AI Content Generation: Napier’s New Service
Pretty much everyone reading this post will have tried AI, and we’ve all had a similar experience. The first time you see AI-generated content for a technical B2B campaign, it’s amazing: the fact that a computer can generate content about such a specific topic is something most of us never expected to see. Unfortunately, the thrill of seeing content generated by AI large language models (LLMs) is usually short-lived.
There are a few problems with AI-generated articles for a niche technical topic. Firstly the second and third times you try the technology tends to sound a little repetitive. It’s hard to get an AI model to generate multiple pieces of content that feel fresh and new. It’s also hard to get AI to generate great content about the newest innovations. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the model hasn’t been trained on them and therefore doesn’t have that knowledge. And finally, there is always the concern about whether you can trust the output of AI: does it include “facts” that are simply untrue or worse, does it plagiarise someone else’s work?
These issues can make the use of AI feel like a lot of hard work, and we haven’t even considered the fact that AI content tends to have a style that is easily recognised and therefore tends to devalue the writing.
Fixing the Problems
It’s possible to address the problems with AI with the right strategy, allowing AI to be that writing assistant we’d all love to have beside us. Here’s how we do it at Napier.
Generating content directly from the AI model rarely produces great material for deep-technology topics. This isn’t surprising: the AI model can only hold so much information, which is why it tends to produce quite repetitive content if asked for more than one article on a topic. What works well is using other content as source material – in the same way that human writers write great content.
Using source material doesn’t mean re-training the model with new information. A technique called RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) lets LLMs access and use content without needing retraining. This is important as it eliminates the time and cost that re-training would require.
Using RAG also helps with new products and innovations: you can provide data about things that simply weren’t public when the LLM was created, and therefore couldn’t be included in the model.
Now you have content, you need to ensure that it’s not plagiarized and is true. Many tools exist to check for plagiarism, so that’s a quick and easy fix. Although RAG reduces the number of hallucinations, the name adopted for errors made by LLMs, it doesn’t necessarily eliminate them. The best solution for fact-checking is the one that has been used by serious publications for some time: having a human checker.
Finally, the output of a LLM can usually be improved with a light edit from a human editor, making it sound less like an AI and more like a subject matter expert.
Although it sounds like a lot of work, if you have the tools then using an AI to generate the first draft can reduce the amount of time it takes to generate written content.
Napier’s AI-Driven Content Service
In many cases our clients want humans to generate their written content, and this is particularly the case with high-value content that could impact a significant value of business. An expert human can generate better research-driven content than an AI – at least that’s true today.
But we recognise that speed and cost are sometimes important factors when generating content, so we’ve launched our AI-driven content generation service. Built from countless hours of experimentation and the leading tools in the industry (we’re not simply entering a prompt into ChatGPT!), and with the safeguards of plagiarism checking and human editors to optimise the writing and check the facts, our AI-driven content service is designed for the most demanding B2B technology clients.
Currently, the service is in beta, but if you would like to try it to see how it could generate content for your organization, send me an email.
Email Doesn’t Suck… at Least Not as Much as you Think it Does
Email has been around in B2B marketing for a long time. In the last decade, with the arrival of shiny new marketing channels such as social media and the increasing data protection regulation, email has become a little… uncool. That’s not a good thing. While it’s not the trendiest channel, B2B email is still one of the most effective.
Yes, it’s true that we all struggle to keep up to date with incoming email. I’m avoiding working through a bit of an email backlog as I write this blog post. But we spend a lot of time reading our emails, and our experience is that great email campaigns continue to deliver great results. In fact, our monthly email newsletter is one of our best sources of leads. So why do people think email sucks?
Here are a few reasons why I think email under-performs for some companies:
Lack of creativity: email is one of the older channels and for some reason, some organisations think this means that they can’t be creative. While they are posting funky images and witty comments on social media, their emails are formulaic and boring. Failing to engage with your audience is a great way to ensure your email campaigns are disappointing.
Over-formatted HTML: yes, I know the importance of maintaining the brand. However, it’s important to remember that the unformatted plain-text emails from your sales team tend to cut through to customers and prospects far better than over-designed HTML marketing emails. Sometimes it’s good to drop the cute layout that screams “I’m selling something” and opt for a plainer layout.
Lack of persistence: like all marketing channels, consistency produces the best results. But all too often we see organisations start campaigns – for example, an email newsletter – and then stop or deliver the emails inconsistently. Repetition with decent frequency delivers results, so you have to be committed for the long haul.
Unrelated campaigns: of course, you’re going to want to run different campaigns. But all too often we see organisations running campaigns that appear a little random. Although you might ensure consistent branding with the same layout, the recipients are bombarded with different messages about different products that at best feel inconsistent and at worst could confuse or turn them off.
Lack of segmentation: sending all campaigns to the whole database is a bad idea. Email works if you talk about products or services that interest the recipient. It’s obvious, but you must make sure you segment your database to allow targeted and relevant emails to be sent.
Over-segmentation: almost as bad as not segmenting is to focus your campaigns on particular groups. It might be that there is a subset of your database that has more profiling data, or you might hammer on the biggest customers or prospects. Either way, over-mailing one segment of your database while ignoring other segments is a bad idea.
Failure to maintain the database: surely I don’t need to add anything to this! If you don’t maintain the database, so you are mailing contacts that will engage and not bounce, you’ll not get very far with your email campaigns. At the extremes, poor database management can endanger your domain’s reputation with email spam filters.
Failing to grow the database: contacts will move companies, retire and opt-out, so it’s crucial that you have a clear strategy for growing the database. It’s really hard to build databases as prospects are less and less willing to complete forms to access information. Working out how you will get sufficient new contacts to grow the database is crucial, as is understanding what you will need to invest to execute that plan.
Dealing with unengaged contacts properly: some contacts on your database will be opening and clicking on emails and you know they are engaged. Others will appear completely inactive. What does this mean in your industry? Are they just too busy to read email, are your emails going to spam or do they get all they need from your subject line (please be real – you know that is not the case!). Developing a methodology to deal with unengaged contacts, which typically involves a break from email followed by a specific nurture campaign to try to get some engagement so you know they are at least receiving the emails, is vital.
Restrictive policies: some people are not going to like this, but so many companies implement restrictive policies on their marketing departments – for example only sending emails to contacts that have double opted-in. Although this [usually] ensures a high-quality list, it could be that your database reaches a fraction of the contacts that it could. It always frustrates me when an organisation has restrictive privacy rules for marketing while letting sales do what they want: regulations like GDPR don’t discriminate between departments (trust me, I’ve read the GDPR regulations and there is no difference in the rules for emails from sales and marketing).
Hopefully, you’re not making any of those mistakes and are using email to deliver the best possible results for your business. At Napier, we see a very positive future for emails, with the most successful companies aggressively adding large numbers of carefully identified relevant contacts to their database using legitimate interest and opt-out.
If you are interested in making your email marketing deliver better results, contact me, and I’ll put together a team from the agency that can significantly increase your RoI. Email doesn’t suck: in fact it can deliver amazing results.
9 Ways to Improve your Digital Advertising Campaigns
At Napier, we run a large number of digital campaigns, which gives us fantastic insight into how to run campaigns that deliver results that make a real impact on your business. To help you create great campaigns, here are nine tips that have worked for us:
Get the basics right
We shouldn’t have to say this, but getting the basics right is so important. Whether it’s campaigns that advertise to the wrong countries (we’ve seen large sums spent on Google ads to countries to which our clients can’t legally export products) to campaigns that produce bounce rates well above 90% and zero leads continuing to be funded. Even if you are sure, you have the campaign setup correct and are monitoring performance, check again. It’s so easy to miss things.
Pick publications for display ads based on performance
The performance of adverts in online trade publications is primarily determined by the publication you pick. You have to understand that – in most industries – nothing you do to the format, position or creative you use can bridge the gap between the best- and the worst-performing publications.
As picking the right publication is so important, you have to gather data about performance. Using an agency is one way to do this, as they will have more data than you can produce, although remember that what works for another client might not work for you. And no matter how nice the advertising salesperson is, don’t believe them: they are trying to sell you ads, not give you an independent assessment of the best place for your advertising dollars.
Use meaningful performance data
Are clicks meaningful? Maybe, but they are the most superficial measure of advertising success. Ideally, you’d want to measure the impact that your advertising has on generating new sales and customers. Unfortunately, attribution to this level is really, really hard. So, pick something that at least measures whether the click generated some engagement on your website – several pages viewed in the session, return visits, time on site, etc – rather than assuming every click is valuable or even genuine.
Some paid digital channels are particularly susceptible to generating clicks that have no value and no interest in your product. I’m particularly thinking of Google display ads that appear in apps (especially in games) and social media, where we’ve seen significant sums of money spend with no discernible benefit.
Remember a click doesn’t necessarily mean interest or a potential customer
You’ll get clicks on your ads from people who will never be customers, and who have no interest in your organisation or products. Yes, some of them are bots, but you’ll also get people clicking for no reason.
Sometimes it’s down to the design of your ad being a little too clever and getting people to click accidently. Sometimes it’s where your ad appears: we particularly find this problem with display ads in games where people are desperate to play the game and they over-enthusiastically click to close the ad, and end up on your landing page. And sometimes there is no apparent reason why people are clicking on your ad, yet they bounce immediately without even reading your lovingly-crafted landing page.
Question whether you need to run paid search using your brand keywords
One of the most wasteful forms of advertising is Google search ads where you are bidding on your own brands as keywords. Yes, it is worth considering paying if you have a lot of competitors bidding on your brand keywords, but many times we see an organisation having the only ad when they are number one in organic search. If you are going to be top organically, it frequently doesn’t make sense to pay.
Retarget the people who click on your ads
You pay a lot of money to drive people to your website from your advertising. Whether they clicked on a display ad on a trade magazine, a search ad on Google or a LinkedIn promotion, if you have set up your campaign well, they are probably potential customers. However, in B2B few people convert immediately, so no matter how hard you try with your landing page, they are probably not going to buy after the first click.
Retargeting the people that engage with your ad is a great way to move these prospects along the customer journey and get engagement for a much lower cost than the first click. Use retargeting based on tracking people who visited your landing page or within a platform such as LinkedIn. Trust me, even if you drive people back to the same content offer, there will be a significant proportion of contacts that don’t convert after the first click but do convert after retargeting.
Don’t target large audiences when they are not relevant
We all want to generate high volumes of clicks, leads and sales. But when you can target an audience precisely, and you have a niche product or service, large numbers often don’t make sense. For example, there might be a couple of hundred people in the UK who determine the total spend with agencies in the electronics industry. So, if Napier is running a campaign to this audience, it doesn’t make sense to follow LinkedIn’s “advice” to target at least 300,000 people.
There are definitely downsides to running campaigns to smaller audiences, particularly that the optimisation algorithms used by platforms such as Google and LinkedIn usually fail with small audiences. So, you’ll have to manually optimise yourself. However, if there are only 200 people to target and you can identify them, it really doesn’t make sense to pay to reach an additional 299,800 people to make the advisor from LinkedIn happy.
Be wary of “Super-Auto” mode
Digital advertising platforms are great at offering different ways to make it easy to implement a campaign – it’s their “super auto” modes. Whether it’s creating the advert or finding relevant keywords, they provide tools to help you spend your money. In general, the tools are good, but you have to remember that they weren’t developed to help you or your organisation.
You’re working in B2B. Unless you are in the top 0.1% of B2B advertisers, your campaign is tiny compared to consumer campaigns. The platforms understand this, so they optimise their tools to work with large budgets that reach huge audiences. Unfortunately, this is not you. Make use of the tools but be cautious and bear in mind that they might not produce the best recommendations for your campaign, because they simply aren’t designed for the campaigns you run. The tools also really struggle to “understand” deep tech.
Do a lot of testing
We all know this, don’t we? It’s so important to test, yet sometimes it feels like it is just too much hard work. However, getting data on what engages your audience is valuable, not just for your current campaign but for future ones too.
You do have to be careful. Don’t test without a good understanding of statistical significance (or if you don’t like maths, use our AB Test Calculator). We have seen campaigns start where advert A looks like it is doing better than advert B and it just feels that A is better. Yet when the number of impressions grow, B overtakes A and consistently out-performs A, something you’d never know if you trusted your gut early on. Randomness is not something our brains are good at intuiting.
Paid campaigns in B2B are hard to get to work. It can feel almost impossible to get the high-value decision-makers to engage, the conventional advice just feels wrong (because it was developed for consumer campaigns) and getting test results that are statistically significant can take some time. But putting in the effort to optimise campaigns (or working with an agency who will do it for you) is the only way to guarantee the RoI that your manager demands.
27 Essential B2B Marketing Email Tips
Email remains one of the most effective channels for reaching prospects and customers for B2B marketers. In fact, there is a good chance you’re reading this blog post because you saw it mentioned in what is probably our most effective marketing channel: the Napier Newsletter (sign up to Napier News on our blogs page if you’re not already a subscriber!). Getting the best results from email, however, can be a challenge.
We’ve worked with a wide range of companies in the B2B technology space for many years, and have learnt how to create great emails from our experience. Here are some tips that will help you create emails that deliver results.
Be clear about your goal: it’s critical that you are clear about what action you want to result from your email. Do you want the recipient to click and read a blog post, reply to your email or complete a form to download content? To be effective, emails should have just one goal (OK, newsletters can try to get people to click to read multiple stories, but the click & read goal should be consistent). Thinking about the goal is part of the first step of our four-step process to developing great marketing campaigns.
Design your email to achieve your goal: it’s so tempting, and so wrong, to try to get your email to do multiple things. Don’t: it will just make it less effective. Concentrate on getting your email to achieve the one goal you have set, and don’t offer your recipients too many options.
Consider your audience: different audiences have different levels of knowledge about you and your product, and probably very different perceptions too. They’ll also be at different stages of the customer journey. In general, it’s not a good idea to send the same email to a customer that you’d send to cold prospects, as they are starting from very different places. So, write the email to meet the needs of your audience, and consider writing different emails for different audience segments.
Be respectful of your audience’s time: be brief and get to the point. You know that when you’re processing email, you want to get through it as quickly as possible, and the same is true for your audience. So don’t waste their time with long, rambling copy.
Consistency is key: yes, staying on brand can be boring, but it’s important that your audience recognises the email as being from you without having to look at the from address or footer. The more consistent you can be, the more effective your email marketing will be in the long term. But don’t feel you need to be dull – you can always have fun within your brand guidelines.
Don’t try to be too clever: I’ve mentioned that you need to understand that your audience is trying to get through their email quickly. An obtuse subject line that needs the recipient to stop and think to work out what it is saying or get some clever joke or pun is unlikely to be successful. Make your copy direct and clear and save clever headlines for the editors of tabloid newspapers.
Personalise when it makes sense: personalisation is great, but it’s really effective when it helps the recipient. The biggest difference can be made when there is something you can do to make the email more valuable through personalisation. This doesn’t have to be hugely complicated: for example, if you have an audience that covers different industries, simply providing case studies, examples or even copy that is personalised to the recipient’s market will almost always improve performance.
Use the technology: your company has almost certainly invested in marketing technology tools, so make use of them. In particular CRMs and marketing automation platforms will help you personalise content and add relevant information.
Be sure you have high-quality data: it’s obviously important to have high-quality data for basic fields like email address and first name. But it’s also important for the fields you use for personalisation. For example, if you have poor-quality industry data for your contacts, attempts to personalise will be less effective, and in the worst case could produce poorer results. Love, nurture and care for your data: it’s just so valuable!
Make your copy sound like it’s from a human: most recipients will be much more likely to engage with content that feels like it’s from a human, rather than an AI employed by the marketing team (or even a marketer writing cookie-cutter copy). So don’t get hung up on being formal and formulaic: write the copy as if you were writing an email to a real person.
Spend time on the subject line: if your email doesn’t get opened, no one is going to take action. As the subject line usually has the biggest impact on whether an email is read or not, really do spend time getting it right. Don’t forget you’re trying to get an overworked recipient who just wants to get through their email to stop and not just delete your email, so make sure they feel there is a real benefit to them to give up the time it will take to read your email.
Ignore the fact that subject lines of x characters are most effective: you’ve almost certainly seen the research that says that having a subject line of a certain length is most effective (or a certain number of words in the body copy, or…). These studies are interesting and should provide some sort of guide, but the impact of an extra character or ten is normally negligible. Great copy will always produce better results than the “optimum” character count.
Don’t feel there is only one day/time to send your email: there are endless studies showing the “best” day or time to send emails. They’re so popular because the data is so easy to get, not necessarily because it matters. These studies don’t just look at your audience and often make a big deal about small differences. Think about your audience and send at a time that will work best for them. Oh, and don’t forget to test different days and times!
Remember it’s an email, not a prize-winning novel: write short sentences, don’t have long paragraphs and use bullets or other techniques to make the text easier to read. You’re not getting paid by the word, so keep it short and in a format that is easy to read.
Don’t be that “sales email”: we’ve all read those emails whose copy is like a pushy salesperson. In B2B, at least the vast majority of B2B, sales are considered and generally involve a buying committee (DMU). So present reasons for choosing your product in a way that your recipients would do in their organisation and avoid tacky sales copy.
Don’t be afraid to create scarcity: making something scarce can work for some products. If you’re trying to get someone to select you for a major building project that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, you’re not going to succeed by offering a “limited time discount”, but a flash sale can be a great way to get an engineer to finally buy that development kit that they have been thinking about for the past six months.
Proof your email: there are a lot of marketing emails that get sent with typos. At best the typo might be distracting, at worst it could negatively impact your brand while making the email completely ineffective. So, make sure you, or even better someone else, proofs the copy.
Make use of preview text: we’re all guilty of judging emails by their preview text, so make use of customised text to sell the email contents in the best light possible.
Think about your “from”: the from address does matter. It’s generally better to send from a person than a generic email (i.e. try to avoid using addresses like newsletters@yourcompany.com).
Don’t feel you need fancy HTML layouts: some of our most effective email campaigns have been plain text. No layout, no images and nothing fancy. Just plain text. In fact, if you really want your audience to feel like someone in your company is talking to them personally, then plain text can be one of the most effective ways of making an email feel personal.
Have a clear CTA and repeat it: I mentioned earlier that it’s important to have one goal. This usually means one CTA (newsletters are one exception). Make that CTA clear. And don’t be afraid to repeat it: often emails with a CTA in the body text as a link and then separately as a button are more effective than those with just one CTA.
You don’t always need to gate content, unless…: fortunately it doesn’t happen often, but we do see emails sent through marketing automation platforms that link to content behind forms. You know who has clicked, and often this is enough: you don’t need to put forms in their way. However, there could be good reasons to do this if you want to clean or enhance your data, but consider using progressive profiling and hiding as many fields as you can.
Do a lot of testing: you think you know what will resonate with your audience. You’re probably wrong. It’s amazing how many times we find the copy that our clients – or even our digital experts – thought would work best comes second in an AB test. Use your instincts, but always test and be prepared to be proved wrong!
Consistency really is key!: it’s not just about being consistent with your brand, good email campaigns are not one-offs. If you’re communicating with your audiences frequently, you’ll get better results than if you only send emails when you have time. Don’t forget that the right frequency will almost certainly be different for different audience segments, and this is particularly the case for customers and cold prospects, who will welcome very different volumes of email from you.
Be careful how you use the data: email stats are very unreliable. Whether it’s that anti-track measures (such as those in Apple Mail) generate opens for all emails received, even if they are never read, or phantom clicks caused by malware filters, your email stats do not present anything close to the full story. So always use stats with caution, and try to use real outcomes (e.g. measuring meaningful visits to your website or form-fills rather than opens and clicks). RoI is often the best approach, and you can use our marketing RoI calculator to either forecast or measure the return of your email campaign.
Understand randomness: personally, I loved statistics at school and university. But I’m weird. Most people don’t love nor understand it. This is a problem because randomness can do strange things. Just because “A” produced better results in an AB test, doesn’t necessarily mean that it was better: it could be random. So, try to learn a little about statistics and probability so you can have a better chance of knowing if you are making decisions that are based on real differences or just luck. Alternatively, visit our AB Test Analyser to have the hard work done for you!
If the email isn’t opened, the recipient didn’t read it: this is obvious, but every now and then we hear people talking about changing the body copy to improve open rates. This makes no sense. The from address, the subject and the preview text are the things that affect the open rate.
I hope these tips are useful. If you have any approaches that have helped you generate better results, please post them in the comments or email me at mike@napierb2b.com.
Caroline Hayes Appointed Editor of Electronics Weekly
Since 2013, Caroline has been a freelance journalist, working for a number of publications who are all presumably feeling a little glum at the news that she won't be able to support them in the future.
“I am thrilled to be joining the EW team as Editor and intend to build on its enviable reputation. As features editor, I am already working alongside some of the industry’s most respected journalists, but this is a wonderful opportunity to edit a title I have always admired.
“With the support of emap, there are opportunities to explore multiple media and ensure the strong editorial values of EW reach an even broader audience and to reflect the changing landscape of our industry,” said Caroline.
The team at Napier is excited to work with Caroline in her new role. We've loved working together when she has been freelancing with a range of UK titles, and particularly enjoy the sense of fun that she brings. Caroline certainly has a tough job: the trade media certainly faces a number of challenges, but we're confident she will be able to bring innovative and successful ideas to the publication. In fact, one of Caroline’s first projects will be editorial lead on the new Electronics Weekly’s Women in Electronics Awards in April 2024.
Congratulations on the new role Caroline!
OK, We Admit it. We Used AI for Content Generation!
We have misled our blog readers by using AI for content generation. But we’re not sorry! In fact, it was a small test that we ran to see how well AI could generate blog posts and to find out if anyone noticed. We posted a couple of blog posts under the alias Greg Aidley that were generated by AI and had some light touch editing by human writers.
We thought it would be a good experiment and have learnt a lot from it. We’re sharing the findings so you can understand whether AI can provide a solution. Here are our findings:
Nobody complained
Perhaps the most surprising thing was that no one asked whether we had used AI to generate content. So the quality of the AI writing was good enough to “pass” as human written when people didn’t know. The audience included most of the Napier team (we kept the use of AI as a little secret among a couple of us). So it is possible to use AI to generate content that feels “good enough”.
You have to edit
No one noticed, but to be fair we need to confess that we choose to use human authors to review and edit the text. To be honest, some of the stuff that the AI produced really wasn’t up to scratch and we weren’t prepared to have the content on the website without editing.
Obviously, the introduction of a human editor does mean that it’s less surprising that no one spotted it was AI-generated. We suspect that if we’d used unaltered output from AI then people would have recognised that the quality wasn’t at a level you’d expect from a human writer.
Choose the right topics
AI is better at writing some things than others. We did try a number of different topics and picked the ones that produced the best output. The most obvious thing to point out is that AI is good at looking back, but it’s not so convincing when trying to make predictions or talk about something new. Content like “Why Podcasts are an Important Part of the B2B Marketing Mix” are the best sort of article as the AI can draw on many similar articles that have been used in the language model’s training.
Select your tool carefully
Although impressive, ChatGPT isn’t great at writing long-form content. It does tend to be a little unstructured and rambling. We decided to choose a tool designed to generate content at a higher level of quality, Jasper.ai. There are many other tools like this – for example, we had the CEO of Rytr.me as a guest on the Marketing B2B Technology podcast recently.
Note that at the time we ran this experiment, ChatGPT and the tools we mention above all used the GPT3 large language model. It's likely that as the models improve, the quality of output will also get better.
These tools allow a step-by-step approach to creating content using AI. You first create an outline and then generate the content in sections. In our experience, this created long-form content that flows much better than the output of ChatGPT or other unmanaged AIs.
AI isn’t necessarily quicker
Surprisingly we found that using the AI tools wasn’t that much quicker than writing the posts ourselves. We do write a lot of blog posts, so we’re pretty efficient, but even so, we expected the AI to save us more time. In fact one post needed quite a lot of editing and so, by the time we’d managed the creation process and then edited the output, it actually took a similar amount of time to write the post from scratch.
There is one major caveat here: it takes time to learn how to get the most out of an AI tool, just as it does any other marketing technology tool. We weren’t experienced users of Jasper (although we had generated a few test pieces before the trial) so we expect that the process would get faster as we developed our own skills.
So how good was the AI-generated Content?
There are a number of ways we could try to measure the quality, but perhaps the best one is to look at how long people spend reading the article. Although the subject will have some impact on time on page, the topics weren’t that different and so we felt it would be a pretty good proxy for quality.
We were somewhat surprised at the result. Although content written by our experienced writers on average performed better, the difference wasn’t huge. And the AI generated content had longer time on page than posts that were written by Napier team members who don’t often blog. Basically, the AI was better at writing than a graphic designer!
The figure below shows the time on site for 10 recent blog posts, which are categorised based on who wrote them.
Does this mean that you should use AI to write your content?
We started this project expecting that AI would be significantly out-performed by human writers. Although humans are better – and we needed humans to tweak the AI output – the difference isn’t anywhere near as big as we would expect. In fact, if you have people who normally don’t write content we think they would probably do better by using an AI to help them. This is true even with the limitations of today’s large language models.
If you are a good writer then I think it’s time to make sure your ego is kept in check. Yes, you’re better than an AI today. Yes, there are topics where AI models are not going to perform well. But AI is catching up. We’d strongly recommend that all writers experiment with AI to help them improve their writing, whether they are using the AI for ideas or editing sections of AI content into their own writing.
So, it doesn’t look like great writers will be out of a job any time soon. We expect low-quality content farms, particularly those in lower-cost economies, to be out of business very quickly. AI is clearly already above the level of the cheapest content designed for SEO. But we know that often this content is laughably bad, so that’s probably a good thing.
Will AI continue to improve?
The most interesting question is what will happen in the future. Realistically no one really knows how good large language models will get. We can, however, say that the likelihood is that quality improvements will slow down dramatically.
The improvements in output quality from GPT1 to GPT3 have been incredible and this has happened in only four years. However, there are factors that are going to limit the improvement in performance. The underlying engine will suffer from diminishing returns when it is made more complex. This is a very technical argument: GPT1 used only 12 layers while GPT3 used 96. Adding more layers is likely to require a lot more complexity to generate the same perceived improvement in performance.
We’re also running out of training data. GPT4 is trained on a significant percentage of online content (the actual amount hasn’t been revealed), and at some point, there won’t be any more easily-accessible training data. So the rate of improvement will slow.
Although we have highlighted a couple of problems, it’s clear that AI will continue to improve, it’s just the rate of improvement that will be uncertain. The Napier team will be watching developments and running more experiments, and we’ll keep you informed of the results!
Is this the Future of Publishing?
It’s no secret that the world of trade media publishing is tough. Arguably few industries have been forced to change more than publishing, and trade media has been particularly badly hit. Publishers have gone from a world where they controlled much of the distribution of information to the industry through printed magazines, to one where there is more information available than any reader could possibly consume. Furthermore, online publishing requires a very different approach to advertising than print, completely changing the business model for publishers.
Of course, some publishers are still doing well, but others are finding it harder. We’ve seen a steady decrease in the size of editorial teams as budgets are cut, and this is obviously something that has to stop at some point.
The challenges from an advertising point of view are frightening. Previously revenue was effectively unlimited in print: if you wanted to take more advertising you just needed to print more pages. The publisher just needed a corresponding increase in editorial, something that resulted in greater employment for journalists.
Although publications were able to generate rapid increases in website visitors when they first launched their sites, in recent years we have seen the visitor numbers stagnate for many B2B trade publications. This is clearly the case in the electronics industry where in most Western European countries the number of page views has not increased according to Napier’s recent research. Website display advertising revenue is limited by the number of monetizable pages (unless you are willing to increase the number of ad units per page). With cost-per-ad-unit falling at some publications this means that in a time of relatively high inflation, publishers have seen the maximum revenue they can achieve from ads on their website decrease.
Of course, there are other sources of income including newsletters, email rental and lead generation, but these are also typically maxed out with advertisers apparently willing to wait for slots rather than pay increased pricing.
The Options
On the face of it, there are few good options open to publishers. Let’s look at the potential ways that they can deal with the increase in costs and stagnant revenue.
Some publishers are still generating a significant income from print. This does give a lot of control and allows as many pages as they want to be published. The costs of print, however, have increased significantly: both the cost of printing a publication and mailing it have grown significantly. So the print publications are often then forced to reduce circulation.
Digital magazines seemed like a great option. I actually have a couple of digital magazine subscriptions, but even I know that I am definitely the exception. Few people are reading magazines in digital format and so digital “flip-book” publications have not been the modern version of print that many hoped.
One option would be to grow the share of the website pages viewed in the industry. This is somewhat of a zero-sum game, particularly when it comes to organic search traffic: the reader is probably not going to read more pages if publications put more effort into SEO.
We have seen some publications broaden the things they cover to try to grow the available market of readers, but care needs to be taken as too broad a remit will devalue the publication to advertisers who want to know that as many of their ad impressions as possible are hitting potential customers.
Obviously, diversification is an alternative. In addition to direct email, publishers can offer paid-for products such as directories or vendor selectors, while events - particularly face-to-face events - are often highly profitable sources of revenue. Both of these, however, cannot be scaled beyond a small number of products, so are quite limited.
We’ve seen publications be purchased by vendors. Arrow’s ownership of Aspencore is the biggest example by far, but they are not alone: for example, Mouser’s parent company owns Electropages (the publication from EPM). In these cases, however, the owners have not chosen to buy the publications and use them as mouthpieces for their businesses. Although they have clearly brought value to the owners that go beyond their publishing activities, both Aspencore and EPM seem to be required to run as profitable businesses by their owners.
None of the above approaches seems to offer much of a solution, so we have inevitably seen a squeeze on costs. Ultimately this means fewer editorial staff, and sometimes fewer salespeople, which will weaken the editorial proposition or potentially reduce revenue.
The Ojo Yoshida Report - A Brave Test?
One publication that is very different is the Ojo Yoshida Report. Founded by Bolaji Ojo (Publisher & Managing Editor) and Junko Yoshida (Editor in Chief), they have taken a different business model: subscriptions. This is a brave move: will they be able to persuade people to pay money for a product when there is so much free content available?
Of course, they are both highly-respected journalists who have been in the industry for a long time. Their great connections mean that they will not only have access to some of the most influential industry figures, but they will also have connections with companies that could spend significantly on subscriptions.
They have also chosen to target their publication at the management tier of the electronics industry. Although the information is clearly relevant to engineers at all levels, the content will be particularly useful to executives, and therefore to an audience that is probably not particularly price-sensitive.
The publication is an exciting experiment. It’s a brave experiment. I really hope it succeeds.
Will the Ojo Yoshida Report be Successful?
In the past, we have had successful publications that relied on subscriptions. In Germany, engineers have paid for publications. Many years ago I was an avid paid reader of Microprocessor Report: an essential publication for anyone involved in the microprocessor industry at the time. If subscriptions have been successful in the past, I see no reason why they can’t work today.
So I’m optimistic. It will be fascinating to see if the Ojo Yoshida report is successful. But it’s probably not an option for most publications: inevitably it’s likely that only a small number of titles can successfully run a subscription model as readers will limit how many they pay for. So although this might be paving the way for a small number of paid publications in the electronics industry, it’s probably not a solution that will work for most of the titles out there.
The Ultimate European PR FAQ
Answers to the questions our American clients ask about doing PR in Europe
Europe has a very different culture from the USA, particularly when it comes to the media. We often get asked questions about PR in Europe, so we thought it would make sense to put them together in a frequently-asked questions (FAQ) blog post.
Are print magazines still a thing in Europe?
Yes. It’s still the case that some readers prefer print. This is particularly true in Eastern Europe and Germany, but you can still find publications with print circulations around Europe.
The readership of print magazines continues to decline, so just because print is still relevant, don’t think it’s the most important medium. In particular, we’re seeing younger engineers across Europe spurn print for digital, so your campaign should always be digital-first.
Why didn’t journalists attend my breakfast meeting?
Generally speaking, journalists don’t like breakfast meetings in Europe (this is particularly true in the UK). There are many factors that result in their dislike of early mornings: frequently it’s related to the challenges of travel in rush-hour, personal commitments before work or even the journalist living a long way from where you hold the press conference. We’d always recommend trying to avoid breakfast meetings.
I don’t speak the language: does that mean I can’t be interviewed?
Most B2B trade journalists speak English and are prepared to interview people who don’t speak the local language. Sometimes, however, they’ll ask for an email interview, as this allows them to take time to understand your responses.
We’d always recommend avoiding telephone interviews in this case – having the journalist able to see your face, whether that’s virtually or in-person will make it much easier for them to understand what you are saying.
Do journalists really want to talk to local spokespeople?
Yes. Often publications will prefer to talk to a local personality. There are several reasons for this, from wanting to have a “local market” spin on the interview to wanting someone that their readers are more likely to relate to or even meet in their work.
Despite this preference for local spokespeople, there is always an opportunity to have senior executives, particularly CEOs and CTOs, interviews in local publications. However, it’s often worth bringing a local spokesperson along too, as this may help build the relationship and could ensure that there are no misunderstandings due to translation.
How do I get a feature article placed?
In the USA, many trade journalists like to work with a company that is developing a feature article (also called a contributed article). This collaborative process is much less common in Europe, and journalists will typically look for completed articles that they can review and select, rather than an abstract.
Should I change the style of writing for Europe?
The preferred format and style of releases do change over time, both in the USA and in Europe. If we were to generalise, we’d say that European editors prefer more succinct and factual releases than their American counterparts. German editors in particular like lots of data and numbers to validate any claims you make in your releases and articles: sometimes this can seem like focussing on features rather than benefits, but trust us, a more factual style will work better for a German audience.
Publications also vary considerably, so rather than relying on rules of thumb for each country, it’s always better to engage with an editor or knowledgeable agency to find out what tweaks to your style will produce the best results.
Do I need a photo with my press release?
To be honest, most American titles are now keen to find images for online stories, so most of our clients are pretty good at supplying images. But if you are thinking of issuing a release in Europe without a photo, please think again. European journalists are more focused on the visual look of their publications than some of the Americans, so having a good photo really does help get coverage.
Do I need to translate releases?
You don’t need to translate your releases, but you’ll get much better results if you do. Even though many journalists across Europe speak excellent English, it does take them longer to take an English language release and translate it than it does to use one in local language. In fact, one journalist we know said it’s about three times longer to use English language releases.
So given the pressure that journalists are under, and the competition for coverage, you’ll find that local language releases will almost always outperform those in English in continental Europe, and the RoI on translation is usually excellent.
Do British editors really go to the pub on Friday afternoon?
This is a stereotype of British journalists that, particularly in the trade media, is a little dated. Although pub culture still exists, you won’t find many journalists drinking from Friday lunchtime. However, there is still a culture that you don’t organise big events (such as press conferences) on a Friday afternoon.
How many holidays are there in Europe?
It is true that there are a lot more holidays in Europe. Whether it’s the majority of the French workforce taking August off, or the many different public holidays in months like May, it can be difficult to navigate vacations and holidays. Check with an agency that knows the countries you are targeting before planning a press tour: it’s important to make sure you don’t pick a day when no one can attend!
Do I need to pay to translate a feature article?
Yes. Generally, there is an expectation from publications that if a company writes an article and the publication is going to publish it, the company funds the cost of translation.
Do I really need to pay the journalist to translate my article?
Sometimes journalists do supplement their income by charging companies for translation of feature articles. They’ll often say that they want the translation style to be consistent. Generally having a journalist working on the publication doing your translations will result in outstanding quality and a real commitment to publish the article, so we’d always recommend that you agree if a journalist gently suggests they should do the translation.
Don’t the English-language pan-European titles cover the whole of Europe?
The English-language titles do have some reach across Europe (as do some of the titles published in the USA), but that reach is limited. In pretty much every country the local language titles will have a greater penetration of your target audience than titles published in English from outside of the country. So if you want to be successful, you need to engage with local publications.
Do I need to address every country in Europe?
No, of course not. In fact, we strongly recommend that companies focus on a small number of key markets initially as they build their presence in Europe and the European media. Focussing on the countries that matter, and doing a great job there, will be far more effective than doing a superficial job in a larger number of countries. It will also be a lot more manageable and cost-effective.
Why is a journalist so keen to take my photo?
Some journalists will be paid extra if they take a photo that is published. So they will be very keen to take your photo rather than use a stock image. Don’t feel bad – it makes for a better story, so everyone benefits.
I met with the journalist a year ago, why are they not keen to meet again?
It’s possible they didn’t find the interview useful, but it’s more likely that they are frustrated that you met and then didn’t continue engaging with them. It’s really important to be consistent with your PR. A once-a-year press tour annoys journalists as it’s all about you, and not about what they need. In fact, there is a word for executives from American companies that do this: “seagulls”. This is because they fly in, make a lot of noise, and then leave a mess afterwards. If you want to meet with journalists, make sure you are engaging with them on a frequent basis, rather than only when it suits you.
Is everything different in Europe?
No! Of course not. The PR process isn’t completely different, and generally, a good story in the USA will be just as effective in Europe. We’ve written this blog post because it can be easy to assume everything is the same, and so people can get caught out by the few areas that are different.
Why it Sometimes Makes Sense to Advertise for Your Channel
I’ve worked for manufacturers and channel partners. The dynamic for each, particularly in technology, is an interesting one as both recognise the need for each other, yet there is almost always some degree of friction between the two.
Relationship Challenges
Manufacturers use distributors to reach smaller customers that they couldn’t service cost-effectively, while integrators and VARs provide additional services for the end customer. So there is clearly value in the channel, both in terms of efficiency and maximising the markets that any manufacturer can reach. Yet you’ll often hear manufacturers worry that their partners are favouring other suppliers, not doing enough promotion or taking too much margin.
On the channel side, there will always be concerns about large businesses going direct and the lack of support from manufacturers. That perception has been exacerbated by the advent of e-commerce which has given rise to a trend for manufacturers to support direct online purchasing, something that channel partners might feel is “cutting them out of the loop”.
Stronger Channel, Stronger Supplier
Even though there can be issues in the relationship, the reality is that manufacturers need strong channel partners to succeed. The channel remains a vital part of the way that many B2B products are sold, with partners able to drive growth with a very different set of resources than those that are available to manufacturers.
Doing Marketing “for the Channel”
We’ve seen a trend recently where several manufacturers who are Napier clients have allocated money to marketing that might traditionally be seen as the responsibility of their channel partner(s). At first, this might seem strange: spending valuable marketing budget to influence the results of partners who have their own marketing budgets and are usually also incentivised by co-op or sales performance incentive funds (SPIF).
Our clients, however, are really smart. Sometimes there are great reasons to fund additional marketing that - at first - might not seem like the responsibility of the manufacturer. Here are two great examples of how savvy clients have deployed marketing to increase their profits.
Reducing Stock Returns
Channel partners that hold stock typically have the right to return that stock under certain conditions. This might be due to products becoming obsolete, or simply stock rotation rights that allow the partner to switch out stock that is not selling. These terms make a lot of sense: the stock held by partners does boost sales figures, but there is no benefit for either the manufacturer or the partner if money is tied up in stock that just won’t move.
Unfortunately, when products approach end-of-life, there is little incentive for the channel to put additional effort into selling them: they know they can return the products without penalty when they are declared obsolete. This then leaves the manufacturer holding stock that is often unsalable. A similar effect is seen with stock rotation when new products are introduced: there is less incentive to focus on the older model as they can also be returned.
Smart manufacturers, however, can recognise a potential problem and address it before they are left having to take back products. We ran a very successful campaign with one client who was launching a new product. They knew that the new product would kill demand for the previous generation, so they ran a search campaign to maximise sales before the new product was released, thereby minimising any dead stock they would have to accept. This not only helped the manufacturer but also meant that the distributor paid more attention as they saw a nice uplift in sales, followed by the excitement of a new product to offer that generated further improvements in sales and SKU figures.
Building Communities
Channel partners are often great at building communities. In many cases - particularly if a manufacturer doesn’t have a local office - online community building is an important part of their role. Typically, they give their suppliers access to their communities for marketing purposes, and the best suppliers are quick to take maximum advantage.
We worked with a client who helped their partners build their online communities by running social media promotions encouraging prospects and customers to connect with their respective partners. As each partner was better placed to build communities in the target market, and their supplier was able to use the community for marketing, it benefited the channel partners and the manufacturer.
Real Partnerships Work
These examples show that by really engaging with, and being prepared to invest in, the channel, manufacturers can extract benefits that will deliver significant improvements to their bottom line. When marketing really engages with the channel, rather than seeing it as a necessary evil, or even competition, investing in innovative campaigns will produce a great return on investment.
How Does LinkedIn Match Job Titles for Advertising Campaigns?
If you are running B2B LinkedIn advertising campaigns, you’ve probably realised that the more targeted you can be, the better the results. Although LinkedIn will encourage you to open up your criteria to make the audience large – and therefore boost LinkedIn’s revenue – generally the ability to target exactly who you want to communicate with is the superpower of this important advertising platform. We see many very small campaigns that are often around the minimum audience size deliver phenomenal results with almost negligible budgets.
There are some downsides to more precise targeting: the cost per click, impression or acquisition will increase. Furthermore, companies often want to target a similar persona, so there tends to be greater competition as you focus your campaign more tightly. This shouldn’t be a surprise – the average cost of running an advert to everyone working in, say, the retail industry in the UK should be less than targeting only CIOs in this sector.
Although job function can be useful, it’s pretty broad. So we typically work with clients to target specific job titles. But it’s important to understand that job title is not an exact match: LinkedIn groups job titles so you need to be very careful to make sure you are hitting the right people for all of your campaigns.
The LinkedIn Job Title Matching Algorithm
Let’s be clear about the problem: if you put a job title into an audience definition for an ads campaign your ad will be shown to people who have different titles than the one you enter. LinkedIn is trying to get related job titles, but sometimes it just goes wrong.
Let’s take a really simple example at first. Assume we have a campaign that is designed to target engineers. So we put in “engineer” as one of our job titles. That’s got to be an approach that will generate a technical audience, right? Wrong!
If you enter “engineer” as a job title, LinkedIn will also match “sales engineer” and “field sales engineer” amongst many other job titles. You’ve now got a campaign that is targeting a sales audience rather than your technical audience (in this case it’s not unusual to find more salespeople who see the ad than those who are “real” engineers).
So clearly broad job titles can be bad, as the same word might be used in unrelated job titles. But it’s more complex than that. Let’s consider a recent campaign we ran for a client that aimed to target people who were involved in production or managing sustainability. Here are the job titles we used initially in the campaign:
Looks pretty good, right? So why was it that when we reviewed the campaign 6.2% of the audience had a job title of office manager and 2.3% sheet metal worker?
Before you start panicking and cancelling all your LinkedIn ads, let’s take a breath and be realistic. These two non-matching job titles represent less than 10% of the audience. When we looked, we could see that the campaign was actually working quite well: 90% of the audience fitted the personas we wanted to target.
So this is different from using engineer and finding that you get a large percentage of your audience working in sales. It’s much more typical of the campaigns we see – a smallish percentage of your audience just feels wrong.
You’ll never get a completely perfect audience, so maybe 10% mistargeting is acceptable: after all, it’s probably way better than the targeting you get when running display ads in an online publication. However, there are things you can do to improve your targeting.
Demographics: Possibly the Most Powerful Feature for Optimising LinkedIn Targeting
If you are not using the demographics feature in LinkedIn, you are really missing out. This is a feature that lets you see where your advert is being shown and who is engaging and can be used at the account, campaign group and campaign level.
When you click the demographics button, you’ll see the breakdown of the audience by job function. This is a great overview: if you have a campaign targeting an engineering audience and you see that there are a significant number of people with a sales job function you know something is going wrong.
If the job functions look reasonable, then you can select job title from the drop-down. This is where you can see the main job titles you are targeting. We’re going to show you some results from a set of test and training campaigns Napier has run – they show the points well although the values for CTR, etc are probably not representative of what you should be seeing in your campaigns.
The breakdown by job function will quickly show you if you are hitting the right audience or not. If you take a look at the example below, you can see that Napier’s campaigns have done a pretty good job of hitting people in marketing, communications and PR. So we don’t have to worry about changing the audience to better target the people we want to reach.
Note that where you have a low number of clicks, LinkedIn doesn’t report the data, so if you are running very targeted campaigns, you might be limited in what you can see.
The report can also show you the likely level of engagement: if you look at the top two lines you’ll see that Marketing Directors have a 0.25% CTR, whereas Global Marketing Managers engage at more than double this CTR. This could be caused by a number of factors: the content could be more relevant to the Global Marketing Manager, they could have been targeted by different campaigns (note here that the numbers are spread across a large number of campaigns) or directors could simply be less likely to click. Whatever the reason it’s important to understand why you are getting such a low CTR and, if possible, address the problem.
Tips for Getting Better Job Title Matches on LinkedIn
If you look at the job title demographics and see there is a problem, there are a number of ways to fix it. The first stop is always the pesky audience expansion checkbox: if your audience has the checkbox enabled, then LinkedIn is going to match much more broadly. If you have a clearly defined audience, it’s usually best to ensure this checkbox is not ticked.
You then need to look at the job titles you have entered. Which one do you think is triggering the erroneous match? Perhaps you can remove or replace it with more specific job titles. Sometimes, however, it can be hard to even understand what is causing the unwanted match, and even harder to get a better job title.
Of course, what we would like is to have an audience defined by job titles and job function – in the example of engineer matching with sales engineer having an additional job function filter would let us eliminate people in sales. But LinkedIn doesn’t allow job function to be used in conjunction with job title. Annoying!
There are, however, different filters that might help to eliminate the spurious matches. You can combine field of study in the education section: it’s great if your audience needs to have a degree in a particular field, such as engineering. You might also want to use skills, group membership or interests as filters, although they can result in some LinkedIn members you want to target being eliminated.
Often negative filters are better than positive: for our example where engineer also targeted sales engineers, you could include people with engineering skills/interests, or you could choose to eliminate people with sales skills or interests.
Getting the perfect audience is going to be an iterative process on LinkedIn. Because the matching isn’t exact, you will have to try different things to get the result you want.
Don’t Overthink LinkedIn Audiences
Although you can spend a lot of time tweaking the definition of an audience to get the results you want, it’s important to make sure you’re not wasting your time. For example, if you are running a campaign that is getting 100 clicks at £5 CPC per month, and 5% of the audience is not what you want, that only represents a cost of £25 per month. If it’s easy to fix the problem, it’s worth doing, but a senior marketing professional wasting hours trying to improve this probably isn’t a good use of their time.
Getting LinkedIn Audiences Right
This blog post has hopefully given you some ideas of how to monitor the targeting of your LinkedIn campaign and some ways to make future campaigns more precise in the people they reach. It’s important to optimise for audience as well as results on LinkedIn – as we saw earlier optimising our marketing campaigns to increase CTR might actually result in a campaign that simply targets more junior people. Being able to know information about the people viewing and engaging with your LinkedIn ad campaign is one of the platform’s superpowers, and you should ensure you always use this when optimising.
If you would like more information or a review of your LinkedIn campaigns, please get in contact with Napier via the form below – we’d love to help you out!
Get Help with LinkedIn
How to Get Great Case Studies from B2B Customers
How to get great case studies and testimonials from customers…
Case studies are hard. It’s so difficult to get a customer to agree to write a case study, generate a description of how they are benefitting from your product or service without revealing confidential information and then get approval from the customer’s legal team, or whoever is the gatekeeper of supplier endorsement.
But case studies are so important. They showcase your products in action, bring benefits to life and have an implied endorsement from the customer.
So if case studies are so important, how do we overcome the challenges? It’s not easy, but in our experience, there’s a lot you can do to make the process a little easier.
Put Yourself in the Shoes of the Customer Doing the Case Study
A customer is committing a lot when they agree to a case study. It’s not just the time to write it, it’s what the case study means for their future relationship with you.
The customer is going to tell you all the benefits they got from your product. They’re also going on the record saying that you are the best supplier. This is not what tough negotiators would recommend if the customer is to be in a strong position when trying to get a discount off next year’s maintenance or a repeat purchase. So customers feel they will be indebted to you.
Perhaps more importantly, customers are committing to you as a vendor. If your product fails, there is no way that they won’t get blamed if they allowed you to produce a case study. So not only are they weakening their organisation’s position for future negotiations, they are risking their own career progression.
Fortunately, it’s not all bad news. Case studies are a good way of promoting an organisation, and the individual you work with will raise their profile both inside and outside of their company. There are real benefits to case studies for both sides.
Think about the benefits, drawbacks and risks from your customer’s point of view and try to create as safe a situation as you can. A simple approach is to focus on what using your product or service has already achieved, rather than trying to make the case study about potential future benefits: less risk for your customer and frankly the story will be more compelling.
Good Salespeople Shut Up
We all know the image of the fast-talking salesperson who won’t keep quiet, but this is not how great salespeople operate. Once the customer has committed to the order, the salesperson knows that the customer can still change their mind and go somewhere else. So good salespeople avoid doing things that might make the customer reconsider their decision, and asking for a favour – i.e. time and endorsement for a case study – is one thing that many salespeople sensibly avoid.
There are ways to remove the real concerns salespeople have about case studies. Put a requirement for publicity into your contract. Wait until after the product has been deployed and has been used for some time (although this can be difficult as people move around and you might not know who actually uses the product). Or simply divorce the request from the sales process by getting someone external to ask: a good agency will be able to advocate for the benefits of getting publicity to your customer and there is obviously no opportunity for that customer to ask the agency for a discount on the original product or service.
[Almost] All Case Studies are Good Case Studies
There are always those big blue-chip logos you really want to see associated with your product. These customers are just so impressive. The only problem is that often their case studies are dull, and the work to get anything approved is immense.
When you get a case study or testimonial, you are borrowing some of the brand equity from your customer to promote your brand. Big customers instinctively know this, and if they are a much stronger brand or larger company than you, they’ll feel the balance is wrong.
So big customers are very, very careful about who they will partner with on a case study. They’re very, very careful about what they allow you to write. And they are very, very careful about having many people check and re-check to make sure they are not saying anything too positive. The process is painful, and the result is often bland.
Smaller customers are different. They see the benefit of being associated with you. They have much less to lose and much more to gain. They’ll tell you more about their use case, and will usually take much less time checking and getting approvals. You’ll get a better story with less effort. Of course, if the smaller customer has used your product or service to beat an industry giant, everyone will love the David vs Goliath narrative.
Our recommendation is not to focus on the one amazing logo, but to try to get many different stories from interesting users who love what you sold them. Don’t forget about the big guys, but equally don’t spend too much time on them.
One final point: there are a group of customers whose business is lending their brand equity to [paying] partners. Formula One teams do cool stuff at racetracks, and companies readily pay to be associated with the high-tech, exciting and glamourous F1 brands. In fact, the business of F1 is based on paying sponsors, so don’t imagine that they are going to be keen to endorse your product, even if it did help win the last Grand Prix. Unless, of course, you are a sponsor and have been smart enough to ensure that a case study is part of the deal.
Case Studies Should be Stories
It happens too often: an organisation writes about a customer and the resulting text reads like a mash-up between a brochure and a data sheet. Case studies are not sales pitches, and they should not focus on your product or service: case studies should tell a story from the customer’s point of view.
There are lots of good books on storytelling, and it’s definitely worth spending time educating yourself on how stories are written. If you want a short-cut, then checking out the seven story architypes is one approach (yes, some academics believe there are only seven types of story).
Most case studies are a quest or “hero’s journey”, which is defined as: The protagonist and companions set out to acquire an important object or to get to a location. They face temptations and other obstacles along the way. In our case, the goal is unlikely to be an object or location, but rather a business objective.
It’s important to remember that good stories have problems and challenges that must be overcome. Star Wars wouldn’t have been the same if Darth Vader had simply said, “Oops, my bad. I’m on the wrong side and will switch my allegiance immediately to the rebel alliance,” when he first met Luke Skywalker. The best case studies have obstacles, setbacks and even problems with your product or service, although it’s always a good idea to overcome those issues before writing the case study!
Don’t Forget Video and Images
We shouldn’t need to mention this but have seen several projects stumble because no one thought about how video and images make any customer endorsement more compelling. Seeing one of your users talking on video will have much more impact than simply inserting a sanitised quote into a description of how you helped them. Make sure you’re getting as much visual content as possible to bring the application to life.
Preparation is Everything When Interviewing Customers
The most important step of any case study or testimonial project is the time you interview the customer to find out why they are so happy with the purchase they made. Not only do you need to ensure that you dig down to find the real story, it’s a crucial time to enthuse the interviewee so that they push the project through legal and other internal hurdles to get it approved.
There is no substitute for experience, which is why agencies like Napier have a specialist writing team who have many years and hundreds of case studies behind them.
Don’t be Disheartened: Case Studies are a Numbers Game
People will say no to your requests. A lot of people will say no. But you’ve got to think like the optimistic door-to-door salesperson who believes that every no is one step closer to a yes. It’s not uncommon for companies to give up quickly on case studies when they have their hopes of an enthusiastic endorsement dashed by a risk-adverse customer. The companies that do have great case study programmes have failed many, many times but have the resilience to continue asking until they hear, “Yes, I’d love to work with you on that!”
I started this post by saying how difficult it is to generate case studies and testimonials. That’s never going to change, but by understanding why there is such reluctance on the part of your customer, knowing how to make the process smoother and being able to deal with the inevitable rejection, it’s possible to set up a great case study programme. I’d also recommend getting in external support: by using a skilled agency you will not only get access to the best writers, but you’ll also be able to remove some of the power dynamics from the negotiation, making it easier for the customer to engage. Good luck with your case study campaign and please do let me know how it goes.
B2B Marketing Trends 2023
Many clients ask us to give our take on the latest trends in marketing. We frequently put together presentations that analyse what has happened and make predictions about the way marketing will change in the future. This blog post is a summary of one of those recent presentations.
What Happened in 2022 – The Starting Point for Marketing
It’s always important to know where you are starting from, and 2022 proved to be an interesting year for marketing. A lot of the change was driven by the fact we began to exit the crisis caused by the COVID pandemic, although other crises were also available during the year. The return to more normal working after coronavirus, however, made it clear that things would never be quite the same again.
Customers Interact More with Marketing, Less with Sales
Perhaps the biggest change was the increase in the time B2B suppliers spend on self-directed research rather than talking to salespeople. Now, this is by no means a new trend: let’s face it there was a far bigger impact when companies started putting product data on their websites and salespeople could no longer secure a face-to-face meeting by offering to bring a printed data book. But the rate of change accelerated during COVID and in many industries, it’s clear that buyers are not going back to pre-pandemic levels of interaction with sales.
I’ve heard many salespeople complain about how much harder their job is because customers don’t want to meet in person any more, and often are reluctant to have online meetings too. The result is that by spending more time researching themselves, customers are more reliant on marketing content and less on salespeople when making decisions.
Although this does mean that marketing is more important if you want to be successful, it doesn’t mean salespeople are now irrelevant. In fact, one of the things that sales teams can do is to work closely with marketing teams to develop content and campaigns that drive customers to take the step of engaging with a salesperson, as well as closing the sale which is still done in person for many industries (although the percentage of B2B sales made online without a human salesperson is increasing at a rapid rate).
Greater Focus on Customers
If we are honest, the B2B sector hasn’t always done a great job of considering customer experience (CX). The focus on experience has been something that has really mattered in the consumer space for some time, and we’re running behind. But in 2022 we saw many clients pay attention to really understanding their customers and devote resources to try to improve CX. This is something we believe will continue to develop over the coming years.
Move to Real Metrics
Napier has been banging on about the need to try to use business metrics, rather than the convenient but often misleading simple marketing metrics like CTR and impressions. We thought no one was listening, but apparently, they were because in 2022 many of our clients really started trying to dig into data to understand whether campaigns had achieved business goals.
This is great news: no one wants to run campaigns that have little or no impact on the audience. It’s also linked to the increase in people processing marketing and sales data for clients. In 2023 we’d expect to see more data-driven decisions in marketing that use real-world data rather than artificial metrics.
AI Content Generation
You’ve heard of ChatGPT, surely? And hopefully about similar tools for images like DALL-E. At the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, it sometimes felt that generative AI was the only thing that mattered. We are now at the point where AI can create high-quality images and text that matches some of the content-farm generated SEO content. Although it’s difficult to know how quickly, these technologies are going to get better and better over the coming years. It is important, however, to not get carried away with the hype as they also have limitations – not least the fact that for image generation there is a real question over whether using copyrighted images in these tools is allowed (and they all have been trained on copyright images).
Four Categories of Marketing Trends for 2023
We believe there are four categories of trends for 2023:
- Megatrends: these trends are not things that just change in 2023, but are long-term trends that are becoming particularly powerful. Understanding megatrends is critical if you want to stay ahead of the marketing wave.
- Publishing and intermediaries: changes in publishing are hugely important to marketers, and 2023 will see some significant changes to both professional publishers and user-generated content.
- Tools and AI: we can’t get away from marketing technology. It has always been a key driver of what is possible, and in 2023 the emergence of usable AI will be a game-changer in some areas.
- Legislation: although we don’t expect any major changes on the scale of the introduction of GDPR, we do expect governments – and sometimes the companies themselves imposing restrictions – to continue to impact the way B2B marketing develops this year.
Marketing MegaTrends
The four megatrends we see are changes in the way people think about marketing or changes in the approach that customers take to brands. The megatrends are typically long-term changes and their impact is not restricted to 2023, although we expect them to be particularly powerful this year.
Credibility and Trust
The expectations that the public has of businesses are increasing, and your customers are a subset of the general public. In 2022 the Edelman Trust Barometer found that people around the world think that business is not doing enough to address societal problems. One specific example is that 52% think companies should do more on climate change.
Reputation – perhaps more than ever – is an important factor in the selection of B2B suppliers. Your customers know this and they are not going to do business with organisations that they feel might hurt the credibility they have and customers’ trust. We believe that 2023 is the year when brands have to address ESG and the way they do business to become a more attractive partner.
We expect an increase in brand-building tactics such as PR, where companies will want to tell their story in a way that reassures people and enhances their reputation. In fact, we expect that the companies that establish the best reputations will see a huge range of benefits, including better performance of middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns such as email marketing.
Supporting the Self-Directed Customer Journey
In many cases we have realised that the phrase, “things will never be the same after COVID,” was wrong. Our personal lives are returning to normal, and we are happy to have close contact with friends and strangers at places from bars to concerts. When it comes to purchasing B2B products, however, it’s frightening how much things have changed and how quickly the “new normal” became “normal”.
Earlier in the post, the trend toward self-directed research was discussed. It’s nothing new, but the step-change we saw due to the pandemic seems irreversible. B2B buyers are spending less time talking with salespeople and more time interacting with marketing content when they do desk research. The importance of understanding this change is huge: companies need to be producing more marketing content, and some of this content should be addressing buyer needs at the bottom of the funnel that previously was the domain of sales. The most successful companies in the coming years will reduce the size of their salesforces and move money to marketing. Hoping that things will go back to the old way, where personal selling was important is a route to B2B disaster.
High-Quality Content Marketing Really Matters in 2023
A lot of the noise about content marketing has been around SEO: generating often low-quality content to target specific keywords. The value of this has always been somewhat questionable, and increasingly it looks like companies will turn to AI for this work. With so few AI models available – let’s face it today the GPT3 model that underpins ChatGPT is also behind pretty much every other AI marketing and content generation tool – organisations are going to produce content that is almost totally undifferentiated. Chasing the long tail with low-quality content just won’t work because anyone can do it with AI.
High-quality content really matters. Let’s be honest, a small percentage of high-quality content really matters. Yes, even with the time and effort we put into the content we generate there is definitely an 80/20 (or maybe a 95/5) rule that means a relatively small number of best-performing content pieces dominate the results achieved. In fact, research by ahrefs shows that 90.63% of content online gets no traffic from Google.
Smart companies realise this. They know that they need to generate lots of high-quality content to find the gems, but when they do find the “golden” content piece, they will double-down on it. They’ll produce different versions and formats. If it’s a white paper, they will make a video, or a podcast, or an infographic, or an eBook, or… well you get the idea. We think that the most successful brands in 2023 will be those that admit that some of their content is OK, but a small percentage is magic and they invest a lot of time and effort in spreading that magic content through as many channels and formats as possible.
Microjourneys will Dominate Customer Journey Conversations
Unbelievably the concept of customer journeys is only just over 30 years old. We’ve moved a long way from simple funnel models, but the reality is that many organisations are completely unrealistic in their view of the customer journey. All too often we see brands with complex sales processes try to create a five-email nurture sequence to move a prospect through the entire customer journey. With 74.6% of B2B sales taking at least four months (according to CSO Insights), and many much longer, trying to have one campaign for the whole customer journey is just not effective.
Driven by the need to show results, organisations will realise that the best way to think of the customer journey is in segments, or microjourneys. Campaigns might not be able to move someone all the way along a customer journey, but they can be incredibly effective in moving prospects a couple of steps forward. This is particularly true of marketing automation. By building campaigns around microjourneys and then linking the campaigns together, the leading B2B companies will create a powerful but manageable marketing machine.
Publishers and Influencers in 2023
We’ve grouped together publishers and influencers because it is so hard to tell them apart today, other than by looking at the business model. This is particularly true of B2B, where many of the leading influencers online are also editors working for the old-school publishers.
B2B Trade Media Battles on
You’ve got to feel sorry for B2B publishers. Only 25 years ago they simply needed to send out paper magazines. The readers wanted those printed titles because there were few alternative channels to get the information they needed to do their jobs. Marketers wanted to advertise because there were no other channels that had such cost-effective reach and great engagement.
And then the internet changed everything.
Fortunately for publishers, they still provide a service of aggregating news, technical information and new product launches that are needed by readers. The big tech services like Google and LinkedIn aren’t quite there yet and don’t have the same level of product. So B2B publishers will continue to struggle on.
But there is a real concern for the long term. We reviewed online advertising pricing for leading electronics trade media over the last five years. Most prices remained unchanged. Some had even fallen. With traffic to trade media roughly flat over that period, the revenue from display advertising is clearly falling in real terms: and that’s before you consider things like the use of ad blockers. So although they will struggle on, it’s not getting any easier for trade media to succeed (but perhaps with the real-term fall in costs they are becoming a more compelling channel).
Trade Publications Need to Get into Video
Perhaps an unsurprising prediction, but it’s worth saying that trade publications will need to increase their video content in 2023. Many have been slow to adopt video, but the expectations of readers is driven by what they see in their personal lives. This also presents a huge opportunity for brands to help publishers by generating video content.
One argument we often hear is that video is for young people. Maybe younger people are even more engaged with video than an older demographic, but even if this is the case it doesn’t mean an audience of business leaders doesn’t want video. In fact, research by Forbes showed that 60% of executives would rather watch a video than read text: a clear indication that you can’t use the youth excuse to avoid creating video content.
B2B Influencers in 2023
B2B is different from B2C, particularly when it comes to the impact of influencers. More importantly, different B2B markets have very different influencer landscapes. In some – for example marketing – you have mega-influencers like Seth Godin, Rand Fishkin and Neil Patel. IT security is another market where influencers can have large followings and drive the way the industry thinks. In others, such as electronics engineering, the larger influencers have modest followings and most are journalists or employed by suppliers.
In both B2B and B2C, however, micro-influencers and non-influencers, generally defined by having 1000 to 50000 and 100 to 5000 followers respectively, are extremely important. These following numbers are really consumer numbers and with content that is at the low end of these bands the influencer they exert is important.
Even in electronics, where engineers are not renowned for being social animals, nano-influencers and micro-influencers are emerging. We think that the future for social media in many B2B markets will be driven by these influencers with much more focussed audiences. The good news is that in consumer sectors, followers are more engaged with micro-influencers having 60% greater engagement rate than macro-influencers.
Paid Social Cements its Position in the 2023 B2B Marketing Mix
If we are honest, we’re hoping that you are wondering why we don’t see paid social as already part of the B2B marketing mix, but a surprising number of companies are only just beginning to benefit from paid social campaigns. The Content Marketing Institute found that 17% of B2B brands are not using social media ads or promoted posts.
LinkedIn is the obvious go-to platform for many due to the ability to target by demographics and firmographics, but we’ve also seen very effective campaigns on mainstream platforms from Facebook to TikTok. In particular, they can deliver very cost-effective retargeting campaigns, although you need to deliver content that is appropriate to the platform: to quote one insightful ex-client, “People go to Facebook to waste their time and brands should respect their wishes.”
AI and Tools
At the end of 2022, ChatGPT sent the world into a spin. Tools have been transforming marketing over recent years: 25 years ago many companies were not sending any marketing emails and today enterprises are paying $1M or more for a marketing automation platform to do this. AI is clearly going to have a massive impact on the features and capabilities of tools, almost certainly moving some marketing spend from people to technology.
Although we’re heavily involved in trialling and using new tools, it’s not clear that trailblazing is always the right approach. Being a “fast follower” is often a better strategy. Although some people are outsourcing work from writing Google Ads to creating LinkedIn posts to ChatGPT, the resultant quality is often not fabulous. Our advice is to test, test, test.
For example, we’ve used AI-generated content on our website but are still also writing content manually (this post is 100% human-generated in case you were wondering). Currently, the AI-generated content is doing OK, but there is a clear difference: the time readers spend on a computer-generated page is shorter than those written by people. The AI-generated content will improve, so in the near term the machines are not yet ready to take over and our experiments mean we will know exactly when we need to switch to synthetic writers.
Better Tools Drive more Focus on Strategy
Many marketing teams have been pressured to do more in less time, which can often result in strategy not getting the attention it deserves. Marketers are so focussed on creating and sending emails to the various divisions competing for attention that they don’t have enough time to think at a higher level.
We believe that as tools become better, the marketing teams will get the time they need to develop effective communication and marketing strategies. This is really important: we think that the quality and effectiveness of campaigns will increase because they are underpinned by better strategic thinking. So even if your new tool just saves time and doesn’t really improve quality, you should start seeing your results improve, provided that you use the time you save to build the foundation for better campaigns.
2023 will see More Channels per Campaign
The improvement in marketing technology will also drive an increase in the number of channels per campaign. In B2B, particularly for smaller campaigns (and many B2B campaigns are small), often only a small number of channels are used. This is not always a good idea: reaching the audience through multiple channels almost always makes campaigns more effective.
The good news is that not only will marketing technology free up time to allow teams to run multi-channel promotions, but the tools themselves will also add functionality that enables them to do a lot of the heavy lifting that’s needed to repurpose from one channel to another. Thinking multi-channel will become the norm, even for the smallest campaigns.
Personalisation Gets Real in 2023
Simply putting the recipient’s name at the start of an email isn’t really personalisation. Your prospects will expect relevant information that is tailored to their role, company and challenges. We know how effective personalisation can be: Everguage found that 86% of marketers got a measurable lift in business results when they personalised their campaigns.
The good news is that everything is coming together to allow greater personalisation. We collect more data about our contacts, prospects and customers than ever before. Marketing technology is providing new capabilities to make personalisation even easier. And tools will free up time to allow teams to build strategies around personalisation and implement them across campaigns.
We believe that the move to more personalisation will drive the leading marketing teams to invest even more in targeting their materials to the audience, and that those that lag behind will see the performance of generic campaigns fall. A part of this will be even more focus on ABM, with greater even greater attention paid to personalising content for the most important companies.
Marketing Legislation and Rules Become More Challenging
Although GDPR was perhaps the most challenging law for marketers in recent years, we will continue to see legislation affect the work we do. There could be major challenges around the legitimacy of AI-generated content with cases already making their way through the legal process to determine if software really can take a copyrighted picture and use it to make another image, and similar cases around the use of text are likely to follow. We also see companies effectively making the rules: the delayed but inevitable elimination of the third-party cookie is a good example.
Fear of Legislation Drives Focus on Owning Data
We believe that smart companies will move to increase the amount of first-party data that they own, primarily because they worry that other data sources will become harder and harder to use. This could be counter intuitive as owning data also presents compliance challenges, but in the long term it seems clear that the availability of third-party data will diminish.
We might see opportunities for publishers whose second-party data is not under attack in the same way that Google or Facebook are being challenged. But it is really hard for publishers to gather data and obtain consent, so we expect brands to decide they have to invest in first-party data and spend the time it takes to navigate the issues around following the rules and regulations.
Brands will have to work hard to grow their databases: the ease of opting out and the pressure on inboxes make any contact vulnerable to opting-out. Many contacts might opt-in for a while, then opt-out, only to opt-in later provided that the brand is running outbound campaigns that capture their attention at the right time. A good strategy and a clear value proposition are going to be crucial to maximise both contact acquisition and retention in 2023.
Conclusion: A Challenging 2023 for B2B Marketing
We’d love to know what you think about our predictions and whether you have any of your own. In 2023 we believe that automation and tools will help free up time, but to take advantage of new technology marketers must keep up-to-date. We also think that many brands will level-up their marketing, whether that is through better personalisation, more thoughtful strategy or simply building their knowledge through data. The landscape will be more challenging and you’ll have to work harder to cut through the noise.
We also think that 2023 is going to be exciting, particularly as our customers and influencers rely less on interactions with sales and consume more marketing content when making decisions. Communications and marketing have never been so important to B2B companies as they are today, and we’re looking forward to the challenge and making the biggest possible impact on our client's business goals.
Marketing is Replacing Sales in B2B
“It is now accepted that most B2B buyers prefer a seller-free experience, increasingly relying on digital interactions to research solutions, evaluate suppliers and complete a purchase,” Chief Sales Officer Leadership Vision 2023 – Gartner.
It has been obvious for some time that B2B customers are increasingly seeking information themselves, rather than involving a sales person, and contacting potential suppliers later in their customer journey. Gartner is one of the analyst companies that has highlighted this trend, and their excellent report, Chief Sales Officer Leadership Vision 2023, highlights the declining influencer of the sales person in B2B transactions.
It's likely that the pandemic accelerated this trend. Buyers were unable to meet with their reps and this provided a gentle push for them to do more self-directed research. But this isn’t a fad that will reverse in a few years: it’s clear that many buyers feel that digital-led engagements are not only more enjoyable, but are much more efficient and effective.
What Gartner Says about Marketing and Sales
In the report, which follows on from other Gartner research showing that an increasing proportion of the customer journey is completed before a salesperson is contacted, the trend towards digital commerce is clearly described. The data show that 72% of B2B sales are transacted digitally, with 83% of B2B buyers saying that they prefer this approach. Clearly the move to digital and away from traditional rep-led sales will continue to grow.
A further challenge is cost: Gartner identifies that sales salaries are increasing. So we have the situation where vendors are having to spend more on a resource (salespeople) who are not valued highly by their customers.
Digital isn’t Perfect
Interestingly Gartner identifies a problem with digital engagement: buyers often tend to make ill-informed choices. In fact, they’re 22% more likely to regret a digital commerce than a traditional rep-led purchase. It’s clear that one of the challenges that must be overcome is the availability of more high-quality and engaging content that helps the buyer avoid making a bad choice.
The Importance of Marketing
Ultimately the digital content consumed by buyers in their journey to purchase is generated by the marketing team or product marketing. And it’s clear that the content needs an improvement in quality as well as an increase in quantity.
What this Means to Marketers
At a high level, this is good news for marketers. We are having a greater influence on the buying decisions of B2B companies than ever before, and are responsible for the engagement of potential prospects through an ever-increase proportion of the customer journey. Companies need marketers more than ever as the sales/marketing balance tips away from the sales teams.
But with this increased opportunity comes greater responsibility. Not only do we need to deliver digital content and campaigns that helps lead customers through the purchase process, we need to improve the quality and utility of our content. Our content simply isn’t good enough to ensure buyers make the right decision: the higher proportion of digital buyers regretting a purchase shows we need to do more to help them make the right decision.
Educating the customer and providing useful, actionable content has been a key element of marketing for many years. But clearly marketers need to do better: the content isn’t always good enough! Understanding customers, their pain points, needs and drivers is critical to being able to produce the type of content that will not only secure the first purchase, but get customers coming back for more because they made the right decision.
There are approaches that can help. The frameworks provided by persona definition and customer journey analysis should be key elements of any good campaign today, and if used properly will enable you to deliver more useful content. At Napier we go one step further: you will often catch us talking to sales teams to gain more insight into the sales process.
Understanding how the rep-led sales process works are fundamental if you are to respond to the move to digital-led engagements. Because of the personal interaction, sales people get immediate and constant feedback from customers on how well they are doing. This makes the sales team’s knowledge invaluable to any modern marketer.
The Future of Marketing
As we look to the future, it’s clear the trend away from rep-led sales towards self-serve digital will continue to grow. Companies that succeed will be those that invest more in marketing and content generation, so they can hold the virtual hands of their customers and prospects, leading them to make the right choice.
We will also see sales and marketing come even closer together. We’re not predicting the end of the sales person, but smart companies will ensure that sales and marketing cooperate more, building a digital customer journey that is as effective as the best rep-led sales process. In addition to helping to build better self-serve journeys, there will always be a need for some human-to-human contact in many sales, particularly very high value or high perceived risk products and services. Sales people are not going to disappear, although it wouldn’t be surprising if some decide that a move into marketing would help their career!
We’d strongly recommend you download and read the Gartner research. The data presented paints a compelling picture of how buyers are operating in the B2B sector, and show that you need to ensure marketing steps up to the bigger role it is now playing.
Why a LinkedIn Pod isn’t the Solution to Extending Your Reach on Social Media
Over the last couple of months, you might have seen some of my posts get a large number of likes or comments, and will have seen me liking and putting bland comments on some posts that really don’t interest me. I need to confess. I’ve been experimenting with membership of a LinkedIn pod.
What is a LinkedIn Pod?
A LinkedIn pod, or engagement pod, is a group of people who agree to like and/or comment on each other’s posts. The idea is that LinkedIn will tend to favour posts with more engagement, so if you get more likes and comments, then your posts will perform better. Pods can be automated or manual, and the idea is that membership will ultimately drive a greater reach for your posts.
For this experiment, I signed up with Lempod, and joined a couple of B2B marketing pods (one was US and the other was UK-focussed).
What are the downsides of LinkedIn Pods?
In terms of getting likes and comments, there really are few downsides. You do get banal comments from automated engagement pods as they are machine generated and therefore not specific to your post. If you are happy with lots of comments like “Great post”, you’ll probably not worry about this, but I felt that the banal comments were a drawback.
One thing that will happen, particularly with automated pods, is that you lose your ability to decide which posts you like. So an algorithm will start clicking the like button for you on other people’s posts, which may not be the type of content you want to share with your network. I certainly got a couple of questions about the posts I was liking by people in my network. If my network questions why I am liking content (which then means it appears in their feed) then I think that’s a problem.
Is there a Benefit to LinkedIn Pod Membership?
We all have egos, and I must admit that seeing 10x the likes and a stream of comments attached to my posts definitely massaged my ego! It feels good, even though you know it’s fake.
But the goal of becoming a LinkedIn pod member is to increase reach. Did my posts get more views because of my pod membership?
Initially, I looked and was pleased to see a small uplift in impressions. That’s good – it must be working! But a deeper inspection simply showed that my additional audience could be almost completely attributed to the other members of the pod who interacted with my post. Actually, the system automatically generated the interaction, so realistically pod membership did nothing to increase the real reach of my posts.
To make things worse, it’s also much harder to work out whether a post engaged your audience or not, as the engagement pod interactions can swamp real engagement. Losing this feedback means you could easily drift towards writing less engaging posts.
Why Don’t Pods Work?
LinkedIn has claimed it can detect pod activity and will ignore it when ranking posts. My experience is that the system does this very effectively. It’s not clear how it identifies pod likes and comments, although I suspect that one of the issues might be dwell time. The LinkedIn algorithm uses the time that viewers spend looking at a post as one of the primary indicators of engagement, and it’s likely that automated systems don’t generate this dwell time.
The good news, however, is that none of my posts appeared to be penalised for being hyped up by the pod. As I mentioned before it was impossible to see any significant change in views, other than the “views” from the pod.
Are Engagement Pods a Bad Idea?
I guess this is a difficult question. For me, they were not a great experience: no real increase in reach and the downside of losing control of the posts with which I engage. Basically no benefit, other than a slight ego boost, and it left me feeling a little dirty. So I’d stick with the “white hat” techniques in Kevin’s post about LinkedIn tips and tricks.
It is important to remember that some people claim that LinkedIn pods are “the secret to going viral” on the platform. Clearly, they had a different experience.
Overall I’d say that the experiment showed that automated pods are not a good idea. If you have the time, however, then agreeing to like, comment on and share the posts among a group of friends is probably a great idea. You’ll be able to control what posts you engage with, you’ll write and receive genuine comments and there will be significant dwell time generated. Anyone fancy forming a LinkedIn engagement pod like that?
EETech Launches Data Insights: Genius or Missed Opportunity?
EETech has launched a product called Data Insights. Put simply, the product uses information gathered on the EETech website to identify users coming to a supplier’s site. The technology provides information including company, geo, and business unit.
Now this is not that different to the many other systems that use data such as IP address to identify companies visiting to your site. We love CANDDi, and feel it’s the best of the bunch, but there are several other suppliers available. If you’re in marketing, you’ve almost certainly had a call from one of them. But Data Insights are a little different. You might also be using one of the platforms that has visitor ID as a part of their functionality – Demandbase is a good example.
Is Data Insights Genius?
The first thing is that the platform will use interactions on the EETech site to identify visitors. This potentially means that they might have a better database of electronics engineers than some of the other companies in this space. With WFH, it’s probably reasonable to assume they have much better understanding of who is an engineer, and that’s definitely clever.
The platform also gives a good indication of what interests those users. This means you can find out the product interests, industries, top content, and suppliers (if you are a channel partner) that get the most engagement from certain companies.
The benefits are clear, although if you have an alternative, it will probably be hard to justify the cost of the platform.
Is the EETech Platform a Missed Opportunity?
It’s really good to see a publisher innovating. But I’m not quite sure it’s a genius move. At least, not yet.
The problem is knowing what to do with the information that a certain company has started to look at a particular category of products. It’s way beyond the creepy line to call up your contacts and say, “we know someone has been looking at our site”. Although it’s useful information, it can be hard to take action on the information. In fact, you’ll probably end up relying on the retargeting that you run through Google, and that doesn’t need this specific data. (You do run retargeting ads, don’t you?).
The frustrating thing is that EETech has the capability to do something. It could serve your ads on their publications to anyone from a company that shows increased interest in your products. It could fire off emails to those contacts. But it doesn’t. Yet.
I talked to clients about the product, and they pointed out that there isn’t anything new in the product itself. With no automated interface to adverts or emails, and no link between the content viewed on the EETech website and your website, it’s hard to use the data you get. Yes, you could run email campaigns to those companies, and yes you could target them with ABM ads, but it’s all going to be manual.
Why Doesn’t EETech Offer Automated Marketing?
Surely this is an easy decision: if someone is interested in a product, I’d pay a lot more to advertise to them than I would for untargeted display ads. A lot more: maybe 10x.
But do the maths. Let’s assume that I have 20 companies showing interest in products on my website, paying 10x CPMs for those companies isn’t necessarily a good deal for the publisher.
Firstly it’s likely I’ve picked the 20 biggest companies. These are the companies that everyone wants to target. If I sell automotive semiconductors, I want to target Bosch and Continental. In fact, I’d probably pay more to target them whether they are in market for products or not looking. Additionally, if a company is in-market, they will probably hit the websites of several suppliers, all of whom might be using data insights. So there would be a bunfight over advertising to the most valuable companies (and this would mean that anyone buying ads not targeted to companies will suddenly have a lower-quality audience).
The same applies to emails: managing email limits when multiple advertisers are triggering behaviour-driven campaigns is going to be hard. And if it’s popular, it’s going to take some of the best prospects out of the general database because they’ll be sold – at a higher price – to company-targeted campaigns. Let’s be honest, there are still publishers that only want to sell mailings to their entire database, so we have a long way to go before publishers really are able to offer micro-targeted campaigns.
Even if the availability problem could be overcome, there is an integration problem. Most publishers (including EETech) use DoubleClick to serve ads: that allows targeting based upon domain, but you need to use Google’s domain lookup, which will be very different from the data held by EETech that identifies the company at which each visitor works. You’ll basically lose the value of EETech’s bespoke data.
Would I Use Data Insights?
Today this is not a simple question. If I had a website in the electronics sector and didn’t have a tool that identifies anonymous visitors by company, then I’d definitely want a solution. We’ve not benchmarked the performance of EETech Data Insights vs other tools, but we’d guess it offers a higher match rate. So depending on traffic, it could offer a good solution (note that EETech’s solution is definitely not as cheap as many of the other IP lookup tools).
If I had an existing solution, the answer is harder. Something like Demandbase offers the potential to advertise to the companies visiting the website and to automate this process. That’s definitely a step ahead of the current Data Insights product, so it would be pretty hard to justify unless I found that Data Insights did a much better job of identifying visitors.
The good news is that it’s easy (and free) to benchmark the tool. I suspect results may vary, so taking EETech up on their trial must be a no brainer because you might a company that finds the tool to be pure magic.
In the long term, however, Data Insights really needs to be able to automatically trigger email and advertising campaigns through the EETech/All About Circuits database. If they can make the technology and the economics work, then the product would be compelling. We’ll be watching and let you know about the developments as they emerge.
How to Crush Your First Paid LinkedIn Campaign
We deliver a wide range of different marketing tactics, and I often feel that paid LinkedIn campaigns are massively underrated. In certain circumstances they can offer a great RoI, are low-cost and quick to set up. They really do come into their own if you know which companies and who within those companies you want to target.
A recent example is a consultancy business that helps large organisations improve user experience. They know the markets and have a list of the names of the companies they really want to work with. They also have a good idea that in large companies the person they need to talk to will be the head of customer experience or the CMO, and understand that there will be different job titles that matter in smaller prospects.
This is a perfect setup for a paid LinkedIn campaign. All they need to do is execute and the leads should come rolling in…
If only it was that simple!
Here’s what I told them they needed to consider to crush this first paid LinkedIn campaign.
How do I find My Audience?
Defining the audience is obviously critical to ensuring a good campaign. The best campaign in the world will fail if shown to the wrong people. LinkedIn, like any advertising platform, would love you to spend as much money as possible so encourages larger audiences. Many of our clients, however, have very specific people they want to reach and can often target a number of people that is close to the minimum audience allowed by the platform.
It is the case that as you add more filters to an audience, the price for the ads will increase. You’ll have to bid more to target an audience more precisely. But in general, the extra cost is almost always worth it to get the people you want, rather than many far less engaged leads.
Really understanding who you want to reach can reduce costs. The “obvious” targets, particularly the C-suite, will also incur a premium price. In the example above, the head of customer experience is likely to be cheaper to reach than the CMO, showing more precise job titles will not only enhance lead quality, but also cut your spend.
We also have a few recommendations that we have found help to improve the performance of most B2B campaigns on LinkedIn:
- Use permanent location (don't use recent). If you want to target someone in a particular country, target someone who is there permanently, not someone who passed through on holiday.
- Identify specific companies if you have a list. If you really can’t put together a list of target companies, when identifying a market always use company size as there are a lot of micro businesses on LinkedIn.
- Job titles are better than job functions (they're more expensive in terms of CPC but we think it's worth paying slightly more to be more precise).
- Do not enable audience expansion. This allows LinkedIn to guess who might be like your audience and show them ads. In B2B marketing where audience definition really matters, you are in a far better position to define the audience than the system.
- Do not tick the box to enable the LinkedIn network - this is usually poorer quality. There are exceptions to this: for example, if you have a very small, very high-value audience then you might choose to invest the money in ads on the network. But in general, try to spend your budget on the LinkedIn platform itself.
Two Campaigns are Better than One
Often it makes sense to run multiple campaigns. Targeting different sectors of your audience separately not only allows you to optimise the messaging for each segment, but also provides useful information about who is responding and who isn’t engaged.
In our example, it would make sense to run separate LinkedIn campaigns for the CMO and Head of Customer Experience. If one of these audiences performs better than the other, then it’s easy to move your budget to the one that is producing the leads that will generate the best RoI.
Note that in the language of LinkedIn a campaign is a set of ads targeting a specific audience, so you might have multiple LinkedIn campaigns as part of what your marketing team considers a campaign.
Click the Demographics Button
My favourite feature on LinkedIn Ads. In all the levels you can view your LinkedIn Ads (campaign, campaign group and account) there is a button on the screen labelled Demographics. Want to know the job titles that are seeing the ad? Click the button. Want to know the clicks by job title? Click the button. This amazing button lets you ensure that the right people are seeing your ads, and understand more about who is engaging.
The Demographics button will segment your advert performance by job function, job title, company, company industry, seniority, company size, location, country/region and county. Trust me, every time you click this button you will learn something new about what’s working and what’s not for your accounts!
What format to use?
There are numerous different advert formats available on LinkedIn. My first port of call would generally be the helpfully named “Lead Gen Forms”. This is a great innovation from LinkedIn because the form is hosted on the platform and are produced with a simple click on sponsored content by the prospect. No need for a landing page or anything on your website. And even better, LinkedIn pre-fills the form to help improve conversion rates.
If you’re looking to make these forms really perform, it’s important to get the content offer right. What works varies from one industry to another, so don’t just think of the obvious white paper or eBook. Testing different content offers is always a good idea: in some markets video case studies are the thing that breaks down any resistance to sharing contact details.
If you’re offering an eBook or white paper, remember that the thing that will determine whether your prospect presses submit on the form is the title. They can’t know what’s inside the content until they download it, so experiment with packaging the same content with different titles to see what resonates with your audience.
Although the Lead Gen Form coupled with sponsored content is awesome, it’s not always the best approach. The LinkedIn Conversation Ads are delivering some great results for our clients. They appear right inside the inbox for your target audience and allow simple interaction that can “warm up” the contact to encourage them to engage with you.
Conversation Ads do require some thought to create the right journeys for the target audience (and frankly can be a bit cringy if you get it wrong), but when done right, they are a real marketing superpower. And, of course, they can link with Lead Gen Forms to allow you to capture data.
How Do I Bid?
The LinkedIn maximum delivery bid strategy works well, particularly for smaller audiences. It’s super-easy and we’ve never seen it go horribly wrong.
If you want to bid manually, our advice is to never bid the recommended amount. Generally starting with the lowest allowed bid (start at 1 in your currency and it will tell you the minimum bid) is a far better strategy. Once you have started a campaign at the minimum bid, you can experiment with higher bids to see if that makes a significant impact on the number of impressions and clicks you get. Generally, we find you’re increasing costs for a marginal improvement in performance.
Conclusion
Paid LinkedIn really does work. Get the audience and the offer right, and the cost per lead is very competitive. It’s also not complex to create and manage campaigns. To get the targeting right, however, you often end up with several small campaigns, rather than one large one (multiple campaigns are also good to allow you to compare results for different audiences). So make sure you have sufficient time and expertise to analyse and optimise the campaigns, or perhaps give an agency like Napier a call.
The Data Parties
What’s the difference between first, second and third-party data?
There is a lot of news around moves to limit the use of “third-party data”, with many browsers preventing the use of third-party cookies for privacy reasons. But what is third-party data? And how do all these parties relate to cookies and online tracking? Here’s a brief explanation of the different terms.
Who are the Parties?
In the case of data, things are not quite as fun as they might sound. The parties are the people and organisations that are interacting. The parties involved are:
- The organisation running the website or marketing to customers and prospects
- The customers and prospects themselves
- Other organisations offering data
It’s important to understand that, although there are three categories of parties, they don’t map directly to first-, second-and third-party in the context of data.
The Difference between Cookies and Data
Technically, cookies are small files that are placed on a website visitors PC to allow tracking. The cookie itself doesn’t contain data about the person but identifies a particular browser that can then be associated with data held in another database.
First-Party Data
First-party data is information owned by the company doing the marketing that has been collected as a result of their relationship with the customer or prospect. A simple example would be data that has been collected from a registration form on the organisation’s website and fed into the marketing database or CRM. You can also include other information that is collected directly from the prospect or customer – for example, the website pages they have visited.
First-party cookies are simply cookies that are placed on the visitor’s computer by the website that is being visited. Note that for marketing automation systems, cookies are now all first-party cookies – i.e. the code runs from your website, even though the cookie information is held in a separate marketing automation tool.
Second-Party Data
Second-party data is information that is collected by someone else, but used directly by the marketing company: essentially, you’re getting access to someone else’s first-party data. For example, if you use a publisher’s email list, this is second-party data. You can also buy data to enrich your marketing database or CRM – for example, you might be using the Dunn & Bradstreet database to add firmographic data.
Second-party cookies don’t exist.
Third-Party Data
Third-party data is information that you use from other sources who didn’t directly collect the data themselves. So third-party data is generally acquired from data brokers or technology companies that aggregate data from a range of sources and then resell it.
As the companies providing third-party data are aggregating from several sources, quality can be a concern. Often the sources vary considerably in the accuracy and completeness of the data, and it’s also the case that it’s very difficult to be confident that the data was collected with consent. Third-party data is often the easiest to obtain, but frequently the lowest-quality data available.
Third-party cookies are cookies that are placed by a website or server that is different from the site being visited. A classic example of this is the Facebook “Like” button, which enabled visitors to a website to click an icon to “like” the content on Facebook. The code to place the button on the website also put a cookie on the visitors’ computers.
The Facebook Like button is a good example of non-monetary payment for third-party cookies: the website got an easy-to-deploy promotional tool that they could use, and Facebook was able to gather the browsing habits of its users when they were not surfing Facebook (creating more data about them that could be sold to advertisers).
A major concern about third-party data and cookies is whether there is consent from the subject. For example few web users knew that Facebook was tracking the websites they visited and using that data to enrich the information that was gathered on the Facebook platform.
The like button also illustrates the power of third-party cookies, with Facebook able to collect the browsing habits of their users across a huge percentage of the web. The volume of data that can be collected, and the ability to gain deep insight from such large amounts of data have resulted in a powerful backlash against third-party cookies. With browsers increasingly filtering out third-party cookies, there is a frantic search by the large tech companies to find new ways to gather information about internet users.
What Data Should I Use?
First-party data is almost always the most accurate: if you’ve thought about what information you need about customers and prospects, and built campaigns to collect that data, you should be in a good position. As you have complete control over first-party data, you can also ensure that consent and privacy are built-in to the collection process, and that compliance with regulations is therefore ensured.
But first-party data is limited. Typically you’ll have much more data about customers than prospects. And this is where second-and third-party data comes in. Ensuring you only use credible sources for your data is critical: not only will that help ensure you remain compliant with legislation, but it will also help guarantee quality and accuracy. Selecting the right data providers is, therefore, a critical part of any marketing team’s work.
When is a Conversion Not a Conversion?
Interesting news from Google, which have announced a move to "data-driven attribution". OK, that's a complex term for the first sentence of a blog post, so let's unpack what is going on...
What is Attribution?
Hopefully, you understand attribution: in this context, it's giving credit to the different marketing activities that resulted in achieving an objective (e.g. online purchase, conversion, etc.). Often the algorithms used are really simple - for example:
- Last click attribution: the thing that was clicked last (e.g. display advert, search ad, email) before the objective was achieved gets all the credit.
- First click attribution: the first thing that was clicked (well actually that you tracked the person clicking) gets all the credit.
These approaches obviously have potential problems. What if your email and advertising system are separate - both systems would claim all the credit. Of course, we also know that few activities are the "magic bullet" that causes you to achieve an objective with a particular prospect, and that marketing tactics work together over time. So more complex attribution approaches such as linear and time decay were added to try to better reflect multiple ads (or other activities) working together.
What is Data-Driven Attribution?
This is a tough question. We don't exactly know. Google describes the operation of data-driven attribution as:
"Data-driven attribution gives credit for conversions based on how people engage with your various ads and decide to become your customers."
This means that there is some algorithm tracking users and determining how much credit different activities should take for converting the prospect to a customer. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, Google isn't telling anyone how it works. It's also likely they will change the algorithm on a frequent basis.
We do understand the basics of data-driven attribution: put very simply Google looks at the different things in your marketing campaigns and determines how the probability of reaching the goal is impacted by seeing different adverts. In principle this should be a good thing.
What Will Happen With Data-Driven Attribution?
We do know this! You'll see credit for conversions (and conversion revenue if you track that) applied across all of your advertising. This could mean that Google decides to award some credit for conversions to ads that actually get no clicks. It's a little counter-intuitive but does make sense: seeing an advert could make someone more likely to convert on a future advert, even if they don't click.
One thing we won't see is Google giving any credit to any marketing activity outside of their advertising domain. So don't expect to see your adverts on trade publication websites, email marketing or PR credited. You'll only see attribution assigned to things Google sells to you.
Why is Data-Driven Attribution a Concern?
In theory this should be a good thing. We are getting a much better model of what causes a person to convert and therefore we should be able to better optimise our ads. But the reality is that when you look at B2B PPC advertising, you're often trying to reach a very small and specific audience. So it's easy to get things wrong because probability gets in the way. The reality is that you need a significant amount of data to make a model like this work, and if you are targeting CEOs of fortune 1000 electronics companies (and doing it well), you might not get sufficient data. The other problem is that in small samples external factors can skew the results: if the small number of CEOs of Fortune 1000 electronics companies who buy our product are big users of YouTube, data-driven attribution might give credit to a YouTube ad, even if the ad is ineffective.
Just to be clear, as numbers targeted get larger, the issues around data become less challenging. For many B2B technology companies, however, it may not be possible to get enough data to really understand whether the advert should get credit or not for the conversion. We see this all the time with clients who have one ad in an A/B test out-performing another at the start of the campaign. As the numbers build up, the initial indication that the ad was better is proved wrong, and we realise that it was just randomness skewing the early results.
Oh and we're going to have to just trust Google on its attribution. But they would never implement something to make their advertising products look like they were performing better than they were... would they?
What's the Solution?
As an engineer, my go-to solution has to be maths. In this case, a good understanding of probability and statistics is going to be your best friend. No AI can overcome the laws of mathematics, and it's impossible to know whether a result is caused by randomness. So it's important to understand there will be limits to how well the model can work with smaller data sets.
If you know how probability works, and understand sample sizes, however, you'll be able to navigate the new approach and hopefully benefit from the AI Google has deployed. If not, I'd recommend playing with something like our AB test calculator to find out how probability means that sometimes the ad with the better click-through rate isn't necessarily bad, but pure chance has made it seem as if it is.
More Information
Check out the following for more information
- Google information about attribution models
- Google article on data-driven attribution
- Search Engine Land article about the Google announcement
Why Your Improving Open Rates Might Not Be Good News
Anyone seen email open rates increase? Thinking you're an email genius? Well, it might not be such good news.
On September 20th, Apple rolled out mail privacy protection, a new feature that limits the ability of email marketers to track when users open emails. Apple described it as:
"In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location."
Almost any marketing email system uses tracking pixels to detect opens. These are single-pixel images that do nothing to change the look or layout of the email, but can be used to track when someone opens because each one has a URL unique to each recipient. So when someone opens an email (which actually means asks the email reader to display images), the tracking pixel URL is called and you know that this recipient has opened the email. You can also get other information, including location, that gives you more data about where the email was opened. This was great, and has worked well for about 28 years (according to the cool team at Groundhogg, the first time a tracking pixel was used was 1993). Now Apple has stopped this approach from working.
What has Apple Done to Tracking Pixels?
The new mail privacy protection doesn't load the pixel when someone reads an email. What happens is that the Apple servers will download all images for emails. If you then view that email in Apple mail, the images come from the Apple server and not from the server used to track the email opens. This will do two things:
- All emails sent to Apple Mail users with the privacy protection system activated will show as having opened the email. This is because the server will download the tracking pixel automatically
- Even if the email is opened by the recipient, you will not know when they did it, nor where they opened it, because all the information you will have is when the Apple server opened the email (and where that server was).
So this is not only destroying the metadata you got from email tracking pixels, it will artificially increase the open rate as every email sent to an Apple Mail account with the feature enabled will show as an open.
What Should I Do About This?
Firstly don't believe email open rates! They will go up, depending on the proportion of Apple Mail users (think most of the people who read your emails on an iPhone or iPad) in your database. So the open rate isn't going to be that helpful.
Some people might decide to move to monitoring click rates, but there is also a problem with clicks: malware detection bots are clicking on the emails to check that the links don't route through to anything that could be a security risk. We flagged this as an increasing problem about a year ago, and it's not going to go away.
Ultimately the best thing to do is to think more about your business goals. What are you trying to actually achieve with the emails you are sending? If you want someone to click through to learn about a product on the web, then are they visiting the pages you want them to see and spending sufficient time? If you want to generate leads, did you get valid form-fills? Or if you want online sales, measure the value of the sales.
It's becoming very clear that privacy measures are only going to increase. In some ways, this is bad because we're losing some of the fabulous metrics that are so easy to collect around digital marketing. However, I think it's a good thing. It's about time we moved away from dated digital metrics towards more sophisticated measures that determine whether our marketing activities actually made an impact on the organisation.
Ad Blocking: How Does it Work and What Should Publishers do About it?
If you’re advertising online or in advertising-funded publishing, you need to know about ad blocking. In either case, this technology will potentially reduce the number of times advertising is seen, either making your campaign less effective or reducing your advertising income.
This blog post provides a primer that explains the technology and how publishers are fighting back against ad blocking. When you’ve read this, you’ll have a good understanding of the technology and the issues surrounding ad blocking.
What is Ad Blocking?
Ad blocking is a technique that removes adverts from a web page. It’s that simple, and people have developed other similar applications, including several that replace images. One example is a Chrome extension that replaces all images on a page with photos of Chuck Norris.
Why do People Block Ads?
There are a couple of reasons why people choose to block adverts: either they “don’t like ads” or they are frustrated with the time to render advertising-heavy websites. There is a huge moral debate about whether it’s ethical to access content that’s advertising funded with an ad blocker, and many publishers deploy anti ad block technology to prevent it.
Some people dislike ads because they don’t like being tracked, although ad blockers don’t necessarily block all tracking, only the adverts that are the result of tracking.
Why are Publishers so Upset?
Ad blocking is a serious threat to many publishers’ business models, particularly in B2B. Traditionally B2B magazines were typically funded by advertising, with companies keen to pay to use them to get their messages over as they knew who was receiving the magazine. This “controlled circulation” approach meant that B2B magazines were incredibly effective at getting adverts in front of the people that the advertisers wanted to reach (provided that the readers opened and read the magazine).
Today many B2B publications work on the same principle, with the audience defined by the content. The logic is that content talking about interrupt models of a microcontroller is likely to attract engineers designing with those products. Generating the level of content that is going to attract engineers, however, is difficult and requires skilled and knowledgeable journalists. And, of course, these journalists cost money.
So the position of publishers is pretty clear: although they don’t like to say this in public, they often view ad blocking as a form of stealing content, as the work of the journalists is being taken by people who are not paying because they don’t see the adverts.
Why Does My Ad Blocker Still Show Adverts?
Many ad blocking products participate in the Acceptable Ads programme, which defines guidelines as to what adverts should be shown. Some ad blockers will give you the option to enable or disable acceptable adverts.
The Acceptable Ads programme is not without controversy. Started by AdBlock Plus, the programme enables anyone whose adverts meet the criteria for acceptability to be whitelisted, but does charge the biggest advertisers for participation. Large advertisers (defined as companies that would receive 10 million impressions or more by whitelisting) are charged and pay 30% of the revenue they realise through whitelisting.
How Does an Ad Blocker Recognise an Advert?
The technology can have several ways to recognise an advert, which are referred to as filter rules. One of the most popular lists of filters is EasyList, which holds a large list of strings of text (for example “&trackingserver=”). If the ad blocker sees the string of text, then the code that includes the text is not executed, preventing adverts being displayed as well as website tracking.
Note that EasyList doesn’t stop all tracking, although the organisation does have a database of text that indicates tracking that ad blockers can used, called EasyPrivacy. There is the EasyList Cookie List that blocks all cookie banners, including the GDPR notifications that no website owner wants on their site but are forced to include because of European law.
A more comprehensive guide to ad blocking techniques is giving in the Wikipedia Ad blocking article.
How Does the Ad Blocker Stop the Advert from being Displayed?
To block the advert, the blocker simply changes the code used for the website. Normally a web page is displayed by your browser simply running through the code. Ad blockers are browser extensions, which lets them change the code before it is processed by the browser, meaning that they can detect and remove adverts and other content.
Perhaps the simplest example of how the code is changed is some websites use data:image/png; (an HTML function that doesn’t result in an HTML call that can be blocked). Ad blockers, however, simply add some CSS code that hides anything on the page displayed using this technique. Obviously, this can block elements that are not adverts, but ad blocking technology isn’t very subtle.
Dealing with Ad Blocking
There is an arms race between users and publishers over ad blocking. Realistically publishers have a limited number of options:
- They can simply accept ad blocking and the related fall in revenue. For some B2B publishers this might be the best strategy because many companies will not allow users to deploy their own software (including ad blocking) on their PCs.
- Publishers can use the ad networks that are whitelisted by the ad blockers. Although most systems allow users to ignore the Acceptable Ads, frequently users are happy to allow them and therefore this is one solution. Obviously, there is the tax on the large ad networks to participate in Acceptable ads that will inevitably be passed on to the publisher.
- They can beg. Some publications ask people to whitelist the site, so they see adverts from that site. We’re not aware of any studies that show how effective this is, but we suspect that in the majority of cases the pleas to visitors’ better natures will be ignored.
- Bypassing ad blockers is possible, but it will be a game of whack-a-mole. Finding ways to confuse the blocking software, making it display the adverts is difficult and any techniques are likely to be soon detected and patched, so successes will be short lived.
- Publishers can refuse to allow visitors with ad blockers turned on to access their content. This seems to be a common trend today.
- Publishers can make their sites subscription-only, without any adverts. This presents a challenge as it is hard to get people to pay money for online content, although some newspapers have done this successfully and I suspect there will be some high-quality publications that take this approach.
Personally, I like publishers who are confident enough to say that their content is valuable. If visitors are going to block ads and therefore not pay for the content. I think it’s a positive move to stop them browsing the site. Although this approach won’t make friends with the ad blocking community, it doesn’t involve any loss of revenue (the ad blocking visitors would not generate revenue anyway) and gets the message across that people who access news sites should do something to pay for the journalists that create them.
One extension of this option is to offer ad-free versions of the site if you pay a subscription. There have been a few experiments around this approach, where you can choose to see adverts or simply pay money, but it doesn’t seem to have taken off strongly in B2B technology.
Detecting Ad Blockers
Typically, when a publisher detects the use of an ad blocker, they will either display a plea to turn it off, or simply block access to the content. Detecting that a website visitor has ad blocking can be tricky: remember that ad blockers work after the HTML code for the page has been downloaded by the browser, so the website doesn’t see any of the changes being made. There are, however, some rather clever approaches that have been taken.
One simple approach is using bait. For example, a publisher might place some code inside a file called ads.js, and then try to load it from the web page. It’s pretty clear that as ad blockers use text strings, they are very likely to block the loading of any file called ads.js! So, with the loading of the file blocked, the element included in the file is not added to the page.
The clever part, however, is that the publisher can place JavaScript code on their website that detects whether the elements saved in the ads.js file are actually on the page. If they are not, then clearly the visitor is using an ad blocker, and this code can trigger an action that blocks the content and instead displays a message.
There are a range of different solutions using the bait approach, including one that was developed by the IAB and is available as open-source code to publishers.
A relatively new technology is called ad reinsertion. The battle between publishers and ad blockers has now got to the point that publishers look to detect where an ad has been removed (which will typically create a blank space) and then they insert the ad from a server that is not going to be blocked. This uses JavaScript code that contains the page’s HTML. Some ad blockers are even offering deals where publishers can pay to enable the ad to be reinserted.
There are two approaches to ad reinsertion: ad recovery puts the original advert in the empty space while ad replacement puts another advert into the space. Many organisations, however, question whether ad reinsertion is the right way for publishers to deal with ad blocking.
A third approach to dealing with ad blockers is the use of native ads: what older marketers would call “advertorials”. This simply means placing the promotion of the product or service inside an article. Native ads have been controversial as many publishers have not been completely open about when content is editorial, and when the publication is paid to carry it. It does, however, represent a way to deliver paid-for content that is not an advert as such and therefore won’t be blocked.
The Future of Online Advertising
I’d love to say that we have all the answers to the future of online advertising, but the reality is that no one really knows what will happen. In B2B marketing, however, there are a number of factors at play:
The cost of adverts in publications is very high compared with other platforms (e.g. search engine marketing or social media advertising). This suggests that there is real value in advertising in an online publication and therefore there will always be demand as it works. Publishers are also becoming more creative in how they generate money online, adding newsletters, email rental, webinars, lead generation programmes and other campaigns to their media packs.
Internet users and publishers will continue to battle in the ad blocking wars. Whether you side with users who say that the amount of advertising deployed is unacceptable and therefore ad blocking is justified, or the publishers who think that ad blockers steal their revenue, it’s likely that leadership in the arms race will swing from one side to another with no long-term winner.
Suppliers are moving towards more self-publishing, whether that is on a website, through marketing automation or with separate microsites, eBooks and other content. Customers value the technical competence of the authors of this content, but equally understand it has inherent bias and are much less trusting of self-published content than independent publications.
The large players in the online advertising market, particularly Google and Facebook will continue to try to monopolise the market. Although we frequently see stats saying that they are hoovering up most or all of the new money being spent online each year, it’s also clear that the money spent on display advertising with B2B publications is, in general, holding its own.
In the long term, I think we will end up with an equilibrium. There will be internet users who insist on using ad blockers, but equally many people will recognise the need to pay the journalists whose articles they love reading. I suspect we might see the less technically competent publications struggle to keep pace, but I’m pretty sure we will end up with a few subscription-based publications and a majority of online titles that are primarily advertising-funded. I certainly hope the advertising publications will continue: whatever your views on advertising, having high-quality content available to all engineers without the need for a cash payment has to be a good way to improve the knowledge and expertise of the engineering community.
Alternatives to Meaningless Marketing Metrics
Digital channels have enabled marketers to generate huge amounts of data, from number of followers to click-to-open rates. Although these metrics can be useful when analysing the performance of campaigns, they do not tell the whole story. Without context, many marketing metrics are meaningless, and frequently referred to as “vanity metrics”.
An Example of Meaningless Metrics
A great example would be one of our clients, who works in a specialist area where there are only a few thousand people globally who would be responsible for selecting their category of products. In this case, would having 50,000 followers be better than 40,000? It’s clear that not all of these followers are influential, so does more mean better? We need alternatives to these meaningless marketing metrics.
Return on Marketing Investment
The return on marketing investment (ROMI) is defined as the contribution to profit divided by the amount spent on the marketing campaign. Simple!
Although this feels like a good alternative to meaningless metrics, it can be very difficult to measure ROMI. In particular it’s hard to attribute sales or profit to a specific marketing activity as you rarely have a situation where it’s only the marketing that changes. For example, a campaign to launch a new product would typically be supported by sales training and incentives. It’s very difficult to separate the impact of the different types of investment.
Equally one marketing activity is unlikely to make all the different: typically, it’s the impact of many activities that ultimately causes someone to buy, particularly in a business-to-business environment with a long sales cycle. Discussing the challenges of attribution is beyond the scope of this blog post, so to learn more check out the Wikipedia article on marketing attribution.
The Metrics that CEOs Care About
Despite the many pretty presentations marketing departments produce based on the meaningless metrics described above, the reality is that the senior executives don’t take any notice of them. They care about financial metrics, for example Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Put simply, if it costs you less to acquire a customer as they are worth to you over their lifetime, then the marketing to get a new customer is worth doing. If it costs you more to acquire customers than they are worth, then you probably need to revisit your business model (although this often doesn’t apply to the over-hyped VC-funded start-up world).
Although financial metrics are great alternatives to meaningless marketing metrics, they don’t really help marketers. For example, when acquiring a customer, what activities have an impact? How much impact does each marketing tactic have? You simply can’t analyse your marketing performance with these high-level metrics.
AVE is a Meaningless Marketing Metric
If you talk to people about the measurement of PR, you’ll soon get on to the issue of advertising value equivalent (AVE). People try to measure what it would have cost to generate the same amount of “coverage” as the PR campaign by buying advertising instead. The logic is that if the PR campaign costs less than the value of the advertising, you’re getting a great deal.
This is just not true. Apart from the fact that the two are very different (and frequently the PR-types will multiply their value of coverage by a number they claim to represent the impact: I’ve seen anything from three to nine times used by other agencies), just because you got PR coverage, doesn’t mean that the publication would be the right one for advertising. Equally it’s almost impossible to judge AVE for PR that appears in places such as publication websites.
The amec Framework: An Alternative to Meaningless Metrics
One organisation that has made considerable progress in devising alternatives to meaningless metrics is the association for the measurement and evaluation of communications (amec). This organisation has built a framework for planning the evaluation of campaigns, and even has an online tool. The tool, however, only produces results that are as good as the inputs it receives, and it’s perfectly possible to generate a set of meaningless metrics by using the tool ineffectively. So, although the organisation made significant steps forward, it doesn’t have the full solution.
Business Thinking: The Alternative to Meaningless Marketing Metrics
The reality is that the alternative to using simplistic and meaningless metrics is thinking about what marketing is trying to achieve for the business. This needs marketers to consider a wide range of factors, from financial (such as LTV) to the customer journey or sales funnel.
Ultimately if you can show how you are moving prospects along the customer journey and driving them to become customers, then you can show value. To optimise each marketing tactic, you need to look at a small section of the journey, for example you might want to look at conversion rates for a landing page, but it’s critical you don’t forget the big picture. Increasing a landing page conversion rate only benefits the business if the additional contacts generated ultimately become profitable customers.
Being able to focus on a small aspect of your overall marketing activities and keep the big business picture in mind can be very difficult, but if you can do it then you are well on your way to finding your best alternative to meaningless marketing metrics.
Inbound 2019: ABM is Just Good Strategic Marketing with Personalisation
At Inbound I attended a session presented by Sigstr, a company that delivers email marketing by appending different footers to emails. We use one of their competitors to do exactly the same thing: please do ask if you want more information.
During the presentation, the speaker, Justin produced one of the wisest comments I’ve heard about ABM: “ABM is just good strategic marketing with personalisation”.
The presentation started off with some general “why you should do ABM” statistics. Although I think almost everyone has seen these stats, they are worth repeating because although we all know the benefits of ABM, not everyone is taking advantage.
- ABM outperforms all other marketing channels by 91%. Typically, 2% of leads convert.
- ABM increases win rate by 38%
- ABM delivers a 200% increase in revenue compared with other channels.
First Steps in ABM: One Target Account
Sigstr started by targeting a client they had previously lost, Salesforce. Their campaign was creative – they bought the URL sigstrlovessalesforce.com, built a simple one-page website and had Starbucks cards made with the URL on them. They sent the cards to 10 people they were targeting in Salesforce and also started putting footers on emails that went to Salesforce contacts. As the website was blocked from being indexed, they knew as soon as they saw traffic it must be a result of the campaign.
This experimental campaign taught them a lot, but sadly – despite the clever idea of creating a website specifically for this ABM campaign – they didn’t manage to win Salesforce back as a customer. Despite this they decided to expand the campaign to the next stage.
Growing ABM: 100 Target Accounts
The next step was to expand to 100 accounts, and this required the generation of a suitable target account list. This was perhaps the biggest problem, and required the following process:
- Create a clear ICP (ideal customer profile). Don’t build off previous customers only: look to the future too
- Choose accounts that have something in common - a common audience. It’s hard to build 100 different messages, but if audience is common then can use the same message.
- Sales and marketing finalise the selection
Rather than creating 100 websites, Sigstr built 100 landing pages on the standard template, having first built a spreadsheet to determine what goes where for each landing page to make the implementation as easy as possible. The most important thing for these pages was to make them feel highly personalised to each of the target companies.
Sigstr built a content matrix mapping the three personas and three industries targeted in the campaign to make it easier to determine what content was included on each page. Apparently, it was this content matrix that was one of the main factors in simplifying the development of so many different landing pages.
Sigstr’s team believed that there were only a few ways to reach accounts in an ABM campaign: targeted advertising, email, direct mail and phone/meeting. Although the Starbucks cards didn’t work in the first campaign, they chose direct mail and made boxes of “swag” to send to contacts in the target account. Initially they did this in house, but later on moved to a third-party provider, Sendoso.
The campaign did include advertising, email, phone calls and meetings. Interestingly, they highlighted phone as the least effective channel, mainly because of the difficulty in getting hold of people on the telephone. Meetings were the most effective as they had the highest value interaction.
SIgstr built a technology stack to deliver these campaigns, using the following vendors:
- Targeted advertising: Terminus, LinkedIn, DemandBase, Sense and RollWorks
- Emails: SalesLoft, Outreach and Sigstr (of course!)
- Direct Mail: Sendoso, PFL, Printfection and alyce
For this campaign they changed metrics that were monitored from cost per lead to cost per opportunity and cost per customer. Perhaps surprisingly one of the biggest problems with this was that it took longer than expected to secure the customer, even with the relatively short sales cycle of Sigstr. This meant that early on it was hard to see progress, and so the team actively sought out opportunities to celebrate success.
This campaign did result in opportunities in sales, and generated three key lessons that were used to inform the next campaign:
- Measure based on cost per opportunity or customer acquisition cost, rather than marketing metrics
- Get sales to care: if sales are not involved the campaign will not work
- Focusing on revenue as being the primary KPI
Expansion to 1000 ABM Accounts
The next stage in Sigstr’s ABM campaigns was to roll out to 1000 accounts. At this stage they needed to purchase a tool to create a scoring framework to select the accounts as discussions with sales would have taken too long for this many companies.
Accounts were also tiered, with more money being spent attracting tier 1 accounts than tier 2. If a second-tier account engaged with the campaign, however, then their priority was raised and so was the budget for that account. The picture below shows how they managed the criteria of their tiers:
Scaling up to a thousand accounts also made manual creation of customised landing pages impractical, so Sigstr deployed Drift to create the pages using a standard template. Interestingly, the campaign didn’t always root prospects to the Sigstr website. For SaaS services like Sigstr review sites are very important. So many people were directed to the Sigstr reviews on G2 Crowd.
Adverts were personalised with the target company’s name. The ABM campaign also ran during onboarding, with ads during the process and a request for review on G2 after the customer was up and running.
One of the most interesting insights about ABM was the difference Sigstr saw in the journeys different customers took. Although they tried to map out the ideal customer journey, real customers didn’t play ball and almost everybody took a slightly different journey. Flexibility is clearly an important element of any ABM campaign.
Although there were other problems, for example attribution became very difficult, the campaign was very successful and 65% of deals closed were from ABM campaign. ABM resulted in a 75% increase in ACV and saw a 5-day decrease in sales cycle. 30% of the tier 1 and 11% of the tier 2 target accounts became opportunities.
The Next Steps
Sigstr identified three changes that they are implementing to further improve their ABM campaigns:
- Reducing the number of targeted accounts – they are down to about 600 accounts, but also moving up market to target bigger companies. Of course, this introduces the challenge that the sales cycle is a bit longer with larger opportunities.
- Outbound has been moved from sales into marketing to make management of ABM easier
- Events are now a key part of the campaigns and they invite the key accounts to the event or side event that Sigstr is hosting to create more meetings
Three ABM Insights
My top three insights were:
- ABM really does work if you keep at it, although sales cycles for ABM are likely to be longer than for inbound enquiries
- “ABM is just good strategic marketing with personalisation” – don’t over-think it!
- Flexibility is important: no two accounts are going to follow exactly the same customer journey, no matter how much planning you put into your ideal journey
Source
These notes were taken when I attended From No ABM Program to Award-Winning ABM Program in Just One Year at Inbound 2019 presented by Justin Keller, VP Marketing at Sigstr.
Electronic Component Manufacturers Drive Advertising Spend
Our recent survey of European electronics publications has thrown up some interesting information about who is spending money on advertising. We asked publications where their advertising revenue came from, and the results were very interesting. The share of spend was:
- Distributors - 31%
- Semiconductor manufacturers- 21%
- Other component manufacturers (passive, power supply, connectors, etc)- 23%
- Tools vendors (including software) - 12%
- Other- 13%
The component manufacturers (adding semiconductor and other manufacturers) totalled 44%, with the spend roughly equally split between semiconductors and other components. This isn’t a surprise as, although there are more of the “other” companies, many of the bigger spenders are semiconductor manufacturers.
Distributors were responsible for almost a third of publishers’ revenue: this is an impressive total as the number of distributors is much smaller than the number of manufacturers. But with the challenge of differentiating distributors, the limited loyalty and the strong advertising presence of companies such as Digi-Key, distributors clearly need to spend significant amounts to maintain market share.
Tools and software accounted for 12%: this is a good number for a sector that has a reputation of not wanting to pay for advertising and represents a decent proportion of publications’ income.
Although there isn’t anything too surprising in these results, it’s interesting to see who is spending the advertising money. Perhaps the best news is that publications aren’t reliant on one sector of the electronics industry for advertising, making their businesses a little more stable and secure.
The survey did find some surprising results so if you’ve not seen it yet, click now to read European Publishing Myths Smashed with Electronics Media Survey.
European Publishing Myths Smashed with Electronics Media Survey
We recently conducted a survey of the European electronics media and the results have been more than a little surprising! Although we’re always a little cynical of conventional wisdom, we’d have expected a rather gloomy picture from the media as online revenue fails to replace rapidly declining print sales. What we found, however, told a very different story.
68% of European Electronics Publications Grew Revenue Last Year
Based on the publications that responded, things seem rather rosy. I was delighted that 68% of respondents said that their publications’ revenue grew last year. It’s great to see that so many are doing so well, and although most of the growth was between 5 and 10%, around one third of the publications grew by more than 10%.
Clearly the publishing industry isn’t doing too badly. In fact, only one publication reported a revenue decrease of more than 5%.
When we asked how competitors were doing, the consensus was that competitors were probably declining. Clearly conventional wisdom has influenced publishers! The good news for them is that the market isn’t as bad as they thought, but the bad news is that competitors are growing.
60% of Revenue is from Print Advertising
60% of revenue is from print advertising? It’s 2019, don’t you know!
We were surprised that more than half of the revenue for publications came from print advertising, three times the billings for online banner ands and six times the revenue from email newsletters. Email rental represented just 4% of revenue.
These are amazing stats, which are possibly due in part to publications in Eastern Europe skewing the figures. Despite this, it’s clear that there is still a long way to go before print advertising disappears!
The Study
The research was carried out in July, attracting responses from 24 publications from around Europe.
More Information
We’re working on further analysis of the study, and are sure to find other surprises. Keep checking the Napier blog and reading our newsletters to be the first to know when more results are announced!
Napier Partnership Streamlines Structure with Peter Bush Communications Merging into Armitage Communications
The Napier Group announced today the merging of Peter Bush Communications into Armitage Communications: forming a specialist high-tech PR and Marketing agency, focussing on industrial automation, engineering and communication.
Since the acquisition of Armitage Communications Ltd by Napier Partnership Limited at the beginning of 2019, the natural synergy between Peter Bush Communications and Armitage Communications has become apparent, due to their non-conflicting clients and focus on similar markets. The merger creates an agency with a team of journalists; electronic and mechanical engineers; and experienced marketing professionals, that offers a vast amount of market insight and knowledge to drive clients’ commercial success.
There will be no change to clients served, and the office and team in Saffron Walden will remain. The merger allows Peter Bush’s existing clients to have access to additional services and resources provided by Armitage Communications as well as those of Napier.
“The merging of Peter Bush Communications into Armitage Communications creates a team with deep understanding and expertise of markets such as industrial automation, communications and electronics/electrical, enabling them to offer deep technical market insight to clients,” commented Mike Maynard, managing director of the Napier Group. “The companies already work together across several clients, and this move will create a strongly integrated agency that will help our clients create and distribute compelling marketing content.”
Napier Partnership’s mission remains providing a comprehensive content development and distribution service that speeds the process of converting awareness to opportunity for B2B technology companies.