybe someone's personal situation. And then the rest, we asked like, can the application form and in terms of questions between five and 10, that's should be sort of the max, depending on except if you want to do something like in the education market, where that's, that's maybe mandatory, but yeah, so my say would be in a Q&A. That's, that's, that's always a valuable part of the webinar. But the challenge there is to keep it within, you know, within a certain range that it's still relevant for every one of your viewers.
Mike: So it seems to be a real need to focus when you're doing webinars to make sure you know, people are getting what they expect. Is that fair?
Remy: Yep, that's fair. We also do q&a webinars regularly for for for our users who want to know a bit more in detail, specific questions. But the challenge there as well is sometimes you have questions that are very detailed to someone's personal situation, like, Hey, I have this to do and I have these five cameras and two microphones, what kind of devices would you recommend me to use? And it's, if you go too much into those kind of questions, and the rest of the audience will be like, it's not really relevant for me, I can't learn anything from this. So we try to we try to route them back to like, okay, we're going to get back to you after the webinar. And then we, we use the wish we follow it up with those individuals later and get into more details, a tailored conversation to someone's specific needs and questions.
Mike: Perfect. So we all need to make sure that we don't get too hung up on a particular question or particular topic. Are there any other mistakes you see people making when they create webinars that, you know, either cause people not to register or to lose interest during the webinar?
Remy: Yeah, I would say still focus is one of it's one of the key things. And it requires something different as well. I mean, we see many people doing it for the first time and having not have enough practice is something that usually you can see or hear. And the reason is that is and this is what we hear a lot from, especially people that start with webinars is, hey, it's so weird for me to be talking to a camera, rather than talking like I was used to or like it, it's in like in groups and physical groups of people. And it's really takes something different. I mean, you have to be, yeah, you have to almost imagine your audience there. And that takes some practice. So like with anything and the more, the more preparation you do more carefully, you prepare things like a webinar, the more effective it will probably be like in terms of you talking about your content, but also the technological aspect of it, the more comfortable you are, the better. A webinar often goes because it's your it's it's very personal, right? Because you're broadcasting yourself you're in you're in view, you're you're audible and so the more comfortable you appear, and the more engaged probably your audience will be And that is less a lot to do with both preparation and a bit of experience, because the more often you do it, of course, the more comfortable you get with it.
Mike: Now I can certainly relate to that we, we did a few practice runs of our first webinar. And in the end, we recorded it, but it certainly wasn't the first run through. So I'm intrigued to know, I mean, you, you've pointed out the difference between, you know, giving a presentation where you can see the audience and a webinar there. Is there any advice on how to overcome that awkwardness where you get absolutely no feedback? Because there's no audience in front of you?
Remy: Yep. Well, what is it? One is practice. But there's also another aspect, it's, and that may be also within the preparation. I mean, there is still room for feedback and interaction, but you have to prepare some of that. So prepare questions, but bear interactions I use, I personally use a lot of polls. Okay, what is your first time here? Are you already familiar with webinars as a whole? And those kind of questions get the audience sort of engaged and make it more interactive sort of becomes a little less awkward, rather than you spending 30 or 60 minutes non stop just talking into a camera without any feedback at all? You want to? Yeah, answer some questions, you want to pull a bit about your audience, you also want to know your audience, right? Because it's breaking into the relatively smaller groups. It's not that everyone is the same, it's the same in terms of need or where they're from or what kind of company they work for, what kind of role they have. So you want to get to know your audience a bit. So these poll like questions about what is your role? or How long have you been with this? Are you familiar with this subject? Those both give you some sense of interaction, which makes it less awkward, but also gives you more information to make your webinar more personal, more relevant for those that are watching.
Mike: Perfect, now that’s really good advice. I mean, I've tried posing in webinars, and obviously one of the issues is not everybody responds, how worried should you be that not everyone's responding? Is it just that they don't want to respond? Or are they actually not listening?
Remy: You shouldn't have to worry at all, except when no one responds, that problem is probably not a good thing, although that depends on your, your, the size of your viewer group. But I sometimes always prepare for that case, as well, because I've had some q&a webinars that were rather small, skinny, early days. And what I learned from it is that I really have to prepare what I'm asking. So if people don't answer on a poll, I sort of have something to say about it. And if no one else questions, I make sure that I have pre sort of made up questions or questions that we're sending and fonts ready, so I can answer those. So I still get to have because yeah, your audience might not even be aware of how many people are watching. So you can make it appear as if it's a bit larger. And it also makes it less awkward than that silence for you waiting for questions, because it also takes some seconds, right for people to actually type in their questions. And for you to wait. So it's good to prepare a bit of that and make sure that you start already answering questions and get into that. Yeah, get into it, too. But overall, if unless it's no one responding, I wouldn't be too worried of people not responding. I mean, we see a lot of this is also how people consume content nowadays. I mean, someone might be on their work computer or in front of their laptop, and they're very engaged with someone might be just listening a bit and doing something else in the background. Someone might be on their phone, where it's not, might not be that handy to start a chat message or to answer a poll or something like that. So you have to be aware of that your audience can be anywhere on any in any environment.
Mike: Perfect. That relieves a lot of stress for me now. So thank you. I'm just looking at the presentation itself. Is there any advice you can give people when they're creating the slides for the webinars? I mean, how does two slides for webinars differ from a normal face to face presentation would you think?
Remy: Not that much, actually, I've looked at a lot of slide decks over the last few years and they don't differ that much. The most of them follow a very straight out path as in like the typical your typical sales presentation, like a build up, tell something about yourself like a personal story of or how you who you are, and then what you've done. And then you go into explaining something to tell about your subject matter. And then at the end, it's sort of more the interactive part. So we, of course, we sweep things on both sides of the edge. Man, some people have large slides like I've seen people having 600 slides and basically if every sentence that they say to bring it on a slide, which is hilarious. kind of funny. But if that's worked for some, then who am I to say something about it? Yeah, it's just with any presentation and you want to keep it, you want to keep it brief, you don't want to put too much information in your slide, you want to don't want to bomb people within over overwhelm people with information, right, you want to you want to focus there, as well as something that is important. And this helps a lot with practice as well. I mean, I've seen many first timers do their presentation in front of friends or family. And that really helps them to, to improve their story. And this is the nice thing about webinars as well. I mean, we have users who do the same sort of webinar, like weekly, for instance, and then you really see this story evolve, because they learn a lot, they learn a lot from feedback from questions. Some decide at some point, okay, this is my, my perfect presentation, I'm going to use that recording and, and converted into an automated webinar, for instance, which is a webinar that will be broadcasted as if it's live, but actually, it's recording, so sort of distress free version of offer webinar. And some just make it up as they go. I mean, it's that's a very personal thing.
Mike: I mean, it's interesting, you bring up recordings, a lot of our clients will record webinars that offer them on demand afterwards. I mean, do you see that those on demand webinars can be as successful or more successful than the live event?
Remy: Probably more successful, and probably the combination is the strongest of all, where you spend a lot of time into your life events. I mean, you spend a lot of energy at it, and you have some, a lot of viewers and interest. And this is also where the earlier thing that talks about subscribers versus viewers, it's not that if only 50 of the hundred are watching, it's bad. I mean, you still have your recording, and we see the value of the recording being becoming much more stronger in over recent years. Also, because your recording last forever. So you can, you can still engage with your audience for a longer period of time. Plus, if you Yeah, if you spent so much time on those preparing your talk, you might want to offer those recordings as a whole or maybe replace your live webinars with automated webinars. But your recording is always there. So you can always when you put it on your website or put it in make it part of your email flow your newsletters, and this is also how people are more and more used to consume content, right? We don't always want to watch something at a specific date and time we want to consume video whenever it suits us best. And webinars are just another part of it. And this is also how I do it. I sometimes provided webinars I'm like, it's not the right time for me, I'm just gonna subscribe anyways, I can watch the recording later when it's when it's convenient for me. And I might be even more focused at that point, because I really made time for it. And I yeah, I really want to watch it.
Mike: Perfect. One of the things that you mentioned right at the start that I'd like to go back to is a lot of people are doing webinars to generate new leads. Is there a trick to getting people who aren't familiar with you or your brand to come along to a webinar? What's the best way to market that webinar to people who perhaps don't know you very well?
Remy: That depends a bit. There are many ways of course, I mean, the most common ways is your addition, kudos, email, and newsletters that are still a valuable way of inviting someone to tag along for your webinar. We see a lot of customers who use advertisements like Facebook advertising or LinkedIn advertising or Google advertising to get people to register for your webinar. But one side note I want to make there is that what we sometimes see is that the more accessible you make it for someone to register, for instance, I'm going to do a Facebook ad and I can't make it in such a way that people only have to click in in their registers, what you might get is that a lot, a lot of people register, but very few will actually watch your webinar. So sometimes it's more about quality leads and quantity of leads. And and I think that's very important as well to to take into account and also who is your audience I mean, we see a very generic, very generic way of inviting people and you get a lot of people to register for your webinar, but half of them is not even within your intended audience. So it's very good to think about to ask yourself those two questions in advance. Okay, who do we want to target and you have some, the more detail the better. And how do I target where are my potential viewers? Are they earning LinkedIn or Facebook or are they in are they reading magazines.
Mike: And I guess that's back to the focus message as well, isn't it? It's focused on the people you want to attend.
Remy: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, for me personally, focus is very important in everything. I mean, it's also as, as a company, I mean, we, we are a webinar tool, we are part we are we are active in the market of online communication. But marketing online communication is also very big. So we, so we might also become a meeting tool or do something else with the video. But focus is very important to stay somewhere and to choose for something and then be very good at the thing you're focused on. Because like we like we all know, the more things shoe you want to be good at, and the emptier, you can be good in anything. Right?
Mike: yeah, absolutely. Perfect. Good. Good advice. Again, back to that, that, that focusing and making sure you get the valuable people rather than just going for, I guess, the vanity metric of the, you know, the biggest number of registrations or attendees. And so if somebody has been listening to this, and that, and they are keen to start a webinar, but they've not done it before. I mean, think about it, how difficult is it to launch your first webinar?
Remy: It's very, very, very easy. It is, I mean, it is easy. I mean, you have to prepare for it just like with anything. And there's like I said, there's two things, there's the content side of things, you want to make a good presentation, you want to have a good story to tell. But you also want to take care of the technical part, right, you want to, you want to present the best version of yourself. So it might make sense to invest in that microphone or webcam that is a bit better than my built in webcam. And the same goes for your internet connection, you want to make sure that it works well. And video streaming is a bit of a different thing than didn't just internet browsing. Is it? Is it wise to be on a Wi Fi network where the receiver is two floors down those things you have to think about, but also they should be part of your preparation. So in general, we see that it might take up to one two weeks before someone if someone runs through the whole thing of preparation of content, technology preparation, practising with with family, friends, colleagues, fine tuning the presentation, Bernie the interaction part, I mean, in theory, you could start a webinar in 10 minutes or five minutes. But if you're very new to the whole concept, you probably want to take a bit more time and do it well. Yeah, that would be my advice to actually use those One, two weeks. I mean, and the software like ourselves, we offer a trial period of two weeks. So you want to use that period to actually not only test the tool, but also tests your story test how you how you are you are in front of a camera. I mean, it's not for everyone as well. I mean, yeah, that that's something as well that you have to if you're in a company, okay, think about who is best suited to talk in front of the camera without an audience. Yeah, ask yourself questions.
Mike: And I mean, a lot of webinars, particularly in our industries, that is just shows the slides and not the presenter, you've mentioned a couple of times about being in front of the camera there, is it important to show your face as well as showing the slides,
Remy: I would say so it makes it more personal, rather than hearing into an audio conversation. But this also, we see, I see this being very flexible. A lot of those lead generation sales kind of webinars, they start with the camera and the slides. And then the presenter often makes the decision I'm going to hide myself from the view and I'm just going to show my content because that's where I'm in here again, focus, that's where I want to focus with my, my viewers to be so I don't want them to look at me but look at my content and hear my story immerse in my story. And then at the end, they're gonna pop up again and then do the more personal q&a part. So but overall, I think it's good for every anyone if they if you're if your audience can identify with yourself know who they're talking with. I mean, business is very personal to me and right. So trust, and it's something that it helps if, at least at some point in the owner, you're in front of the camera, but don't worry if you don't want to be in front of the camera for like the whole hour or two hours. That's, I think that's totally fine. But yeah, I think as in I know what you're talking about, because I followed a lot of webinars in earlier days, and it was always traditionally very much audio and slides, but I for me, my experience is much better if I can see someone at least at some point in the story as well.
Mike: Perfect. Okay. In terms of how you're doing a webinar geek, I'm really interested to know, you know, presumably, you've been incredibly busy recently with people working from home. How are you going to follow what I guess is a big increase in use in terms of driving growth over the next year?
Remy: Yeah, the last few months, It’s been quite hectic for us, but in a good way, I'm not complaining at all it was, it's very, it's a very healthy period to be in from a business perspective. And we learn a lot. And this is also the example I gave earlier about, let's put, let's take one of those examples, the gym sort of sport or the yoga type of webinars, we see, we see, we saw a big increase. And it's really, it helps us to also identify who we are, and what kind of tool we are and how people use you. I mean, you might know you might think of yourself, okay, we're a disk company, and we're doing this but if you're, if your audience is doing, it's using it in an entirely different way, you have to anticipate so we took that last few months, as, and still take this time to, to as a learning period for us to learn more about our customers, our users, to learn more about how online communication is shaping up to be and how it's evolving, and that helps us a lot and helps us to also focus on the right things in terms of taking it to the taking it to the next level help people to, to make the most of their webinars and help people to make the most out of their their content and recordings. That's an area where we have a lot of focus on currently, because so much content is produced, so many webinars are going on. So this means a lot of recordings and we want to give our users the tools to actually use those recordings and bet them on your website or put them on a dedicated recording page. Use those recordings for automated webinars so you can generate leads or have viewers like all the time 24 hours a day almost so we run working very hard on making dos building dose tools that can make you use your content for yeah, for a longer period.
Mike: So fantastic. I mean, if people are listening to this, and they'd like to get started and try running a webinar, and how would they you know, get a subscription to webinar geek and what would they need to do?
Remy: Yeah, so it is webinargeek.com and like I said, we offer a two week free trial so you can use it without any obligations and we are we are available on the live chat which means you can talk to us at almost any time and we're happy to help not only in the in the technical part of it, but also the yeah, the how best practices and tips or references we have a lot of blogs on how you can actually do webinars how to present in front of your camera, what clothes to wear, even or how to talk or what's how to build up your presentation, how to invite your audience and, and how to and again, how webinar or your webinar tool as part of your marketing mix. How can we connect your webinars to your email to your CRM to other tools that you use? And there's a lot of possibilities and like saying yes to almost anything and almost anything is possible. And but my general tip would be to start small start just with a webinar. Don't go all out fancy, like I want to integrate with every platform and I want to do a whole studio approach. Keep it simple. Get some experience, learn from your webinars, learn from the response that you get from your audience and build upon from there and also see for yourself and determine Okay, what's How do I this relating to your question? How do I what for me is a metric that can tell me something about how successful I am? When is this successful for me?
Mike: Perfect. No, that's great. And I'm not sure if you're going to want to do this, because you've said almost anything as possible. So you may get some requests. But if people wanted to contact you, where's the best place to reach you?
Remy: I personally can be reached at Remy@webinargeek.com. But you can also talk with us at any time on the website. There's this this bubble icon in the chat. I can drop your question anytime and if you're if you mentioned my name I might be answering myself even.
Mike: Perfect. No, that's brilliant. Thank you so much your time Remy. I know you're really busy at the moment and really appreciate it and it's been a fascinating overview of of how to run webinars successfully. Thank you.
Remy: Thank you for having me. Have a good day
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 Napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Power Systems Design Host Virtual PSD Power Panel
Power Systems Design (PSD) recently held a 'Virtual PSD Power Panel: Standing Out from the Crowd' webinar, which took a deeper look into GaN and SiC products; and focussed on a range of companies that detailed their own unique products and the benefits that they will bring to the next generation of power designs.
Key speakers included companies such as WolfSpeed, Analog Devices, and Infineon Technologies, with the webinar covering:
- How driving GaN/SiC devices can be a challenge, and how to overcome it
- An overview of applications powered by silicon carbide and the technology's capabilities
- How advancements in SiC technology helped create the lowest on-resistance SiC FETs
- How GaN can be amazingly robust to AC line swells, surges and fast transients
The webinar is now available on-demand, and you can register by clicking here.
Electronic Specifier Announces New Podcast Series
Electronic Specifier has announced a new podcast series, 'Electronic Specifier Insights', which provides listeners with a quick but detailed update about the current progress of the electronics industry, in this current COVID-19 climate.
The podcasts cover a wide range of content, including a look into the current technologies shaping the new world, reviews from all the top electronics show, and the latest product releases.
With 8 episodes already live from the series, listeners can access the podcast via all major streaming services, or via their website.
Podcasts are a tactic we have seen several publications start to use since lockdown has begun, and it's great to see Electronic Specifier using their platform to provide updates on different areas within the electronics industry, which will surely be an interesting listen for readers.
New Publication ELETTRONICA-TECH Launched
We were delighted to receive the news of a new publication ELETTRONICA-TECH, which has been launched following the recent acquisition of ELETTRONICA AV, and aims to create a community dedicated to the digital transformation of four pillars: Innovation, Electronics, Communication, and Security.
The ELETTRONICA-TECH website will provide solutions, insights, and updates for electronic designers, system integrators, and general technicians; whilst the community approach will allow readers to interact with the editors directly, and each registered user will be notified every time an article is published on the site.
The website will offer specific marketing automation features, with an 'Active lead generation' and 'Passive lead generation' approach. Both lead generation approaches will score visitors upon registering on the website and will monitor the number of visits, as well as interactions with the articles including comments and reviews.
The 'Active lead generation' approach will include an interactive pop-up that will show after being on a specific page for 30 seconds, asking the reader for further information. The sponsor of the page/article will then receive the qualified lead's details, including name, email, score information, and if they require any further details on the product or company.
In contrast, the 'Passive lead generation' approach will not include a pop-up but will store the activity of registered visitors, and the sponsor will again receive lead information including name, email, and score details based on who clicked on the specific article.
With plans for the magazine to be developed and produced by industry professionals, ELETTRONICA-TECH will work alongside ELETTRONICA AV under publisher FW Communication, to cover the entire market from economic, financial, methodological, and business issues, to thematic insights on technology. This will enable the magazines to reach and assist with the needs of two different target audiences: managers and designers.
We think it's great to see a new publication being launched in these unusual times, with a unique and interesting perspective to provide results via automated lead generation tactics. We look forward to seeing the direction the publication will take moving forward.
WNIE Launches WNIE Radio
What's New in Electronics (WNIE), has launched WNIE Radio, inviting companies to participate in an interview and discuss the latest updates or news in a pre-recorded podcast/radio discussion.
The podcast is promoted via WNIE's website, newsletter and social media channels, and is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. The first podcast is already live, featuring an interview with Kaitlyn Dotson, Vice President at CalcuQuote.
At Napier, we think it's great to see WNIE launching its own podcast. With WNIE TV already established, but unable to take place due to COVID restrictions, the launch of their podcast seems to be the perfect replacement, allowing them to continue providing new content to their readers in a safe way. We look forward to listening to future episodes, as the podcast continues to grow.