A Napier Webinar: How to Integrate AI Into Your Marketing Campaigns
Register for Napier's webinar and discover how you can quickly and effectively integrate AI into your marketing campaigns. We will cover:
- Where can AI help?
- How do you start integrating AI?
- Examples of how we integrated AI
- Do I need a huge investment of time and money?
- The Do’s and Don'ts for creating successful AI integrations
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘How to Integrate AI Into Your Marketing Campaigns’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Hi, good afternoon and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. Thank you all for joining. Today we are going to talk about how to integrate AI into marketing campaigns and we're going to talk about how to do it now.
I think what's happened is there's been a lot of hype around AI—a lot of people talking about using AI in marketing—but the reality is that most people are struggling to use it beyond using something like ChatGPT or AI that's embedded into different systems. The problem is that today, chances are the systems you're using—for example, your CRMs and your marketing automation platforms—probably don't have the AI features you need.
So the question is: what can we do to add AI into existing, what we'll call "dumb" systems, and make them intelligent—able to create content automatically for you—without needing the developers of those systems to actually add those features in?
Whilst we're going through, I'd really encourage you to add some questions into the Q&A tabs. So feel free to do that. And please ask whatever you want. We'll try and cover all the questions towards the end. So just pop them into the Q&A or the chat, and we'll go from there.
What are we trying to do? Well, I mean, if we have a look at what's happening today, I think most of us feel that things are a little bit like this: we’re working hard, and there's AI, and it's sat in the background, and actually, most of the time, AI isn't really doing the work for us. The reality is, most of the time, the AI is sat back on the sofa, relaxing, and we're sat there wondering where our AI assistant is.
That's not what we want. This is what we want. We want to know that marketers are smashing KPIs with AI. We want to have people promoted to CMO because they've used AI, and ultimately, generating million-dollar campaigns with AI—and having time for marketers to drink the champagne rather than actually do the work.
Now, that might be a little ambitious—I get that. But the one thing I would like to do is have enough time to generate fun newspaper covers like these front covers from The Sun. But I think actually the reality is we’re stuck more in this kind of meme of, “Where’s my jetpack?”
People have been talking about technology for a while. I remember when I was a kid growing up, we were all going to have jetpacks by the time I was an adult—and I’m still waiting. And I’m also still waiting for AI to do my job for me. So it's quite good from a job preservation point of view, but it's not necessarily a great thing when we look at actually getting help.
I think there's a perception that some large enterprises with high-end systems are already using AI. I mean, I can tell you from our work with much larger clients—they are starting to use AI, absolutely—but they're still struggling. There are still issues. Even in these big enterprise systems that have huge amounts of investment, the AI tools don’t really do what you want them to do.
So we're going to explain how to bring AI into your tools. It's going to be a little bit technical, but hopefully nothing that we can't all cope with as marketers.
So let’s have a look at the agenda. We're going to touch a little bit on where we think AI can help. We're going to talk about how you actually start integrating AI and actually give you some examples of AI integration. I'm actually going to show you some examples of how AI can be used within existing tools that don’t currently have the capability. We're going to talk about the costs, and then lastly, we’re going to cover the do’s and don’ts for creating successful AI integrations.
And hopefully, what we’re going to do by the end of this webinar is get that comfortable, AI-enabled robot off the sofa, sat at the desk, and doing our job for us. So that’s our goal today.
The first place we're going to start is: where can AI help? And I mean, the answer is AI can help in a huge range of different places—data analytics, working with contacts and leads, generating content, being chatbots, helping you brainstorm—all these kinds of things. There's a huge list. I mean, this is only really a few ideas. There are many, many more.
But I think one of the interesting things, particularly, is around contacts and leads. And so what I’m not going to do here is I’m not going to sit and talk about generating blog posts using ChatGPT. I think we all know how to do that. It’s not automated. And frankly, it’s pretty straightforward.
But what's much more interesting to me is being able to use AI, for example, to personalize emails and landing pages—something we hear about all the time. What we're going to do is actually show you some examples of how you can get personalized content about individuals into your CRM or your marketing automation platform. That way, you can then create emails and landing pages that are truly 100% personalized. So that's going to be the key example.
Having said that, there's also a lot of things we can do with the same approach that cover everything from data analysis through to segmenting databases. So we will touch on that as well. But the main examples will be around personalization and enriching data about individual contacts. Just so you know, that’s the example we’re using—but it’s not the only thing you can do with these automation tools.
The first thing to say, I think, is that AI is going to come to our tools. We’re hearing a lot—Salesforce probably more than anybody else with their Einstein products—about AI doing the work for sales and marketing teams. So yes, people are adding AI into their systems.
Ultimately, I think integrated AI is probably going to be the best way to use AI. In fact, my personal view is that as marketers, if we look ahead maybe five years, we’re not going to be thinking about AI as something separate. It’s just going to be embedded into everything we use. AI won’t be a standalone technology—it’ll simply be part of our everyday workflow.
But we’re not there yet. In fact, we’re nowhere near there. Often, what you want to do is far beyond what’s actually included in a system. Even if you have something like Salesforce and want to do AI analysis, it’s not necessarily built in with Einstein. And that’s assuming you even have the latest version, the right instance, and you’ve paid for all the necessary upgrades.
So what we need to do is build a bridge. As I said, we're going to use the example of adding data to CRM records—or marketing automation records. The goal is to personalize information by adding extra data. But somehow, we need to build a connection between the system with the contact data and our AI model or engine that generates intelligent content.
We need something magic to sit between these systems. That “magic” is actually called middleware. And I promise, this is about as geeky as it gets.
So what is middleware? It’s just software that connects two other pieces of software, typically through APIs. These APIs exist on both the CRM or marketing automation platform and the AI tool.
Let’s move away from the technical jargon and look at something more practical. These aren’t difficult concepts—it’s just that the terminology makes them sound complex. An API is simply how one piece of software talks to another. You won’t be surprised that some software—because it’s built by engineers—isn’t very sociable and doesn’t talk to anything. So, no API means it’s very hard to get data in or out.
Fortunately, most modern software is built to talk to both humans and other software—which means it has an API.
Now, middleware—again, software that sits between two systems—talks to both APIs. A good example of middleware is a product like Make. But you might be more familiar with Zapier, which is a very well-known, simple, and straightforward piece of middleware.
We’ll look at examples in a minute that use both Make and Zapier to enrich contact data. In this case, it’s data that goes into the Napier marketing automation platform, which is an integrated CRM and marketing platform. These examples will literally enrich contact data by adding additional personalized information.
Of course, other tools are available. At Napier, we use a lot of Make, and also a good amount of Zapier—it’s probably one of the simpler tools to get started with.
One thing to be really clear about: when I was growing up and learning about software, one of the big sayings was “garbage in, garbage out.” And it’s absolutely true. If you don’t have good data, your AI isn’t going to generate anything useful. So you need to give the AI the best quality data possible.
That means you must enrich your data—add more detailed, accurate information to your contact records. The more information you provide, the better the AI will be at writing about the contact and generating things like personalized emails or sales pitches.
Now let’s move forward. Before we even get into middleware and APIs and all that tech, let’s look at a simple example. Here's a real-life project we ran—names blocked out for confidentiality.
We had a list of companies and their locations. We needed to categorize these companies by industry. So we asked ChatGPT what industry each company was in. A top tip here: if you just ask ChatGPT “what industry is this company in?”, it’ll give you wildly varying responses. It’s much better to give it a limited list of options—for example, is it audiovisual, communications, security, agriculture, etc.—so it can categorize accurately.
The prompt we used was something like: “Identify the industry served by [Company Name]” with the company name in a cell. It’s really simple.
We used Google Sheets (though Excel would also work). You create a prompt in a cell, then just drag it down, and magically you categorize hundreds of companies in a very short amount of time.
It’s a great way to get started. Don’t rule this out—it’s quick, it’s effective, and there are a couple of tools worth looking at. One of them is GPT for Sheets, which brings in ChatGPT and other AI models directly into Google Sheets.
So this is actually the tool we used to do the categorization. We ran this all in Google Sheets and used GPT for Sheets and literally had that query just run a GPT query and fill out the cell with the result. Obviously, if you're a Microsoft company, Copilot is starting to do more and more on the AI side. And so we're seeing more and more people using Copilot to fill in data. But to be honest, I mean, GPT Sheets is an incredibly easy and straightforward tool to use.
So that's the first thing. And actually, if you're trying to categorize companies, sometimes Excel is actually the easiest way to do it. It lets you count, look at the number in each category, tweak the categories to get them right. So it can be quite efficient and effective.
But if you're looking to do a bit more, and particularly if you're looking to process things automatically rather than having to manually download and upload, we need to go to other tools. And so our first integration example we're going to look at is Zapier. We're going to look at an integration that basically takes a new lead from Sharpspring, which is our CRM and marketing automation platform, has a conversation with ChatGPT, and then updates the lead with the data.
So if you just give me one second, I will try and open up this example. The first thing I'm going to show you—sorry for the delay in just doing this—the first thing I'm going to show you is this: This is actually the first step that we haven’t really talked about. When we add a contact into Sharpspring, we actually run a query against the database. We use a database called Apollo, and that will enrich the contact data.
Literally what we can do is enter an email and then automatically all sorts of additional data is populated—the person's name, their job title, the company they work for, the company URL, etc. Assuming that there's a match based on email in Apollo, we then update the lead with all the extra data. We also get an error if we can't get a match, so we know when we're uploading data that doesn't match.
This is really important, as I said, because this is the first stage of actually making the ChatGPT—so the AI—work. It's about getting lots of data so the AI has something to crunch on.
The next step is this one here. And that, again, is when there's a new lead. What we do is we have a conversation with ChatGPT. So we'll get the data from the new lead, and then if I click this, we can see on the right-hand side, we open a conversation with ChatGPT. In the configuration, you can see here, it's really simple.
What we've done is we've asked it to create a short summary of the company that we're accessing. You can see here the last run we had looked at a company called B2B Interactive Media. The idea is it’s a short summary useful for someone looking to sell marketing services.
Then we do something quite interesting. We specifically ask how you might pitch services of Napier to this particular company, and so this is all returned as data. Now obviously this is an example to show you the kind of things you can do. You could quite easily, for example, say, “Write a pitch email for Napier,” or you could say, “Write one sentence as to why Napier would be the best agency to work with this particular company.”
Obviously, B2B Interactive Media is actually a publisher, so it’s not necessarily a client or potential client for us. But let’s assume it was a client or a potential client. We could actually ask it to write one sentence. We could insert that into an email—or it could write the whole email.
There are lots of features here you can see around choosing the model and all sorts of different things that we could use. But fundamentally, I’ve used default options and it will produce some data that actually will give you useful information.
If you want it to write emails, it can. And then you can literally just set up a marketing automation to send an email where the entire content is just the field that was created by ChatGPT. The whole email is then custom to that particular prospect. The whole email is AI-generated. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got any AI capabilities or none in your marketing automation platform—you can just send that because it’s in a field once we upload that back into the system.
So we've got huge amounts of capabilities here to create content.
The one thing I would say—and we’ll talk about this later—is that the more you ask AI to do, the greater the risk associated with the content that’s going to be produced. The more risk it has of getting something wrong. The more you can constrain it, the less risk there is. So always think about whether you want your AI to generate a complete email, or whether it’s just customizing a sentence. Sometimes customizing that sentence is actually going to be a lot safer and more powerful.
So now I’m just going to reshare again. Just one second—here we go. This is Make, the other tool I mentioned. You can see it looks a bit prettier; we’ve got little round circles rather than just lines. We can move them about, but actually, Make is much, much more powerful.
Here, for example, we start off by looking for all the leads that have been added in the last 200 minutes. It will load all those leads, up to a maximum of 10. That’s what Make will do here. We then go through and can do all sorts of things. We can set variables that we use later on. So for example, we might want to use the lead ID later, and Make gives you the ability to remember the lead ID through multiple stages.
We then call up OpenAI—so ChatGPT—and finally, we upload the results to Sharpspring. In my examples, we’re asking ChatGPT for text, but there’s no reason why you can’t also use DALL·E and ask for an image to include in an email. You can add images and other creative content as well.
Again, you can see here we’re running essentially the same query: a summary of the company and three things that someone trying to sell Napier’s services could say. It’s the same logic, just a slightly different approach. Make is more powerful—you can pull data from multiple sources and merge them together—so there's a lot more flexibility.
Still, in this case, we’re doing the same flow as Zapier. It’s just as powerful: generate an image or a complete email, and all of it is ready to go.
One interesting thing to mention is that AI is getting more chatty. If you’ve used ChatGPT recently, you’ve probably noticed that it loves to say things like, “Oh, that’s a great question!” So increasingly, we’re having to tell the AI to provide direct answers only—no intro or outro—so it just returns what we need. If you’re experimenting with this, top tip: tell it no intro or outro, and you’ll get much cleaner, more usable results.
As you can see, setting this up is relatively simple. These workflows aren’t hard to build and are easy to use. Let’s go back to our PowerPoint slide.
So this was the Zapier example. As you can see, it’s really a simple three-step process: Zapier is triggered by a new lead, it asks ChatGPT for information, and then it loads the data back into Sharpspring. Just three steps—that’s it.
Make was a bit more elaborate. It’s meant to showcase some of the more advanced capabilities. You can simplify it, of course. In our demo, we looked for leads, got data from the lead, set a variable (which actually isn’t needed in this example but demonstrates capability), called OpenAI with a query, and uploaded the results to Sharpspring. Again, very simple and straightforward.
The great thing about these tools—Zapier is triggered when a new lead comes in, and Make can do the same—is that you can just let them run in the background. So, you get new data, Zapier enriches it, ChatGPT writes a summary and pitch points, and those go into fields in Sharpspring. If someone then wants to pitch the company, those insights are already there.
For campaigns, you might add email content, landing page content, or even dynamically generated links. All of this can be created with AI, and the text can be wrapped around whatever structure or content you’re building.
Hopefully, all of this sounds exciting. However, there are some limitations.
The first question you might ask is, “This is great, but I have a custom GPT that knows about my company—can I just use that?” Unfortunately, with ChatGPT today, you can’t connect custom GPTs to tools like Zapier or Make directly. There is a workaround—you can create an Assistant and upload data for it to reference—but let’s be honest, that’s not something most marketers are going to do.
The better solution is to use a tool that’s purpose-built for this. A good example is customGPT.ai. As the name suggests, it lets you build a custom GPT and upload a huge number of documents for it to use as a reference. This GPT is then fully trained on your company and products, so it produces much better content. And importantly, it provides an API you can connect to tools like Make or Zapier.
So, if you’re looking to build something around your own data and brand, you’ll likely need to go a bit beyond ChatGPT itself. But it’s not hard—just use the right tools that are built for the job.
So one of the questions we also get is, does it cost a lot to do this? Well, actually, it's surprisingly cheap. So if we look at Make, Make’s pricing starts at zero. And actually, the pro level is $16 a month. So you can have middleware that's very, very cheap. Zapier, again, won’t be surprising, starts at zero. The next level up, the professional level, is about 30 pounds. So I guess about $35, $40. It gives you more features, but quite often people are still using the free level.
There are some benefits with spending money with Zapier, not least because the response time for checking for new contacts, for example, gets reduced. You can check much more frequently. So that's one of the big benefits of paying for Zapier, is getting more frequent checking if there's new contacts. So the middleware, this complicated software that sounds very difficult is, you know, it's literally, if you have to pay anything for it, is only a few pounds or dollars a month.
And then if we look at the cost of AI now, because we're accessing ChatGPT through the API, actually it's not related to our standard ChatGPT subscriptions. What we have to do is buy API credits. So you need to buy credits. These credits come out at what is $10 for a million tokens, very roughly. So a million tokens, a good example is about 60 words is about 100 tokens. So you're talking you know maybe half a million words being put in as prompts to burn through your $10.
Now obviously if you're doing a lot of—and you've also got to allow, sorry, for the data to come out. So you're talking about half a million words. Obviously, you're doing a lot of high volume stuff. You can burn through this very quickly. But it's $10. It’s nothing. The cost per contact is absolutely minimal. So I think the important thing to say is, this is not expensive to do. It’s something you can do. And it’s something you could do with next to no pricing.
However, the big question is time. So the first thing to say is, all these tools are no code. Zapier, in particular, is pretty straightforward to use. Make is a little more complicated. But the way I always explain this to people is that, you know, typically you'll sit there for an hour scratching your head trying to work out how to do something and then two minutes to set it up and get it going.
So it is quite difficult to get up to speed with these tools. There is a learning curve and also to understand exactly how to interface between these different systems. It takes a little bit of time. And also, if you’re returning a lot of data, it can come back in different formats. So if you’re not familiar with JSON, which is a very standard way of returning data, again, you can end up scratching your head trying to work out what’s going on.
It's certainly something everybody on this call would be able to do. It may not be something you'd want to spend the time on. And so we recommend getting up to speed. Professionals can definitely speed up the process. We've got experience of doing this. We've worked with our own systems, as well as working with integrating with other people's systems.
And the important thing to say is mistakes can be expensive. And as you'll see in the picture, even with the new image generation tools, ChatGPT didn’t quite manage to spell “database” right. But if you do automate things and you let it run, and your automation runs over all the contacts, there is a theoretical risk. You could overwrite your entire CRM’s data, something you really don’t want to do.
So what I strongly recommend is getting some advice in terms of the setup, the configuration, and then using it and copying it. Once you’ve got a particular AI automation that, for example, adds a sales picture, adds a company description, it then becomes very easy to, for example, have a line for an email that’s added into a different field. So changing what you’ve got already is much easier than creating things from scratch. So get some automations that you can build on. That would definitely be my recommendation.
So let’s summarize. I mean, what should we do? So there’s five things I think we should do. One is we should start experimenting. It may be that AI is not going to help you hugely, but I’m pretty sure if you try different things, there’ll be some areas where AI can really help either your marketing or your sales.
And I would start with the simple things. Data enrichment, adding an extra bit of data into a field is probably the simplest thing to do, either in your CRM or in your marketing automation platform. It’s really easy to do. If you set it up right, you’re not going to do anything other than overwrite data in the data enrichment field, which you can always rebuild through AI.
Definitely make sure you use the right tools. I would recommend certainly looking at the paid benefits. A great example is Zapier where the free version absolutely would do our data enrichment where we enter an email and it fills in all the fields. But you’ll have to sit there waiting for a period of time for it to fill data in. Whereas if you pay for it, you then get a much faster response rate. So I would strongly recommend paying for the tools because they’re really cheap.
When you're testing, I mean, this is super important, you know, because you've got automations that potentially are writing back and potentially writing over existing data, test really carefully and get advice. You don't want to make mistakes here. You want to be really cautious because your data is so incredibly valuable.
And then what are the five mistakes to avoid? Well, I mean, the first thing is assuming that AI is not going to help you. AI probably is going to help you. Don't assume everything could be manual. Think of what you can do to automate things. The more you can automate, the more effective it's going to be. And don't forget that if you look at, say, enriching contact data, even if you're only going to access 10% of that data, even so, the cost per contact is still tiny. The cost of these tools is so small that it's worth enriching more data than you're ever going to use, because it's there ready when you need it.
The next thing I'd say is don't ask AI to do too much. And this is the example about whether you should ask AI to write a complete email or whether you should ask it to write just one sentence of the email or even put a phrase into an email. I would always strongly recommend limiting it down. I know that there's always lots of fun with hallucinations. I think the latest thing that people are playing about with ChatGPT and they're desperately trying to fix is that you can make up sayings and ask ChatGPT what they mean. ChatGPT just, you know, comes back and explains them. So if you ask, for example, ChatGPT, what does the saying, you know, "never lick a badger twice" mean? It'll come back as though it's a really common saying.
So, you know, don't trust AI to do too much. Be really careful unless you're manually going to check it. And if you can manually check it, I think it's definitely worth it. The more you constrain it, the less risk. If you're asking it to write complete emails, I probably would want to check that manually, at least for the first, you know, 100 or so emails to make me feel confident that the vast majority of those emails are going to be good. Because bad emails are very, very obvious.
I would also say don't overcomplicate projects. I mean, if you look at our simple Zapier, you know, three-step approach — got a new contact, add a bit of data into AI field and upload it back to the system. You know, three steps, nothing difficult. Don't feel this has to be complicated.
And finally, as marketers, and I think this is really important, we shouldn't forget that we can help other people. So, you know, the example I gave there was three bullet points effectively for things we could pitch to potential customers. So we're helping the sales team go out and sell as marketers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's definitely a thing worth doing.
So let's summarize. As I said, if you've got any questions, please do throw them into the chat. The first thing is, I think as marketers, we can make better use of AI. The biggest benefits also are going to be from repetitive tasks — these things we set and forget, and they automatically do things. Even if, as I say, a significant percentage of them never get used again, the ones you use will be brilliant because they'll be there and ready. So automation really is one of the ways to maximize your use of AI.
I think it's possible to do much more than you think. You can absolutely generate 100% customized emails using AI. You can absolutely generate customized landing pages using AI. And you can route people to get a pure customized landing page. So I think it's possible to do a lot more than people imagine, even with tools that apparently have no AI integration, because these middleware tools are going to help.
But don't trust AI. Be really careful. There are so many examples of AI-generated emails that have made it onto the internet because they're so cringely bad. So don't ever trust AI. Make sure you check and make sure you put guardrails in. Limit what it's doing.
And then I would say definitely the way to start is to get help and make sure you've got someone who understands the middleware, understands AI, who can get you started. And then once you've got that, feel free to copy and modify. And hopefully, if we do all this, we'll move from us sitting at the desks to the AI being stressed and we'll be on the sofa having a great time.
Well, I hope you've found this interesting. Just whilst you're thinking about questions, the next webinar we're going to do is going to be on the 20th of May. And we're going to talk about attribution. So again, looking at marketing tools. But if you've ever looked at attribution, we're going to explain why it's the biggest marketing fairy tale ever. So hopefully that will be fun and look forward to having you join us there.
Right. I really appreciate your time on this webinar. If you've got any questions, please do feel free to pop them into the chat. And I will try and do my best to answer them.
OK, let's have a look. Oh, so this is very interesting. So I have a question here saying, where do I think the industry would be if AI wasn't around? I'm going to be a little bit cheeky here. I think the industry would be roughly where we are today. Because I think the reality is, in many cases, we're using AI as an advisor, as a coworker, rather than necessarily as a tool.
So, you know, to give you a good example, a lot of us, if we're asked to brainstorm a name for an event, say, first place we'll go is ChatGPT. And it might help us come up with some better ideas, it might help us do it a little bit quicker, but it's not really changing what we do or how we approach the industry. I think what we need to do as an industry is to start using these automations. And then that's actually going to move us into a very different place.
We're going to have much better personalization. We're going to be able to, for example, have business development reps reach out much more effectively. And I think that's going to move us forward. So I think my argument would be that actually today, AI hasn't made as much impact as it's going to make in the next year or two. And to me, that's why it's so important to automate.
Let me just check, see if there's anything else. OK. There's a question here that's asking about APIs and how do you find out about APIs and which tools have APIs?
Well, I mean, the answer is that we know, for example, ChatGPT has already got an API, so there's APIs available to AI systems. They are accessed using slightly different credits to your ChatGPT subscription, but they're available, they're easy, and they're typically built into systems now.
If you've got a CRM or a marketing automation system, that almost certainly has an API. And if you've got a major system, that almost certainly is built into Zapier and Make already. So these tools are already going to know how to talk to them.
There are a couple of challenges around that. So the first is, if you're in a big enterprise, I would be amazed if the team responsible for the instance of your marketing automation platform hasn't locked off the API so you can't use it. So you need to get access. And the way you get access is by getting something called a key. So that might take quite a time inside a large enterprise to get access.
Inside a small company, typically it's very easy. You just ask the person who's the admin of your system, can I have the API key? And they'll give it to you. And then you load that into the system, and it's literally as simple as that.
So you tell the middleware, so Make or Zapier, what your API key is, and it will log you in automatically through the API, and it just works. It really is as simple as a couple of cut and pastes. So I would say it's not difficult at all to implement the APIs, and the vast majority of modern marketing software will have APIs already enabled. So the vast majority will have them.
OK. I think that's a good point to start. We've hit the 40-minute mark, which is certainly where we want to finish with questions.
If anybody does have any more questions or they'd like to understand how they can start adding AI-generated content into their marketing automation or CRM tool or automate any other part of integrating AI with any of their marketing systems, please do let me know. My email's there: mike@napierb2b.com.
Those of you that are clients will know that I'm an absolute geek, so I love talking about this stuff. Those of you who are not, you know, please do talk to me and ask me your questions because it's something I really enjoy talking about.
I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. And I hope we can see you in May when we talk about why attribution is the biggest marketing fairy tale. Thanks very much.
Navigating the Evolving Landscape of Marketing Automation Tools
In this episode of the Marketing Automation Moment podcast, Hannah and Mike discuss exciting developments in the marketing automation space, including ActiveCampaign's partnership with Wix, and HubSpot's acquisition of Dashworks, an AI company that enhances internal document search capabilities. The conversation further explores HubSpot's commitment to user training, emphasising the importance of structured training sessions for different skill levels to improve user engagement and retention.
To dive deeper into the topic of AI integration in marketing, be sure to check out our recent webinar, "How to Integrate AI Into Your Marketing Campaigns Today." https://napier-partnership-limited.webinargeek.com/how-to-integrate-ai-into-your-marketing-campaigns-today
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- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Wehrly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Introduction to The Marketing Automation Moment Podcast
00:00:54 - ActiveCampaign and Wix Partnership
00:02:57 - HubSpot Acquires Dashworks
00:04:49 - The Need for AI in Marketing Automation
00:07:13 - Importance of Ongoing Training in Marketing Platforms
00:10:06 - HubSpot's Inbound Conference
00:11:44 - Spring Cleaning Your Marketing Automation Platform
00:15:00 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: Navigating the Evolving Landscape of Marketing Automation Tools
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wehrly
Hannah: Welcome to the Market Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Market Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Whirly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard.
Hannah: Today we talk about the partnership between ActiveCampaign and Wix.
Mike: We discuss HubSpot's acquisition of AI company Dashworks.
Hannah: HubSpot's training.
Mike: And Hannah gets really excited about spring cleaning her marketing automation platform.
Hannah: Well, hi, Mike. Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Automation Moment. I'm really pleased to get you because I think you're a bit of a jet setter.
Mike: Hi, Hannah. Great to talk to you again. Yeah, it's been quite busy with a lot of travel. I'm actually off to Germany next week as well. So it's great to have a chance to sit down and talk about marketing automation.
Hannah: Definitely. Well, look, let's kick off. We've got a lot to cover today and I have to just forewarn you, we are talking about HubSpot a lot, so my inner fan might little bit. But let's kick off talking about someone else and this is ActiveCampaign. Now, I was really pleased because I was looking around, you know, what's going on in the landscape. And actually, ActiveCampaign have just announced a partnership with a company called Wix. Now, Wix is a web page creator, and the idea is that Wix will be able to integrate with ActiveCampaign to make website creation easier whilst using a model. I mean, before we go into the actual details of what it means for the platform itself, I just have to say congrats to anyone who's doing their PR because they were everywhere. I mean, I saw a lot of coverage of this. So even to just be out in the news that much done.
Mike: Yeah, I think it was great. I mean, it's interesting because it really cements that active campaign positioning as being a tool designed for very small companies. I mean, Wix, I've used it with, you know, things like sports clubs and very little organizations tend to use Wix. It's one of the simplest web page creators. So I think ActiveCampaign has actually done something pretty smart here because people who frankly can't even build a website with conventional tools, they want something a bit simpler like Wix. They've now got access to marketing automation. So it could be an interesting opportunity to own that small end of the market.
Hannah: Oh, definitely. And I have to say as well, it is nice to have something in the news that isn't to do with AI. Now, AI is great, but it's really great to actually just see another platform, another together to create really something
Mike: It's also quite nice to see that two companies are working together and collaborating. I mean, it seems that so much that we talk about in Marketing Automation Moment is all about, you know, large companies acquiring small companies to get little bits of technology. And sometimes that's great. Sometimes actually the customers of those smaller companies can lose out. I think by doing a partnership, you've got the best of all worlds there. So I really like the fact that it's a partnership deal rather than an acquisition.
Hannah: Oh, that's a fantastic point, Mike. But let's move on because I want to talk about someone a little bit bigger. Now, as I mentioned, it's a bit HubSpot focus this podcast episode, but I think it's really worthwhile. And the first thing I really wanted to kick off was talk about the news of HubSpot actually acquiring Dashworks. Now, Dashworks is basically an AI agent that allows you to search your internal documents. Now, this is really cool. I think it provides a really easy AI integration to support marketers. But I wanted to hear what you thought about it because I know you actually did a webinar yesterday about how to integrate AI into marketing campaigns. So what do you actually think about a tool like this?
Mike: Well, I think it's interesting. I mean, HubSpot, they've got their AI tools already integrated into HubSpot. They've probably been arguably, if not one of perhaps, you know, even the most advanced in terms of integrating AI. And yet they're still having to acquire companies to fill out their AI offerings. So to me, what it says is that we're a long way away from getting the AI functionality that marketers need and want. into our marketing automation platforms. And that's really interesting because people using HubSpot obviously have some AI features, as for example, does Salesforce, your friend Einstein. But I think if you look at some of the other market automation platforms, they're a long way behind. If HubSpot haven't made it, there's a real need to add more AI into marketing automation. And that's really what the webinar was all about, was how you can do it now, rather than waiting for the tools vendors to catch up.
Hannah: I think that's a great point, Mike. And I think, again, it goes back to something that you said a little bit earlier when we were talking about ActiveCampaign, that even these big companies are having to buy the small companies in order to get the functionality they need to be able to keep up with the evolving landscape.
Mike: Yeah, and I think it's interesting that the vendors, they want to control things. They want to own everything, which is why HubSpot's Bulk Dash works. But actually, if you look at it, you don't necessarily need to do that. It's the modern world today. Everything's cloud-based. Everything has an API. And I won't go too technical for the listeners here, but basically, all the systems that you need have the ability to connect together. And that's what we talked about in the webinar, showing people how you can take what you might call a dumb marketing automation platform that's got no AI. And actually, with simple integration that really doesn't take more than a few minutes to do, you can actually then get AI generated emails within that system. So to me, I think the promise of AI is really exciting. And it's going to be really interesting to see how many people take advantage of it or whether marketers are going to sit back and wait for the tools to catch up. Because if you do, you know, you could be left behind, your competitors could be actually much more proactive because clearly we're not there yet.
Hannah: I totally agree. And I think I actually just want to reference one example, Mike, and I believe I'm right in saying this, but I mean, one of the easiest integrations that we have is through our marketing automation platform, Sharpspring, through to a contact research tool called Apollo. Now we've used Zapier to connect those and it's all automated and make sure that the platform's updated. But if we were just waiting for Sharpspring to do updates, have that upgrade, allow us to do that, we would be doing not a great job right now in our marketing for Napier itself.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely and it's a really interesting point because we've now got the ability you can enter an email and all the contact details are filled out. It's also really important if you want to use AI that you give the AI as much information about the contact as you possibly can and so this content enrichment It's a key part of using AI. Get as much data about the contact, because that will then let you create better and more complete emails. Or if it's not emails, maybe it's just a sentence or some customization information, or perhaps a different landing page. But all of that's really important. So I think marketers now particularly with the importance of AI, probably do need to think about doing some of this integration and using a couple of tools together, rather than relying on a single tool to do everything. Because frankly, those single integrated tools, they've got some catching up to do.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I can't resist, Mike, so I'm just going to do a little plug for our webinar. We'll make sure that the link to the on-demand version is in the show notes. And so listeners, if you're there, please watch it. Let us know what you think. And if you have any questions, please do reach out because it was a very interesting webinar, although I'm a little bit biased. Let's move on, Mike. Actually, something that HubSpot is doing really well, and we've always thought this about HubSpot, I was browsing their webinars, looking at what they're talking about, and they had some really good sessions on training. And what I really loved there was beginner training as well as intermediate training. So it was all sorts of different levels. Now, I do think it varies, but HubSpot's great at this, other platforms not so much. Do you think market automation platforms do provide enough training to their users?
Mike: Oh, that's a great question. Probably applies to all marketing technology platforms. So, I mean, obviously, there's been a lot of documentation about HubSpot, how they realized that actually the big problem was, was people were signing up to HubSpot and then leaving after the first year because they weren't using the tool. And HubSpot worked out not only that actually getting people to use the tool was going to increase the stickiness, increase customer retention, but actually they could charge for some of that. And so they started charging for onboarding. Now, I think what we see in the market today is that there's a lot of companies offering onboarding, but very few at the level or with the quality of HubSpot. And to me, it's not so much about charging for onboarding. It's much more about the quality of the training that makes you use the tools. I mean, what do you think, Hannah?
Hannah: I mean, I do agree. And to me as well, I think there's a very big difference between the onboarding period and then needing ongoing training. So onboarding is about, you know, getting things up to speed. This is how you can do the simple automations, emails, you know, whatever it may be. But then often companies are still left to just then figure it out by themselves. Because one of the things, you know, we've talked about in the past is that you have to continuously optimize. And, you know, we're talking a bit more about that in our insightful tip of the week in a minute, but often multi-automation platforms just go, okay, cool. You're on boarded, have a great time. And yet actually you don't still get that ongoing training, that ongoing help. And that's actually where it's really needed because you don't just set something up and leave it like that forever. And if you are doing that, then you're doing it wrong.
Mike: Absolutely. And one of the things we were talking about before we started recording is the way HubSpot's approached some of this new training is actually by giving it levels. So you get beginner, intermediate, advanced. And I think that's a great idea because they've recognized that it's not just the onboarding, it's not just being able to send your first email, it's about being able to do more and more as you learn more about the platform. you know you were absolutely right when you talked about that I think it's a really great point they've understood why they're doing the training and I think that's going to definitely help HubSpot and make it much more sticky.
Hannah: Definitely. And I mean, the other thing that HubSpot does do, and this is huge, so this won't surprise any of our listeners, and that is the inbound conference. I want to just have a really quick chat about this because it's hosted in September like it is every year. But normally up to this point, it's actually been hosted in Boston where they're headquartered. And what's really interesting is it's actually being hosted in San Francisco this year. And I believe, Mike, you know a little bit about the kind of expedition conference hall that it's being hosted in.
Mike: Yeah, it's really interesting. And you've got to wonder why they're doing it. So for listeners that don't know, HubSpot was founded in Boston, which is why the Inbound Conference was held in Boston. And obviously, for us Europeans, we're both based in Europe. So actually, it really helps to have a conference on the East Coast rather than the West Coast of America. But what HubSpot's done is they've moved it to San Francisco. And I can see lots of reasons why they do that. You know, one might just be size of venue, but it could also be around positioning the company. Although you do wonder because, you know, perhaps the most famous conference in San Francisco is Dreamforce. And you just wonder whether maybe HubSpot has got a little bit of Salesforce envy. I don't know. What do you think, Hannah?
Hannah: Oh, I like that a bit of jealousy. Yes. I think it'll be interesting. And I think as we get closer to it, and then seeing how people react will be really interesting. I don't think they've come out and said any specific reasons yet. But maybe that will come clear as the conference actually takes place.
Mike: Yeah. And actually, I mean, I've been to quite a few inbounds. I'm not yet signed up for this one. I'm still on the fence. So we'll have to see what happens.
Hannah: Definitely. Well, let's move on to our insightful tip of the week. Now, this is a really interesting one, and I want to have a chat about spring cleaning your marketing automation platform. Now, I think companies get things running, they could have the most brilliant, efficient marketing automation platform in the world, and yet they still leave contacts in the database that will never be useful. And what I mean is that they will maybe approach some target companies that have these contacts in their database for years and years and years, but actually those people could not even work there anymore. And it can be a bit of an ego thing, but I think personally for me, I love a spring clean and I would rather have a smaller list that I know is really high quality, that I know I'm targeting the right people, than thousands and thousands and thousands which aren't actually making any difference or generating any results. I don't know what you think, Mike.
Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think to some extent there's a lot of this just in case, let's keep everything just in case. And it results in, you know, you and I have seen this, there are companies out there with more contact records that are hard bounces. People who've left the company, you can't contact them, you can't access them, they've gone. more of them than actually active contacts. And also you're paying potentially for some of those contacts. So from my point of view, I think it's a bit of an ego thing. I think people are a bit scared to let go of contact data. But of course, one of the things, and we haven't talked about this for a while, but GDPR is quite important. You should legally actually spring clean your database. So it's not only the fact that You know, spring cleaning is a good policy. It's a good thing to do. And obviously you like it, Hannah, so therefore it's very important. But also it's actually a legal requirement in some cases. And I think people forget that.
Hannah: Oh, definitely, Mike. I think that's a really valuable point to make. And I think I'd add to it as well as people don't spring clean and then they wonder why the results of their campaigns are so bad. So, you know, these emails are going to these people and it's like, God, I've got such high bounce rates, you know, nobody's opening. And it's, well, are you actually sending to people, as you mentioned, who said exist in these companies, or is it just going to emails that generally don't exist anymore?
Mike: Yeah, and I think that's a really difficult thing. I mean, you and I know that we've had people who've been, for example, receiving our newsletter for years that don't seem to be engaged, and then will come to us and actually become a prospect. So, spring cleaning, it's a really important thing to do, but it's very difficult. To me, if you've got people there that are hard bounces, they should go. They're not going to help, really. I don't see anyone reporting on the number of clicks from hard bounces, because pretty much the number's always zero. So I think those should go. But there is a question about how you deal with contacts that may or may not be active. And particularly, you know, when you're sending things that are like newsletter update content, a lot of people can sit there and lurk. And so I think you've got to make sensible decisions. It's not a case of cleaning out everybody who's not clicked on an email in the last you know, quarter or six months. I've seen companies with very draconian approaches to removing contacts, even if they've not engaged for a short time. And that could be a particular problem, for example, if someone goes on maternity leave, particularly in Europe, where you can have long maternity leaves, that contact's still active, it's still relevant. But when they come back, they've been removed from your database because they've not engaged whilst they've been away. So I think it's something that needs a bit of thought. But definitely, you know, now's the time for a good spring clean. So take a look at your marketing automation platform and remove the data that really isn't helping you.
Hannah: I think that is brilliant advice to leave the podcast today, Mike. So thanks so much for your time and for such a great conversation.
Mike: Well, thanks, Hannah. Great topics as always. Really enjoy chatting to you again.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application and we'll see you next time.
Harnessing Intent Data: How to Drive Effective B2B Campaigns – Riaz Kanani – Radiate B2B
Harnessing Intent Data: How to Drive Effective B2B Campaigns
Riaz Kanani, CEO and founder of Radiate B2B returns to the podcast to discuss the evolving landscape of B2B marketing. Mike and Riaz explore the shift in buyer behaviour, the rise of account-based marketing (ABM), and the importance of intent data in driving effective campaigns.
Riaz shares insights on common mistakes in ABM strategies and highlights the role of AI in shaping the future of marketing.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Radiate B2B
Radiate B2B is a B2B advertising and intent data platform that helps companies reach their prospects at the right time, in the right place and with the right message. Radiate B2B has been nominated for Emerging Martech Vendor and UK Martech vendor of the year by B2B Marketing.
About Riaz Kanani
Riaz is the founder and CEO of Radiate B2B. Riaz has a history of building and scaling successful businesses and has been nominated for Entrepreneur of the Year multiple times. He is listed as a Top 25 global account based marketing thought leader by B2B Marketing and one of the Top Asian Stars in UK Tech by Diversity UK.
He built one of the world’s largest video advertising networks and after exiting to Silverpop, scaled their presence internationally. Silverpop helped to set out the best practice for B2B marketing a decade ago and was a leader in B2B marketing automation and content marketing before exiting to IBM to create its marketing cloud platform.
He has sat on the DMA email marketing council helping to set best practice for the email marketing industry, judge its awards and help shape data privacy and the use of data in the UK and Europe. He regularly writes and speaks on the BBC and elsewhere on the intersection between marketing, business and technology, its best practice and future trends.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 - Guest Introduction: Riaz Kanani
00:01:50 - The Shift in B2B Buyer Behavior
00:03:09 - Evolution of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
00:06:34 - Common Mistakes in ABM Campaigns
00:09:07 - The Role of Intent Data in Marketing
00:15:22 - Customer Success Stories with Radiate B2B
00:19:20 - Using Radiate B2B for Internal Marketing
00:20:42 - Future of MarTech and AI Integration
00:23:00 - Final Thoughts on ABM and Marketing Trends
00:23:19 - Best Marketing Advice Received
00:24:16 - Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:25:23 - Conclusion and Invitation for Future Discussions
Quotes
"By the time they reach your website to convert, 70-80% of those companies have already shortlisted who they want to buy from." Riaz Kanani, CEO and Founder at Radiate B2B.
"If you don't have a level of insight which tells you whether they're coming into market or they're in market, then there's a very high likelihood that project is going to fail." Riaz Kanani, CEO and Founder at Radiate B2B.
"Intent data is merely a signal that attention is being given to a particular problem or area." Riaz Kanani, CEO and Founder at Radiate B2B.
Follow Riaz:
Riaz Kanani on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riazkanani/
Radiate B2B website: https://radiateb2b.com/
Radiate B2B on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radiateb2b/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Riaz Kanani at Radiate B2B
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Riaz Kanani
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Riaz Kanani. Riaz is actually a returning guest. He's the CEO and founder of Radiate B2B, and this is his second appearance on the podcast. Welcome to the podcast again, Riaz.
Riaz: Hey, great to be here. Great to be here. Thanks for the invite.
Mike: It's great to have you on the podcast again. I mean, we've talked before, but I think it'd be a really good idea if you could just refresh the listeners' memories about your career and why you decided to found Radiate B2B.
Riaz: Yeah, so shocking, I think I've now spent 25 years in the Martech Strike Agency world, building various cutting-edge platforms, usually using data. And about seven years ago, we started Radiate with this idea that the way B2B buyers were buying was changing. There was a generational shift where more and more of the research was happening away from your website rather than on your website. And research last year suggested that actually even by the time they reach your website to convert and stick their hand up, 70-80% of those companies have already shortlisted who they want to buy from. And because of that, we started to develop and focus on what can we do outside of the website. And that's our view on the world, is helping marketers get out in front of companies before they come to your website.
Mike: And that's really interesting. I mean, you're trying to actually, you know, raise awareness prior to the website. So, I mean, what you're doing is a lot of effectively outbound marketing, going out and trying to reach prospects. Is that how you summarize it? And why do you feel it needed a different approach?
Riaz: Well, a lot of the B2B world back then, even a large amount of it today, when you're thinking about outreach beyond the sort of direct response outreach of email, you're predominantly talking about large-scale advertising, social media advertising, sponsorship, those sorts of things, and the challenge with that is it's very broad. For most B2B companies, they don't actually want that day one. They want to be able to target their particular niche, and they want to be able to know who they've targeted. And all the solutions I talked about just now don't serve that at all. And the big growth area in B2B marketing in recent years has been account-based marketing, which is this very idea of identifying and nurturing specific companies through to close, not just one by one as it was traditionally, but going right the way up to hundreds or even low thousands today.
Mike: And, I mean, account-based marketing obviously is where a lot of B2B companies start when they're really trying to focus down. But there's been a lot of things happen in ABM in terms of new tools, new entrants. I mean, how do you see the whole ABM world changing over the last couple of years? Do you think it's been dramatic? Or do you think there's just a lot more people piling in with similar tools?
Riaz: Yeah, I think what we've seen is that classic product life cycle curve of very strong early adoption. I think in the last couple of years, 22, 24, we were basically crossing the chasm. And we've come out of that chasm now to a different type of market. What the big shift seems to be now within the ABM space, it's twofold. And twofold in the sense of looking at two sides of the market, really. So on the one hand, we're seeing the early adopters of ABM really integrated into their wider demand generation programs. And so the ABM techniques are now becoming a part of a much bigger, broader B2B market, which is great. It means that effectively ABM is now part of your standard set of tools that you go to market with. But the other big change is the expansion of ABM across the marketplace. So it's no longer your larger enterprise companies who can afford the big all-in-one platforms going after enterprise. It's now smaller point solutions whereby smaller mid-sized companies are able to just take what they want. and implement those parts of it piecemeal, if you like. And obviously that's where we're coming in as well with our focus on intent data and the company-targeted advertising piece of the puzzle.
Mike: That makes sense. And I want to drill down into what Radiate does in a minute. But, you know, I'm intrigued by the fact that ABM is still being adopted by that midsize company audience. I mean, what really do you think held people back? Was it just the cost of the tools? Or was it complexity, the time required, the expertise? What were the big barriers? So certainly the cost of the tools was one part, but you didn't need
Riaz: tools to do ABM. The tools support the program rather than make the program, if that makes sense. And so the biggest couple of summing blocks is partly the definition of ABM. We dropped ABM as a phrase from our go-to-market activity a long time ago. and are much more focused on, well, actually, what are we doing to your target audience that's helping you as a business, right? What does it do to your pipeline? What does it do to awareness? Those types of messaging. Because of the confusion around the definition of ABM, I think the market has got to a point whereby it doesn't matter what the definition of ABM is now. The techniques that are sitting underneath it are well understood. And companies are coming at it from the perspective, well, I want to do X. And the fact that X happens to be inside ABM doesn't matter anymore. And I think that's why we're seeing much bigger adoption.
Mike: That's interesting. I mean, obviously, it's difficult. And I think a lot of marketers are approaching ABM, and they are uncertain about what does ABM mean? Does it matter to them? I mean, what mistakes do marketers make when they say, we're going to start an ABM campaign, or we're going to run an ABM campaign? And how can they be doing it better? There's a bunch of things, right?
Riaz: So first and foremost, understanding who you want to target. is the first big, big hurdle to get over. You have to remember that in any one moment in time, a small percentage of your market is in market. If you take the research, it's 5%. Now, if that's the case and you are taking, let's say, 100 or 200 companies, which is often the number that gets settled on, sometimes it's smaller, 50, sometimes it's a bit bigger, but regardless, it's a small percentage of your overall market. And the problem with that is if you don't have a level of insight which tells you whether they're coming into market or they're in market, then there's a very high likelihood, just from basic maths, that that project is going to fail. because the chances are those companies are not in market and they're not going to react. Until they're in market, all you're doing is building brand awareness, which, let's face it, if all we wanted to do was to build brand awareness, we'd just do a big, broad-scale brand campaign. No need for the ABM side. So that's the first big, big thing. And then the second thing after that is really about caring about your data. Just like with AI, if you're running an ABM program and the companies that you're targeting have the wrong associated data with it, then you may think you're targeting Coca-Cola but actually you're targeting some random company elsewhere in the world. So knowing and being on top of your data is also key. And then the last one is relatively new and I think it reflects the maturity of the market as you get over those first two hurdles really. is actually understanding your market in the first place. So a lot of ICP, Ideal Customer Profiles, consist of very broad criteria like industry X, companies of certain size or certain revenue. in a certain industry type stuff and that is very broad and doesn't really address actually the problems that you're trying to solve within your marketplace and you want to be able to narrow it down to the problems that you're solving and the solutions that you're offering and then segment based on that.
Mike: That's really good advice. I mean, I love the understanding the market, particularly, and solving problems rather than targeting a demographic. I think that's really helpful. We've skirted around the issue of intent data. I mean, obviously, Radiate B2B is an intent platform. So people, again, have different views of what intent data is and how you use it. So do you want to give us the Radiate view of what intent data is and maybe talk about how people can use some of the data that you provide to them?
Riaz: Yeah, so our intent data powers advertising first and foremost, and there's a reason why we started there. Intent data was seen as this silver bullet, this idea that you can identify this company that's in market, and they're definitively in market, and they're going to be interested in talking to you. Neither of those statements is true. The reality is that intent data is merely a signal. that attention is being given to a particular problem or area. So that's the first thing. They could be researching because something's grabbed their attention, and they don't know they have a problem, and they're still at that very, very early phase. And then they may get to understanding that problem and think, well, that's not a priority for us. Well, no matter what you do, you're not going to get in front of those companies. But they will be identified as having intent. Likewise with wanting to talk to you, We're data guys. We track and measure everything. And one of the things that we were able to do was to see a picture across market and see some companies' pipelines across market. And we were watching to see how different companies engaged with potential buyers. One company's got very good brand awareness, very good relationships. The other company has very minimal brand awareness, and in this particular case had very little relationships in this specific area. We were advertising to the intent data, same list, across two different companies. One company was getting a 3x increase in response rate. The other company was not getting very much at all. The reason for that was because When companies are going to be interested in talking to you, they need to have some context about who you are. They need to understand why they should talk to you versus why they should talk to somebody else. That may mean that you need to be spending, you know, in the case of the second company who wasn't getting much responses, basically we got over that problem. by a much longer-term program of investing in greater brand awareness, basically introducing why they were a strong player in the market to be listened to. And once we did that, we started to see the metrics grow accordingly. Unsurprising, really. But it is that understanding of context and how to use intent data. The other thing that we do, which I gloss over, is we don't rely on one source for intent data. We collect intent data from the most obvious ones, like browsing across the internet. also first party by looking at what activity is happening on your website. But then we also pull in advertising data from LinkedIn or from the display to look at which companies are engaging. If you think about display, display is a brand-led platform. You really don't run display campaigns to do lead generation. You do it to build your brand as cheaply as you possibly can, really. So when companies do engage, with your display advertising, that's a really big indicator that they are interested in this topic. And we found that was the earliest indicator of intent because we don't need to process tons of data, third parties aren't processing tons of data to get to the idea that they're showing signal based on their browsing activity.
Mike: I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. But I think the first thing to say is, it's really interesting. Brand is cool again. It is, isn't it? I mean, Google a few years ago released some data that said that businesses that did display brand advertising got better results on search ads. And everyone was like, wow. Oh, that's unbelievable. And then moved on and just ran search ads. But now I think what you're saying is really true. There's no magic bullets here. You've got to build a combined campaign. And to me, that's interesting, because what you're saying is you have to go beyond just using that intent data, and you have to also build a platform. And is that something that you offer with Radiate B2B, or are you purely intent-driven? We absolutely do.
Riaz: So we really solve for ABM advertising programs, so taking your ABM list and targeting them specifically with advertising across display and LinkedIn. And then on the other side, powering those advertising campaigns with the intent data. as well, so that you don't need to be worrying about manually, I mean if you think about it, if you're taking a list of companies every single week and then having to manage that into an advertising campaign, that's a bit of a nightmare, as well as the fact that companies will drop in and drop out of showing intent and we take away all of that. We basically enforce management of the campaign so that a company will see ads for a minimum period of time so you know they'll have seen enough ads to be able to recall your brand basically.
Mike: And I'm interested, are there industries where the kind of intent data you generate is more effective? I mean, I know if you look at, some people generate intent from social, what's being discussed on social. If you're targeting defense technology companies, they don't generally talk about what they're developing on social media, mainly because anyone who's done that has been locked up for breach of secrets act. So I'm intrigued, are there, with your method, because you're monitoring engagement, Are there industries where you get better results, or is it pretty much equal across all industries?
Riaz: Yeah, so, I mean, generically, it's companies that are selling to enterprise. That's the first sort of tier, if you like. And generally speaking, that's where we're going to be adding the most value. Sure, if you're a defence company, I'm not sure you'd buy advertising anyway. Your target market is quite small, and there isn't a need for it. But the reality is that we as marketers cannot track every single individual on the planet, technically it's possible. I'm pretty sure most of us will agree that's not a good place for us to be where we're tracking how people behave and act at an individual level. So everything we're doing is at a company level and location. What that means is you have to have a targeted persona. So you need to know that your persona is definable as at least a function.
Mike: That makes sense. So you need, you know, fairly large organisations to reach but very specific targets. I mean, do you have some examples of how some of your customers have actually used the platform to run great campaigns?
Riaz: Yeah, it's… So the intent-powered campaigns are my favourite because it's so easy to show uplift in performance. We run campaigns with one particular company, it's a mid-sized marketing agency, actually. In North America, they were targeting big enterprise, very big enterprise. Their A-list of companies, their ABM list of companies was doing well, in the sense that, and we'll see this typically, it's interesting how consistent this is, 20 to 30% of companies that you target, assuming you're targeting at least 100 companies, will engage either directly or indirectly with your campaign each quarter, so over three months. With an intent-driven campaign, it's 3x the performance. So you'll typically see 20 to 30% of companies engage within a month. So three times faster. Overall, I'd normally say two to three times faster, but for this example, it was three times faster. And also, they're more likely to click. So whereas a campaign that's targeting an ABM list, what we'll see is companies come in directly to the website. 60, 40, 70, 30 in favor of coming in directly. With an intent campaign, we'll see two, two and a half X uplift in click rates. So dramatic changes. Another one, actually this builds on your point about Google and showing search uplift. We had one of those amazing clients that tracks everything, every channel, impact by us across all those channels, and so we were able to watch and see Uplift at every stage of the pipeline. and how their email marketing saw an uplift. Their search advertising saw a 20-something, 28 I think it was, percent uplift post our campaign or during our campaign running for them. And anyone who knows about advertising knows that when you run advertising campaigns, it has a knock-on effect on every other channel, just because you have a couple of factors. Recency, recall, right? So if you recognize a brand, you'll pay it slightly more attention. Because you're giving it slightly more attention, you are slightly more likely to click through because it's of interest to you. And so there's that knock-on effect right the way through. So yeah, so there's those sorts of things that just help with driving pipelines.
Mike: That's really interesting. And I mean, I guess you use the platform to market Radiate as well. So are there some stories of how you've used it and seen benefits from the platform?
Riaz: Yeah. I mean, we use it, obviously, daily. It is actually really difficult for us to use it, because our target market is small to medium-sized companies. So the top end of our target market fits into this idea of selling to larger companies. But we build the platform for companies who sell primarily to large companies, not companies like ourselves. But it does work for even that small slice of our target market. And so we do display advertising. It's automatically targeting companies showing intent. We push the data into LinkedIn to target within LinkedIn. And we use the, I use the intent data that we generate. We sync it into HubSpot. So HubSpot's our sort of center of all data. And we push the data into there, and then I use that to then take action. We're primarily a social selling house. We don't do very much outbound email at all, so not cold anyway.
Mike: That's fascinating. I'd like to pivot a bit and look at the future. I mean, we've talked a bit about, you know, what's changed and what people are doing today and what works today. But, I mean, technology is changing all the time, particularly in marketing. I mean, what do you think is going to be the biggest changes in MarTech over the next, you know, five years? And what are you doing at Radi8 to prepare for it?
Riaz: So I'm hoping, I'm going to put my head on the chopping block and say that by the time this podcast goes live, we will have announced our first piece of technology, which I think is an indicator of where the world is going to go with AI. AI is obviously going to change everything in marketing. Marketing, fundamentally, is about putting the right message in the right place at the right time. All the marketing boils down to that, really. There's a lot of stuff outside of it, but it's what it boils down to. And AI is going to change the way where people are. It's going to change the types of messaging they want to receive. And timing is an interesting one. But we are building an interface that's going to allow you to take your AI, not our AI, your AI, and use it to advise on, in our case, the intent data. and also the advertising campaigns that you're doing. And so with our clients, each week I sit down and review our clients' campaigns and feedback to our clients as to what we should be thinking about next. strategically, and that could be new tests, it could be gaps that we've got in the campaigns, it could be the entire framework, upgrading the entire framework. The AI can advise on all of that already. Fundamentally all I'm doing is taking the data, analyzing the data, and then pointing out what the data shows, and AI is very good at doing that. So that's going to change from a marketer standpoint. From the person being marketed to standpoint, I mean, I think we end up with AI on our phones. I'm not sure I'm particularly keen on the idea, but I suppose it's not that different to everybody being glued to their phones with their heads down while walking, but I suspect we'll end up with earpieces. constantly in our head with the ability to talk back and forth to an AI and that's both amazing and terrifying at the same time.
Mike: I think we have to leave the discussion about ABM and the future on that amazing but terrifying point. Before you go, Riaz, we always like to ask a couple of general questions. So the first one is, what's the best piece of marketing advice someone else has given you?
Riaz: You know, I come back to this over and over again because I love it. I think it's illustrative of everything we have to do in marketing. And it's Ogilvy's quote about you never know which 50% of your spend is actually performing. I love that because at the end of the day, we will never have enough information to know. Attribution was always a farce. We all knew it. It just gave us a little bit of a glimpse into what's working. And it's only going to get harder. I don't see that getting any better in the sense of giving marketers insight. We're going to always be playing. in the dark a little bit, and we're having to test and try things and be bold. And yeah, that's the point.
Mike: I love that. It's amazing. Second question we ask is, if you're talking to someone who's about to start their career in marketing, what advice would you give them?
Riaz: I think there's never been a more exciting time to become a marketer. It's also potentially the easiest time to be a marketer. You can create a blog, you can create a fan page, create a YouTube channel, any number of things that you couldn't do 20 years ago at all. And so you can hone and practice your marketing before you even graduate from high school. So there's that element of it. You can play in the world of marketing without ever going and applying to be a marketer for somebody else sort of thing, which is great and allows you to understand whether you want to be a marketer in the first place I think. But the second thing I'd say is the last 10, 20 years, change has been constant. Change will continue to happen all the time. And I think if anything, there's greater opportunity as a marketer in the next 10 years to do something amazing for your company than there was in the last 10 years.
Mike: That's such a positive way to end up. I love that. Riaz, I mean, you've proven that you've got so many interesting insights, you know, second time on the podcast. And still it's brilliant. I think I got maybe a third of the way through my questions. So we'll have to look for a third, another return to the podcast. Riaz, it's been really good. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. Really great to be here. Enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, always happy to come back again. Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Unlocking ABM Success: How Recotap Empowers Companies on LinkedIn
Ganesh Chithambalam, Co-founder at Recotap, explores how account-based marketing is evolving and discussed the challenges marketers face when it comes to effectively marketing their products.
Learn how Recotap is enhancing ABM by using LinkedIn as a high impact advertising platform and empowering smaller SaaS companies to run personalised campaigns. Ganesh also unpacks key topics such as understanding buyer intent, avoiding common pitfalls in traditional ABM strategies, and creating messaging that resonates with target audiences.
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About Ganesh
Ganesh Chithambalam is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in the SaaS and marketing technology space. Before founding Recotap, he built and scaled 30+ high-growth SaaS products and a high-performance programmatic ad exchange. With a deep focus on performance marketing, automation, and account-based strategies, he brings a pragmatic, results-driven approach to solving complex B2B marketing challenges.
Ganesh is passionate about using data and technology to drive meaningful outcomes for marketing teams. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, discovering local cultures, and experimenting in the kitchen.
About Recotap
Recotap is an Account-Based Marketing platform purpose-built for B2B marketers who want to run high-impact, personalised LinkedIn campaigns at scale. Designed to simplify complex ABM workflows, Recotap brings together data signals, audience segmentation, ad personalisation, and performance tracking into one unified platform.
By leveraging intent data, CRM insights, and website behaviour, Recotap helps marketing teams identify high-fit, in-market accounts and automatically activate 1:1 ad campaigns and personalised landing pages. Whether you're building awareness, accelerating pipeline, or influencing late-stage deals, Recotap enables full-funnel ABM execution with minimal effort.
Trusted by fast-growing SaaS and tech companies, Recotap is helping redefine how modern B2B teams approach demand generation, sales alignment, and marketing ROI.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 – Guest Introduction: Ganesh Chachambaland
00:00:43 – Ganesh's Career Journey and Founding RecoTap
00:03:38 – Challenges in Current ABM Campaigns
00:04:12 – Common Mistakes in ABM Marketing
00:06:24 – Intent Signals and Their Importance for SaaS
00:07:03 – Personalisation in ABM Campaigns
00:12:18 – Balancing Lead Generation and Brand Awareness
00:16:37 – Predictions for the Future of ABM and Marketing
00:18:26 – Valuable Marketing Advice Received
00:20:28 – Outro and Contact Information
Quotes
“The companies which are getting successful are the ones who are marketing it well.” - Ganesh Chithambalam, Co-founder at Recotap
"I think brand positioning and brand differentiation is very, very important.” - Ganesh Chithambalam, Co-founder at Recotap
Follow Ganesh:
Ganesh Chithambalam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ganesh-chithambalam/?originalSubdomain=in
Recotap website: https://www.recotap.com/
Recotap on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/recotap/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Ganesh Chithambalam at Recotap
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Ganesh Chithambalam
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Ganesh Chithambalam. Ganesh is the cofounder of Recotap. Welcome to the podcast, Ganesh. Hey, Mike. Nice to be here. Great to have you on the podcast, Ganesh. I'm really interested, you've formed Recotap. Can you tell us a little bit about your career and what made you get to the point where you felt that Recotap was the company you wanted to found and grow?
Ganesh: Yeah, it's been an interesting journey and I think it's an interesting story how we started Recotap. So I started my career as a programmer and I used to work at a couple of IT services companies where we started building apps. Then after a while at it, I thought, Hey, I should start a consulting company where we start building apps for other companies. Right. And while we primarily worked with startups, SaaS companies were trying to build SaaS solutions for real world problems out there. right? So we built close to 30 or 40 SaaS products. And what I found out was the companies which are getting successful were the ones who were marketing it well, right? They were really good products, but then companies, especially the SaaS founders, found it really struggling to market those products well. And that got me thinking, hey, I've built products for others for a long time, so why don't I build products for helping founders succeed once they build their SaaS products? And then we started understanding, hey, what kind of problems they are facing. And then SaaS companies finally used LinkedIn a lot. And then one thing led to another, and then we kind of figured out, hey, ABM is a product space where we want to build a product and where there's a lot of need for a long tail kind of companies trying to do ABM selling to large enterprises, but they don't have the budgets and resources to have a large ABM software or a team. And that was the space we wanted to play in. And then we launched Recotap, which is helping small SaaS companies implement ABM to close large value deals.
Mike: I think that's a great description of, you know, Recotap ad at a high level what it does and why it's needed. Perhaps we can just delve a little bit deeper into what you're actually doing to help marketers, you know, run ABM campaigns for SaaS products. So can you talk a little bit about how Recotap works and how your customers might use it to run great ABM campaigns?
Ganesh: So Recotap is a LinkedIn-only focused ABM product. So the primary challenge what we're solving is LinkedIn is a great advertising tool for B2B audiences. but it lacks tools to run an effective ABM strategy. So if you ever end up talking to a LinkedIn executive, they would say, Hey, minimum audience size should be 50,000 matched contacts, right? Which is too huge. And it's not really useful for anything more than a brand awareness campaign. So if you want to do ABM on LinkedIn, you really need to know, Hey, where in the buying journey is an account sitting? And then you have to use the right message for that account at the right time to get meaningful results. So essentially what RekruTab does is it helps B2B marketers run full funnel account-based marketing campaigns with the right amount of personalization, depending on the journey stage. So that's how I would sum up Recotap, right? It's a full funnel account-based marketing campaign purpose-built for LinkedIn.
Mike: And it's not just LinkedIn as well, because you also cover the development and optimization of landing pages as well, isn't that right?
Ganesh: Yes. Yeah, it's not just ads, right? When you start engaging an account, It's also important to engage them completely, right? Typically, what people do is they look at an ad, they click, they come to your website. Imagine if you could show content which is relevant for an account on the website as well. That's an additional capability what we're going to pass.
Mike: I mean, let's go back and talk about ABM because I think, you know, you obviously understand ABM incredibly well and have built a product that helps people do it better. What are people, other than having audiences that are too large you referred to earlier, but what are people doing wrong with their ABM campaigns today?
Ganesh: Yeah, I think a lot of B2B marketers think ABM is, hey, I identify a bunch of accounts, run ads to the decision makers, and then somehow they're going to fill forms and then come to demos, right? So I think that's a primary mindset that most marketers have, right? Unless you've done AVM well for a while, and then you really go, hey, that's not how it is. Most people think, hey, I run a campaign. I put in a bunch of $10,000 budget and I would get 20 booking demo books from decision makers right from the right. I think what ABM essentially is understanding the needs of an account, where are they even looking to buy your solution right now, and then take the right action based on where their needs are, right? So if an account is not even thinking of buying a solution, it's best to nurture them and educate them and be on top of their minds. so that when the right time arrives, they think about your brand versus think about an account which is visiting your website or comparing you on G2. They're actually considering purchasing a product or a solution similar to yours. The messaging and the ads should be completely different then. You should be talking about, hey, what pain points we can solve? How are we better than the competitors you are researching about, right? So that's how the messaging should be. Only when you engage your accounts in a way, depending on what their content need is, is what is an efficient account-based marketing campaign. And that's what most marketers miss out. They just think, hey, I run a bunch of ads and then I'm magically going to get decision makers into my demo or buy my product.
Mike: And that's really interesting. I mean, this is something LinkedIn talks about a lot with targets that are in market and targets that are not in market. And they have this 5% number they come up with. Only 5% of the people you're targeting are actually ready to buy at the moment. Presumably, one of the nice things about working with SaaS companies is that it's actually possible to get some intent signals. And you mentioned a couple of places where you might pull in intent. So you can understand whether an account is considering a purchase or not. Does that make ABM for SAS easier? Or do you think that's something that Recotap is going to apply across other markets in the future?
Ganesh: Yeah, I think the Recotap app is quite useful for markets where a lot of decision making is done digitally. And I think that's a lot of markets now. And I think if your audience is on LinkedIn, Recotap app is going to be quite useful. So we are right now focusing on SaaS companies because of the intern signals, what we have natively built in. We work with G2, we work with Trusted Years, we work with Bombora, right? And I think it's primarily SaaS and software. focus signals at this point in time, or tech companies, if I have to go broad. But I think as a product, I think it's primarily dependent on LinkedIn. So anybody who has audiences on LinkedIn can actually use like that.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, one of the features, you know, as well as bringing intent is personalization. I think anyone who's run ABM campaigns, typically is quite surprised that relatively straightforward personalization can actually really improve performance. So can you talk a little bit about how you help marketers personalize the content in the campaigns, whether that's the ads or the landing pages, and what you've seen that works really well?
Ganesh: So, I think personalization is one of the key actions which you can take when you're running the LinkedIn AVM campaign. So personalization, if you have to do personalization well, so you need to really understand what your accounts are looking for, right? So I think the standard personalization is, hey, company name, or hey, person name, but I think that works to just grab attention, but then nothing more than that. So real personalization is understanding, hey, what your account is, look at all the signals which an account is exhibiting, understand what an account is trying to achieve right now, and can you customize your message for that account and for key personas inside that account. So, Rekodap helps automate 80 to 90% of this process. So, as I mentioned before, we integrated most signals which B2B marketing teams have at hand. It could be signals on the CRM systems. It could be signals on website. It could be signals on third-party systems like G2 or Vumbora and so on. Say, for example, if you are a SaaS company selling to a HR head, and if you know that this particular certain company is interested in procuring HR tech solution like, let's say, payroll management. And they have problems related to payroll management. And then if you can try and position yourself saying that, hey, we are the best payroll management tool, and we solve certain problems in payroll management, which is quite relevant for you based on the intent signals what the account is exhibiting. So that's deep personalization. So you need to take your messaging from not just, hey, company, or hey, person, to actual pain points and actual requirements of an account basis at a certain stage, right? So that's what is personalization. And how Recotap helps you do is understand the signals, segment the accounts, and also create ads with AI, which use those signals, and then place those ads directly on LinkedIn. So you're not actually spending tons of time understanding signals, creating creatives, right? You can automate all of it with Rekrut app.
Mike: And in terms of managing that, I mean, I think one of the challenges people have with ABM on LinkedIn is that the LinkedIn ad tool is fairly clunky. So presumably what's happening is Recotap handling all that management and creating separate campaigns that have customized ads. So you're doing that all automatically in the background, is that right? Absolutely, right?
Ganesh: So, imagine you have 100 accounts who are interested in the same payroll solution, but they have different pay points. So your ads, need to be 100 different creatives. What record app can do is create 100 different ad creatives for each of those 100 accounts and also push it to LinkedIn and run those campaigns for each of those 100 accounts automatically.
Mike: And then presumably you can also route people to customized landing pages? Absolutely.
Ganesh: If you have a personalized ad, if people are clicking on it, they're going to land on your website. And then you can personalize with the same intent signal, with the same information. You can provide a lot more context and a lot more information on why a particular brand should be considering your product. So you're pairing a personalized landing page with a personalized ad.
Mike: And I think one of the things, you know, people would really like to know is you've obviously seen some campaigns that have been really effective. Are there any kind of either great campaigns or ideas or tips you can give as to how marketers can personalize ads more effectively on LinkedIn?
Ganesh: Yeah, so I think there are a lot of use cases where personalized ads can be used. All of us know LinkedIn ads are quite expensive and personalization brings the cost per click down and also increases the click-through rate. So that's like the leading metric. If you personalize well, I think you're going to get your cost per clicks and click-through rates at least 50%. We have seen customers decrease it by 300% and also getting your cost per leads down effectively. So that's the leading metric, right? But what could also happen is I've seen a customer who effectively used personalized ads to do ad cover for sales when they were part of an RFP process. So there was a large IT company going behind a bank and the sales were requiring marketing to influence their RFP. So this particular customer ran personalized ads, engaging the entire decision-making team for over three months. And then this campaign actually led to a win of a $3.2 million deal. So essentially the spend was not more than $20,000. but the revenue was $3.2 million. That's the power of personalization. If it's done well, I think it can really short circuit long sales cycles and also win deals for you.
Mike: And I think you mentioned something there that I think we really do need to address. LinkedIn is great, and particularly for its ability to target not only just at the company level, but also in terms of roles, which is clearly why a lot of people look at LinkedIn as their go-to platform. As you mentioned, LinkedIn can be very expensive. So it seems to me like there's an opportunity for for Recotap to potentially expand in the future and maybe offer, for example, Google Display retargeting of people who visit landing pages and don't convert. Is that something you're looking at? Is that in the plans? It's absolutely in the plans.
Ganesh: So, the key difference between retargeting and Recotap is this. So retargeting is you're targeting one person who has just visited the website. They may or may not be the decision makers and may or may not be part of the influencing team. So with record app, you could target the entire buying group. It could be influencers, it could be users, and that's the power of, we call it pre-targeting. But essentially, once you get the right decision makers on your website, you could automatically start a retargeting campaign on Meta, Google, YouTube, whatever channel.
Mike: That's really interesting. You did mention something earlier, we had a quick talk about companies in market versus companies that aren't actually ready to buy. I'm really interested, how should B2B marketers balance their approach to companies that are showing intent, that are in market looking for a product, and then nurturing those potential future customers that maybe aren't quite ready to buy? Is there a way you can use RecoTap to actually balance your budget and allocate it more sensibly so you're not 100% focused on lead gen or 100% focused just on awareness?
Ganesh: Sure. I think it's more a question about what your company's goals are for this quarter. what your goals are in the long term. Record app and LinkedIn in general as a tool can be used to achieve both, right? It's a question of how much budgets you have and what is high priority right now. But I think good ABM campaigns are a mix of both. And then I definitely recommend using record app to build broad level awareness among your accounts, but also use Recotap to close leads and get leads and close deals faster. So I think there's no right mix on how much you need to spend on brand awareness and how much you need to spend on demand gen and stuff. But I think it's different for different companies. What we've seen customers successfully do is they figure this number in a quarter or two when they use Recotap. And because of the journey stage based orchestration, what record app has, you know, Hey, if I, if I start targeting X amount of accounts at the top of the funnel, how many actually go into the middle of the funnel and how many actually go into the customer stage, right. In a, in a quarter or two. And then you can use that number, which is actually relevant for your organization to make, uh, for the decisions for the next quarter and the next year and so on.
Mike: Yeah, makes absolute sense. One thing that interests me, you primarily work with SaaS companies, and there's been a lot of talk in B2B marketing about customers spending more time doing self-directed research, less time talking to salespeople. And I think SaaS is pretty much an extreme of that, where actually many people are buying SaaS almost entirely through digital processes rather than talking to salespeople. Do you see this trend continuing? And if so, presumably, that's going to drive more focus on ABM marketing, because frankly, the major prospects don't want to talk to salespeople. Is that a reasonable assumption?
Ganesh: I think it's a very, very reasonable assumption. And I think with AI, chat GPT of the world, I think doing research is becoming much and more easier and easier, right? But I do think for ABM SaaS companies, this is actually a good thing. Because when there's a lot of research online, it's easy to track intent compared to the previous ways of traditional sales. You have to have expensive salespeople take your customers on expensive dinners, golf events, and so on. But I think because a lot of research happens online, I think in my opinion, it's a good thing for SaaS companies. There are tools right now where you can get intent of these accounts. That's actually a good thing. It's actually lowering the cost per acquisition in my opinion. And I think it is a vote to continue.
Mike: I mean, that sounds very similar to what a lot of people I hear saying. I'm also interested what you think is going to happen in terms of changes to technology. I mean, ABM is actually, what is it, a couple of decades old? It's not really been around for that long, but it's changed massively. How do you see ABM or marketing in general changing in the next five years?
Ganesh: interesting time. I think what has happened because of the advent of AI is there's not too much difference between a good messaging and which is really well-crafted messaging and a not so well-crafted messaging, right? I think a lot of companies have cracked how to use AI well in their messaging and also implement automation. So what I see happening is There's going to be too much of noise. Customers are going to find it very difficult to figure out, hey, which is the best solution for me? I think there's a lot of overload of AI generated content out there. And then every ad is going to look similar. Every landing page is going to look similar. They're going to talk the same thing. So it's going to become very difficult for companies to actually make decision. And I feel people are going to go to human connections then to make the decisions. I think it's going to go into a full circle and I predict it's going to happen pretty soon.
Mike: Interesting. I think we're all seeing a lot of AI generated content and beginning to recognize it. I think that is going to be a challenge for marketers who've bought into AI heavily, is that customers are going to see it and value it less. I totally agree. Ganesh, I really appreciate your time. It's been fascinating. I feel like we've only scratched the surface of some of the capabilities of RecoTap. But I'm aware of your time. So there's two questions we always like to ask people on the podcast. And the first is, what's the best marketing advice you've ever been given?
Ganesh: The best advice which I ever got, which I reused at Recotap is think about differentiation right from the beginning and then think about positioning right from the beginning. And also, it takes a little bit of time and experimentation to arrive there, but I think you think about what your brand is, right? When somebody is searching for their problem on a weekend, they should think about your brand, right? And I think brand positioning and brand differentiation is very, very important.
Mike: I think that's great advice. I think certainly it's something we're all trying to do, maybe not always giving it as much focus as we should. The second question is about people entering the industry. I mean, obviously, industry is going through huge change at the moment, particularly due to the influence of generative AI. So what advice would you give a young person just about to start a marketing career?
Ganesh: Yeah, I think, again, I touched upon this a bit in one of the previous questions. I think it's an interesting time. A lot of grunt work in marketing, processing Excels, taking data from one place is all getting automated. I think what's going to still remain intact, at least in the near foreseeable decade is the human element of marketing. So I think an end person who's getting into marketing right now, I think should focus more on the human element, the psychology of marketing and not on say things like performance marketing, for example, which I think is going to get automated with AI pretty soon.
Mike: That's great advice. I love that. Ganesh, it's been great having you on the podcast. It's been a fascinating discussion. If people want to learn more about RicoTap or about account-based marketing, where's the best place for them to go?
Ganesh: I think we are very active on LinkedIn because we have a product which is on LinkedIn. I think the easiest place to reach me is on LinkedIn.
Mike: That's awesome. Ganesh, thank you so much for your insights and it's been a really fascinating discussion. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.
Ganesh: Thank you. Thank you so much, Mike.It was fun being part of this podcast and I think I really enjoyed this experience as well.
Empowering Marketers with AI – Sam Mallikarjunan – agent.ai
Discover how Sam Mallikarjunan, Growth Lead at agent.ai transitioned from being an AI skeptic to an advocate, and learn about the innovative platform that allows anyone to build and customize AI agents, regardless of their technical skills.
Mike and Sam explore what AI agents are, share real-world examples of how marketers can use them for tasks like research and content creation, and discuss how AI is reshaping the future of marketing roles.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About agent.ai
Agent.ai is the #1 professional marketplace where users can build, discover, and deploy trustworthy AI agents that deliver real-world value.
Founded in 2024 by Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, and led by Sam Mallikarjunan, Agent.ai empowers professionals to revolutionize their workflow across sales, marketing, and customer service through intelligent automation.
Since its launch at HubSpot’s INBOUND 2024, the platform has experienced explosive growth, amassing over 1.5 million users and hosting more than 1,200 public agents by early 2025. The platform distinguishes itself with its intuitive low-code agent builder, access to cutting-edge AI models, and a vibrant developer ecosystem.
About Sam Mallikarjunan
Sam Mallikarjunan is a growth strategist, entrepreneur, and the Growth Lead at agent.ai. He is the former CEO and co-founder of OneScreen.ai, a marketplace for out-of-home advertising, and previously served as Chief Revenue Officer at Flock.com and Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs, where he drove significant customer acquisition and revenue growth.
Sam is a former professor at Harvard University, where he taught Advanced Digital Marketing and Innovation, and he currently shares his expertise as a LinkedIn Learning Instructor. He is also the co-author of the bestseller Inbound Commerce - How to Sell Better than Amazon and frequently offers insights on AI, marketing, and business strategy
Time Stamps
00:00:18 - Guest Introduction: Sam Mallikarjanan from Agent.ai
00:01:41 - Overview of Agent.ai and Its Features
00:02:45 - Understanding AI Agents in Marketing
00:04:10 - Practical Applications of Agents for Marketers
00:10:34 - Target Audience: Individuals vs. Enterprises
00:12:57 - The Importance of AI Confidence in Marketing
00:17:27 - Future Changes in Marketing Roles Due to AI
00:19:59 - The Shift from Performance to Brand Marketing
00:22:44 - Best Marketing Advice Received by Sam
00:24:07 - Career Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:27:15 - Conclusion and Closing Remarks
Quotes
"The more focused you try and make an AI, the more effective it's gonna be at whatever the task is that you're trying to have it do." Sam Mallikarjunan, Growth Lead at agent.ai
"The biggest challenge is getting people to become AI curious and AI confident." Sam Mallikarjunan, Growth Lead at agent.ai
"It was an interesting project because it's what helped turn me from an AI doomer into an AI boomer." Sam Mallikarjunan, Growth Lead at agent.ai
Follow Sam:
Sam Mallikarjunan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallikarjunan/
agent.ai’s website: https://agent.ai/
agent.ai’s on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pulsar-platform/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Sam Mallikarjunan at agent.ai
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sam Mallikarjunan
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Sam Mallikarjunan. Sam is from Agent.ai. Welcome to the podcast, Sam.
Sam: Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Mike: So we'd like to start off, we'd like to give people a chance to introduce themselves, talk about their background. So what led you to found Agent AI? How did you get here?
Sam: Yeah, so Dharmesh Shah, who founded HubSpot, founded Agent AI. He came to me with the idea last year. I worked for him when I used to run HubSpot Labs way back in the day. And it was May 30th, he emails me and says, can we have 100,000 users by inbound, which is in September. We did. We had 156,000 users by inbound. And now it's, we've gotten kind of the old band back together. A lot of the early HubSpot executives, people that I worked with back when the company was 150 people, not, I don't know what they are now, probably like 8,000 people. But yeah, I know it was an interesting project because it's what helped turn me from an AI doomer into an AI boomer. Like I didn't want to see a world in which we went from having millions of websites to like dozens of orchestration agents and all dominated by major players. So I really like the ecosystem play. So yeah, I exited my last startup back in 2023. And it was too interesting, I think not to work on.
Mike: That sounds really exciting. I mean, do you want to explain a little bit more about what agent AI does? I'm sure some people listening will be familiar, but maybe some people won't have heard of a platform.
Sam: Yeah, we are less than a year old. So the idea is we have an agent builder. So anyone, regardless of technical skill or budget or anything else like that, can come use the free builder. It always has access to all the latest models. We don't charge for it because we assume performance is going to keep going up and costs are going to keep coming down. So it's silly to try and charge for AI usage. About 25,000 agents have been built on the site, which is quite a lot. And a lot of them are just like very niche applications. So it's LinkedIn prospecting for executive recruiters in Scotland, not just LinkedIn prospecting. So make it more precise. And the rest of the 1.5 million users are using agents that people build. So we wanted to make it so that anybody could build an agent or customize an agent. And then the marketplace side of it is anybody can discover and use an agent. So that's the majority of the users are finding agents that people have already built and then using those in their daily lives.
Mike: And that's interesting, but I mean, we've got a lot of marketers listening. Can you just unpack exactly what you mean by what an agent is in terms of the AI world?
Sam: Yeah, so an agent, first of all, this is why we should never let engineers name anything. The CEO at OpenAI had this joke. He's like, yeah, we're running out of weird number letter combinations to keep naming GPT dolls. An agent has quite literally agency, not in the philosophical sense, the literal sense. You allow it to take actions on your behalf. So it's not just the AI we've worked with for 20 years has been about predicting things. So, you know, auto completing texts or giving advice. An agent actually goes and does stuff on an ongoing basis for you. So it attends meetings for me and generates a summary based on things that it thinks I'll find interesting. It does, every morning I get an audio overview because it looks at my calendar. Everybody that I'm meeting looks at their company, their LinkedIn posts, generates, when I go for my morning walk, an overview for me. So it's, we've started to trust computers enough now that we let them take some actions on our behalf, generally as long as we're still in the loop. It's called human in the loop. But that's the difference between the normal AI, like autocomplete. Everybody's familiar with that. It's just instead of autocompleting sentences or predicting the next word, now we're having it autocomplete entire emails, entire articles, or entire essays and books.
Mike: So, I mean, do you have some examples of, you know, some of the agents on the agent AI site that maybe would be useful for marketers, you know, the kind of applications where you can do something that's just a little bit better than opening up chat GPT and driving it yourself?
Sam: Yeah, I mean, again, I love ChatGPT. They do great stuff, but they're solving for a generalized use case, which is very hard. In general, the more focused you try and make an AI, the more effective it's gonna be at whatever the task is that you're trying to have it do. The main thing, I mean, markers use it to draft copy. That's totally fine. They use it for prospect research, which I really like. So understanding what do the people in your audience want to read? What are the questions that they have? I think it's my favorite thing about AI is you can ask it to adopt a specific perspective. It's really hard, unless you're me, because I've had an easy career. As I said earlier, I was at HubSpot. We were literally marketers marketing to marketers about marketing. Most people aren't the exact customer that they're marketing to. So having it ideate with them, having it say, you know, how is this simulated persona, how is it going to perceive this email, this article that I'm writing, or even this landing page? So now that it can actually see things, you can have it, you know, tell you how you should change the page to make it less interesting to you, potentially, but more interesting to the people who matter, which is the people that you're actually marketing to. So that I think is the most practical way. You can use it to automate all the stuff that you already hate, right? You can post LinkedIn spam at scale. That's fine. It's how most people are using it. You could have a draft and write blog articles for you. It'll get you probably 85% of the way. But that's still a big time saver. It allows you to provide different languages.
So Most people don't realize the T, the Transformer, the T in GPT was originally built for language translation. And so like having that context and that ability to provide support, provide collateral, everything else that you're doing in multiple languages, very important for a lot of marketers. So you can automate things you do. You can expand your skill set too, right? Like I no longer have to go bug the engineering team every time I want to write My local pub, I built a drunken spelling bee game for them. And that's maybe not the most powerful application of AI, but it was particularly interesting that I didn't… I haven't written code in 20 years, at least none that anyone used, but I was able to do that without bothering them. You know, like back in the day at Upspot, we had a woman, I think her name was Diana. She like took a week off, taught herself jQuery and like manually coded, she was on the marketing team, manually coded a slide in CTA, now it's a feature that they have. And like kind of the goal is can everybody be a Diana, right? Can everybody have access to code? Sales reps can generate presentations so that you don't have to, you know, be bothered by that. Can you do advanced data analytics, you know, without having to loop in the data science team? So it's like we're still T-shaped markers, we've got our deep specialization, but the breadth of the T, the number of things we can be mediocre at has dramatically increased. So like automate the things you want, you can have access to new skills, and then access to different perspectives and ways to communicate with people, those are my favorite ways to use it.
Mike: And so what an agent is doing is basically, and this is probably not the right technical word, but tweaking an AI so it's more focused on achieving a certain task. Is that what you're trying to do? Or what exactly is agent AI trying to provide?
Sam: Yeah, so an agent generally needs access to tools as well. So even just using, you know, my example of my daily briefing that I get, it has to access my Google Calendar, right? Then it has to access LinkedIn because it firstly enriches the contacts using a different system. Then it accesses LinkedIn. Then it generates the text, which GVT 4.5 is pretty good at. Then it uses a different AI to generate the audio for me. And then it like sends it to me. So, the ability to have multiple steps, multiple tools, have specific instructions, so you can have it adopt a specific perspective. It doesn't get lost in the memory chain. But then also, different AIs are good at different things. You may want to use Anthropic, so Claude, for something. You may want to use Perplexity for searching, which Perplexity has completely replaced Google in my life. I just don't use Google anymore, except when I'm looking up the HubSpot stock price. And, you know, it's not always like just use GPT, that's not always kind of the, or Chachapititas, not always the best thing to do. So it's the ability, if you can use workflow tools, right? Like just be able to think logically about what you want to have it do. Like I have it, and it's not always work related, right? I have one that's a chess coach. So every week I have my chess lesson and I got really annoyed at this like 20 something year old genius, like calling me stupid every week. So I built an AI agent that looks at my games, looks at the lessons I was supposed to watch that week, tells me what I clearly didn't learn, then it generates a quiz. So it pretends to be a teacher, generates a quiz, and then improves my answers. It tells me how I can improve my answers so that I show up to that meeting slightly more educated than I would without the help of the AI. So it's the ability to use different AI models and access different tools and then be able to force things very logically. Forcing AI to think step-by-step is not very easy when you're just using chat. You can tell it to think step-by-step, but it's going to forget and get weird. As opposed to if you build your own agent, you can force it to do this, then this, then this, then this.
Mike: But I think Asian AI takes it a step further. You don't actually have to build your own agent. You can actually use somebody else's agent. So do you want to talk about how you're giving people access to all these different potential helpful agents?
Sam: Yeah, like I said, 25,000 agents since we unlocked the builder in January. They're generally fairly different flavors of the same thing. So you can take an agent, somebody else. When you build an agent, you can either keep it private, you can make it public, You can use it for lead generation or in the future, you'll be able to monetize it. You'll be able to just like an Apple app store kind of situation. If you make it public, which is about I think 1,500 or so agents on the site are public. So most people keep them private. If you make it public, then people can clone them. So you can let people take the agent that you've built, which does something interesting. Maybe it's a meme generator. They can clone it and say, I want memes specifically for B2B enterprise marketers. Here's examples of really good memes. Here's examples of really bad memes. And now you have a meme generator for B2B enterprise marketing. That's not something you can do with just a regular agent. But yeah, that's like, right now it's all citizen developers. Nobody's making money off of building agents on agent.ai yet. They will eventually. Right now it's just people building stuff that they find cool. And then other people taking that stuff and building on top of it.
Mike: And what's the cost? I mean, is this sort of an enterprise type thing? You said people were citizens developers. So is it just individuals doing this?
Sam: For the most part, it's individuals that are building agents. Not a lot of enterprises are using it, because if you need an enterprise solution, there are other AI studios out there that have great enterprise-grade solutions with SOC 2 security and everything else like that. Our focus is the hundreds of millions of global professionals who aren't in the enterprise, or whose enterprises just haven't adopted it. I'm speaking at a big banking conference later this year, and people want to use AI, but their companies are just so slow. And if your company's not going to pay for it, but you still need it because you are an enterprise marketer or whatever, then you can come use HDI. So it is mostly individuals who are using it. I think like most disruptive technologies, it's going to start from the individual and then move on up more than it's going to be a thing that you can't wait for your company to evaluate a solution, buy it, implement it, train everybody on it. By the time that happens, six new AI revolutions will have happened. So it is a lot of individuals. But I think that if you're at a big enterprise, I think you count as one of those.
Mike: So it's fascinating. I mean, obviously, you know, you've got plans to grow and presumably by monetizing the agents that gives you a chance to drive revenue. So what's your strategy for growing the business growing the number of users? What's your marketing strategy overall?
Sam: Yeah, so we've been remarkably effective with paid acquisition. Turns out we're pretty good at that. We also, obviously, we're not part of HubSpot, but we are, I call it, strategically adjacent to HubSpot. We share a founder, obviously. We have a lot of reach into marketing with them and kind of their channel program. We're about to announce, actually, by the time this airs, probably we will have announced, a $1 million grant fund to subsidize people who want to build agents but can't afford to quit their jobs and focus on it. And then the thing I'm really excited about, another thing that we're announcing this month is, it's a terrible name, we're calling it essentially the Corporate Builder Program. So if you're a company, and you want to offer agentic functionality in your own platform, but you don't have AI engineers, or maybe it's just like really expensive, maybe you're a startup, you'll be able to build an agent on Agents.ai and have your users experience that agent in your own platform.
So right now we've got a million users. The way to get to 10 million users by inbound of this year, which is our goal, is mostly going to be around, can we empower people who already have big audiences, already have platforms that they're monetizing, etc., to enable those people to provide agent functionality to their users? That I think is, we're not going to buy our way into 10 million users. You know, our normal marketing channels might get us to three million users by September of this year. I think the rest of the growth for our target is going to come from letting other people build, not just on our platform, because we don't care at the end of the day if the user knows it's agent AI or anything else like that. Right. Like we just care that people are using AI agents. I think that's going to be the real issue. It's also the thing I feel good about because I know one feels good helping Microsoft make more money. Right. But like you feel good helping startups like my local pub. They built an agent. where they upload the stuff they want to get rid of, food and booze and stuff like that, and have it generate recipes and clever names. So these people who can barely update their website are doing inventory turnover optimization that would make Amazon proud. Those are the types of people that we want to help. So that's the strategy. There's definitely organic acquisition that we're doing. The biggest issue Much like the early days of HubSpot, I had to convince people that search engines mattered before I could sell you SEO software for quite a long time. And blogging was something your nephew did on LiveJournal, not something you thought serious businesses did. So our biggest challenge actually is, and the reason I do all these podcasts is getting people to become AI curious and AI confident and go try it out. But yeah, the biggest growth I think is going to come from that core program where we let other people build AI agents and we keep footing the bill, like it's fine. We don't mind footing the bill. We just want people to build cool things and we want to not live in a world where only large enterprises have access to build AI, which by definition means only people with large budgets have access to the AI that those people are building.
Mike: There's so many things I could ask you from that. I mean, obviously, you're, you're in a great position because you can foot the bill. Your your pounder Dharmesh has obviously got another company did okay HubSpot, I think is probably made him a few dollars. You mentioned a term that I thought was was really interesting. You talked about people being AI confident. And I think it's interesting, you know, if you talk to a lot of marketers today, they'll probably say, Yeah, I feel confident, you know, sitting down engineering a prompt for AI, that's okay, you know, this, this whole prompt engineer thing that's kind of gone away. Now, we can we can do that ourselves. If you said to them, how do you feel about building your own AI agent, I think, you know, a lot of marketers would be like, well, that's, you know, There's programmers go do that. So how difficult is it really to create, you know, an agent that maybe looks up some data from LinkedIn to enrich your CRM or something? Is it hard or is it really straightforward?
Sam: It's casual effort. If you can build a workflow in like an automation tool where you're just listing out like the steps that you want it to do, you can build an AI agent. My local pub They can't update the QR codes on their website without having me help them. That's the level of non-technical. Nobody opens an Irish pub in Cocoa Beach, Florida because they want to be a software developer. So if they can do it, anybody listening can do it. But my big thing is this change is happening much faster than any of us are used to. Industrial Revolution, we had a century to get used to it. Didn't happen everywhere at once. Even digital transformation, I mean, you had like 20 years to figure it out before it became a huge competitive disadvantage to not have CRM and analytics and stuff like that. This is probably more like five years. I mean, Shared GPT is only, what, three years old? right? Less than three years old. The paper that founded all of this, I think was published in like 2017. We went from underlying theory to, oh my God, how do we keep up in less than 10 years? The main thing I want to explain to marketers, I literally study this stuff for a living and I barely understand it and I can barely keep up. So I know it's an instinct for all of us to pretend like we know what's going on. And if we don't know what's going on, to find it very intimidating. But if you're curious and can overcome that, This is an, it's just an amazing time to create advantage for yourself because nobody is as far ahead of you as you think they are. All of the thought leaders on LinkedIn and everything else like that are, I don't know, a couple of weeks of study ahead of somebody listening to this podcast who's never even logged into chat GPT.
Mike: That's amazingly positive on one side and unbelievably scary on another because you really bring home the speed of change. I mean, that leads to this obvious question. How do you think the role of marketers is going to change over the next, you know, and let's keep it quite short, you know, one to three years because of AI?
Sam: One, I think we will be able to and therefore expected to do more in the organization. So we're going to be expected to be able to do data analytics, light coding, stuff that we haven't been expected to do in the past. The flip side of that is we will be able to expect others to do more on their own, like the product team being able to do product marketing and research, the sales team. Do not bother me with another question about what was our sales pipeline at the beginning of the quarter or something like that. Ask the freaking AI and let it figure that out for you. Have it build presentations and stuff for you. So like, we'll take on more responsibilities, we're going to lose some of those responsibilities. I think brand marketing is going to become much more important. So for the last like 20 years, it was kind of the quantitative marketers who were the popular ones. You know, performance marketers, PPC, conversion rate optimization, all that kind of stuff. The storytelling One, in a world in which everything's optimized to death, right? Like marketing is a game of millimeters before generative AI hit the stage. And now it's going to be even worse. Everybody's going to be good at that part. The brand's storytelling will set people apart. And also, optimizing for language models, because we are not far, and already people are using language models to help them shop, right? I asked Perplexity the other day, should I buy a new router? And it actually told me no. which I'm sure is not ideal for the people at the Netgear Corporation. But it's not like search engine optimization where it's keywords and links and stuff like that. It is more about what does the kind of zeitgeist of the internet writ large think about you and your brand and your product and your competitors. And that is more of a PR brand storytelling thing. You've got to get the internet to think something about you. more than just getting the right links and adding metadata and all the kind of, or A-B testing, copy and stuff like that. All the things that quantitative marketers have done. So I think if you are a pure performance marketer, start picking up some books about brand marketing. And if you are a brand marketer who has seen your budget cut for the last 15 years as PPC marketers got all the love, you're about to reenter your heyday.
Mike: I think that's fascinating. It's been an incredible cycle, actually. And, you know, we see people like Ram Fishkin talking about zero-click marketing and the importance of brand as well. I think what's happened with the internet is it came in, it almost killed brand marketing and made performance marketing like some kind of marketing god. And then 15 years later, as you say, it's actually reversing the situation. It's incredible how much priorities are changing in terms of marketing and how quickly it's happening.
Sam: Yeah, I mean, when everybody has access to the same tools, like when you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets. Right. And so it was an advantage for us. Like 15 years ago, if you just had a blog, you were ahead of the schedule. Right. I was back then I was the number number nine or something CMO on Twitter. Right. Like number 10 was the guy from Best Buy. And it's not because I was particularly interesting at the time. I think I was CMO of a cigar company, but there were only like 20 CMOs on Twitter. So it pays to be an early adopter to things. And this is the most leverage I've seen, where if you can be an early adopter to all the stuff that's going on right now, you can have a huge advantage. But everybody else is going to have those too. So content creation on the internet is already a slop. I mentor some startups that are publishing 2,000 blog articles a month. Right. This is going to crush things like SEO. The AI is going to write better ad copy. It's going to run better experiments, especially as we let it take more and more actions. We trust it more and more. The way people interact with the internet is going to change. Everybody now has the ability to do advanced data analysis. Great. Makes it not a competitive advantage. So you have to have an interesting perspective. It's the only way to win in the future is you actually shock, actually have to have something interesting to say in order to be effective at marketing. You can't just be really good at math, which is a bummer for me, by the way, because I built my entire career off of performance marketing.
Mike: And I was going to say, I started my career as an engineer. So that's not necessarily a positive view for me in terms of marketing, because clearly math is one of my marketing strengths. I mean, Sam, it's been fascinating. You know, I really appreciate your time. We'd like to ask just a couple of questions at the end. I mean, I feel there's so many things we could ask. There's a couple of standard questions you'd like to ask. And the first one is, what's the best piece of marketing advice someone has ever given you?
Sam: The best piece of marketing advice someone has ever given me was actually one of the early HubSpot customers, where he reminded me that what's obvious and potentially boring to me is novel, mind-blowing, and very interesting to the customers. So by definition, you know more about your industry, your product, your service, etc. than any of your customers. Otherwise, why would they be coming to you? And I think that is something that's hard to remind myself of right I write articles or even when I'm designing speeches and lectures for teaching. It's hard to avoid trying to make it interesting to me, and remembering that, like, marketing is a service that we provide to customers, our job is to educate and entertain and help them make a decision. So that, I think, is Tom Schwab, if you're ever listening to this, was the name of the person who first told me that. And that perspective has stayed with me.
Mike: That's awesome. The other question we'd like to know is, if you're talking to someone who's just about to enter marketing as a career, what career advice would you give them?
Sam: That's tough. My 16-year-old nephew actually just asked me that question. He's coming from a computer programming kind of angle. So what do I major in in college? I think broad experiences matter more than specialization. So in the world of weird things coming full circle, liberal arts degrees and having a broad exposure, I think is going to be a lot more important. Start using the AI tools if you aren't already, if you're just starting your career. The good thing is the younger generation finds AI tools very intuitive. It's not like, you know, people who have to kind of like figure out, oh, okay, this isn't a person. They also get better results from the language models because they don't, they're not like over engineering their prompts, right? They just interact with it in a natural way. But if you have a bent towards quantitative stuff, take some brand classes. Take a creative writing class. If you are a very creative person, take some more technical classes. Because I think our T-shape is getting wider. And again, the expectations are going to be important. But also just being able to understand different perspectives, different disciplines and trades, that's going to be really important. So don't just take the classes that you're super interested in that you think are very relevant to your marketing career. Take other ones, take sales courses, take a finance course. Like we all need to be much have much broader tees since we have the skills to do things. Now we need like the wisdom and context to be able to do those things.
Mike: I love it. It's fantastic. I mean, just to follow up on that, I think one of the things that some industries have seen, and I think software engineering is probably the best example, is that actually, the opportunities for younger people to enter have shrunk quite dramatically as some of the entry level tasks get taken over by AI. Do you think that's going to be a trend in marketing as well, that it's going to be harder to get into the industry because AI is going to do a lot of entry level work? Or do you see a more positive future?
Sam: Yeah, that used to be one of my main concerns, right? If you automate all the entry level sales reps, where do the senior sales reps of tomorrow come from? Because AI is just not going to be able to do things that require wisdom, judgment, context, experience. I'm more bullish now because there are interesting companies out there that are doing things like, it's hard to replace a sales rep, a full sales rep, right? It's quite easy to replace a prospect. So having a junior person is actually better for them because historically we would have to waste leads on junior sales reps that might have closed if we gave them senior sales reps. Now we can just create synthetic prospects and you can practice all day long. You can learn all of these things. And it's the same with marketers, right? One, you have unlimited information. You have an incredibly patient teacher. I sometimes just have chat GPT sit there and teach me quantum mechanics or some weird thing that I want to know more about. But you also have the ability to practice things. If you're applying for a job, you can practice interviewing. We all suck at interviewing. right? Unless you're a sales rep or somebody who's inherently good at managing a conversation. It's incredibly important to your life and it's something you probably only do like less than 100 times, right? In your life. And if you get it wrong, you're dramatically changed the trajectory of your life. So using AI to help younger people have access to wisdom and mentorship. They're creating these AI clones of people now, right? Like you can have an AI clone of Dharmesh and ask him for advice. He's always willing to give advice and talk to people, but there's limits on his time. He can't give advice to a million people. So I think taking advantage of AI as a learning tool and an opportunity to simulate the things that you're going to have to do and learn from that, I think it's actually going to make younger professionals more successful versus getting crowded out of the marketplace.
Mike: Thanks, Sam. I mean, that's just a great positive view to end on. I think that's really exciting. I mean, hopefully people listening to this will actually be really motivated to do more around AI, and they'll want to try Agent AI. So if people have questions about Agent AI or just want to get started, where's the best place to go?
Sam: So I actually suggest going to community.agent.ai. It's also linked in the footer of the main site itself. We don't pretend that we know all the answers. And much like the early days of the internet, there were forums where like developers and marketers were talking to each other. We have the same thing going on in the community. So join the community, ask questions, share perspectives that you have, we're all going to learn this together. It's not going to be, you go to the agent AI blog and you learn everything you need to know. And now you're a AI master. I think the really interesting stuff is going to be the stuff that we don't think of. So yeah, go check out community.agent.ai. Even if you just watch what other people are talking about, you're going to learn a lot.
Mike: That's amazing. And it shows that even if you're leading one of the most exciting companies in one of the most exciting sectors, you can still be humble and say the community knows more. I love that. Sam, that's been brilliant. And nothing has humbled me more than the AI revolution of the last several years. Sam, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for your insights. And thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Challenging Attribution, Repurposing Content, and Elevating Email
This episode dives into the challenges of attribution in marketing, the benefits of content repurposing, and what’s new in Salesforce’s spring AI updates. Mike and Hannah also cover Marketo’s improved email designer and share a quick tip on boosting engagement with more creative CTAs.
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcast
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- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Wehrly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:00:42 - Attribution vs. Incrementality
00:02:40 - Repurposing Content
00:05:02 - Salesforce's AI Agents
00:07:45 - Marketo's Email Designer Updates
00:10:41 – The Insightful Tip of the Week and Call to Actions in Marketing
00:12:36 - Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: Challenging Attribution, Repurposing Content, and Elevating Email
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wehrly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Whirly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard.
Hannah: Today, Mike rants about the problems of attribution.
Mike: We discuss making marketing content reuse a little bit simpler.
Hannah: The launch of Salesforce's AI agents.
Mike: We'll talk about Marketo's new email editor.
Hannah: And whether call to actions really make a difference. Hi Mike, welcome back to another episode of Market Automation Moment. How are you doing?
Mike: Hi Hannah, it's great to be back and good to talk to you again.
Hannah: Definitely. Now, I've got a few things I want us to cover today, but I've been doing a little bit of a stalk of your LinkedIn, and I've seen that you've been actively talking about attribution versus incremental increase. I'm really interested. Do you just want to take two minutes to explain what is that? And you know, what is it that you're actually talking about?
Mike: Well you've obviously noticed one of my hot buttons. I think you know one of the issues we've got is that actually attribution is one of the biggest cons that's ever been sold to marketers. Yes it can be useful if you design a campaign to be measured by attribution but there's so many ways that you can increase your campaign ROI using attribution. The classic example I said was if you simply advertise keywords around your online shop. So if you've got an online shop with a brand and you've just put Google ads there, you'll suddenly find great ROI. And the reason is, is people were going to go to your online shop, they would have clicked that organic result you had that's top of the list. But because you put an ad in front, they click on the ad and suddenly it looks like the ad has changed everything. The ad gets attributed value doesn't mean that it's increased any sales and i think what's going to happen is more and more people are actually going to run experiments where they're going to measure whether their campaigns are actually increasing sales or not and to me that's a great thing perhaps something for another marketing automation moment because one of my big frustrations is is that marketing automation platforms don't actually offer a good way to measure incrementality. They're all about A-B testing between two different things rather than testing whether sending an email or not really makes a difference.
Hannah: Definitely, Mike. I'd be interested in talking about it in a bit more detail. And it'd be interesting to see how these campaign measurements do change and whether marketers can then actually look at return of investment in a realistic way that matters and impacts them.
Mike: I hope it works. I mean, to be honest, incrementality is super hard to measure in B2B. So there's lots of problems. I'm very good at kind of ignoring the problems, just moaning about, you know, attribution. But I think, you know, it'll be an interesting thing to see.
Hannah: Interesting, Mike. Let's move on and kickstart the podcast episode. I really wanted to kickstart and talk about a webinar I recently saw from Acton. Now it was about repurposing content and don't get me wrong it wasn't anything that was out of this world but for me it was quite a nice surprise because we've talked about a lot of content the last few episodes and they've really been going hardcore on choose us, pick us, we're the market automation platform of your dreams. And so it was really nice for them to actually provide some content that I would view really valuable to marketers and to their users. And especially around this kind of concept of, yes, you've got your content, it's running, you've got your automations running great, but don't let your content get stale. I don't know, what did you think?
Mike: I actually thought it was a really good webinar. And the reason I liked it was they weren't actually trying to do too much. I think one of the things that happens is people look at content and they believe repurposing needs a complete rewrite or recreation of different format. And actually sometimes that's just not the case. A bit of a refresh can actually make the content look and feel very different, but doesn't require a lot of work.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, it's one of the things that we, you know, preach a lot at Napier. We're always saying to our clients, content is the most expensive thing. It's really time consuming. And actually you don't need to be creating everything from scratch. Things can be repurposed. They can be refreshed. And I think it's nice to look at that from a marketing standpoint as well.
Mike: Yeah, and I think as marketeers as well, we can also be super guilty of imagining that our whole audience has seen some content, read it, understood it and remembered it. And there's this great story about Ford, where apparently Henry Ford walked into the advertising department many years ago. and said, when are we gonna stop running this ad? I've seen it so many times, I'm really bored of it. And the poor ad manager at the time had to say, actually, Mr. Ford, we haven't run it yet, it's just been seen internally. And I think we get that same impact when we are marketers. We've worked on content, we've seen it so many times, we've been through the third revision, and I've had issues with the 20th revision. Hopefully nobody's doing that, but if you've seen it so many times, you imagine that everybody in your audience has seen it, And the answer is probably the vast majority of your audience haven't seen that content. So doing something to refresh it, you know, maybe changing the cover, you know, something really simple can actually get a much wider audience to see your content. So I think it's a great idea. It's a really good webinar.
Hannah: I love that story, Mike. Let's move on because we have actually had some updates from the other mass automation platforms in the landscape. And one I came across was Salesforce. Now they've just released their spring 25 updates. And I was interested. I was like, oh, is there going to be some really cool stuff? Let's have a look. And actually, it's all about AI agents. So they've got this one web page that just lists different AI agents for all different areas. Now, I'm not disappointed, but, you know, they've spoken about Einstein a lot. That's really their brand. And I get that it's new, but to me, it doesn't seem really exciting, really fresh. But I might be being a little bit cynical. I always hold my hands up if I am. What did you think about it?
Mike: Are you sure you're not disappointed just because it had the astronaut cartoons rather than the Einstein cartoons?
Hannah: It always affects my view.
Mike: Yeah, I think actually, in all seriousness, it's interesting how Salesforce are managing their branding of AI because it is outwardly a little confusing, a little inconsistent. You know, what they're trying to do, I think, is trying to give the impression that it's much bigger. And so they're using multiple characters. But you're absolutely right. The Einstein brand is very clear. And then the astronaut appears. I don't quite know what they're doing and whether it's actually going to make people understand or not. You know, it may be diluting, I think, the strength of some of their branding. Do you agree?
Hannah: I do agree. And, you know, often we like to argue on these podcasts, but I can't do it at this point, Mike. We've spoken about AI several times in the podcast and we've spoken about everything that they can do. But to me, it's almost come across, whether this is true and whether it's just how they've marked it, but it's almost a bit like a crux. So it's their crutch of, oh, well, look at us, we're laying this out, we're doing this. And in my head, I'm like, but weren't you doing that already?
Mike: It's interesting. I think there's a lot of hype around AI. And, you know, really what Salesforce is saying is that they've got agentic AI. So they've got agents that will actually do things using AI. And that can be really interesting, but it can also be really challenging. And I think one of the things that's really important is not so much the technology that they've got, which without doubt is pretty cool, but it's whether people can actually use the technology to implement customer service or marketing activities that are consistently better or at least as good as using humans. I think the whole question about whether AI is going to take jobs of humans is, you know, something different. But clearly from the marketing of AgentForce, which is all about digital labour, I think Salesforce is definitely pushing the fact that you'll need fewer people if you use our AI.
Hannah: I think that's a great point, Mike. And I think I'd be really interested to see some use cases, because at the moment, you know, it's all theoretical. We're not quite sure how it's going to impact people. So I think it's definitely something to watch.
Mike: Yeah, be interesting to see. I think you're absolutely right. The use cases are really what's going to define what happens.
Hannah: Well, let's move on because I want to talk about a platform we actually haven't spoken about for a while, and that's Marketo. Now, Marketo is often quite quiet on the marketing front, but I did come across quite a good blog that talks about some changes they're making to their email designer. Now, you've got a bit more experience with Marketo than I do, Mike. Do you think this is actually going to make an impact to users?
Mike: Do you know, I think it's interesting. So one of the things they seem to be trying to do with their new email designer is ensure that emails consistently look the same across all platforms. Anyone who's run big email campaigns knows that there's always platforms where your beautifully designed HTML looks a bit squiffy and off. And so I think that that's quite exciting. You've obviously had the same problem with, you know, marketing for Napier. The question is whether they'll be able to do it and whether they'll be able to keep up with changes in different email platforms.
Hannah: I think that's a great point and it's the risk that they go from being clunky, you know, email designers are often a bit clunky, they fix it, updates get made, the landscape changes and they're just back to being clunky straight away again.
Mike: Yeah, I mean I think the other thing that also is interesting is that clearly email's still a thing. I think for anyone who's actually active in marketing, that's the least surprising news in the world. There is a perception that email's going away. It certainly isn't. And I think if anything, really good email is here to stay. If you can get into the inbox and not into that kind of, whether you call it other or clutter or junk or whatever, if you can get into the main inbox, email is awesome.
Hannah: Oh, that's such a good point, Mike. I think I've heard nearly every week since I started my career, is email dead? I think email's dead. This is going to be the year that email is dead. You know, for Napier, for us, it's one of our most effective channels. And we spend a lot of time, and as you said, it's finding that balance of getting actually into that inbox, making sure that your system settings are set up right in the back end, making sure that you're testing, A, B testing subject lines, that it's not too long, it's not too short, and finding that balance, spending that time is so important.
Mike: You're so right, Hannah. I mean, I think people have been talking about the death of email forever. And if you do it right, and clearly you've done it right because you've talked about all the things to do, then it's really powerful. The other thing I think to say is that increasingly brands are realizing that to get into that primary inbox, one of the ways to do it is not to use over-designed HTML emails and just use plain text. That is a bit of an issue because obviously the Marketo designer is designed to make those beautiful emails that look wonderful. So I wonder what you think about that. I mean, do you think more and more people should be going to plain text?
Hannah: I think so. I've always been a massive fan of plain text. I think you can spend a lot of time. I don't want to say wasted, but I don't think it's the best use of time in making this beautiful header, making it look so lovely, having the layout. But really what it comes down to is if you do all that, but actually your writing isn't very good, the point, the value, it doesn't matter what it looks like, people are still going to click delete.
Mike: Absolutely. I totally agree. That's a great place to leave it and move on from email. What's the next thing on the list, Hannah?
Hannah: Well Mike, actually it's our insightful tip of the week and it links in quite well because I wanted to have a chat about call to actions and whether call to actions really make a difference. And now I'm talking about call to actions obviously in our emails but also on things like our website. We're a classic, we use our Discover, Learn More, Find Out. I do think there is quite a difference in the way landing pages can perform, for example, based on what you use. What do you think about it?
Mike: I absolutely agree. I mean, call to actions are super important. Anyone who's A-B tested it obviously will find people aren't clicking through to what you want them to do unless you ask them to actually do it. A strong, clear call to action is clearly important. And I think also it's really important to get the wording right. I mean, one of the greatest crimes against call to action is probably committed by LinkedIn. Sorry, LinkedIn, love you really. But just having a limited list of call to actions that you click from a dropdown, that's not great. I think what the HubSpot article made the point about, and really, you know, what as marketers we should look at, is honestly, learn more is not the only call to action.
Hannah: I think that's a great point, Mike. And I think sometimes being a bit creative with it. Yes, we're limited, but let your creativity come through. Think about what it is that you want to communicate and don't just fall into those same old tick boxes.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, you know, some of the calls to action in the HubSpot article, I mean, they gave a whole list of things, but some of them were actually quite cool. You know, I don't think I've ever used an upgrade call to action, but upgrade's a great active verb to use in a call to action. Claim is another one if you're offering content behind a registration wall. I think claim is a great call to action. So it did bring home to me that actually we all understand calls to action are good but maybe we sometimes sit a little bit in our comfort zone of CTAs and perhaps what we should be doing is being prepared to be a bit broader and certainly get them on those A-B tests and see whether they work or not. Find out.
Hannah: Well, I think that's a brilliant way to end the podcast, Mike. I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for another interesting conversation. I know we've covered a real variety of topics today.
Mike: No, thank you, Hannah. Great topics, as always. Thank you so much for digging them out. I look forward to talking to you again.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
The Power of Audience Narratives – Francesco D’Orazio – Pulsar
Francesco D’Orazio, founder of audience intelligence platform Pulsar, joins the latest episode of Marketing B2B Tech to share his journey from studying the internet's impact on society to founding Pulsar, a company that helps brands understand how people engage online.
He dives into the challenges of navigating the fragmented media landscape and how AI has become a crucial tool for analysing diverse data sources. Francesco also emphasises the importance of understanding narratives and public perception to uncover deeper insights about audience beliefs and behaviours.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
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- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Pulsar
Pulsar is the world’s leading audience intelligence platform, harnessing rich data sets, AI and human minds, so clients can access nuanced and actionable insights that get straight to what matters most to their customers, their businesses and to society.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 - Guest Introduction: Francesco D’Orazio of Pulsar
00:00:42 – Francesco’s Career Journey
00:01:57 - The Rise and Fall of Virtual Worlds
00:05:40 – Overview of Pulsar
00:06:04 – Understanding Audience and Narrative Intelligence
00:10:11 - B2B vs. B2C Audience Engagement
00:15:06 - AI's Role in Data Analysis
00:16:22 - Forecasting Trends with Audience Data
00:20:01 - Best Practices for Utilizing Audience Listening Data
00:25:09 - Valuable Marketing Advice Received
00:27:15 - Outro and Contact Information
Quotes
"The thing that most companies get wrong is that they go with the one platform fits all approach in terms of how they communicate on these different channels." Francesco D’Orazio, founder of Pulsar.
“What AI has done is give us incredibly flexible tools for analysing data in a way that before was quite complex and required a lot of training or specific machine learning models." Francesco D’Orazio, founder of Pulsar.
"Different communities look at the same topic and brand in very different ways. So, your message should be aligned on how these messages are articulated by the different communities in an audience." Francesco D’Orazio, founder of Pulsar.
Follow Francesco:
Francesco D’Orazio on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francescodorazio/
Pulsar’s website: https://www.pulsarplatform.com/
Pulsar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pulsar-platform/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Francesco D’Orazio at Pulsar
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Francesco D’Orazio
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Francesco D'Orazio. Francesco founded a company called Pulsar. Welcome to the show, Francesco. Thanks for having me, Mike. It's great to be here. It's great to have you on. We always like to start by allowing guests to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about their career history. So tell us a little bit about what you've done and what led you to found Pulsar.
Francesco: Yeah, so I was lucky enough to be at Uni at the time where the web was becoming a thing. I think I started my Uni degree in 1997. And at that time, the internet was starting to blow up and it was starting to emerge as a major force in the media space. And so I started to apply what I was learning to the internet and I got into trying to understand how societies and culture is kind of like what's developing on the internet. And actually one of the first things that I studied was how rumours spread online through forums and blogs and all of that. And that got me into that space of trying to understand what are the kind of like narratives and the trends that are emerging on the web. But then I got into an academic path. I did my PhD in social science and I did half of that in Italy and half in Canada. and while i was doing that i developed this appetite for building tech solutions related to what i was studying and so i decided to make the leap from academia and i founded the first startup which was a bad marketing company in 2004 so applying that idea of rumours to to the web and turning into an online community where people could connect with brands and organizations and influence the way they shape, the way they design products and campaigns. With that company, I then moved on to a virtual world company. So I created like an online social network for avatars, which got quite a lot of press because you could create profiles for avatars instead of humans. And that was at the time when Second Life was really big and you were just trying to connect. what happens on the web, what happens on inside virtual worlds, which were quite kind of like isolated environments at the time. And then after that, I thought, like, I'm going to take a break and get a job. And so I got a job at an innovation consultancy called Face. And within a year, year and a half in that job, the job was literally trying to understand how we can bring millions of people that are sharing opinions on the web within an innovation funnel and how we can use that insight to build better products. And within a year and a half of doing that, I built a bunch of tools with a team that then became Pulsar. And then Pulsar effectively then swallowed the agency and then it became the company that it is today.
Mike: Wow, so, I mean, there's a lot there. I think the first thing I've got to ask you, and this intrigues me, because when Second Life was big, I thought it was really exciting, it was going to change the world. We've not really done this whole avatar meeting, and we're now looking at basically pictures of people's faces on Teams all the time. Why do you think that virtual environment never took off?
Francesco: Well, I think it did take off, but it did take off in a different shape than the way we imagined it. I'm saying this because I was there when it happened. So what happened with virtual worlds, the 3D environments were there before social media was there. What happened in 2004, 2005, 2006 is that social media started to get real time. So the benefit that you would get from being in an environment where you could interact with people in real time through chat rooms that ended up having 3D environment, got completely outweighed by being able to be on a web page and seeing someone commenting live in response to what you were just posting. And so that real-time nature of the second wave of social media after Web2, basically, is what cannibalized completely 3D online environments. And we've been trying to get back to that immersive dream for the last 50 years, really. And this is what my PhD was about. There's been this kind of focus on trying to reach his promised land of immersive media that has been going in waves since effectively the 60s and then the 80s when you had cyberspace and Neuromancer and the whole side of kind of like a a science fiction dedicated to cyberpunk and that kind of like envisioning an inhabitable information space effectively. And then you started to get the waves of that going into iMac cinemas, the gaming experiences like the Nintendo gaming experiences, all of those consoles that promise the more immersive world until you get to, you know, the last wave is what happened with Meta really. with the metaverse, which actually was just a reincarnation of a previous wave. The metaverse term was coined in the 90s and was part of that kind of like second wave of the back of cyberspace where you started to see this 3D world. So I think the reason why it hasn't taken off to answer to kind of like a short point is that it's not convenient enough. the value of the clunkiness of a 3D environment interaction is just not outweigh the value of what we're getting from video and what we're getting from real-time textual communication on the web. So why bother? Convenience trumps anything. And that's why AI is successful also right now. It's convenient. Convenient for images, for text, for insights, for anything.
Mike: That's fascinating. That's a really simple explanation of what I think was a very complicated phenomenon. Obviously, people are still fighting to get us into the metaverse, not least meta. Anyway, let's move back to talk about Pulsar because I think that's what's really interesting. So, you talked about creating Pulsar in your role and that ultimately swallowing the business and becoming the business. So, what does Pulsar do?
Francesco: So Pulsar is an audience and narrative intelligence company, which means that we try and understand where the audience is at in relation to a brand, a topic, a product or something that is happening in society. And then we help organizations craft messages that matter to those audiences based on what we know about those audiences. It's a way of baking the audience at the core of anything organizations do and you know this has been a mantra for a long time but what we've seen over the last 30-40 years is this kind of like tsunami of audience engagement that has kind of like broken into every space of life that used to be quite confined and quite sanitized You know, crypto is one of the latest evolutions of that where you get like the audience breaking into the world of finance as a force that finance has never seen before in terms of like outsider input. And so the tools that you deal with that have been changing over the last 100 years. You know, you start having like surveys and statistics in the I mean, kind of like in the 30s and 40s and trying to understand what people thought about the war and policies. And you started to optimize the machine in the 50s and in the 60s. But really, it's when you start getting this real time signal from the audience with the web that the game has really shifted massively, both in positive and in negative terms. And so it was quite interesting for me to be as a Gen Xer at the intersection of that, because I grew up in a world without the Internet. And then I became an adult in a world that was completely engulfed by the internet, so I still find it fascinating. For my kids and for people that are like even just like five, ten years younger than me, that's like not interesting at all, it is what it is. But I still see the difference and that it's fascinating how rumours spread, how public opinion shifts and the changes that we've seen in the last, even in the last two years is insane.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. It's really exciting. And a lot of organizations really care about what's happening and understanding what's happening with their audiences. Could you give us perhaps some examples of the kind of companies or organizations that make use of Pulsar and how you help them?
Francesco: Yes, there's a baseline use case, which is social listening and media intelligence, which is effectively understanding what people are saying and what the media is saying about a specific topic. Now, the way you use that can vary differently depending on how advanced the organization is. Let's say at the bottom of the pyramid there are the companies that are just trying to not be caught off guard and so they just monitoring things and they say something crops up that they should be reacting to if you start moving up the ladder you start seeing people using that for example for customer experience and so they want to improve the way their products are perceived or their products are designed or delivered and they want to know what they should be focusing on. So we provide the best real-time signal for people to understand what they're doing wrong and what they're doing right. If you go another level up, you can start seeing companies using this data for planning their strategy. they start looking at where's the white space, how do we enter this category, what kind of messaging we should be using and how is it working in relation to what competitors are doing. Is there a gap that we should enter? Is there an opportunity that we should take? And then if you start going up, there's like top levels that are companies that are using these in, in predictive ways. So you'll be, you want to spot what kind of like narratives or cultural trends are happening in public opinion or in culture and try and pre-empt how your organization should be positioning itself or react to those to be able to capitalize on those trends or just simply being in tune with where the audience is at. Effectively, what we see ourselves as a machine for tuning your organization to what the zeitgeist is in the audience.
Mike: And I think that's interesting. And I want to dig in a little bit later into a little bit more about how you help these companies. Most of the audience listening to this podcast is going to be in the B2B sector. And traditionally, it's been consumer or governments or public sector, or maybe even third sector that have been really switched on about understanding trends and understanding what's happening with audiences. And arguably, B2B has been a little bit behind. Do you agree with that? And then do you see B2B companies using Pulsar to really understand their audience?
Francesco: Yeah b2b is as crucial for us as the consumer audience and so the types of company use us, it is true that I’ve been historically behind a couple of things happen in the space first of all, the veil has been completely torn in terms of, Who is the audience of B2B? And the assumption is not that the audience of B2B is people, like it is consumers for B2C companies. So you should start treating that audience as you treat the consumers that you're focusing for B2C campaigns. And you need to think of that audience in terms of cultural affinities, in terms of emotions, in terms of behaviours, in terms of brand. It does not require a completely different playbook because you're talking to humans. On top of that, yes, you can then deploy specific strategies that are related to B2B. And those strategies range from educating customers to providing actionable insights on their category. So there are many, many ways that you can make yourself useful. But the starting point is that you want to be as focused on humans as you are when you're working on a B2C campaign. And I think that also helps in the world of AI because that is the major opportunities that all brands are going to have now when most companies are going to implement or are implementing already AI in a way that makes their tone of voice drown in a sea of sameness. And if you maintain your distinctive, authentic tone and you have a clear understanding of who the audience is, you're just going to do easily much better than the average because everybody else is going to default to the basics.
Mike: That's really interesting and I think it's a really good point that B2B needs to actually catch up. I guess one of the things that probably intimidates a lot of people when they start looking at these kind of projects to understand and listen to audiences is just the volume of places you can go and look. Not necessarily always the volume of content, but there's so many social channels, you know, and you're obviously within Pulsar monitoring a wide range of different sources. How do you get the balance right? How do you simplify down what the audience is saying from all these different places?
Francesco: Yeah, so first of all, I think we've got into a new phase of what the media ecosystem used to look like even just five years ago. You know, when I started this business, the focus was on maybe like four or five platforms and the audience would be congregating in numbers that make those platforms relevant to you in those four or five avenues. And, you know, you wouldn't have to think about those. And, you know, that would be in terms of like advertising, but in terms of community engagement in terms of strategies. It's a simpler world in a way, and it's also a simpler world to generate insights off the back of that. Today, we have this kind of like post platform world where the fragmentation that has been introduced has completely blown up the playbook for most of the social media strategy that was in place even just five years ago. And now you have the ability to see so many different aspects of your audience through all these different platforms. And the thing that most companies get still wrong is that they go with one platform fit or approach in terms of how do they communicate on these different channels. And the game is always and will always be to be where your audience is and to be specific to the value of that specific platform where the audience is engaging in a specific way. and to not make it about yourself really, to make it about the audience and then look at how you exist in the world of the audience and not how the audience exists in your world. In terms of us trying to make sense of those platforms, I mean obviously I feel like we had a gentle ramp in terms of trying to standardize data from hundreds of different data sources and now we've got thousands and actually in some cases like millions when you look at like news organizations and you look at more traditional media sources. So that fragmentation that exists today it's something that we are well trained to cope with. I think that the major changes in this space have been the change of formats that has introduced a lot of complexity in terms of introducing like audio platforms, image platforms, video platforms and different types of formats within those as well so the short form content the fact that you have text overlays on most videos so all of that means that i think if ai didn't exist today we would be in a very different place in terms of like how we can understand that because what ai has done is given us incredibly flexible tools for analysing data in a way that before was quite complex and required a lot of training or specific machine learning models. But today with AI we can do video transcriptions, we can describe what's in an image, we can transcribe an audio discussion, and we can extract insights from visuals by doing OCR on an image and understanding if an affiliate marketing code has been shared in a video, for example, and we can use that for attribution. So the use cases are really huge because the formats of the engagement from customers in these different communities are really diverse and if you can actually deploy your techniques for analysing that data in effective ways, the signals are incredible, like incredibly rich. We run a lot of work on integrating traditional data sources like survey data, for example, for reputation management and social media data and news analysis. And what we see is that when you create a framework where you can analyse both data sources, the surveys, for example, on how stakeholders are perceiving your brand and discussions that you see on social and on the news about your brand, the signal we get from social news usually anticipates the signal we get from a survey by about six months. And so you effectively get a warning shot for what's to come when you see the dip in the brand tracker, for example, from survey data, and you traditionally didn't know what caused that dip because you didn't know what question you should have been asking at that point. What we do is that you can go back almost with a time machine and explain that dip with what you can see in the social data. And that adds a whole new level of complexity and opportunity in the strategy.
Mike: I think that's really important what you said there, that some of the signals you see on social effectively forecast how attitudes as a whole are going to change. So presumably, you're maybe seeing a minority of your customers raising issues on social, that can be picked up early, that's not necessarily seen in a survey. But it's the start of a trend. Is that basically what you're saying? Or is it something different?
Francesco: Yeah, it's that, but it's also that the ability is on trying to understand how pervasive and prominent the signal is, and trying to have the right algorithms to make an educated bet on how big it's going to grow. We released recently this new protocol, Narratives AI. The idea is exactly that, is can we spot the early signals in culture to try and understand how an issue, a brand or something is perceived by the media or by the public and identify a direction of travel, but also put a quantitative number on it so that you know how much of the overall perception of that brand is constituted by that specific narrative and how is that narrative evolving over time. And if you spot the trend, where is it going to go next? What you should be doing? And what we're trying to do is move away from very productive ways of managing reputation and managing brands using indicators like sentiment, for example. If you think about how rudimentary sentiment is, even today that sentiment gets to a 97, 98% accuracy when you use LLMs to run sentiment and apply a lot of context to the analysis of sentiment, which is what we do now. Even with that, what you're getting is, is this conversation positive or negative and in relation to what? Fine, but what is that telling you? Not telling you anything other than a kind of like a symptom, but you're not going to get to the root of what is causing that perception and why things are going to go next because of that. So what we're trying to do is spot the narratives and we like the idea of narratives because those are the stories that we tell ourselves and our peers to make sense of the world. And those narratives reveal the deep-seated beliefs that people have about a topic or a brand or an issue. And when you unveil those beliefs, what you have is effectively a roadmap to behaviour. You go, because people believe this thing, we know that in the next six months, this is going to happen. There's different ways of deploying that insight. Like if you look at the narratives in the media, you can either assume that if the narratives in the media are not present in the public, you might see those narratives in the media as potentially shaping something that might appear in the public. Or if you see narratives in the media that have some kind of ego in the public, you consider the media is actually leveraging some of that zeitgeist and bringing it into their platforms to generate more audience traction and engagement and reflecting what society is doing. So either way, what you get is a nice dynamic between the audience and the media and how these narratives are born and whether some are becoming forces for culture to be shaped by, or some are just going to die. The battle we're fighting here is to try and make this data available to as many people as possible and not make it specific to the specialists. We obviously have data people, we have researchers, but this is basically the lifeblood of the community. So if you make this information available to everyone, marketing, politics, everything is going to get so much better, so much faster, so much more effective because it's going to be showing this connection between the audience and the organizations. And that's really what we want to do.
Mike: That's fascinating. I think one of the questions has got to be, you talk about the potential for people to get faster and more effective. What do great companies do to make use of their audience listening data? Are they always constantly changing course? Or are they building big strategies? You know, is there kind of a high level approach that people can use to take this kind of data and really improve their overall organizational performance?
Francesco: I think there's an element for flexibility and as a case for consistency. To start from consistency, because that's who you are and what you believe. And people like to know where people stand. As humans, we do not trust people that we don't know where they stand. We don't trust people that change stance on things too often. So consistency is key and that's why I think this is the golden age of brand. Like we have come out of a world where performance marketing was eating budgets and actually even the separation between performance marketing and brand marketing was completely fictitious. What you see today is because of the nature of the media ecosystem that we're involved in, brand really is where the game is at, and so consistency and staying true to yourself is key to make it. As a byproduct of that, authenticity is obviously the currency that everybody's looking for when trying to engage with an organization or leadership or anything that has a public profile. And this is also connected to the way we see the advertising and the engagement funnels evolving. Like a lot of people have been starting to talk about a zero-click world. A zero-click world being a world where we're kind of like moving away from an economy of attention based on getting you to click onto something and go to a specific page. And we're actually going into a world where the answers are available to you through systems that give you what you're looking for instead of pointing you to a page, which obviously changes completely the way marketing is done. So the other dynamic alongside this is that the platforms that we used to lean on for generating those clicks and generating that traffic are actually holding that traffic now and trying to keep you in the platform. And this is true for the social media platform but it's also true for search engines trying to provide you with answers thanks to AI instead of sending you to some links. And it's also better for us because we want the information we don't want to be sent to a specific page. So when that whole thing changes What you left with is a reliance on optimizing for impressions and reach and focusing people's attention on who you are and then leaving it to them to come to you when they're ready, rather than trying to funnel them into a specific route for traffic that delivers a specific conversion. And so, I'm excited because this golden age of brand means that we are going to be in a much more creative space where the people that don't take shortcuts using, for example, slop AI messaging and things like that, they're going to be easily standing out and do interesting things. And we're entering a world where execution is becoming trivial, but that doesn't mean that creativity is trivial. That simply means that Executing something becomes a lot easier than it was before and a lot cheaper than it was before, but that means that direction is going to become crucial. And so what do you shape that execution as? The idea behind it is going to become the differentiating value, not the budget that you have to produce something, which I think is also very exciting and it aligns really well with this brand shift.
Mike: I think that's a super positive message to leave it on. The fact that whilst execution may become easier, the creativity and the direction is potentially going to become harder. And that's where we as humans add value. Francesca, I really appreciate your time. Before I let you go, there's a couple of questions we always like to ask our guests. So the first one is, what's the best piece of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Francesco: Well I think for me it's always been about focusing on the audience first and everything else flows from that. And the thing that has become a mantra for me has been something that we learned from Netflix actually 10 years ago. We were going to them to show them how we could analyse the discussions about a TV show and how we could look at the audience of that specific TV show. And the response to them was like, this is interesting, but we don't really care about your audience of a TV show. Within each TV show, there are multiple audiences and each TV show thinks about the same TV show in very different ways. And that kind of like made me think about what we do. And it became the mantra of actually what Pulsar does, which is that different communities look at the same topic and brand in very different ways. So your message should be aligned to how these messages articulated by the different communities in an audience rather than trying to reach them with a single message. And so using the audience as a prism. is the best marketing advice that I've been given by Netflix, which set us on course to become an interesting company doing interesting stuff. This was like back in 2016.
Mike: Wow, that's great. That's fascinating. The other thing we like to ask people is if you're talking to someone who's maybe just graduated from university looking to start their career in marketing, what advice would you give them about achieving a great career in marketing?
Francesco: Be curious, be curious in terms of audiences, because that's where everything starts. So I got into this because I was into music and music is a great school for understanding audiences because each artist has his own audience and his own community. So understanding that allows you to decide who you should be booking for an event. And that's a superpower. So be curious about audiences, be curious about technology and be curious about creativity. And these are the three kind of like assets that you need in this game and if you are good at understanding audiences, understanding creativity and understanding technology, I think it's going to be a smashing success.
Mike: Fantastic. Francesco, it's been amazing. We've talked, it feels like, about quite a lot, but it seems like there's so much more we could cover. If people want to find out more or perhaps learn more about Pulsar, what's the best way to do that?
Francesco: They can check out the website, pulsarplatform.com, P-U-L-S-A-R platform.com, or they can just email me, name.lastname at pulsarplatform.com.
Mike: And I think you also have a podcast as well talking about some of these issues too.
Francesco: We do have a podcast, thanks for reminding me. Podcast is called Audiences and it's a podcast where I ask three simple questions for every episode. So every episode is an audience and it's focused on one audience and we invite a guest and we get the guest to tell us who's the audience of Wrestling, who's the audience of Tesla, who's the audience of AI tell us how their audience has been evolving over the last five to 10 years and tell us where is their audience evolving next. We wanted to create like a podcast to spotlight the opposite of what normally gets spotlight. Most podcasts focus on the content, the thing that is being produced. We wanted to focus on the people that are consuming that content, that are consuming those products.
Mike: That sounds fascinating. Definitely a podcast to add to my listen list. Francesco, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Francesco: Thanks for having me.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Return on Investment or Risk of Ignoring? – Gurmeet Dhaliwal – Diodes Incorporated
Marketing and Investor Relations at Diodes Incorporated, shares his journey from engineering to marketing, and Diodes' approach to enhancing brand awareness, generating demand, and building strong customer relationships.
He offers valuable insights on how to effectively market to engineers, strike the right balance between bottom-of-the-funnel tactics and top-of-the-funnel branding, and emphasizes the importance of sales and marketing alignment.
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- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Diodes Incorporated:
Diodes Incorporated (Nasdaq: DIOD), a Standard and Poor’s SmallCap 600 and Russell 3000 Index company, delivers high-quality semiconductor products to the world’s leading companies in the automotive, industrial, computing, consumer electronics, and communications markets. We leverage our expanded product portfolio of analog and discrete power solutions combined with leading-edge packaging technology to meet customers’ needs. Our broad range of application-specific products and solutions-focused sales, coupled with global operations including engineering, testing, manufacturing, and customer service, enable us to be a premier provider for high-volume, high-growth markets. For more information, visit www.diodes.com
About Gurmeet Dhaliwal:
As the Head of Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations at Diodes Incorporated, Gurmeet Dhaliwal oversees both investor relations and corporate marketing. He has developed a robust integrated marketing strategy with a strong focus on digital marketing, utilizing both inbound and outbound tactics. Prior to his role at Diodes, Gurmeet led Corporate Marketing at Pericom, which was acquired by Diodes Incorporated in 2015. He has also held various senior marketing positions at prominent public companies, including CA Technologies, EMC, Cisco, Zarlink, and National Semiconductor.
Gurmeet holds an MBA from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA, and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Santa Barbara, CA.
Time Stamps:
00:00:18 - Guest Introduction: Gurmeet Dhaliwal
00:02:51 - Overview of Diodes Incorporated
00:07:43 - Building a Marketing Strategy at Diodes
00:08:00 - Engaging with Engineers in Marketing
00:12:05 - Successful Marketing Campaigns
00:14:06 - The Role of Digital Marketing and Analytics
00:18:35 - Sales and Marketing Collaboration
00:19:58 - The Role of Sales in the Research Process
00:21:07 - Transitioning to Investor Relations
00:25:39 - Best Marketing Advice Received
00:27:59 - Advice for Young Marketers
00:30:14 - Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Quotes:
“ We always talk about ROI in marketing, right? Return on investment. But sometimes you have to think of ROI as risk of ignoring.” Gurmeet Dhaliwal, Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations at Diodes Incorporated.
"Engineers like to get information on their own... they prefer doing their research... by the time they are ready to engage, they have already done their research." Gurmeet Dhaliwal, Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations at Diodes Incorporated.
"One of the things I do is every time is I think of is, how can I simplify this? How can I make it simpler?" Gurmeet Dhaliwal, Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations at Diodes Incorporated.
Follow Gurmeet:
Gurmeet Dhaliwal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhaliwal/
Diodes Incorporated website: https://www.diodes.com/
Diodes Incorporated on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/diodes-incorporated/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Gurmeet Dhaliwal at Diodes Incorporated
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Gurmeet Dhaliwal
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Gurmeet Dhaliwal. Gurmeet is the Head of Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations at Diodes. Welcome to the podcast, Gurmeet.
Gurmeet: Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having me.
Mike: It's great to have you on. I mean, I've obviously known you for a while, Gemi, but the listeners won't necessarily know you. So can you tell us a little bit about your career and why you actually chose Diodes as your current company?
Gurmeet: Yes, Mike, currently my position, as you said, is head of corporate marketing and investor relations at Diodes Incorporated. But as you probably know from our previous conversations, I have been in many different companies and at different positions. I started my career as an engineer at National Semiconductor. So when I was an engineer, I worked on many different products in different areas. And at one point, my role was product assurance engineer. That's when I worked very closely with the customers as well as with the factories. So I had a broader view of the business, which I really enjoyed. And that's when I thought, okay, you know, I want to be closer to the customer. And that's when I chose to shift to marketing. I started as a new business development manager and then did product marketing and then eventually got into the internet marketing. So at that time, it was new. Everyone, we were trying to figure out how to build websites and go online. So that's how I transitioned from engineering into marketing. But since then, I've been, you know, worked for various kind of companies in, you know, in the B2B space. which was National Semiconductor Cisco Systems, EMC, CA Technologies. And then after that I joined a smaller company in the Silicon Valley called Pericom. So I started as a head of marketing at Pericom and then a couple of years after that Pericom was acquired by Diodes Incorporated. back in 2015, I think. Yeah. So that's how I became part of the Diodes team. And over time, Diodes has been a very good company. I really enjoy working here and continue to, you know, expand my role as well as do new things, try different ideas. And it's been fun since then.
Mike: That sounds great. I mean, I think, you know, listeners may not be familiar with diodes, so I'm interested to know what diodes manufacture. I know it's a lot more than just diodes.
Gurmeet: Yes, that's right. Diodes is a, you know, we have a very broad portfolio of products. As our name suggests, right, we started 60 plus years ago selling diodes. But since then, diodes has expanded its portfolio organically as well as through acquisitions. So now our broad product portfolio includes discrete products, analog, mixed signal, all these products. Unfortunately, our name doesn't serve us well and doesn't really explain the portfolio, but the portfolio is very broad. If you look at it, half of our business comes from analog and power discrete products.
Mike: And I think it's interesting because, I mean, a lot of the news about the semiconductor industry is all around AI and processors and things like that. But actually, you know, a lot of your products are really, really important, even though perhaps they're not what people might think of as the sexy semiconductors.
Gurmeet: Yes, they are. If you look at our portfolio, like I suggested before, we serve different markets. First of all, we are in five market segments, which is automotive, industrial, consumer, communications, and computing, which is very broad. Our products go in all these areas. I can talk about the sub-segments as well, where we are focused on. But if you look at our products, all our peripheral products, power management products, discrete products, connectivity products, and our timing portfolio, It's all around the processor. So if you open up, you know, if you look at a block diagram of any computer or server or embedded computer, which is now in everywhere, right? Except the processor and memory, we pretty much make everything that is needed all around the processor. So I think that's where we bring value with lots of different pieces that allow the processor to communicate and manage, whether it's power management, provide timing solution, we have a complete timing tree solution, as well as the connectivity products.
Mike: I mean, that's interesting. I love that description, you know, almost everything apart from the processor and the memory. So you've clearly got this very broad range of products that are really important. Are there particular areas that Diode really excels at?
Gurmeet: Yeah, I think there are a number of areas that, you know, first of all is as we have expanded our product portfolio, which is, like I mentioned earlier, is very broad and addresses different blocks of the application, right? That's one. The second one is our manufacturing capability, our manufacturing excellence, right? That's where we excel, and we have a hybrid model of manufacturing, right? So broad technology that we have. Today, if you look at it, you know, half of our manufacturing is from fab perspective. 50 to 60% is internal, the rest is external. So this hybrid model gives us the opportunity to bring the right technology at the right time, so we are not tied to just one specific technology. The other one is our global footprint. We have factories in the US, in UK, in Scotland, in Germany, in Taiwan, China, and beyond. So we are closer to the customers we serve and we are very responsive and serve them the way they want to be served, when they want, what they want, where they want. So these are the things that I want to highlight is the soft side, which are in addition to the technology, the product. The other areas, you know, if you look at is now everyone is talking about AI, AI, right? We have been, you know, in AI for years or when we used to call it machine to machine learning, right? If you look at, you know, we have a product line from packet switches. That is in pretty much in every AI server we work with or we are in the process of working with customers. So that's a unique opportunity for us. In addition to that, that's not only the product, right? If you look at a traditional server, when we were in traditional server, we had about $50 to $53 content per box that diodes can offer. Now in this new server, we have improved it to the, it's up to $90 per box. So that is by bringing new products, new technology, expanding our portfolio. We are constantly bringing new products to the market. Last year alone, we introduced 750 new part numbers. And out of those, about half of them were for the automotive market segment. So I think we're constantly innovating, bringing new products, expanding into these markets that we serve.
Mike: You're obviously very enthusiastic about the company, which is fantastic. I guess the obvious question is you've got all these products in all these different categories and you've got all these markets you address. So what's your approach in terms of building a marketing strategy? How do you put it together with so many things to control?
Gurmeet: Yeah, so, you know, marketing strategy for any marketer, like it's the couple of things, right? It's the goal is to enhance your awareness, right? And ultimately, marketing's job one is demand gen, right? But the way, or I would say my philosophy is that we stay customer focused and with integrated marketing. What I mean is with different channels, using different channels for the marketing that is appropriate at that time. So, you know, our focus is that enhance awareness, generate demand, and cultivate relationships. while we facilitate customers and their buying cycle. And that we do it by listening to them, by engaging with them, educating them, inspiring them. So that's how, you know, what we are focused on. And of course, it's all about what customer wants, what technology, but keeping that in mind that we want to build longer term relationships, cultivate relationships, and continue to serve them what they want, when they want, where they want.
Mike: And of course, I mean, a lot of what you're doing is marketing to engineers, which is notoriously difficult. So I mean, how do you excite and inspire those engineers you're trying to reach?
Gurmeet: So number one is, you know, you and I, we both have been engineers, right? So we understand how engineers think. and how they like to get information. And engineers like to get information on their own, right? They prefer doing their research. That's where I think is web has played a significant role, not today, but for the probably last two decades, right? Where engineers, they used to, you remember the days when Data book was the only thing, right? That's where you, or you call the sales rep and get the next data book, revised data book, and that's all you had to work with. Now, you know, with the website, which initially, if you remember when we transitioned from data books to website, people were skeptical, right? But now with the web and the information that is available online, it makes the design engineer's job very easy. They can find the information when they want. You know, design engineers work at odd hours, right? They like to get the information maybe at 9 p.m. And this website works 24 by 7, and they can go and get the information when they need, do their research. You know, by the time they are ready to engage, they have already done their research. They know what they want. And our goal is, coming back to your question is, Keeping that in mind, how they work, how they like to get information, what they prefer, and then we provide the information the way they like to consume. Number one, you know, like in our business, data sheet is number one. Then it's app notes, eval boards, other supporting, design supporting information. And then if they need to talk to somebody, make it very easy for them to send us an email. you know, they raise their hand that I want to talk to somebody will be happy to do that. So I think that's how we are trying to serve them the way they want, trying to listen and engage with them. Again, give them different options, whether they want to consume the information from our website or from our distributors website, or through different channels, whether it's social media or email or calling somebody or picking up the phone. So it's up to them how they want to engage with us. And then once they do, then like the things I said, is make sure that everything is available to them in one place so they can quickly access that.
Mike: That's really interesting. I mean, you've talked a lot about I guess what we call bottom of the funnel stuff where people are already interested in engaging your products. I mean, one of the things I think there's always a challenge in technology is balancing that providing data that people need to actually select a product with, you know, enhancing the brand. So people actually come to your website and look for it. So how do you balance that sort of, you know, bottom of the funnel stuff versus the top of the funnel brand?
Gurmeet: So that's, yeah, you know, both, like I said initially, right, that's enhance the brand or enhance the awareness of the brand and the product. I think they are, they're both important, but I don't think they really, to balance, they don't really compete, right, for the enhance the brand and bigger picture. that is a longer term strategy, right? You don't change your strategy every quarter, right? So the strategy is longer term, you stick with it, but your tactics may change. So I think that is once it's defined, then it's just the execution point of view. But I think the bottom of the funnel things that we talked about, that depends on the customer or prospect you engage with, where they are, how they would like to. So that is, I think, is more engaging and more demanding, right, that part. So we try to kind of separate the two, but but linked together. So the bigger picture stuff is already defined, and you're constantly reinforcing, enhancing it, versus the bottom of the funnel, like you said, is more tactical. It becomes more one-to-one, right? So the broader picture is we try to tell everyone, right, Diodes offers these, right, analog and discrete power solutions with these products, and then the portfolio. But once they know that, then, you know, somebody might be interested in one product. Somebody might be interested in three other products. That's where we really, we use marketing automation. We use our people to engage with them, depending on at what stage they are. Our sales people are engaged, and our FAEs, and ultimately our goal is to get the design win.
Mike: That's amazing. I just love the way you talk about the way you approach this strategy for marketing. I mean, I think what people also really interested in is about great campaigns. So is there one, you know, particularly brilliant campaign you pull out as being one of your best? Yeah, that's, I think there are
Gurmeet: campaigns that we can talk about, but best campaign, there are a number of them. What we are focused on, I would say, is a couple of things. Before I get to the campaign question, let me explain. I think one of the things is, remember when we were doing traditional marketing, which was like I talked about data books, which was print, right? The problem at that time was that you do print something, you put it out there, you had some information who's consuming your content, But not as much. You may have heard, a long time ago, people used to say, any CMO's dilemma is, I know 50% of my budget is working, but I don't know which half. So I think with the internet marketing, with the analytics, with all these tools, we have solved that problem. is right now we know what's working, what's not working. We can quickly test things. If it's working, we do more of it. If it doesn't work, we change the course. And you can get the feedback. So I think with this approach, with the tools and internet marketing and digital marketing, it allows us to see, create a campaign or create an idea, test it with A-B testing and the tools. And then with the feedback we're getting, the analysis you can do, what my approach is, if things don't work, let's definitely, when there's a new idea, try it. Don't be afraid of trying that new idea. Try it. If it works, expand it, do more of it. If it doesn't work, figure out a way to tweak it. And if it doesn't work, if it fails, then you can quickly shut it down. When we were back in the print days, if you put something out there, it's out there. It's very hard to change, right? Now you can change the course. So what I am trying to do is build, like I said initially when you talked to me about the strategy question, use an integrated marketing approach. build this marketing machine at Diodes that allows us to do both. You know, first is there is a lot of inbound, like we talked about earlier, right? Design engineers like to get information on their own. So that generates inbound traffic. We make sure what kind of things will help us with the inbound marketing, right? But that's not only what we can rely on, right? Then we have the outbound piece, which helps us what are the things we can do that we are, you know, all the way like from very broad messages, we have a newsletter that we do once a month. And also the other thing which I'm trying to do is keep in mind is that, you know, design engineers don't like to be, you know, like I said earlier, is they like to get information on their own, but they also don't like to get too many emails and where we annoy them. So my approach is that with the newsletter, we send one newsletter a month, And that way that we stay connected with them, we stay, you know, in sight and their mind that we are here, we offer these products that, or whatever we want to say in that newsletter, but we don't bother them, you know, every day here's, you know, another email, another email. Then we have the next level is the targeted marketing. That is very targeted when we know somebody has raised the hand and they said, you know, I'm interested in automotive or I'm interested in compute segment. Then we'll send them a very targeted message. about that technology, about that product that'll help them solve their specific problem. So then they listen. So it has to be, the message has to be relevant. It should be somebody that cares, and then they will listen. That's what I was talking about engaging with them. That's how we do it. And then it goes down to ABM, right? One-to-one marketing. That's very specific. It can be a customer. It can be a single person, right? And that part, we do it in conjunction with sales because they know what's going on with that account. We listen to them, you know, what exactly they want to, and that's a combination of sales and marketing. And that's, you know, one of the things that when I was at EMC, we did a lot of work with sales and marketing integration, right? I learned a lot that how important it is for sales and marketing to work together. And it really not only, you know, once you have a prospect or this, but even for demand gen, right? Who are the people to target? And it's very important for ABMPs that sales and marketing work together before marketing starts sending messages to a specific person or an account, right?
Mike: I mean, that's fascinating. I love the way you talk about sales and marketing working together, because that's not always the case in companies. Yes. I'm interested, though, there's been a lot of research saying that increasingly engineers and other people in B2B contexts, they're actually spending more time doing research. They're spending more time being impacted by marketing and less time interacting with salespeople. Is that something you've seen in your role?
Gurmeet: I don't know about, time may have, you know, how much time they spend with sales may have decreased. Like we talked about earlier, they like to get their information on their own. They usually have done quite a bit research by then. But I think in our business, sales and FAEs, right, our field applications engineers, play an important role. I think what this online marketing has done or the capability for our customers, design engineers, to do their research on their own, has enhanced and made them more efficient, and the cycle time has been reduced. Like I talked about before, if you needed a data sheet, you call the sales rep, then he or she has to drive to your office and drop the data book or mail it to you. So it used to be three days before you get the data sheet. Now you can get data sheets with one click. So you've done a lot of research. I think that cycle time has shortened, but in my mind, I think sales and FAEs play a very important role. And what this has allowed us to do is, you know, they can serve more customers and the quality of the conversation has improved and they can really focus on the problem that they're trying to solve, right? Every, you know, for example, a lot of our customers have the same products available, right? There are reference designs available. If everyone picked up the same reference design and built a product, then our customers, every product will look the same. So our customers, just like we differentiate our products, our customers are trying to differentiate their products too, right? They are trying to optimize their design. They are trying to have features and this. And I think that's where these conversations help with working with our sales team, our FAEs, trying new ideas, trying new things. And as a result, you know, we get ideas for new products from these conversations, what our customers want, how they are trying to differentiate their product so we can have the right product for them. So I think, yeah, I would agree. So just to summarize, I would agree, you know, the research, how the work is done has changed, but I think they still play an important role.
Mike: I think this is fascinating. It's amazing how much you think about marketing when it's actually only a part of your job. I mean, we talked before about you also being responsible for investor relations. I think a lot of people listening to the podcast who will be in marketing roles at the moment, they'd be interested to know, how did you actually get into the investor relations side?
Gurmeet: Yeah, that's interesting. So it's both. I think it happens with the planning. And I remember one of my managers at National Semiconductor used to say, plan for serendipity, right? A lot of things happen serendipitously. So what happened was, I think, here's what I would think, you know, a lot of it is serendipity and also based on the interest. When I go back and think about it, even when I talked to you about, you know, when I was an engineer and I wanted to have a broader picture of the customer's view, right, even at that time when I was in marketing, I always was interested in bigger picture of the company, you know, what our CEO is saying. I used to listen to the conference calls, what are they saying, and interested in just the big picture, you know. One was, like I talked about from the marketing role, is what are customers saying, what they need, how we can serve them. And second is what are investors saying and what do they care and what they want to listen to it. But that was it. I think then always I've been, you know, being in marketing, I had some contact with investor relations, but, you know, never got really involved directly with that. When I came to Pericom, our CEO and CFO pulled me in on a couple of things, you know, to help with either messaging or things like that related to investor relations, and I think that my interest was kind of intrigued again, you know, into, like, this is interesting. And then, like I said, with Diodes, right, when we merged, I was mainly focused on marketing side, but over time, a couple of executives asked me if I can help with some of the things on the IR side, because I think there's a direct relation for corporate marketing, your messaging, but also what you are saying on the investor's side. So I started doing that for a couple of years, and then our IR person, the head of IR, decided to retire. And that's when I was asked, would you take over that role too? And since then, it's been fun. It's a lot of fun. I'm learning a lot. As you know, you know, from my career is I like to learn. I like to take challenges and improve things. I'm a continuous improvement believer guy, you know, even though it's every day you improve something a little bit. So I think that's given me that opportunity. to engage with a different audience, talk to them, understand. Same thing, you know, what are they looking for, understanding who are they, you know, like sell-side analysts, buy-side analysts, our investors, what is important to them, what do they care about, how we can give them the information they want. in a very, you know, in a trusted way. So I also think the other philosophy, which is not a strategy, but philosophy in general, is, you know, of course, you know, marketing role is to expand and enhance and, you know, wherever we get the opportunity is talk about us, but ultimately to you know, build relationships with customers and expand. For example, let's say you engage with one customer. As you know, in our business, when you have one customer, let's say you acquire a new customer for one product. So your goal is to expand the share of the wallet, right? How can you sell adjacent products? What else do they need? And I think that is best done by developing the relationship and building trust So we need to, you know, whether it's sales, marketing, or anyone who touches the customer needs to become a trusted advisor, that we give them the information they need, serve them well, and kind of become their advisor, right? Trusted advisor, where they come to get the information, we give it to them. in a timely manner, the accurate information. So I think that helps strengthen relationships and cultivate new relationships and continue to expand them. But, you know, a lot of things we do based on trust, and that helps us expand into other markets, applications, products, whatever you want to call it.
Mike: I love that. I mean, that's just such a great way to end. Before we go, though, there's always a couple of questions we'd like to ask our guests. So the first one is, what's the best marketing advice you've ever been given?
Gurmeet: Okay. One is, a senior gentleman told me, we always talk about ROI in marketing, right? Or in any business, ROI, which is, you know, return on investment. But sometimes you have to think of ROI as risk of ignoring. It's some things you can't ignore, right? Even though you may not have good ROI on it, but you have to do it. So get it done. So I thought that is always, I look at, you know, of course, the first thing is we look at ROI as a return on investment. And the second is ROI is risk of ignoring. So I thought that was a good advice to have another lens to look at, right? The other one, which is, you know, it may not sound like very, You know, the wording is exciting, but I think when you think deep about it, it was very meaningful. It was one of my senior VP. We were talking about something, you know, a lot of things about the digital marketing and platform and e-commerce and things like that. And he said is, you know, we were 30 people in the room. He said, everyone talked about a lot of things I heard, but no one talked about simplifying things. You know, I said, oh, okay, simplifying things. But then I kept on thinking about it. You know, we human beings, we get so excited about complex things, and sometimes we make them even more complex than they have to. So now one of the things I do is every time is I think of is, how can I simplify this? How can I make it simpler? And I think if you keep that in mind and wear that hat, it solves a lot of problems and we don't have to make them complex and get people excited about it. So I try to get excited about how we can simplify things rather than how we can make them more complex.
Mike: That's, I mean, that's all great, great advice. I love that. The other question we like to ask is, you know, given the amount of change that's happening in marketing and, you know, AI particularly, what would be your advice to a young person who was just starting their marketing career?
Gurmeet: Yeah. Okay. So I think is, I think in these days, kids are very smart. I don't think they need my advice, but if I go back and think of, you know, the things that I would tell somebody or, you know, I think number one is, like I said earlier, is learn the business, all right? You need to understand a bigger picture of the business. Even if you're starting new, of course, you're not gonna get everything from day one, but be curious about it. Understand the big picture of the business, why we do things, why do our customers buy what they buy, right? Why do we sell it to them? How these things work or make difference when they go into the car or a computer or whatever that might. So I think that bigger picture view is good idea, right? The second is from marketing person, like we talked about earlier, don't ignore sales and as well as the people who are developing, designing products. You can't be just say, you know, I'm a marketer, I know how to message it and how to package it and I know better. No, I think it's understand both sides of the business unit, what they're trying to do. And from sales, you learn a lot about customers. So I think that's also having a, big picture view and joined at the hip with sales helps. And continue to be curious. Try new ideas like we talked about. Now we have tools and ways to try new ideas, build something. If you have some idea, try it. Try it with A, B, Mark, you know, testing. You can try your idea with 10 people who you feel safe, right? You can make mistakes. and fix them. So then try those things, and if it works, then say, okay, how can I take it to the next level and expand it? And if it doesn't work, then let's change the course. So I think curiosity, big picture, learning, continuous learning, and working across the aisles, right, with other departments, and being collaborative. That's, to me, I think these are the things I would say to focus on.
Mike: That's great advice. I mean, Gurmeet, I really appreciate your time. You've been so generous with all your knowledge and insight. And I will certainly be asking people about the risk of ignoring in the future. I love that term. If anybody would like to get in contact with you, I mean, what would be the best way for them to reach you?
Gurmeet: I think the best way is LinkedIn these days, so I'm on LinkedIn, so they can connect me or reach out to me via LinkedIn or otherwise. As with my marketing and IR role, I think that information is on our website as well with my email and phone number, but I would please request no, you know, no marketing solicitation, which, you know, I get lots of people contacting me. But but if if somebody genuinely wants to connect as a professional or have a question, that's perfectly fine.
Mike: Thank you. That's very generous, Gurmeet. Thank you so much for your time. And thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology. Thank you so much.
Gurmeet: It's a pleasure to have and have this conversation with you. Really enjoyed it.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Brands, Beats & Bytes Podcast - Seizing Opportunities & Elevating Others
Mike recently joined the Brands, Beats & Bytes podcast to talk about his career journey. He shares some of his career-defining lessons and the values that have shaped his people-first leadership style. The conversation covers:
- Seizing opportunities when they arise
- Surrounding yourself with leaders who uplift others
- Understanding that mistakes aren’t the end of the world
- Leading with people at the forefront and empowering your team
Listen here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/brands-beats-bytes/id1463454598
Re-evaluating Marketing Automation: Are You Using Your Platform to Its Full Potential?
In this episode of Marketing Automation Moment, hosts Hannah Wehrly and Mike Maynard discuss why so many companies are reconsidering their marketing automation platforms and whether they’re truly using them to their full potential. They explore the rise of AI driven sales tools, market growth trends, and how businesses can get more from their existing platforms. Plus, in the Insightful Tip of the Week, they tackle when it’s the right time to change your MarTech stack.
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcast
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Wehrly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
[00:00:00] - Introduction
[00:01:12] - Acton’s eBook Insights and re-evaluating Marketing Automation Strategies
[00:02:25] - Understanding Platform Capabilities
[00:05:54] - Underutilisation of Marketing Automation Features
[00:08:08] - Market Growth and AI Influence
[00:11:49] - Salesforce’s Shift in Strategy
[00:13:22] - When to Change Your MarTech Stack
[00:16:29] - Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: Re-evaluating Marketing Automation: Are You Using Your Platform to Its Full Potential?
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Wehrly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard.
Hannah: Today we talk about the number of companies re-evaluating their marketing automation strategy.
Mike: The fact that most people don't use the capabilities of their marketing automation platform.
Hannah: The growth of the market.
Mike: An AI sales development rep.
Hannah: And the insightful tip of the week of when should you look to change your MarTech tool stack.
Mike: Hi, Hannah, it's great to be back recording another episode of Marketing Automation Moment. Obviously, you were off for a little while. It's great you're back at Napier. And I'm really looking forward to having a much more frequent discussion about marketing automation platforms with you going forward.
Hannah: Thanks, Mike. I'm super excited to be back and actually super excited to be delving back into the market automation world. There seems to be a lot that's happened since I've been gone. So let's jump straight into it. I've got some real great things to talk to you about today.
Mike: It's great to hear lots has been happening, Hannah. What are the exciting stories you've seen?
Hannah: Well, let's kick off with Acton, Mike, because I actually received an email from them quite recently, a couple of weeks ago, and they were promoting their new e-books, very marketing focused, How to Find a Better Market Automation Solution. But it did have some interesting insights within it. And one of the things that they actually said was that 87% of companies are re-evaluating their market automation strategy. And I have to say, as an ebook, it was quite ballsy. They had a really good section about, you know, whether your market automation investment is paying off. Then they went straight and delved into, you know, how to migrate, how easy it can be. What did you think? Did you have a chance to read it?
Mike: Well, yeah, you said it through and I thought it was really interesting. I mean, obviously, it's basically Acton going, pick me, pick me, you know, choose us. But I was quite shocked that 87% of people are re-evaluating market automation. The cost of moving from one market automation platform to another is so big. And the reality is, is pretty much all the platforms have the capabilities to do at least all the basic functions you need. I wonder whether people are perhaps not really committing to making their platform work and perhaps blaming the platform rather than blaming what they're actually using it for.
Hannah: Yeah, I absolutely agree, Mike. It's really interesting. I always think there's in two areas. You've got the reasons why you'd actually want to look at other platforms, and then perhaps the reasons why actually you're not trained enough to understand what the platform can provide. For example, things like budget. If you are looking to cut marketing budget, you know, you're under pressure from your board, actually switching to a different platform could be a really good idea. But I often feel it's situations where actually the marketing team doesn't really understand the features or how to use the marketing automation platform fully, and instead they jump to another platform, they do all this hard work, they spend all this time, and then they're faced with the same problems because they haven't bothered to actually learn the features.
Mike: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, we have seen, particularly our enterprise clients, some changes. So, you know, and maybe we shouldn't say this publicly, but it's been pretty clear that large enterprise customers of Salesforce who were using other market automation platforms like, for example, Marketo, were being really strongly incentivized by Salesforce to move their marketing automation all onto that one Salesforce platform with their CRM. And there I know some of the amounts of money involved have been so compelling, it's been worth doing. It doesn't mean you shouldn't move, but I do agree with you. I think the first thing you should be doing is really looking at what you could do with your existing platform, rather than deciding that all the problems you have are platform related, rather than maybe training expertise and resource related.
Hannah: Oh, definitely. And I actually think this segues quite nicely into the second point of this podcast. And again, this is Act On. It's a very Act On heavy conversation today. They've actually recently done a webinar. And again, it was the hits, the misses and the opportunities of marketing automation in 2025. And what I thought was really interesting is that they talked about how email marketing is the main priority for marketers for marketing automation success. followed by social media management. I know you've got a couple of comments on that, Mike, so I'll chat that over to you in a second. I think what was really interesting is they said that 64% view nurturing prospects as the main element of a market automation platform. And to me this screams, I use this real big complex system just to send emails. I don't know what you think.
Mike: I think, you know, you're being a bit harsh there. I mean, one of the things is, is that was obviously a question where people could pick more than one option. And I think nurturing prospects, fundamentally, that's what marketing automation does. I mean, I was actually quite surprised it was that low. You know, interestingly, only 42% ranked personalized outreach as being a top use case. I mean, that's kind of scary, really. You think with all the power of marketing automation platforms, that would be, you know, a key focus is personalize your outreach. So I don't know, I wasn't surprised so much with that. But I felt actually, you know, again, we're kind of seeing these things that suggest that marketing automation platforms are massively underused in terms of what people actually do versus what they potentially could achieve.
Hannah: I think that's a really great point, Mike, and I guess maybe I've been a little bit harsh because I think what I really am trying to say is that, as you mentioned, there's all these features and, you know, in previous episodes we've talked about things like dynamic content, we've talked about nurturing and segmenting your lists, and it's taking it from being a nurture and email marketing system to this real complex system that can really deliver a great return of investment.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I found some other really interesting stats there. So if you look at what people use their marketing automation platform for, only 50% use it for email marketing. So I'm not sure quite what you do if you've got marketing automation platform, why there's all these people. And let's be honest, 43% of marketing automation users are actually sending email from a different system. The majority of people don't use their marketing automation platform for social media management. 60% don't use it for content management. And then, you know, if you look at paid ads, it's only about a third that is linking their marketing automation to their advertising campaign. So you look at all that and you think, wow, people really are not using the capabilities of the systems they've paid really good money for.
Hannah: Oh, no, absolutely. And I think there's an element of perhaps multiple automation platforms not doing the right marketing. So instead they're focused on, you know, migrate, look at us, we're all great. But maybe there should be a switch and a focus on the content of, are you using it to your full capabilities and look at all the cool stuff that we can do.
Mike: For sure. And I think, you know, let's prove we're not totally in to act on in this episode. One of the things HubSpot discovered very early on was their biggest problem selling marketing automation systems was the people who churned very quickly, who used it for a year and then gave up. And those were people who weren't using the system. So this is why HubSpot introduced all the onboarding that now typically all marketing automation systems have. But what we're seeing is actually people do this onboarding, they get trained up, they probably make quite good use of the system in the first year, but they kind of hit a ceiling and they don't get better. And actually I think, and this is a call out to all you marketing automation platforms out there, maybe you should be thinking about really focusing on growing the use of the platform. Personally, I love Sharpspring, which is, you know, the platform we use internally. They actually tell you how much you're using and how active you are. And it gives you a good idea of, you know, how well you're using the platform.
Hannah: Great point, Mike. Great point. Let's go back to HubSpot for a minute, because I think it's really important to say, you know, they were one of the first players on the market. And HubSpot have actually been listed as a top player in a market research study. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, for me, the interesting thing is that the market's huge. I mean, almost $7 billion in 2024. And yet it's going to grow by way more than inflation. And they're talking about 12.5% growth in this market. Clearly, market automation is still a place that businesses can make a lot of money and see a lot of growth. And there's still people out there who haven't bought market automation systems. What are you doing, guys? And they now are starting to look at it. So I think it's a really exciting market.
Hannah: I couldn't agree more. I think we spoke about this a bit last year, and the figures have just improved and they've just grown. And this moves on to another point that, you know, we've put up for discussion today. But do you think this growth is influenced by AI slightly with the market automation platforms?
Mike: Well, that's a great question. And we're starting to see more and more AI feed into marketing automation platforms. I don't know what you think. My gut feel is people are not buying marketing automation to access AI. There's AI everywhere. I mean, it's not a problem accessing AI. I think people are buying into marketing automation because of the potential of a marketing automation platform. Do you agree?
Hannah: I do agree. I think one of the things is the messaging might have changed. So AI talks about saving time for people. We both know, you know, that market automation does that. And I think I've seen a change, especially with the big players that use these market automation tools or integration. You know, we've talked about my favorite Einstein with Salesforce before, but they are pushing that. So it's that messaging of, yes, we've got AI, but also look at us, look at our systems. We save you time. It's efficiency. it's time-saving, it's making you more efficient. And I think there is a slight change in the AI messaging may have accelerated that. I don't know if you agree or not.
Mike: Yeah, or maybe it's just made it easier. I mean, it does definitely give the capability to introduce new features. And, you know, one of the other things we're talking about is the integration between Piper, which is effectively an AI business development rep, as they pitch it. So it's an AI tool to replace some of your nurturing. And they've integrated that with Marketo. And that seems to have generated a lot of interest, you know, in some ways, almost outside of the marketing press. And I was quite surprised to see how much enthusiasm there was for this story.
Hannah: See, I think this is where we always disagree, Mike, because although I was a little bit surprised, I think it makes sense to me. You know, we've seen how much coverage there has been about AI, these type of tools. And I think it's interesting to see how Marketo is actually using a third party tool rather than building something in internally. What do you think about that?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. That's fascinating, because as you mentioned, you know, we talked briefly about Salesforce and the fact that they're bringing a lot of AI into the platform themselves, which is interesting because us old guys, I mean, we remember Salesforce was initially promoted as a CRM in a platform. And the whole idea was people would build apps on top of Salesforce. And that really drove its initial adoption. And now, I mean, maybe I'm being wrong here. I get the feeling that Salesforce more and more wants to control more and more of the functionality, and it's becoming much less of a platform and much more of a standard product. What do you think?
Hannah: No, I do agree. And I think it would be interesting to see how Marketo compares. I mean, this news about Piper was released really recent, 18th of March. So I think it'd be interesting for us to come back to this maybe in a couple of months and see what the difference is and look into a bit more of why is Salesforce going down this route? Why is that better? But also what has happened to Marketo and actually are users preferring this sort of approach?
Mike: Yeah, and I think also the other thing to see is, you know, how many of us will actually be having conversations with either through email or actually voice conversations with AIs when it comes to the sales process. I think there's areas where that can work. And typically that's, you know, the lower value type purchases. But when you look at some, you know, really deeply involved, very high value B2B purchases, I wonder in reality how many companies are going to trust AIs to actually run that process, knowing that we still have problems with things like hallucinations.
Hannah: Oh, I think that's a great point, Mike. And I think that's something we definitely need to look at in the future. But just looking at time, let's move on to our insightful tip of the week. So I want to have a quick chat about when do you look to change the platforms within your MarTech stack? Now, we briefly mentioned earlier, you know, it's really time consuming, it costs a lot of money to change your market automation platform. and that isn't something that should be taken lightly. But when we're looking at the MarTech stack as a whole, when should you be looking to change and when should you be actually sticking with it and deciding that I'm gonna make this work?
Mike: That's a great question. I was on another podcast earlier this week. They asked me basically the same question, you know, do you lean into finding new technology or are you more about pushing it away? And I actually said, I'm a nerd, so I love new technology, a new shiny thing. I'm like Bolt, it's like Squirrel and I'm off and looking at the new shiny tool. So actually I try and stop myself doing it because generally speaking, there's a real risk of spending too much time churning through tools, updating the capabilities of your stack and then never using those capabilities. I mean, you use a lot of marketing automation, and you know, the more familiar you are with the platform, the better you're going to be at using it.
Hannah: Oh, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And I mean, we have a great team for biz dev here at Napier, and they use a variety of tools. And there's some that I'm more of an expert on some that they love and there's some that's non-negotiable. I mean, you know, we're coming up to a new financial year and we're like, you know, how are you getting on with this? And I think I would say about 80% of the tools that we've used, the team has been like, please don't take this from me. I absolutely love that and that is down to the fact that we really dedicate the time to training the team, understanding the platforms, we don't just as you said, might do a squirrel and go, oh, shiny new thing. You know, sometimes I have to say to you, do we really need this? And I think it's the value of understanding, okay, we're spending money on this. We've chosen this platform for a reason. We're going to do all we can in the next year to make sure that we're using it properly because you don't want to be in a situation where your subscriptions review and you go, oh, right, I had that. And I think that's actually the case for quite a few marketers.
Mike: I totally agree. I mean, sometimes tools come on the market. I remember when Descript started really being able to fully edit podcasts. It was so powerful that, you know, that was a tool that everybody wanted to switch to. But then you have other tools. I mean, you know, recently there's been a lot of tools around AI to pull clips from podcasts. And they're interesting and they do a pretty good job. but they don't necessarily always pull the right things. And so again, we're using some of those tools, but also we're still doing some stuff manually because sometimes the AI doesn't quite get what you're talking about. Either that or you and I aren't very good at explaining it.
Hannah: I think that's a great point, Mike, and we've started using Swell AI to help with our podcast, you know, pull descriptions, but we have Natasha out there doing a manual check, making sure everything makes sense. The tools have to be taken with, I guess what they say is a pinch of salt sometimes, to make sure you're still hitting that quality as well.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Swell, I think, is one of those tools that the team would not want to lose because it definitely helps write up the show notes. It's another great AI tool that works really well. But equally, I think, you know, sometimes these tools are not the magic bullet. And as you say, you do need to be involved with the tools. And that has a cost. You know, throwing more tools into your marketing stack has a learning and familiarization impact. that really is going to slow you down if you're not careful. So I think people need to think very carefully about switching tools. I think we're getting to the point where most tools are good enough. And if it's good enough, then maybe you don't want to jump to the latest and greatest tool that might have a little bit of a extra feature lead for the next couple of weeks. We should be a little bit more German, I guess. I mean, Germans are very, very into their processes and their workflow, and anything that disrupts the workflow is a really major change. So that's why they tend, culturally, to be really efficient at things, because they don't go around messing around with the tools they use and the way they work. Whereas I think in the UK, we're perhaps not as disciplined. And maybe learning a bit from the Germans might be a good thing to do.
Hannah: Well, I think that's the perfect statement to end the podcast on, Mike. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed being back in the game, having such an interesting conversation. And we'll be back soon for another one.
Mike: Absolutely. And if anybody is listening from Germany, hello from us as well.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
The Evolution of PR – James McCann – Everhaze
James McCann, CEO of Everhaze, an all-in-one PR platform, shares insights into the challenges PR professionals face today, particularly in proving ROI and managing media relations in a digital world.
He discusses how Everhaze aims to transform PR into actionable business intelligence, helping brands and agencies demonstrate the true value of their efforts.
James and Mike discuss on the role of AI in PR, the importance of building relationships with journalists, and the future of the industry as it adapts to new technologies
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Everhaze
Everhaze is a PR business intelligence platform that turns media campaigns and mentions into actionable BI through real-time narrative tracking, messaging consistency scores, big data insights and AI PR Executives.
Solving the problem of scalability in PR, Everhaze helps clients across the UK & Ireland with in-depth media monitoring across print, broadcast and online, detailed media intelligence through its intuitive media database, automation of PR campaigns and real-time media insights to ensure its clients can fully realise their reputation protection and management capabilities.
About James McCann
James is CEO of Everhaze, an AI enabled PR business intelligence platform that provides real-time reputation impact tracking through combined data sourcing across media database, media monitoring and narrative analysis capabilities.
He previously established ClearStory International, an international PR agency in 2017 building a team of 15 and sourcing international clients from North America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. He currently serves on the AI in PR Advisory Council for the Public Relations Institute of Ireland and is also a board member on Oglaigh Naisiunta Na hEireann, Ireland's veteran charity. He was a former PR Campaign Manager for Web Summit. He was recently included in Business Plus Magazines 40 under 40 for PR professionals in Ireland.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 - Guest Introduction: James McCann
00:02:09 - Overview of Everhaze
00:03:11 - Functionality of Everhaze
00:06:09 - The Pressure on PR Professionals
00:09:14 - Challenges of Media Monitoring
00:11:08 - AI's Role in PR
00:17:08 - Marketing Tactics for Everhaze
00:19:09 - Future of PR in the Next 3-5 Years
00:23:31 - Best PR Advice Received
00:24:06 - Advice for New Marketing Professionals
00:25:30 - How to Learn More About Everhaze
Quotes
"We're turning PR into actionable business intelligence for large-scale brands, for semi-states, for governments, for NGOs, and obviously for agencies and their clients." James McCann, CEO of Everhaze.
"The major issue when it comes to media relations right now, which is that journalists are under enormous pressure." James McCann, CEO of Everhaze.
"You need to continue to advocate for yourself and your value. Constantly demonstrate value." James McCann, CEO of Everhaze.
Follow James:
James McCann on LinkedIn: https://ie.linkedin.com/in/jamesmccann862
Everhaze’s website: https://everhaze.com/
Everhaze on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/everhaze/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with James McCann at Everhaze
Speakers: Mike Maynard, James McCann
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by James McCann, who's the CEO and founder of Everhaze. Welcome to the podcast, James.
James: Thanks very much, Mike, and look forward to kicking off.
Mike: Well, it's great to talk to you. I mean, let's kick off by finding a little bit about yourself. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about your career and also why you chose to create Everhaze.
James: Sure. So I suppose I started off, I suppose, in communications and public relations through politics initially. I was a local election candidate here in Ireland back in 2014 and segued into an Australian startup then as a campaign manager for them, which lasted for about six months. And then on to Europe's largest technology conference, which was WebSummit. So I was one of their PR managers and then PR operations managers. And then I set up my own PR agency for a number of years. And as part of that whole process, as you're kind of going through the day-to-day of PR operations, you're constantly looking to find ways where you can, say, save time or, you know, we explored all different tools on the market and the fragmentation that was out there already and, you know, trying to constantly prove value to clients then as part of that. And then when you're building a PR team, trying to keep track of you know, all of the inputs and outputs that are happening on a day-to-day basis. And a number of years ago, you know, we had an innovation voucher basically here in Ireland that we could take advantage of. We wanted to build an in-house tool for the agency. And then that just ballooned to becoming a whole different entity. And that's how Everhaze came to be.
Mike: So before we dig into Everhaves, I'm really interested, you know, you're based in Dublin, it's certainly an area which has seen a lot of, you know, creativity and startup activities. Do you think that's down to the support, the government support you mentioned, or what else do you think is driving, you know, so much success in Dublin?
James: Yeah, I think, you know, obviously Dublin and Ireland in the main, certainly, you know, down Cork and over in the West and go and Mayo, there's actually been massive investment in technology infrastructure, but also, you know, ecosystem development, right? Enterprise Ireland has obviously played a big role in that through the state, but there's been a whole positive ecosystem that's developed over the last 20 years where successful founders have reinvested through angel investments. And obviously you've got the big multinationals that have come in that have developed and brought a lot of tech talent here to Dublin that then wanted to spin out and do entrepreneurial activity. So Dublin is fast becoming not just a large-scale technology hub with the presence of Facebook, et cetera, but just a startup hub. I think we had our first Unicorn Tynes announced there a couple of weeks ago, and the future certainly looks bright for Ireland where I'm sitting on the tech side.
Mike: That sounds really cool, really exciting times for Ireland. Let's go and dig into the product you built now. So can you explain very briefly what EverHaze does?
James: Sure. So EverHaze is an AI PR platform that first of all consolidates your media database and media monitoring CRM functions. And effectively, we're turning PR into actionable business intelligence for large-scale brands, for semi-states, for governments, for NGOs, and obviously for agencies and their clients. And that's a big claim, right? So I think we've all struggled over the last number of decades, certainly since things have gone digital as opposed to print, in trying to prove ROI to our clients and trying to put some tangibles on the very intangibles that we do in our industry. And ultimately, yeah, that's what we're looking to do, is help brands and PR professionals put proper attributable value on what they do.
Mike: So you covered an awful lot there. And maybe we can break this down a little bit. I mean, the first thing is editorial databases, media databases. I mean, there are a lot of them around, they've been around for a long time. Did you see that as being core to the product? Or is that really an enabler for what the product does differently?
James: It's an enabler, you know, media database functions from a tech perspective, and this will become more the case. It has a very low barrier to entry, right? So it's data capture and then, you know, distribution function, and then your media database provider. Now, obviously, we've seen what's in the market at the moment, where there's AI functionality coming into us to help pure professionals hone in on particular germs, helping them with media lists and the research function. you know, that is absolutely needed because we've all been there where we're, you know, working with account executives or, you know, team members and we're trying to put together an accurate list, right? But it is only one piece of a wider puzzle that needs to be solved, right? Because we all know that the major issue when it comes to media relations right now, which is that journalists are under enormous pressure, newsrooms are under enormous pressure, and as a result, it's harder to prove a return for your clients, right? And I often see this debate around the spray and spray approach and kind of targeting kind of specific journalists for specific content is the way to go forward. I think there's a reverse to that, which is also true, which is that because journalists have such limited bandwidth, they have such limited ability to respond in a lot of cases. You're constantly vying for the retention, whether you have that relationship personally or not. And journalists are rightfully setting boundaries now around digital communications, WhatsApps and text messages and whatever else, because they are just so overwhelmed. So irregardless of the intelligence that you have, you need to be pitching good, relevant content and sometimes you need to be doing that at scale or certainly with accurate intelligence to help you capture that journalist's attention. So, as I say, I think media databases are one part of the puzzle, but you need a wider input, you know, for where the industry is going in order to deliver the value that you need.
Mike: And I mean, you mentioned the pressure on journalists. I think equally, there's a lot of pressure on PR pros as well. And this is really around the impact of what their coverage is generating. So it's not just, you know, today, it's not acceptable just to count the number of clips or column inches or fairly trivial measures. So I think this is one area wherever Hayes really tries to differentiate itself is by really analyzing what you get from the coverage. So can you talk a little bit about that?
James: Sure. I mean, obviously, there's different sizes and scales of campaigns, as we're aware of. On the upper end, you could have a client that's generating hundreds of mentions a day. You could have a one particular campaign, for example, that just goes gangbusters and generates, you know, 100 clips in a week, right? And to your point, you know, you can go off and you can get the number of articles and the estimated reach and the estimated views, all of which are relatively intangible. and go back to that client and say, look, this was the great work that we did. But from the client's perspective, and we often see this with CMOs in particular, their job is to go and to sell their success to their executive team. And if you do not equip them with the right insights, it becomes very hard to do. And oftentimes, us as PR pros, we will adopt whatever metric is there that we feel we can stand over, even though we're kind of squinching a little bit and we're saying, I wish I had something more tangible to show these guys. Because the whole technology landscape has changed, you know, even in the last two years with AI, but even before that, the amount of SaaS products that are now available on the commercial side of enterprises, everything from zero to your financial metrics, obviously there's Google Analytics, there's a whole host of social media tracking tools and all the rest of it, that it's quite possible now to link your business intelligence with your pure inputs and outputs. And that's really what we're looking to do. You know, every large brand is unique in how it measures success. It's not one size fits all. So you need to be able to provide a broad plethora of options so that you can sit opposite a client and we have one at the moment that we're going through a process with. whereby you're helping them understand as CMOs what their C-level team need to see, and then you're working with their business intelligence team to link up the required sources so that we can show on the PR end what the impact of a campaign is, positively or negatively, linking obviously key messages. And so up until quite recently, messaging was NLP related, right? So if there was a particular keyword that you were tracking, that would be reported as a tangible kind of win. But the wider context is missing from that. And the significance of that mention is also missed from us. So from a metrics perspective, or just from a reporting perspective, it's very hard to attribute value to that, other than the fact that that keyword got a mention. So we're going kind of a step beyond that then again, and we're tying all of what we're reporting back in to our enterprise clients BI.
Mike: That's interesting. I mean, one of the things that strikes me quite difficult is obviously you've got to monitor the media and there's a lot of media out there. So, I mean, does getting that media monitoring element of the tool, is that a complex thing to do or was that relatively straightforward to include?
James: Look, it's complex, right? And it's complex for a couple of reasons. You obviously have a multitude of different platforms. So you've got digital, you've got print, you have TV, you have radio. Radio is expensive to monitor, right? It's not that it's difficult to do technical, it's expensive. The digital side is very much, if you're building out your own technology like we are, it's just hard to get it refined. So technically, it requires a lot of time and effort. Print, as we well know, is very well licensed and its providers are rightfully protective of that. Print is also very expensive to secure that. And then TV just as much. And in a lot of cases, we've had to go kind of direct to TV providers for rights. between the licensing, the technology, and what we found with a lot of our competitors is that they've kind of skipped a lot of that, and they've gone directly to third parties for their technology infrastructure, which is all well and good, but it's quite restrictive then in terms of the capabilities you can roll out to your clients. So we've decided that we spent a long time before we launched in effectively January of this year, on the media monitoring side, we spent a long time investing in the technology and the infrastructure so that we can roll this out at scale. That's kind of what we've been focused on these past few years is making sure that when a client comes to us and say, okay, can you integrate with our systems X, Y, and Z so that you can show the comparatives or tie in with this metric or demonstrate how this particular narrative arc is going to impact on visitor numbers, for example, or whatever it might be. And we can tangibly work with them on that. without having to go back to a third party and say, oh, you know, would you be able to do X, Y and Z for us? So that's kind of what we've been positioning for.
Mike: That sounds great. I'm really interested because at the moment, one of the things that a lot of people are hyping, particularly with the CRM type products that are able to build relationships with journalists, is AI and building AI pitches for journalists. You seem much more restrained with your mentioning of AI. So what's your view about the importance of AI for PR pros?
James: Sure. Look, I seen a good quote there yesterday. I can't remember who said it, but basically every software technology company is going to be an AI company and that's just the truth of it, right? So it'll power background processes, it'll power insights, it'll power an awful lot of the day-to-day maybe automations that we want to kind of roll out. But I just think with respect to content, one of the most common faux pas obviously we're still seeing now around AI literacy is like American English being put out in press releases, right? And websites and content and blog content and so on. It's just very apparent, right? I also feel on the publisher side, there is going to be just a level of temptation to adopt AI to screen the noise, right? So pitches and relevant stories and so on. I think that's coming. But on the PR side, the drafting of the content, as we all know, is instinctual in a lot of times. It's ensuring not just that the content messaging is in there, but the paragraph structure, that your size and scale factors, your pedigree factors in there, whatever the kind of story that needs to be written. AI can't understand your intentions, right? And you can explain it, you can prompt as much as you want. But we just don't think Gen AI is going to be in the content writing space sufficiently enough that doesn't require the rework in order to distribute them to journalists. So we're making a bet instead that actually what PR people want is more like reducing admin around media coverage, logging, reports, writing and construction, media intelligence and research, and all of the kind of background hassle that comes with all of that. So like our CRM system, for example, on the agency side, you can track all of your client campaigns at an account director level or account manager level concurrently. And that just enables you at a snapshot to see where everything is at. And then you can make strategic high-level decisions on what has to happen next for each one of those clients or campaigns and work more proactively under less pressure with your account executive teams to deliver what you need. So, That's, I suppose, why we haven't leaned so much on the AI content piece yet. We just don't think it's there yet. And also, it's going to be interesting to see how the industry responds to the strategic element of kind of what AI brings. And I suppose what I mean by that you're not going to need account executives to do as much list building, right? That's a given. You'll be able to track your agency or your organization's personal relationships, in most cases, with journalists or outlets. You'll be able to see who's kind of positive, negative, you know, all of this intelligence. What you do need is still good instincts around content and editorial and, you know, relationships. And That is just not something that AI can do. And if you want to do it at scale, even at that, it's just harder to do without that human factor of context.
Mike: I love that. And I'll tell you why I love that. It's great because what you're doing is you're solving all the problems and challenges around the work that people hate in agencies. And you're doing the difficult grunt work rather than try and do the exciting work, which is building relationships with journalists. And I totally agree. I think certainly today, AI is not great at building those relationships, but people are. So I love that approach.
James: And look, you know, in my experience before this on the agency side, you'd come across CMOs that were just torn to pieces, right? Because, you know, the role of CMOs has just grown to an unbelievable extent and it's still going now, right? That PR oftentimes isn't their greatest strength and they might have a PR executive as part of the team or whatever it might be. And it's overwhelming. And it's not necessarily possible to roll out the kind of campaigns required now to capture attention, especially if you're like an emerging brand trying to crack into a new market. Just that attention seeking piece, you know, you haven't got the relationships, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It requires an awful lot of time, effort, creativity and just labour. 80% of your role could be just centred on the admin. That's just wild. So we're trying to solve that problem so that, again, and the way I look at this from a journalistic perspective, you know, journalists have just the same problem as PR people do, but in reverse, in that they need good stories to sell to their editors. And in order to ensure that they get that, sometimes they go with just their trusted sources. And what you start to see in the news landscape then is just almost like a monopolization of large brands in the news cycle the whole time. And we're trying to get to the point whereby if we can help pure people be more creative to pitch higher quality stories, even if that's at scale and journalists can kind of trust what they're getting from clients based on this editorial led approach, you're solving a problem for the journalists as well as just the agencies and the pure pros themselves.
Mike: Well, that's a really positive view on how you can help people. I'm intrigued to know, how's it going now? You mentioned you really launched at the start of this year. Who've you got as customers so far?
James: Yeah, so, I mean, I can't disclose too many. We have UPMC, which is a US multinational. That's probably all I can say publicly at this stage. One of our enterprise clients now, as I said, is quite a large organization. Their biggest challenge so far has been tracking the significance of their narrative publicly. So they're in a significant argument with government right around a particular issue, and they want to know who's winning the overall narrative publicly. It's around from their perspective, it's kind of the rate of fire, right? The amount of mentions of kind of positive and negative. And then they want to be able to go into their CEO and say, look, this is how we're winning public discourse in detail. This is what it looks like in terms of visitor numbers. This is what it looks like in terms of spend. This is what it looks like, you know, in various other different metrics. So that's at a very enterprise level. And we have quite a number now of kind of mid-sized companies as well. And I think what we're finding is We went to market earlier with the media database. It wasn't that great of a sell because there's so many of them. But now that you have this combination of both and the higher-level analytics, people save money on it, and that's been a big plus.
Mike: That sounds great. It sounds like you're really building momentum. So I'm interested to know, you've now got this problem that you've actually got to promote your own product. What are your marketing tactics? How are you building your customer base?
James: There's two approaches we're taking. I mean, one is iterative marketing, right? So, like, we're a bootstrapped company. We haven't raised any investment yet. So what we've been doing is taking small bits of advertising, 100 quid here, 100 quid there, looking at our core messaging, what's working, what's getting a better response rate. Typically, we're looking for kind of views around our tick-through rate. and then 0.5% and we're standing kind of scaling that up. And that's just purely market awareness because it's a very small population overall. We're like maybe targeting 25,000 people. So it's a highly targeted audience. And from that building up awareness and then I suppose the latter part of this year is just going to be focused purely on market education. So ensuring that the market knows that there is something in addition to just the monitoring and database side, that we do have this plethora of other core metrics that they can go off and maybe sell to their own kind of bosses. That's our approach. What I have always tried to do with any business that I've set up is prove that there's a product market fit and to do so with whatever shillings I have in my pocket. Like we haven't started to spend massively yet, but so far so good.
Mike: I think it's exciting and I love companies that are bootstrapped, you know, rather than taking as much money as possible and basically relying on having unlimited resources. So I think it's really laudable that you're building your momentum based upon the quality of the product rather than huge advertising budgets.
James: Yeah, look, we've seen us on the agency side, we used to work with a lot of early stage technology companies and kind of post COVID boom, right, so between 2020 and 2022, where venture capital was just flowing very freely. You make mistakes quickly, but they're really, really expensive mistakes. And if there's no follow on investment, everybody's kind of diddy goosed. So we're looking at a more pragmatic approach to building in the market, building trust, building awareness, all of the first principle stuff, really, you know. That sounds great.
Mike: Moving forward, I'm interested to know, you know, you see a lot about what's happening with PR. You're obviously working with quite a number of your customers who are looking at the changes in the world of PR. Other than obviously EverHey saving us all from a lot of admin work, what do you see as the biggest changes for PR process going to happen over maybe the next three to five years?
James: I suppose this is kind of the holy grail for where we're going. Ultimately, I think in my head is AI, PR, account executives. And I know that sounds kind of, you know, if you're collecting all of this data, all of your distribution, your relationships, the content conversions, your messaging conversions, you're doing so historically, you're doing so across, you know, 30, 40, 50 clients, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of that is interrogatable and all of that can be used to learn in a particular way for each individual customer and client. And It's not there yet. It's going to take another three to five years, exactly your timeline there. But I can see a world where you can jump on a platform, hopefully ours, and you'd be able to ask your AI account executive to build your lists to advise you on who engages with your content the most at a particular time, ask them to send a prompt to a particular journalist to remind them about a certain thing, ask them to produce you a report around the most positive articles that have been produced for a particular client. All of those things can just be asked with a prompt and converted quite quickly. I think that's the game changer. having just an instant assistant to execute these tasks. I remember years ago, I worked for an insurance company before I moved into PR and we were kind of shifting from print to digital, right? And obviously the PR industry went through this transition and the massive changes in workflow and also massive resistance to it in a lot of cases as well, right? And the learning curve that came with this was significant. But if you don't upskill to a higher level, you risk redundancy. And I genuinely think the next three to five years, we're in that period, right? It's not just a buzz. It is a very tangible thing that is going to change how we work and all of that over the next couple of years. And the last thing I'd say on it is, It's not that the value of what, like we're just eliminating a lot of the bottom tier admin work so that people can go on to spend more time thinking, strategizing, creating. And it will give rise to other segments of the market that we haven't even thought of yet. So that's kind of what I'm excited by is We have an opportunity now within the industry to think a little bit differently, and it's going to challenge us to push ourselves. We have to follow the publishers as well, right? It could be the case now that publishing is going to become video. Like, I mean, we're looking at it already where the Daily Mail pushes out a lot of its content over TikTok and Sky News, etc. Newspapers will probably go that route to a degree as well. Is every publisher going to become a multi-channel publisher, having to produce all of its content? Because it'll be scalable in about three to five years time. What does that mean for PR professionals and how we then generate content? We're just talking about media relations here right now, but there's a whole other industry that's going to emerge from this over the next kind of three to five years, again, that we haven't thought of, and it's just trying to get ready for that.
Mike: That sounds very positive because it sounds like you have a view of there still being a lot of demand for PR professionals, even with the assistance that AI can bring.
James: And look, this is just an old story that I like to say, old story is an ancient story. But in Dublin, the mansion house, the mayor's residence here had a cable to the Freeman's Journal in O'Connolly Street. and that was the first wireless to be put in to communicate news from the mayor's office directly to the Freeman's Journal. My great-granddad was the runner in the 1890s for that route and obviously he got made redundant and, you know, and he went into the print room then and obviously kind of things changed but This has always happened. Technology has always driven change and skill changes and disruption in the labour market. I think we just need to keep an eye on what the potential is, as opposed to protecting our patches right now, because it's not going to be defensible in the long run.
Mike: I love it. I think that's a great way to summarize where PR is going. You've been really generous with your time, James, but we'd like to ask a couple of quick questions of everybody just to really dig down and get some advice. So from your point of view, what's the best ever PR or marketing advice you've ever been given?
James: Best PR or marketing advice? Do you know, it's funny, I was thinking about this. I don't know if you've seen We Crashed, the documentary about Adam Neumann and WeWork and his kind of adage of, it's not who you see, it's who sees you. Like right now in the world that we're in, being front of mind and competing for everybody's attention is literally the name of the game. So yeah.
Mike: That's great advice. And then my next question is, and I think this is going to be perhaps challenging for people in the near future with AI potentially taking away entry-level jobs. What would your advice be to someone who's about to start a career in marketing? What should they do?
James: You know, I think for anybody starting off, a lot of the theory that you're probably going to come across in college, start immersing yourself in, I suppose, the tradecraft of the industry now. Obviously, you have to learn the basics and understand the significance of, you know, accuracy and editorial and writing. I think those are critical skills. Critical thinking is going to be huge, I think, for the next generation of PR professionals and marketing professionals. One thing that I would say is for those in marketing, those in PR, continue to advocate for what you do. I think it's becoming harder and harder to demonstrate the value of what we do. It's taken for granted a lot of times. It's not seen as a need to have. It's seen as a nice to have. And I think we have to advocate on behalf of ourselves and the industry as much as possible. again for the next five years to demonstrate value. We're looking at kind of what's known as a go-to-market engineer, GTM engineer, which is basically an automated CMO that will run all of the various campaigns from one centralised location, which, fair enough, there's a potential for that. It's not going to be tangible for everyone. And I just know from a CEO perspective, it's going to be a temptation to say, look, we can consolidate your positions, we can consolidate your roles, we can consolidate this and that. And burnout is obviously massive in the industry already. You need to continue to advocate for yourself and your value. Constantly demonstrate value.
Mike: That's great advice. Great way to end it. People who've listened to you, if they're interested in Everhazen and want to find out more about the products and maybe try it, what's the best way to do that?
James: Sure, anyone can book a demo at www.everhaze.com, or if they want to send me a direct email, they can get me at james.everhaze.com.
Mike: That's awesome. James, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
James: My pleasure, Mike. Thank you so much.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Webinar: The Impact of AI on SEO and Search Advertising
Register for Napier's on-demand webinar and discover how generative AI is affecting marketers as it impacts SEO and search advertising tactics. We will cover:
- How Generative AI is changing search
- The impact on SEO
- How is search advertising changing?
- How might your website traffic change?
- Five things to do now to manage the impact of AI
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘The Impact of AI on SEO and Search Advertising’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our latest webinar.
Today we're going to be talking about the impact of AI on SEO and search advertising.
So particularly, we're going to look at generative AI in search results pages.
So what I'm going to do is I'll get started, and we'll start talking about this important topic.
So why are we doing this? Well, it's pretty simple. I mean, other than the opportunity for me to use AI to generate some crazy robot characters, really, it's about stopping the robots eating your SEO and SEM lunch. So one of the big concerns that a lot of people have is as generative AI starts dominating the results on search, the question is, what's going to happen to my website traffic? Am I going to lose all my traffic? Are people going to stop going to the site? Am I even going to appear? So this is a very valid concern, and it's something we'll talk about today without wishing to spoil the whole webinar and cut to the end, I will say this is a rapidly changing situation. So whilst I can talk about what's happening today and what to do, there isn't any firm answer as to what's going to be working in a year's time, because, frankly, I don't think even Google knows what its search results page is going to look like in a year's time.
Anyway, let's have a look at what we're going to talk about today.
So I'm going to start off by talking about how generative AI is changing search I suspect pretty much all of you understand that, but I think it's important to get onto the same page. We look at the impact on SEO and also advertising. And I think advertising is something that is often underrated as being impacted by these generative AI search results.
We'll look at what's happening with website traffic and how it's likely to change, particularly how it's likely to change in the near future.
And then lastly, we've got five suggestions of things to do to manage the impact of AI.
So lets look at a typical search. So choose a microcontroller. So this is one for our semiconductor audience here.
So it's quite an informational query, and you'll notice that I'm tending to use informational queries. This is not because informational queries are the only things that produce generative AI results, but at the moment, you're much more likely to get a generative AI result when you're asking a question that needs to be answered with lots of information, rather than a simple search that is much more transactional.
So if I run this search, and this is what I did when preparing the webinar, this is what I get as the results, and I think it's really interesting to understand what happens as we go down the page. Now this is particularly chosen as a page that doesn't have a lot of ads against it. In fact, there's no paid results on this particular results page. Doesn't mean people aren't advertising against terms like microcontroller. It just means I've managed to find a search where we didn't get ads to confuse the situation.
So the first thing we'll see is, right at the top, we've got the generative AI result. This is the text that Google's AI Gemini has generated to try and answer the question.
It's been generated using certain sources, and you can see here there's references. So if you want to be in the top part of the page, you've got to be one of the websites that's referenced by this generative AI result, and you've got to be referenced early on it in that generative article, because what we've seen.
Now is that Reddit is next. That's not that unusual. Reddit is certainly seems to be the current website of choice for getting really good ranking. At the moment, not sure that's always going to be the case. You get the people also asked, and then finally, you get the first website results. So this is, you know, right down at the bottom of the page. Now, I mean, almost off the page before we get a result from a website, from somebody that's trying to promote or sell microcontrollers. In this case, it's a distributor.
And so, as I mentioned, no adverts are shown. If they were we'd actually see everything pushed down.
Now what we can do is we can click on the Show More section of the AI overview. I'm sure you've seen this, and what we'll see is we'll see a much longer answer from Google, an answer that, in fact, is covering the whole page. So we've now wiped out all search results, and all we've got is the references. And you can see there's a lot of references that are on this page, so it is quite important to remember that references do matter. That's what we're trying to achieve when we're trying to deal with the impact. However, if you caught the previous top search result. It's interesting that although tme was the top search result, it doesn't get quoted in the references. So this is the first thing to recognize, is that actually the generative AI results and the pure search engine result pages results, they are going to be different, and you may need to do different things to appear in the generative AI summary than you do to appear in anything else. So in the results below it, it's also important to notice that there's not just these generative AI summaries. So there's AI shopping as local results, travel results, informational results.
So AI is going to produce a lot of results on Google, and increasingly, it's going to produce more and more results on Google. Google has actually experimented with 100% generative AI results pages. So it's clear that Google is looking at what delivers the answer that the searchers want.
Now the big problem we have with this is that although there's lots of references compared to a Google search results page, there's actually not that many, because each of these references apply to a particular section of the of the generative result, and we've basically only got this one page, so although we might get 10 references, we haven't got page two, which is 11 to 20, page three, etc. So it's really important to recognize that this is very much a winner takes all game. If you get into generative search results, you are going to be beating a lot of your competitors.
But before we talk too much about how to get into those results, I think one of the important things to say is that appearing in Gen AI results, it's what's called Zero click SEO. So Rand Fishkin, well known in the essay SEO community, he came up with the term of zero click SEO. And here what you're trying to do is get an impression. You're trying to show yourself ahead of anybody else. So you're trying to show yourself an ingenerative ai results. You're not necessarily trying to get a click. Now, of course, we'd love it if people look at the references click through to our website and then read our website. That's fantastic. But the reality is that's not the behavior of most people who are doing searches. So most people will read the Gen AI result, and your goal is to get your opinion, your point of view, and also reference to your product into those results. It's not necessarily going to drive traffic to your website, and that makes measurement really, really hard. You're not going to necessarily see traffic in the same way as you did from your standard SEO campaigns.
However, it's not completely new, and RAM fish can actually introduce the zero click SEO term back in 2019, so this is best part of six years ago, when some research he shared showed that actually the majority of Google searches don't produce a click. So even today, you're being shown in Google search results, and it's more than likely there's not going to be a click to anybody, not just to you, but to anybody, from that Google search result. So more and more we are going to have to think about generating SEO and measuring it in a different way, purely from traffic.
So I mentioned informational queries. And you know, one of the things that certainly is the case is that disproportionately.
Gen AI results appear for informational queries. They do for more transactional ones. So it's okay, because AI is not going to tell you what to buy, or maybe they will. Let's ask which high performance ARM based microcontroller offers the best price performance.
And here you can see AI is certainly not at all shy at telling you what to buy. AI is recommending the STM 32 h5 and the Renaissance ra series as being best price performance. Now this is interesting, because actually, if you go through and analyze this, it's really not telling you why these two products here are actually the best price performance, and in fact, it's been created much more from an SEO type approach, in terms of linking words around price performance on the same page next to these products than it is necessarily from a technical analysis. So it's super important to remember that we've had two product families that have ranked in the Gen AI for the best price performance. But that's not necessarily driven in any way by their price performance. It's driven by what's said on the page about price performance, and therefore Gen AI has linked these two products to good price performance.
So this is a real problem. I mean, it's no different in many ways to when we looked at Search Engine Optimization, in the good old days, we didn't have to worry about Gen AI, where if you did do this query, you would get different products being listed in an order that doesn't necessarily represent their price performance. And here you can see, for example, the ST product that is mentioned is actually the number one search result. So again, this is a search engine optimization challenge. It's not AI providing analysis that really tells you which is the best price performance products.
So what's the problem? I mean, basically, there's a ranking of results, and that's being done by Google, but it's also being done by these generative AI tools like Gemini.
That's always been the case, that's not changed. But the issue is these generative AI answers, they're quite detailed, they provide a lot of information, and there's much more of a risk that people won't read further than the generative AI and you're putting fewer options into that generative AI summary. So the generative AI result being in it matters a lot, because people are less likely to look at your position in the search results page.
And, you know, they're much more likely to pick something from Gen AI.
Of course, some people use chat bots. And you know, just to let you know, here, I've done Google for I've used Google for the search and therefore Gemini and I'm using chat GPT as an example of a chat bot. What I'm saying here applies across all sorts of AI engines. So whether that's Bing, which actually is fundamentally, you know, driven from chat GPT, GPT, whether it's perplexity, which a lot of people are using for search, or whether it's something like Claude. So all of what this what this webinar covers, applies across the range to different AI models.
So I'm going to ask chatgpt, which high performance ARM based microcontrollers offer the best price performance. Let's try the same question. I But before we get carried away, let's not think that everybody's doing this. So I talked to oops, I talked to a lot of people who say, I use chat GPT. Everyone uses that. Actually, it's not the case. Google Search grew 20% in 2024 and actually, Google Search receives almost 400 times more searches than chat GPT.
So if we look at what's happening, yes, some people are querying chat bots, but actually not everybody is. So whilst we're looking at this, let's not get too freaked out by chat bots, because it currently it's nowhere near the majority of traffic or the majority of questions on the internet. Okay. Now, with that caveat in place, let's have a look at what chat GPT tells us about the best price performance micro controllers.
Well, st, Mike, electrons have done a very good job, because again, that lovely 32 h5 series is ranked as one of the best price performance, again, not through any analysis of price performance at all. This is based upon effectively linking words together, so a kind of SEO type approach. Interestingly, the Renaissance product didn't make it onto the chat GPT summary.
We see a number of other products here that didn't make it onto the Gemini summary. So there's a definite lack of consistency. We're actually seeing quite different results. The other thing as well, I'm sure you guys all know this, but if you don't, it's important to remember that actually there's a level of randomness in terms of the results that any AI engine produces. So an amount of randomness is introduced. It stops the answers always being the same, and it means that sometimes an AI engine will recommend a different product, rather than always recommending the same one. So even though I've seen these through a couple of my searches, it's very likely you'll go and try and replicate this, and you may see different recommendations, either from Gemini or chat GPT, and almost certainly will see something slightly different from something like perplexity.
So it's a similar sort of thing driven by, you know, the concept of content and people describing products as being certain things.
But the question is, now, you know, how important are these chat bots?
Well, there's not much evidence. I mean, we can see here. So the Google trends analysis of my controller, it kind of backs up the research we looked at from Spark Toro that said that actually the number of searches is growing, so even in an engineering environment where people are probably leading edge much more willing to experiment with technology, we're actually seeing Google, the legacy technology, growing and expanding market share.
So the good thing is, we don't have to worry about this too much at the moment, but I do think we have to worry about the Gen AI results on the search engine results pages.
So let's go back to search engine optimization.
You've got to appear in these Gen AI results. It's really important, as I say, it's very much a winner takes all situation. But you also need to appear in standard search results, partly because some people are going to scroll past the Gen AI. And recently, there's been some research I saw which actually said that engineers are becoming less willing to trust AI generated results and much more keen on looking at results that are human generated. They trust them more. So you know, the standard search results still matter, and AI impacts ads too, but in a slightly different way. What AI is doing is pushing the ads down the page.
So here we go. We've got another query. We're talking about variable speed motor drives, or variable frequency motor drives. We've done a search. The AI view sits at the top, and then the ads are below. Now this is going to have an impact, because previously, prior to Gen AI, those ads would sit right at the top of the results. So we are going to see lower click through rates for these ads than we would have seen previously without Gen AI, and that's just highlighting it there.
And obviously, just as we do with organic search results, if we click the expand, the ads disappear off the bottom of the page. So again, you know, if people start engaging with these generative AI results, we're going to see fewer and fewer clicks on our paid ads on Google as well.
So there's less we can do about this, because we can't get those paid ads at the moment into the Gen AI results, but it's certainly something to consider going forward.
So what's going to happen to your web traffic? Well, I mean, one of the concerns is all this generative AI that basically it's going off the edge of a cliff pushed by the AI robots.
So that is a real concern, but I don't think it's really this bad. So let's have a look at a different search. This is an interesting search. It's about a topic called mental availability.
Napier actually ranks pretty consistently top for a search on mental availability.
As you can see here, though, we've been pushed out by the AI search result, although the a search result does reference Napier.
The good thing as well is, you know, we're here number one in the organic search results, and we've actually beaten the erenberg bass Institute, which was really the people who originated the concept of mental availability. So it's really good that we're ranking high, and that has obviously helped us rank high in mental availability, but what's this done to our traffic? So let's have a look at how much traffic is driven to the Napier website based on the search for mental availability.
And here's the traffic by month, looking back over almost a year.
And a half, and you can see it's pretty random. It's jumping up and down. You might be able to argue that there's some seasonality there, but it's really quite hard to see.
But what you see is that when Google started testing what the time they called the search generator experience, we had a low month, then we had a high month, then they released it from beta. We had a high month that month, but the following month was low, and then we had it in the UK, and it was low, but the next month was high. So it was all a mess. So what can we do? It's very difficult to understand this. I mean, we want to beat the bots, but, you know, are there strategies we can adopt that are going to make sense. They're not going to harm our organic search results, but they're going to help us with generative. Ai, well, I think they, there are. I mean, the first thing I'd say is, really just keep calm. A lot of people have freaked out over Gen. AI, actually, the reality is, as we've seen with a lot of these results, if you've got good SEO today that's going to impact your generative AI results. It's going to help, because what you're doing that appeals to Google in terms of ranking you on the organic search results pages is also going to be something that causes you to be ranked higher or more likely to be included rather in generative AI results.
So you can't do a lot about Google ads. Your Google ads are probably going to reduce performance. The most important thing is to become about that and understand that as generative AI pushes Google Ads down, maybe you'll see a slight drop in click through rate. Make sure you're not making decisions about ads, assuming the ads are poor simply because they're being pushed down by Gen AI. So really understand what's going on and don't panic.
Secondly, I would say it's really important to understand whether you show up in AI results, and you can obviously do that to a large extent by looking at Gen AI search results pages and chat bots, understanding where you don't show up and understanding why you don't show up, so why others are preferred to you.
But you can also use tools, and there are a couple of tools shown here, so one is profound. The other is otterly. And we can do something like, you know, ask otterly what happens if we put this prompt into different AI engines, and otterly will give you a result. So it's a paid service that will actually tell you whether you rank in Gen AI results for particular queries. So that is a really useful tool to understand whether you're appearing in Gen AI, or whether you're being excluded, there are lots of other tools as well, and a lot of the SEO tools are more and more beginning to add these Gen AI visibility tools. So it's becoming a much more commonplace thing to use.
So those are two things we do to really, you know, firstly, establish there's not a need to dramatically change what we're doing. Secondly, we need to understand the situation.
The first real thing we could do is start writing answers to questions people ask AI. So I'm sure you've all experienced AI. AI is a very different experience, particularly the chat bots, where people try to engage and ask questions, it becomes quite conversational. And so the best approach that you know, people seem to believe today is to add FAQs or questions and answers onto a range of key pages on your website. And what that's doing is it's putting content that's conversational, that can be very easily ingested by a an AI model, and you're putting it on an important page, so therefore they'd be fairly highly ranked. You get some authority there, and hopefully also people will take them and maybe replicate some of those questions as well.
There is also the ability to do some technical optimization called schema markup, which is basically a tool to tell systems that you have a Q and A on your page or an FAQ on your page. It's important to note that there's no real evidence that any of the AI models are really looking at that schema markup today, but it's generally felt that would be something that would help AI models get better answers for people, and it's felt it's really likely that more and more schema will be used by AI models today, it's much more the content on the page, so that's probably not something that's going to make a huge difference to you the next thing is to appear on authoritative websites, and authority is important. It's important for Google. We all know about that. We've all heard about authority and links and how they rank websites. But actually it's important for chatgpt as well, and very crudely, if you want to.
On authoritative websites, news sites and directories tend to be ranked pretty highly. Even those directories you hate and you think are really low quality tend to get a reasonably high ranking. So making sure you've got a very solid PR program and you're also actively listing yourself in directories is really important.
The other thing that does seem to rank very well, and there's been lots of discussion around, you know, Reddit and Quora and other Q and A sites, over whether the AI companies can take their content or whether they need to pay for them. But it's clear the AI content, the AI companies, so the open AIS and
other companies. They all value these Q and A websites. That's very good content. It gets ingested well into the models, and it produces good answers. So they are, in some cases, paying, but they're definitely looking at things like Reddit and Quora, and it's important to have some presence on there as well.
And then lastly, and this is probably most important, is to have a Wikipedia strategy.
So you know this, this is really interesting, but without doubt, Wikipedia is something that is used by the Gen AI companies, and it's used differently to the internet as a whole. So if you look at, you know how open a AI reported that they trained their models, they'll talk about using Wikipedia and the internet. Well, Wikipedia is obviously part of the internet, so they're separating out Wikipedia, and they're actually making Wikipedia more important than the typical page on the web. So you really, really, really need to have a great Wikipedia strategy.
This is interesting. So we're back on variable frequency drives, and this is a Wikipedia article about variable frequency drives, and the Wikipedia article talks about Stromberg as being the company that invented the technology. And if we go to Stromberg here, we can see that there's an article that ultimately says Stromberg is part of ABB. So ABB ultimately acquired Stromberg. That's one of the reasons why ABB is such a strong supplier of this technology. But you can see, it's not a super highly ranked page. You know, it's got some notifications that the page needs more references. So really, if you want to rank high and you want to link ABB closely to variable speed drives, there's some things you can do in terms of tweaking Wikipedia to make Wikipedia reflect that ABB is the owner of Stromberg, put in more references, improve the ranking, and possibly put a mention of ABB onto the variable frequency drive page. Now, having said all that, it's incredibly important to rank on Wikipedia and to have content on Wikipedia. It's also incredibly easy to fall foul of the very arcane and obtuse Wikipedia rules. So if you don't understand Wikipedia, please, please, please don't sign up, get an account and start editing and particularly, don't start editing content that directly relates to you. There are real strong rules and restrictions around Wikipedia. So please make sure you talk to someone who knows about Wikipedia and understands what can and can't be done.
So thank you very much. If anyone has any questions you know, please feel free to put them into the chat.
I'll just summarize. So the first thing I'd say is don't panic, and hopefully there's a few geeks on here that understand the link between Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and don't panic. I would say definitely keep an eye on the robots and monitor the impact of AI. Focus on quality. And I think this is really important. Increasingly, it's clear that there are definite moves from the AI companies to make sure that they're ingesting content that they view as high quality. Wikipedia is a great example of what they rank as very high quality. So focus on that. Remember, other websites are as important as your own when it comes to appearing on generative AI, this, again, is a zero click play for most of the time. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to get content about you into the generative AI answers. If that content comes from the Wall Street Journal rather than from your own website, that's fine.
Definitely create content that helps the AI, you know, let's try and work together produce content that's going to rank very well. And finally, make sure you ask experts. And I think I will go back and talk about Wikipedia. It's very easy to fall foul of the rules on Wikipedia, and you really don't want to do that.
So thank you for listening.
Hope this has been interesting. I hope it's been helpful. As I say, there's no immediate easy answer as to, how do you change your strategy for optimizing for generative AI results, but there's a lot you can do to give yourself a much better chance of appearing in those results, and certainly, if you're monitoring what you do, you can really learn as to what works for your brand.
We obviously keep these webinars going as a fairly frequent sequence.
The next one is going to be at the end of April, Tuesday, the 29th of April, same time,
although probably one hour different for people in the US. And what we're going to do is we're actually going to demonstrate some integrations of AI into marketing campaigns. So rather than talk on a more theoretical level, this is going to be very practical, and we're going to show how AI can be used to really help and improve your campaigns. So I strongly recommend attending this. I think it'll be a fun webinar, and hopefully we can potentially do some live demos, and they won't go horribly wrong.
Okay, I hope you found this useful.
What I'm going to do now is switch over to questions. So if you have any questions, feel free to post questions into the chat or into the Q and A, and I'll just give Everyone a couple of minutes just to post questions you.
I've got a good question here from someone, and they're asking, is there a way that you can understand the algorithm used to decide which content is put into generative AI results, and that's a great question.
The answer is very simple. There's actually not an algorithm as such to decide that. So if we look at Google, when it ranks pages, Google has a definitive algorithm and that's related to all sorts of things. It's related to the content, it's related to the number of links, it's related to the freshness of the content, all sorts of things will cause your page to be ranked higher when we look at generative AI what we're doing is we're training an AI model. And an AI model fundamentally works by effectively deciding what's the most likely next word. And anyone who's an engineer, please, don't freak out, because that is a gross oversimplification. So it builds up and effectively compresses as much data as it can into its model, and then it tries to work out the next word, so what's most likely. And so there's not really an algorithm. And in fact, you know, understanding how AIS work and why they produce certain results. It's a subject of massive research. People have not got to that point anyway. So there really is no magic answer to this. There really is nothing that says if you do this, then you'll appear in generative AI results. So it is a case of doing all the right things and then, to some extent, hoping that generative AI will produce you as the answer, as the reference, and as I say, also, generative AI does introduce some randomness. So if you ask AI the same question, it will quite often produce a slightly different answer, sometimes choose a very different answer.
And that means that even from answer to answer, you can't predict whether you're going to be in there. So it is a case of the fact that there's an element of randomness, and that is something that we can't overcome. So today, it's very much a case of trial and error, and that's why monitoring is so so important. If you put some effort into trying to appear into generative AI search results, it's then very important to measure to see whether that had any impact or not, so the monitoring tools are key.
Okay, I haven't seen any other questions, so hopefully this means that the webinar was clear and you all enjoyed it. If you get a chance when you finish, please do complete the feedback form, and if anyone has any further questions or would like to talk about how you know their organization can appear in Gen AI search results, please feel free to contact me. My contact details are there. You can email me directly. Mike at napierbe to be.com thank you very much for attending. I hope you found it useful, and I hope to see you on the 29th of April for our next webinar. Bye.
Navigating Programmatic Advertising – David Nelson – Limelight Inc
Mike is joined by David Nelson, Co-Founder and CEO of Limelight Inc, to discuss programmatic advertising. David shares insights from his career, starting in the insurance industry and transitioning into digital marketing and ad tech.
He explains how Limelight operates as a programmatic advertising trading platform, connecting publishers and advertisers. David also highlights the unique challenges marketers face in the programmatic landscape and how Limelight uses context and data to enhance ad performance.
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About Limelight Inc
Founded in London in 2018, Limelight Inc. was created as an answer to the complexity and inefficiency of the ad tech world. The industry, while tech accelerated lacked clarity and experienced human oversight, leaving professionals ill-equipped and frustrated in a maze of complex tools and processes.
David Nelson and James Macdonald, co-founders of the company and pioneers in the media world, realized that the true power of programmatic advertising wasn’t just the technology, but also pairing it with real human expertise.
Today Limelight Inc. combines cutting edge technology with a team of dedicated professionals, eager to guide and support. We don’t offer just a platform – we offer partnership, ensuring every one of our many members feels confident and empowered to navigate the programmatic space and serve advertisers more effectively.
About David Nelson
David Nelson is Co-founder & CEO of Limelight, his particular areas of focus are product development, technical development and client success.
Prior to founding Limelight, David had been active within digital marketing for nearly 20 years. Most recently, a 2-year consultancy spell working closely with his co-founder, James Macdonald, gave them the time to formulate the plan for Limelight.
Before this, David was with AdTech firm Rocket Fuel as VP Product & Operations EMEA. Rocket Fuel was acquired following a successful IPO by Sizemek in 2017.
David’s experience also includes a successful exit after two years with Lumatag, a company he founded in 2013 to provide online tag management and business intelligence for publishers and ad networks.
Outside of work, David is a keen tennis player, an enthusiastic appreciator of wine, and a collector of classic cars. He currently spends half of his year in Spain, where he has business interests in hospitality, and half in the UK.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 - Guest Introduction: David Nelson of Limelight
00:00:42 - David's Career Journey
00:02:40 - The Benefits of Programmatic Advertising for Marketers
00:07:51 - Limelight's Unique Position in the Market
00:12:33 - Trends in Programmatic Advertising
00:16:29 - Marketing Strategy for Limelight
00:21:10 - The Story Behind Limelight's Formation
00:24:45 - Advice for Young Marketers
00:25:41 - Valuable Marketing Advice Received
00:26:20 - Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Quotes
"The problem we solve is how do you manage trillions and trillions of ad opportunities and find the right people to fill those ad spaces?” David Nelson, Co-Founder and CEO of Limelight.
"The ability to truly understand the context, truly understand the moment... is critically important and incredibly valuable to marketers." David Nelson, Co-Founder and CEO of Limelight
"There's always going to be challenges, and I think that the exciting thing about the business that we're in is that we don't really understand or know where those challenges are going to come from." David Nelson, Co-Founder and CEO of Limelight
Follow David:
David Nelson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidnelson12/
Limelight’s website: https://www.limelight.inc/
Limelight on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/limelightinc/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with David Nelson at Limelight
Speakers: Mike Maynard, David Nelson
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by David Nelson. David is the founder and CEO of Limelight. Welcome to the podcast, David.
David: Hi, Mike. Pleased to be here.
Mike: So we're going to dive into Limelight and the world of programmatic advertising in a minute. But before we start, can you just give us an overview of your career and what's led you to found Limelight?
David: Oh, so those who are seeing this on video will know that I'm very old, so my career highlights could go on for a long time. I had a software career in the insurance industry up until around 2007. At that point in time, I realized that insurance was never going to change, and it was dull and very boring. And I wanted something that was a bit more challenging and fast-paced, and I came across digital marketing. And I joined a company back then called Unanimous, where I worked for, well, five years at Unanimous and five more years with Orange, because Orange acquired them. I ran their technology and I ran their ads delivery platforms, later on at Orange, moving my scope to Europe. And then after that period of 10 years, which was super, we'd seen OpenX emerge from that business, and we'd seen the Orange Ad Network emerge from that business, some early kind of programmatic platforms. I moved to Rocketfuel, who at the time were pioneering the use of AI in the advertising world. And I spent five years there building that business throughout Europe and then left for what I thought at the time was going to be a summer off, which then turned into building the limelight business. And so I spent a good many years now, not quite 20, but a good many years in digital advertising and programmatic in general. Brilliant. And what problem are you solving with Limelight? What does it actually do? So Limelight, we like to describe it as a 360 degree programmatic trading platform. And once we understand what that means, I do appreciate that that's not necessarily digestible. So let me try and explain. So our clients will use us to bring supply as a publisher to our platform. And then they'll find demand relationships that want to buy that supply. And we'll make an exchange happen in the middle, like a stock exchange programmatic execution. So some of our clients will be publishers, some will be ad networks generally. But the problem we solve is how do you manage trillions and trillions of ad opportunities and find the right people to fill those ad spaces? That's what we do with our platform.
Mike: So most of our listeners are going to be marketers, so clients like. I mean, what for them does programmatic actually mean? You know, you talk about letting people buy ads. You're obviously doing that on an individual basis really, really quickly. How does that differ from, for example, going to a publisher and just buying all the ads on the homepage?
David: If you wanted all of the ads on the homepage, that would be a great thing to do. Go and find the right publisher. You have the challenge, of course, in the fact that there are, I don't know, how many millions, trillions of publishers in the world. How do you find the right ones amongst that mix? You've got that challenge. Programmatic will alleviate that problem by making sure that you have access to a huge selection of the supply side, be it a web publisher or in-app or an audio or a CTV publisher. And then you have the challenge, if you look at it in the old school way, of placing an IO, finding the right person, placing your order, negotiating your costs, all of these things. Then you have the challenge of halfway through running your campaign, you realize actually you didn't want to run that campaign, you wanted it to change and do something else. So Programmatic gets around all of these things, and it makes the whole process automated. So it's an operational saving, you have the ability to find more success in more diverse places, and you have the ability to adapt and change at the blink of an eye.
Mike: That's interesting. I mean, I think there's lots of different forms of programmatic advertising, and maybe a lot of us looked at programmatic advertising a while ago, and it was fairly simplistic. I mean, actually, what makes really effective B2B programmatic advertising campaigns?
David: So I think you're right. I mean, on the very simplistic side of things, you simply target a few IP addresses or some device IDs. You target a certain geography. It's obviously possible now to use that low on mobile devices and really tie that geography down. But then again, you're still relying on geography. What I think is really interesting is that, in fact, the programmatic space of the last year or so has lost access to a lot of the data that we commonly had with the advent of GDPR and various other things. Data is now more strictly controlled, meaning there's perhaps less free available data. But that's made us think and challenge our status quo a great deal. So now we have the ability, it's almost like we went back 10 years and we realized that the context of advertising is critically still important. Programmatic has the ability to bring huge amounts of data from the publisher side about the context. So really understand where the ads are going. So I think this for me and for us is the future of really getting past broad splashing of advertising across an IP address and losing out on data. We come back to context, we truly understand where that ad is gonna be displayed, and we understand the right moments for displaying that ad. And in that way, I think we actually will end up in a much stronger place than we were even two years ago.
Mike: So that context is really interesting. Can you give us some examples of some of that context information you could get through programmatic that maybe you couldn't get another way?
David: An awful lot of the marketer's job today has changed from putting a banner ad on a website to actually engaging with content. And so the issue with content is you need to understand whether it's surrounded by negative or positive sentiment, for instance. You need to understand whether it is content that is within an environment that is supportive of your message. You need to understand whether it's sponsored by your competitors. You need to understand all these things. So your publishers, in the programmatic sense, will be prepared and willing and will desire to share this type of data with a platform like Limelight, because it makes their programmatic supply far more valuable. And so instead of getting a small kind of $1 CPM, cost per mil, they'll get 10 or 12 because they've shared richer data about the context. And so there's a huge amount. I mean, if you think about just a simple web page, what you can understand from it, not just from what you see, but from the metadata that sits behind its constructs, there's a huge amount of information that can be captured and shared. And publishers are prepared to do this because it increases their revenue. And of course, publishers like to increase their revenue.
Mike: I mean, that's fascinating as someone who's perhaps, you know, not very well educated. I mean, presumably the difference is you can buy the homepage of a publication or you can actually put ads on that homepage when the stories are relevant to your product and positive about the kind of things you do. That sounds like a major boost in terms of performance of ads. You know, your ads are going to perform better. That's the argument that we would make.
David: But don't forget, the programmatic also allows you to do both. So this homepage takeover, as we referred to it years ago, is still possible in the programmatic sense. You can still work on a programmatic guarantee basis and make sure your ads are going to be placed and take up all of that content for a period of time or for a particular set of users, et cetera, et cetera. So both are possible, but for me, I think that the ability to truly understand the context, truly understand the moment, truly understand whether or not you are able to engage with that lead and nurture that lead through to the next stage of your marketing journey is critically important and incredibly valuable to marketers.
Mike: I mean, this all sounds very exciting, but obviously, the market is quite competitive. There's lots of programmatic platforms. So I'm interested about LineLight particularly here, you know, what do you do uniquely well in this market?
David: So I guess we're a B2B organization ourselves. So our partners that come on board are looking at the broad spectrum of programmatic platforms that they could work with. And they're asking, why Limelight? So it's a great question. And in a space that I think has become fairly commoditized in terms of technology. It's harder to stand out by saying that my AI is bigger than his AI. Everybody has very similar sounding features and functions. Our reflection point a couple of years ago when we started looking about who we wanted to be as a company came from the fact that Actually, we are partner first, okay? So I think that because we're problematic, because we're driving technology, people forgot in this world that we occupy that people still exist, and people still buy advertising, and people still make relationships. From our perspective, being partner first, which for us means making sure we make the right decision for the partner rather than making the right decision for Limelight. And at times that can feel painful, but it's the right thing to do ultimately in the long term. It means making sure that we are there to support our partners when they have a challenge. All too often, we all use software, right? So we all know that very, very often it's very easy for a software company to say, well, it's not my problem. It wasn't my technology. It's somebody else's technology. Go and speak to them. So we absolutely won't do that. If our partner has a problem and we're in a position where we can help because we have the knowledge and resources to do so, then we will lean in and we will help even if it's not a problem with our platform. Programmatic can sometimes, engage with multiple agencies to get a campaign live. And it's really, really important that I call it pierce the veil of responsibility. It's one of my NAF terms that I use in the company all the time. But I really want us to make sure that the partner's problem is solved. It doesn't matter whose fault it is, let's solve the problem and move on and make everyone successful. So that's the key thing that stands out.
I think the other thing that we're trying to do is, I think I said earlier on, I spent five years with Rockefeller selling a very, very good AI-driven tool. They spent $200 million on AI, and it was amazing, truly. But on a human level, it was really unsatisfactory, because at a human level, people just don't like that the machine is making decisions without them knowing what decision has been made. They hate it, in fact. And so what we've tried to do with the Limelight platform, yes, of course, we have AI, tick the box. But we also have the ability for our partners to, without code, tailor that AI and bring their DNA, their USP, their personality of their company to the system. So what I like to refer to as real intelligence. So we've got artificial intelligence, but the partner has real intelligence within their business. They might have operational systems that we can automate. They might have data that they own that we can bring to the platform. Whatever it is that makes them important and stand out, their own USP, as a partner-led organization, we want that to become part of delivery on the limelight platform.
Mike: I love that. So, I mean, these customers, obviously, there's lots of benefits. I mean, can you paint a picture of some of those partners that you work with and the kind of businesses they're in?
David: Yeah, so we will work with publishers who have owned and operated sites and apps. They may extend their supplier, available supplier, by partnering with parties, etc. It's a typical model the publishers have followed over the years, building their own ad network. We may work with ad networks in their own right, who don't own or operate anything, but sit in the middle, have really strong curation skills, so that they know the scope and span of the supplier side of the world, or conversely, they know the scope and span of what agencies need and how they can deliver for them. And then we use our platform to either curate, run agency campaigns with specific targeting requirements, or both of those things on the platform. And then we'll work with agencies on the demand side who just have an innate desire, perhaps, and then actually across all three of these, there's an innate desire to in some way become independent of the Google money, right? So the digital trading world of ad networks and digital media in general is pretty heavily Google dependent in terms of money. And there's a real desire across all of our client types right now to think about, well, how do I make sure I exist and I can independently carry on if Google decide they don't love me anymore? And so we're looking at a lot of solutions around that conundrum. That's why they come to Limelight, I guess.
Mike: And I think the whole question around Google and Google's dominance of advertising is probably a good one for another podcast episode. But I think anyone who's encountered some problems with Google will understand why that independence is an issue.
David: I'm really conflicted, because actually I think it's horrid that we champion a company or an individual in this world, and then when they're successful, we turn around and we bash them. But at the same time, they are a huge dominant player, and some caution is required.
Mike: And I think the reality is that, particularly in the B2B space, not very many publications nor advertisers actually count as being significant to Google. You have to be very, very large in our space to even get on Google's radar. And I think that's a frustration of a lot of people.
David: I think that's the biggest challenge. Really, it is. You phrased it incredibly well. You have to become significant. Becoming significant to Google is almost impossible now because they don't have any peers.
Mike: They are out there on their own. This is interesting. Obviously, this move to independence is a trend, but I'm interested to know what you see as the big trends in programmatic and maybe what you think happened last year, so a brief history of what's changed, and then maybe what you think is going to change this year.
David: AI happened last year and the year before, perhaps. It's really a strong message now. I think if you look at any programmatic platform, AI is going to be the first thing they say to you. So that will certainly continue through this year and on to the future. That's not going to go away anyway. And we're going to see, let's be honest, we're going to see some incredible and revolutionary things done with AI. Whether or not we're all on board with the change or not is a different debate, but it's going to happen. The challenge last year perhaps around, or last few years around data, the eradication, GDPR and other kind of CCPA stuff in America has challenged the industry certainly. And it's, I think I said earlier on, it's made people challenge and think about what the future beyond freedom of data is. We are seeing CTV, huge rise in CTV last year and a massive rise in CTV this year too. When we talk about CTV, it's important to say that if you look at your smart TVs apps that are available, there are thousands and thousands and just like there are for your phone these days. And so the amount of CTV companies that now exist is incredible, huge. And you have the same problem there. How do you create that inventory? How do you understand and bring it together so that a agency buyer can access that at a scale that is worthwhile. Nobody wants to buy five impressions a week. They want a scale that's worthwhile. CTV has really come to the fore. There's always new formats coming across. We're seeing audio on the rise. We're seeing digital out of home now on the rise for this year. What happened last year as a frustration point for me was the lack of standardization. So the IAB spent a lot of time devising OpenRTB standards. And that was great for a period of time, really good. But all I'm seeing now is everybody does it differently again. Everyone has their own unique way of doing it. So in a world where we like standardization, the lack of standardization has been a challenge. Whether that will go backwards, and I would like to see that happen again. I'd like to see us get back to a standard operating mode, but we'll see. There's always going to be challenges, and I think that the exciting thing about the business that we're in is that we don't really understand or know where those challenges are going to come from. They drop on us frequently every quarter, and we have to change track and be agile and think about things differently. And certainly, we as an organization will be driven by our partners. So our partners' use case is critical to us thinking about what it is that we should build.
Mike: I mean one of those areas I think is really interesting to B2B marketers so probably because LinkedIn have launched a CTV service. How difficult is it for someone who's in B2B to maybe move beyond the classic sort of web display ads and actually move into connected TV. Is that something you think we should be doing more of and it should grow or is it more of a fad.
David: It's not a fad. I think it's going to be a massive, massive growth area. Our business has seen CTV tripling for the last two years, and there's no sign of it slowing down. So it's certainly not a fad. I think it's something that everyone should embrace. And there's different levels of embracing it, right? So CTV as a format and CTV as an environment need to be split, perhaps. So you can advertise in CTV environments without having to have CTV video formats. Or indeed, you can go the full hog and you can develop more materialized CTV video formats and push them through. The delivery, actually, of both of those things, from our perspective, is the same. So the creative is the layer. And this is the interesting dynamic, I suppose, from your last question, we could have talked about the power shift. Publishers are now taking control of a great deal more, but also the creative layer is coming back and becoming far more important as well. And so for CTV, the creative layer is obviously critically important.
Mike: And so getting that creative right and designing creative specifically for CTV, you think that's a big important thing people should be looking at?
David: I think video ads have changed, right? So, you know, we're not seeing some geezer try and sell us a BMW anymore in the same way that we used to. We're now seeing families engage with a BMW and, you know, love the brand and be delighted and have a better life because of it. So this kind of change in marketing is the right thing, I think, personally. CTV gives you a huge opportunity to do that at a much, much lower cost than going to a TV channel or linear TV as it used to be. So more brands have the ability to engage, which is exciting. And the creative layer is a much cheaper and easier thing to produce than it once was. And there are more interesting, creative opportunities in the world, better thinking around how you produce a video ad, to engage socially with an audience rather than… None of us like to be sold to, do we? We hate the idea of being sold to. Up until we've been convinced in our own heads that we want to buy something, and then we really want to be sold to. And that's the key now, I think, to good online marketing.
Mike: Sounds interesting. I mean, you've just mentioned nobody wants to be sold to, so I've got to ask you, what's your marketing strategy for Limelight? How do you sell the product?
David: I think we're very lucky as a company in many different aspects, but this is one of the areas which is so truly fortunate. We aren't, by taking on more clients, we don't create competition between our clients, which is a fantastic thing. So we found for four years, in fact, that our marketing strategy existed of doing good work and getting recommendations and then also seeing who our partners are trading with and approaching them because they're potential clients. So for four years, really, we didn't have to market ourselves particularly other than look at our business and grow with the people that we were touching within the product. Last year in particular, we changed dramatically and we decided that we needed to look at ourselves as a brand and a formula. You know, we were no longer three people in, you know, working from home. We were now 30 people across the world and we should do something about being a brand ourselves. And I've been involved in those things many times in the past when working for other companies. And I have to tell you, I absolutely hated them. They were awful. You'd sit in the room for two mornings or two afternoons and you'd debate what color, you know, we were going to be or something like that. When I did it for Lime Night, I loved it. It was fantastic. Maybe I just care a bit more or something, I don't know. But I really loved it. It was really, really engaging.
And actually, we loved it so much, we kind of did it twice. We did it first of all with a set of consultants who came up with really good messaging about, you know, how we differentiate ourselves and stuff like that. We then went out and we hired a head of marketing, and she undoubtedly wanted to review some of it. Of course we expected that, and we did, and we… So we've really… I mean, that came from that. That's how we started. Your question was what we do now for marketing. We're live on Google. We spend quite a bit of money in Google search, obviously. We're live on LinkedIn. We spend a decent amount of money there. Those are the two biggest paid channels for us. We're still receiving a good number of internal referrals, and it's always the strongest lead when it comes from an internal referral. And so we concentrate on doing good work, getting those referrals. And then our sales team has grown to the point now where we have people that can spend energy and time engaging on a one-to-one basis with people on LinkedIn and various other platforms where we can find their contact details. I don't think any one of those channels really stands out as the channel of success for us. The whole package is really important. And coming out of the shadows, so to speak, last year and spending a good amount of money on marketing has been revolutionary to the business. We are signing clients at about 10 times the rate that we were up until the beginning of last year.
Mike: That sounds great. I love the way that you look at marketing as being something holistic. Lots of things working together. I think people often try to simplify it with, this is the best, the magic bullet. And it never quite works like that, does it? Yeah.
David: Being an ad tech business, we obviously want to make what we do in terms of spending on marketing fairly measurable. We love measuring data. And I can tell you that every time we measure anything, we can never see anything that comes from one single touch point. It just never happens. There's no magic bullet. They've found an ad of ours on LinkedIn, seen a story, seen a social post or something like that, and then they've asked someone they know that uses the platform and got a referral via there. Or the referral comes after we've hit them a few times on search. There's always some sort of triangulation. It's never a silver bullet. And I just think that's always been the case anyway, to be honest.
Mike: Yeah, I agree. I think it's just more obvious. This has been really interesting, and I think we've covered a lot, David. There's a couple of questions we normally like to ask people. Before I do, I did hear that there's a good story around the actual formation and starting of limelight. So I've got to ask you, tell us a bit more about that. So I think the story you're talking about is hot tub to FinTech, right?
David: So when I decided to take my glorious summer off, I bought myself a new hot tub and I was in my garden. It was a glorious summer as well. I was sitting there feeling very, very good about myself. And I'm about five days into my summer off. And my phone rings, and it's my now business partner, my then good friend, James McDonald. And James and I had known each other since the first days I entered digital in 2007. And we'd gone our separate ways over the years, but always hung out. And when James rings, it's always entertaining, at least, and factual, and very good at most of the time. So I thought, well, OK, I'll take James's call. So James came up with the one phrase during this call that would have got me out of my hot tub and got me back to work. He said, Dave, I need your help. I'm working on a fintech project. So I'm like, God, yeah, fintech. And it was, you know, this is, so this is five, 10 years ago now, 10 years ago. And then, if you remember, fintech was the buzzword. Everybody wanted to be in fintech. I wanted to be in fintech. I didn't want to be in my hot tub anymore. So I said, OK, James, I'll come and get involved. So what I didn't know at that point in time is that when he said fintech, he actually meant a Finnish company with some technology. He didn't mean financial technology at all.
But nevertheless, we spent some years hanging out. And what we did was really, really interesting to me, is I spent a lot of time working with him, talking to various different businesses, understanding what drove them. And many of them have been in business for many, many, many years. And I understood the epiphany moment that made us create Limelight was that I think I'd wanted for many years to find the next best greatest thing for ad tech. And that's really hard to do. And when you do find it, often you fail because nobody else agrees with you. What I realized, the epiphany moment was that actually building a better product to service these clients that we've been working for as consultants was a much, much smarter thing to do than try and find something that nobody wanted yet. build something that they do want and do it really well and service them really well and keep giving them the consultancy and advice and support that we had been giving them as paid consultants via the software as well. So that's the story of how we started Limelight and why we're here today.
Mike: That's fantastic. I love that. So, I mean, our last two questions. The first thing I want to ask you is, if you're talking to a young person starting in marketing, what advice would you give them other than, of course, buy a hot tub?
David: Yeah, hot tubs, I think they've probably come a couple of years into the career. Authenticity, I think, is the important thing. It's not just marketing. I think, actually, any young person studying any career, I think it's really important to be authentic and to continue to do and drive in the direction that you believe in. Too often, I think, we lose 20 years of our career by toeing the line and not being authentic and not believing strongly enough to actually find the role that allows us to do what we want to do. And I think 20 years lost, you can look back and think, OK, well, there were lessons learned in this and the other. But then if you could use those 20 years again, what glorious things you could do. Authenticity and sticking to your dreams, I think would be the advice I would give.
Mike: I love that. And then the second question we like to ask is, what's the best advice that somebody's given to you about marketing? Hire a professional.
David: Truly, hiring Savina, our marketing director, hiring a highly qualified professional marketing director to manage that side of our business, revolutionized where we are in terms of B2B marketing and acquiring new clients. Absolutely incredible. It's very recent advice because, you know, we were limping along and James and I were managing marketing, but hiring a professional completely revolutionized things.
Mike: Fantastic. I think that's great advice. I mean, this has been a great interview, David. It's been a really quick overview of the world of programmatic, but I think you've covered an awful lot. I mean, if people want to learn more about Limelight or maybe get in contact with you, what's the best place to go?
David: Websites, limelight.inc. Get us there. You can find us on LinkedIn, various other socials as well. Easy to get hold of. Thank you, David. I really appreciate your time. Mikey, it's been a great pleasure. A lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Avetis Ghazaryan - Growth Hunter
Avetis Ghazaryan, Founder of Growth Hunter, a community for SaaS professionals, shares how momentum marketing can enable marketers to overcome marketing challenges and increase pipeline growth.
Avetis explains what momentum marketing is, shares some strategies on how to stand out, and offers some advice on how to maximise impact.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Growth Hunter
Growth Hunter is a resource for SaaS professionals to learn, share knowledge and find inspiration for high-demand impact and momentum marketing.
About Avetis
Avetis Ghazaryan is the founder of Growth Hunter with over a decade of experience helping SaaS companies developed impactful sales and marketing processes by tapping into high-congregation events.
Time Stamps
[00:47.2] – Avetis discusses his career journey and the events that lead to founding Growth Hunter.
[07:31.3] – Avetis explains what momentum marketing is.
[12:25.1] – Avetis shares the tactics marketers can use to keep up with momentum marketing.
[14:41.4] – How can you stand out on a topic everyone is discussing? Avetis offers his tips.
[20:02.0] – Avetis shares some marketing advice.
[22:24.5] – Avetis contact details.
Quotes
“If you keep obsessing over understanding your buyer, their needs on a personal level, there is a lot to gain as a marketer.” Avetis Ghazaryan, founder of Growth Hunter
Follow Avetis:
Avetis Ghazaryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avetisghazaryan/
MRP website: https://www.growthhunter.com/
MRP on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/growth-hunter-official/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Avetis Ghazaryan - Growth Hunter
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Avetis Ghazaryan
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Avetis Kazarian. Avetis is the founder of Growth Hunter. Welcome to the podcast Avetis.
Avetis: Thank you Mike, thanks for having me, really excited to be here.
Mike: So it's great to have you on the podcast. I mean, I think the first thing you know I'd be interested in is a bit about your background and your career journey. So tell us how you got to where you are now.
Avetis: Yeah, I've been in software as a service space for over 10 years now. And I started my career, opening my own marketing agency back then very inspired by inbound marketing, who were working with B2C direct to consumer brands are also SAS software companies. And after a year or two, doing consulting and you know, agency type of work for those businesses, I ended very fascinating the challenge a lot of software as a service companies had when it came to marketing challenges for them.
And so very quickly shifted and really wanted to dedicate my career more in that sector. And I happen to work with amazing companies and software as a service as head of marketing, Head of Business Development. And one of the luckiest things I had was every company I joined the product they had they were offering to the market was the perfect window, I worked with a company called cue connect, we're offering solutions selling platform or social media and shopping on social media was thriving back then it was a great opportunity for a marketer to work on a company like that. And then I worked with the company in retail tech sector, AI sector. So every every product offering we had and as a marketer, I had the opportunity to position that company at a perfect time, the perfect window, or that product category was thriving and was of interest. But one thing I found was very quickly as a pattern with all these companies, and I really worked and dedicated my career with an early stage company series A to Series C. And the main challenge I noticed as a head of marketing is the demand problem.
First of all show for context series A and DMC companies, and all those early stage companies, they always have this aggressive annual revenue goals, right ARR goals, it's pretty much 100% year over year growth that every company is trying to achieve. And as head of marketing, your responsibility is to deliver the demand to lead the lead generation everything that required for sales team to achieve those revenue targets. Interesting thing was that that I came to realisation very quickly as every quarter, you have to really deserve your pipeline, you have to really be creative and be on the lookout for new campaigns new strategies to achieve that level of demand. Because early stage companies don't have that level of awareness. And brands are not familiar with the product. It's a new product, new way of thinking new technology. And as head of marketer, you really need to solve for that issue. And that's gotten even more excited a lot of challenges. And, and that was one of the things that drove me to look deeper into and understand what can I do as a marketer to be successful at helping these companies achieve the growth, my focus was always buyers, really trying to understand the buyers needs, where they are in their journey. And how can I position the product to resonate with my marketing positioning to resonate with my messaging with those buyers. And somewhere in throughout my journey, one of the things I noticed is a pattern that works for me is looking for events, I congregation moments that are top of mind for buyers, and really using that to build my marketing my sales development as the our campaigns and messaging. And that really helped me to achieve that high level of demand generation high levels of engagement quarter over quarter, and help these companies achieve that pipeline growth to align with with the revenue targets. And so really excited about the journey and trying this few companies back to back I realised that okay, there's some concept or method of doing this.
So two years ago, I went to Sastre on my own. I just wanted to connect with a lot of software companies and founders, marketers sellers and just understand their challenges and see if this concept resonates. And it did. And it allowed me to connect with really interesting, like minded people who shared the same vision and the challenge, essentially, that enabled me to open a company called Growth Hunter where we just popularise the idea and we bring into challenges discuss how it could be solved through momentum marketing. So that's kind of my journey from where I started to where I am and just a really interesting period in my life where I get to connect with so many amazing people in tech and brainstorm together and solve challenges. That's kind of where I am right now.
Mike: So presumably that Why you form Growth Hunter is to format, I guess community where you can actually discuss these kinds of marketing challenges for SaaS companies, with people in the industry is that was that the reasoning behind it?
Avetis: It is, the reason behind it is the main reason is to enable and help my peers in marketing and business development and sales, who are struggling with that high demand challenge with ideas and you know, inspire them with strategies and tactics to be equipped to go through this, especially now when in North America tech downturn feels like a big topic. And a lot of SaaS companies are struggling with generating and acquiring new customers. It's just becoming more and more relevant topic for a lot of people.
Mike: And so in terms of that community, I mean, what are you trying to give the people who join? I mean, what, what are the benefits? I mean, obviously, there's, there's an opportunity to talk about issues, but I guess there are other places to do that. So can you just walk through what makes Growth Hunter different?
Avetis: What makes your attention different is our focus on the momentum marketing? Hi, congregation moment. Discussion, right. So we see people come in, who are looking for ways to achieve that demand, and we offer a solution and that people usually come to our website to learn how to leverage momentum marketing, how it works, how they can benefit from it naturally, which is interesting that when we started this, a lot of people expressed interest we connected with discuss we shared ideas, they went tried things, and realise that people want to share their success stories or, you know, challenges and how they overcame through momentum marketing. And so when you go into growth entering really stories from ambassadors, we call people who are champions in a way who show the vision and try these things and stress test the concept in a way. And so you find a lot of interesting stories of from different industries from different verticals, within markets, where shass marketers, and as the ORS are trying this concept, which, by the way, in a way, led us to naturally create a community, a small community of people, because we were having this ad hoc discussions of, hey, I'm interested, I don't know how I did started, how do you do this with content writing? Do you know how can I apply this to content marketing? And so after a few discussions by bringing in ambassadors realised we just should do this in some centralised place. So the idea of the community came up?
Mike: I mean, that's fascinating. There's a couple of questions there. But I think first, we should really go back and talk about momentum marketing. This is obviously a concept you've built the community on, can you just explain what you mean by it and maybe give an example of how you actually run a campaign using momentum marketing?
Avetis: It's a great question. And so momentum marketing is really lies on the idea of momentum, right? There's key moments, events that are happening every given quarter that draw your buyers attention. So if you're a software as a service company and your target market or retail decision makers, let's say VPS, or E commerce are the decision makers of a solution like yours, any given quarter, there's certain events that happen that are really working through them. And the way we define them entrance are those are high congregation moments, which involves a large segment of the same buyers that pay attention to that event, but are also strategically important events. One example I have from my experience was Instagram. So one of the companies I worked for SaaS company conversationally i years ago, but Instagram was one of the channels, we were deploying AI automation. And up for our VPs of E commerce, Instagram was a strategic channel, Instagram came up with a upcoming announcement on automating DMS, they were launching new features every time that this was unique in many ways, and was unique because it had a high congregation a high interest of CPAs of E commerce as an upcoming solution. And they were really curious of what that could allow them to do and for their brands and how they can leverage that. And so those are types of events that I call high congregation moments that usually occur every quarter or a few times.
Another one could be in healthcare. For example, Amazon's acquisition of one medical was an interesting and those are entering healthcare is the fig leaf for healthcare industry, it had certain momentums the acquisition of one medical was one of the momentum one event that lasted about six weeks or so. And it got a lot of health care companies small practices attention, because it meant something then things cooled it down a little bit. And then one medical was now part of Amazon's application. And now Amazon is pushing one medical with heavy promotion. So there, those things create those Momentums. The big wave, the big steam is Amazon entering healthcare. But what happens within those certain time periods is what we call Momentums. And so after every business, our recommendation is for every SaaS company, you need to know your buyer by knowing what is top of mind for them. What are those important moments in time every quarter, and that are important for that and build your marketing campaign, your sales outreach campaign, really aligning based on those momentums and in my case of Instagram automation that I brought up is Our approach was, we broke it into three phases. And what we suggest is essentially, phase one, you don't promote your product at this stage. But what you do is you really try to be the guide the voice, helping us supporting your buyers journey. And so in our case, as an AI solution in the space, we really helped our DPO become buyers understand why Instagram automation is a key opportunity for them, and for their business, because I'm relying on their consumers, because we were seeing high demand from consumers on messaging channels, like Instagram, on social media, but also messaging capabilities of Instagram, are really informing and educating by bringing in experts, from Forrester, from our other customers to come in and speak about the need for a technology solution to enable that conversation with consumers at scale. And so what it allowed us to do is position ourselves as a thought leader and an expert in the space without necessarily sharing that we are that one of those solutions, gradually, you then introduce new capabilities. And you inform that audience that, hey, we are actually one of those solution providers, they could help you in your journey. But the way it starts, it's really by you being the voice around that event, and you sharing that unique perspective and voice. And usually my recommendation is, if you're an early stage startup, you use your CEO or your founder, when knows how everything started, why you started this technology product in the first place to bring in that perspective, and help buyers see the opportunity. And you could sum in some cases, it could be also controversial, it could be you making a statement against AI, that might actually, you know, as long as it's genuine, as long as it's guiding and helping your buyers to achieve something. It serves the purpose. So Lee leaning on those events, and building your marketing and sales campaigns around that work. 656 weeks is enabling you to achieve three times more results in terms of engagements, lead generation demo, requests, webinars, submissions, and is what I have seen, in my experience working with all these companies, I'm pretty sure with ambassadors compared to traditional campaigns that companies normally run.
Mike: I mean, that's interesting, it's kind of feels like it's underpinned by a lot of the, you know, HubSpot theory around inbound marketing to educate first. But it also feels that there might be a challenge. I mean, for example, if Amazon's making an acquisition, you know, you're not gonna know about it until after it happens. So do you have to be quite agile to take advantage of momentum marketing?
Avetis: Not necessarily, but it does give you the advantage. So one of the things that I recommend is when you look for momentum is are three ways to do that. One is always talk to your buyers, right? You need to really be connected with your customer base, and really know what's happening top of what's top of mind for them what's happening in their space. What are they currently reading, exploring publications, the topics that are top of mind. The second one is a partner ecosystem. Usually, if you're partnering with large companies, in our case was metal, Facebook, they're always ahead and they know what is coming up. In some cases, they are defining that momentum, they're going to be the momentum, the organisation that brings the momentum. But the third one is using tools like C three, or probably or any PR or like just a Google search, really, or subscribing to key publications that your buyers have subscribed to, you can notice a pattern. And even that you can catch it pretty fast. My general recommendation is if an event is being covered by more than two publications, and they have a pretty strong customer base user base, you can see based on their web traffic, if this is a recognisable publication or not, but if the same topic is being covered by two or more publication, and that topic is being discussed in multiple ways by the publication. So if you see that, you know, one article from a publication, and then a follow up article a few days later, you know, there is a momentum, that if it is a strategically important topic. And that's one of the criteria that needs to be strategically important. It shouldn't be just a quick news, but it needs to be strategically important for the buyer. And if it has more than two publications, that indicates it's going to last about five, six weeks, more than enough time to make sure that whatever you're creating whatever you're using in your SDR outreach, whatever you're using in your marketing, upcoming campaigns, you really want to position that if you have a webinar coming up with one of your guests really want to drive the conversation towards that topic,
Mike Maynard
if that makes a lot of sense. And I think maybe some people are sat there thinking, well, if we're talking about a topic that's important, that's got a lot of industry attention. How do I stand out? I mean, how do I compete when you know, for example, if I'm a start up with low awareness, and maybe there's some incumbents that are that are much bigger enterprise companies with really strong awareness? How do I get my voice out there when there are other people fighting for attention as well on the same topic?
Avetis: It's a really good question. And I think very timely because I happen to do the same or for AI topics. So about a year ago, like about 10 months ago, AI topic has become very hot and GPT. Three went out and everyone was talking about this and I used that opportunity as a mentor. Men really interest noticed an interesting pattern. So AI, I would treat that as a general weights general topic. But then there's shifting enrollments in AI that you need to be looking out for. And that can help you achieve that differentiation. And so when to GPT went out, and people were using it and there was a lot of coverage on the topic of my approach was Chuck GPT is a hot topic, you need to stay up to date on how this technology works, best practices, and what this could mean for your organisation. And that drew a lot of people's attention very quickly. However, within my target vertical within the market that I was after, I noticed that people were sceptical because there were certain events that happened with AI, as Samsung had an unfortunate tribe charge CPT, where they just gave a lot of information to judge. There's a lot of scepticism around this, this topic. And it really allowed us to understand, Okay, it's time to shift away from this type of messaging and to really adapt to the new message.
And gradually, the thing about three momentums that I identified over the past 10 months with AI, the last one is really proof right now, there's certain verticals that require proof, they want to see more companies do this. And so if you're able to align your marketing and change your position, and you're still talking AR you're still within that within that categories, but if you can understand the signals that your buyers are giving you what is like, what is their perception of that topic? How do they feel about that, and be able to change and navigate that that will allow you to stand out and be differentiated? Ai topic is, is really interesting, it's a, it's a double edged sword in a way, in one case, it's a topic that has a high level of awareness. So it makes whatever you say, very familiar. However, it is so noisy today that every company regardless of what type of solution they offer, they have an AI capability. And as a marketer, that brings a big challenge, you need to be able to differentiate. So my recommendation is within your vertical, understand if that's a hot, big topic, understand what is top of mind for your buyer, how what's what is their perception of that event, what is maybe it's a challenge for them, maybe it's an opportunity for them, maybe there is something that's that's top of mind for them around that topic, and really bringing a unique voice, not from your company, from your founders, as to how you see you can guide your buyers throughout this time.
You know, and I think that's, that's really, that's what really creates this connection with with your prospects. And that's really what resonates with them. I'm certain one last thing I just want to add from my experiences that brought the Instagram example is, the fascinating things about this is when we did the Instagram campaign, six months later, it was so big for us that six months later, a lot of those VPs of ecommerce would recognise us at a different conferences, as that Instagram solution providers is that assaulted or about Instagram automation, which is a good and a bad thing. But if you run multiple momentum marketing campaigns, you achieve that trust. And if they don't convert necessarily into a revenue or close deal or partnership in the short term, when they come back, you need building you build such a big vision and trust with them, that you have a high likelihood of those opportunities to potentially convert for you in the future.
Mike: And I think that's that's very important. That brings us back to something you mentioned right at the start with SAS companies that are under a lot of pressure to close business this quarter short term business. But ultimately, you're never going to be able to keep that process of closing up. Unless you're building awareness and bringing people at the top of the funnel. So I think it's always an interesting challenge. With SAS, there's a lot of focus on bottom of the funnel, converting people already interested. And actually, I think you know, what you're saying about momentum marketing, it really gives an opportunity to keep filling that funnel with new opportunities, new people who are aware of your products, and particularly for startups, I think that's important. Otherwise, suddenly, you find that the few early adopters that get dry up and then you've got this Crossing the Chasm problem.
Avetis: Yeah, exactly. I do think there are certain late stage companies that you could also find this relevant, because it's pretty much the same thing. Even like pre IPO stage companies are really very focused on that quarter over quarter goals and achievements that they're that they need to reach. But yes, I think I agree with you. I think that's the level of awareness necessary. And this could also be applicable for companies launching a new capability. Like every time you're launching a new capability within the market, that's a different it's novel feature. But it's a new capability that you would like to introduce to your market, it's a really good way to make it relevant to your buyers at any given quarter, why that particular capability could be so helpful for them. And so aligning that throughout the year. And introducing the same capability from different prisons of different events happening at any given quarter. Still kind of helps you achieve that level of awareness even if you're late stage company.
Mike: That's great advice. I love that. I'm I'm obviously aware of time. And what we'd like to do is ask some general questions. You've been very generous sharing your marketing advice. I'm interested to know what's the best bit of marketing advice you've been given by somebody else?
Avetis: That's a good question. That's a good question. I happen to work with many brilliant founders and Chief Revenue officers throughout my career and every one of them has given me so many one to take would be probably focused on your buyers. And this was an interesting feedback that I received early on in my career, and back then it seemed very valuable, but at the same time very general, because everyone would suggest that Amazon was customer centric, HubSpot, inbound marketing is all around your buyers and understanding of buyers, your buyers profile, throughout my career and pretty much close to second half of my career, I really saw the value of understanding your buyer well, and the impact that can make for you. And when I say understand your buyer, don't understand your buyers a business, right, especially in B2B, we tend to think of buyers as businesses and you know, it's as the POV calm, they have one problem, it's conversions, you solve for it, there'll be happy but there's humans behind that. And so they make decisions whether to open your email with a to request the demo. And it's not always driven by the main pain point, the main challenge that you are aware of it, there's more to it, that you're able to segment your buyers and it could be VPs of ecommerce being segmented into different groups, and understand their preferences in terms of what time of the day, they would like to be reached out what type of publications they're researching, like really in depth information about your buyers broken into segments that only will multiply your outcomes that the KPIs you're after. And so that's something that I've noticed, and I've been chasing as a North Star. And I think one of the things that this Growth Hunter journey has given me and in our community is while we are focused on momentum marketing, it got us closer to understand the buyer, and really be obsessed about understanding the buyer. And there's some interesting things that are coming up for for us in the next month or so. And I'm very excited about it, because it's just it's been driving us to try to unlock the next thing. And I think yeah, to keep obsessing over understanding your buyer and their needs. On a personal level, there is a lot to gain as a marketer.
Mike: And that's great advice. And it's exciting that you've got, you know, so many new things happening as well coming up. If anyone listening to this, you know, wants to find out more about momentum marketing or more about you. I don't know what is your best to go to Growth Hunter, what's the best thing for them to do to connect with you? Absolutely.
Avetis: The best way is to go to Growth Hunter.com. And we have multiple ways you could get started with our blogs with our stories with our community, we have a newsletter. So there are multiple ways you can learn about momentum marketing, you can also connect with me through LinkedIn, just connect with me there or you can reach out to me that that isn't Growth Hunter.com available there. Love to share ideas, brainstorm every open book.
Mike: That's amazing. That is this has been fascinating, a really good introduction to the concept of momentum marketing. Thank you so much for appearing on the podcast, Mike.
Avetis: Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, very excited to have this conversation. Thank you so much.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Webinar: How to Get AI to do Your Market Research
Good campaigns are built on insight, and market research is essential for understanding your audience, but gathering insights, especially in B2B, can be time-consuming, expensive, and challenging.
In our on-demand webinar, 'How to Get AI to do Your Market Research', we explore how AI can support B2B marketers with conducting market research. We will cover:
- What are synthetic personas?
- Using AI to work out what to ask
- The risks of using synthetic personas
- How to create a synthetic persona: demonstration
- The six steps to synthetic success
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘How to Get AI to do Your Market Research’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Hi everyone, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. So, we're going to talk about how to get AI to do your marketing research. And really, you know, the objective here is to get synthetic personas to do your market research. So we're going to talk a bit about synthetic personas, what they mean, how you can create them. And then what we'll do is, you know, really understand how maybe you can do some market research with AI.
Now, the one thing to say is, this is not a perfect solution for market research. There's certainly some downsides. So we'll cover some of the downsides as well, and then clearly, if you've got any questions, I can hopefully cover those at the end to explain whether or not it might be suitable for your particular market research needs.
So here's the agenda for the session today. We're going to run for about 25 to 30 minutes. I'm going to give you a brief introduction to synthetic personas and talk about the risks and also some of the best practices. Then we're going to talk about how we create a synthetic persona.
And for those of you in the UK in the best traditions of Blue Peter, for those of you outside the UK, probably in the best traditions of live TV, I'm going to try and do a demo of creating a synthetic persona, a very, very simple one, not necessarily one you'd necessarily want to create for market research, but to give you an idea of how to approach things. We're going to look at where to get more information. So we've got a reference slide on that, and then hopefully conclude by thinking that AI could be a way to help us do market research.
So firstly, let's look at synthetic personas and what they are. Well, a persona basically tries to humanize typical characteristics. So you know, anyone who's worked for, for example, HubSpot, which is very big on personas, or a lot of marketing automation research, will develop personas. It's like your ideal customer profile in some ways. So it will decide to just describe a person that you're trying to reach in your audience, and it will get the typical characteristics. So all synthetic personas are doing is basically creating AI versions of your personas.
So they're creating AI versions of a particular person you're trying to reach. It can be built on large amounts of data. It can also be built on relatively small amounts of data. But the neat thing about using AI is you can actually interact with this synthetic persona. So you can choose to interact with the person you're trying to reach. And obviously, when we look at market research, that can be hugely helpful, because you can ask your market research subjects the synthetic persona questions about what would be more effective.
Sometimes people call these synthetic customers as well. And what we're seeing is that in B to B synthetic personas are getting used quite widely. And the reason is really simple, is in many B to B markets, it's incredibly hard to put together focus groups or get responses to surveys. So whether you're doing qualitative or quantitative research, it's actually really, really hard to get results in B to B because people don't have time and don't want to share their opinions. It's easier in consumer part of the reason being, consumer markets tend to be much, much bigger in terms of number of audience members. But also there is an issue.
Around confidentiality and focusing on what people consider to be doing their work, rather than going off to a research focus group. And so it's really hard to do market research. And actually what we find is market research can often be the last person that somebody visited in sales, or it can be, this is my opinion of what I think the market wants. And that's obviously dangerous, because you're imposing your opinion. You're taking, you know, short term views and potentially making quite big business decisions based upon it. So trying to do market research is good. It gives you a much more independent view. It opens you up to more ideas, and it potentially stops you from making very big mistakes.
So what we can do is we can take these synthetic people, these people that we've created through AI, and we can do different things. We can do qualitative testing.
So basically this is interacting with the persona and asking questions to get responses. So you can go and ask a synthetic persona how would be the best way to approach you with a headline for an ad for a particular product, for example, very, very simple example, and you can engage and get good feedback. Now, this is actually just like running focus groups in B to B, particularly when you run focus groups. One of the most important things to remember is that, by definition, your sample is skewed. It's skewed to the sort of people who are prepared to give up their time to participate in focus groups. So as with doing standard market research using synthetic personas, is also skewed to the way that you've created these personas, so they might not always be representative of the audience as a whole, and that is a big risk of any kind of market research is making sure you've got a representative sample.
But having said that, it's really great to be able to talk to people who represent, you know, at least a proportion, if not all, but at least a proportion of the audience, and discuss what would be most effective. And it's a really effective way of brainstorming, because you're effectively brainstorming with the audience you want to reach. So qualitative testing is very interesting.
Quantitative testing, which, to be honest, is something that's come in more recently than qualitative is where companies are building, really an army of synthetic personas. And so what you do is you try and profile your audience by building personas in roughly the same proportion they occur in the real world that represent the different kind of views and biases that you see with each of the audience members you're trying to reach. So you're trying to build effectively a sample of the full population. Qualitative is much smaller. It tends to be, you know, a small number of personas. And you're not trying to be completely representative. You're trying to get good ideas. It's much more about the kind of brainstorming and creative approach than it is about trying to get firm data. Quantitative research is really trying to make sure that you build personas that represent the whole population you're trying to reach, and then you use them to tell you how effective different things would be.
So you now understand that within the audience you're trying to reach, there are different people you've built that in you're trying to represent it, obviously with quantitative research, if you don't build your army of synthetic personas to be completely representative of the audience you're trying to reach, you're going to have problems, because you're going to get results that are skewed, and the difficult thing is really understanding what that audience thinks about so you need to Make sure that these personas represent the entire population, having said that, of course, if you were to do survey based research, again, you're only getting responses from people who, by definition, are the people who will fill in a survey form. So there is a group of people who won't respond to surveys, and they may have different views. So you may not get entirely representative views when you do proper or real human research, you know. So the same problem still exists, whether it's synthetic or a real person.
So let's have a look at qualitative. And I think qualitative is really the place where I would strongly encourage anyone to start quantitative requires building a lot of personas, and it also requires a pretty good understanding of your audience to make sure your persona army represents your audience. So qualitative is great, because you can build personas that really represent people you know in your audience, and then you can ask them questions. So here's an example. So we, for example, might be running a campaign for a client, and we want to test two headlines. So 64 bit risk processor for more performance or risk 564, bit processor with larger cash and faster processing. Maybe not perfect headlines, but they're two different approaches, and what you can do is you can ask your synthetic persona which of the headline would be more compelling.
And here we see the answer. It's built from a synthetic persona that we created, and they're very definite. You know, the longer more specific headline made more difference, and that was because it was specific. It differentiated the product. It was what they called Market relevance, but it gives important information. If you're building systems with processors, knowing the architecture is quite important, the performance benefits are clearer and there's no ambiguity. So clarity is good. If you've ever marketed to engineers, you'll know that being specific, being clear, absolutely matters to that audience. So actually, this is a pretty good response. I mean, I would say this is a pretty well defined rationale behind why that headline would be better than the other.
So we can see we've got some really useful information from our, you know, just one synthetic persona. And obviously, you know, if you've been marketing for many years, you fully understand an industry, maybe you're going to say that actually, you know, I don't need this. I know this already. But for people who are newer to the industry, perhaps less experience, perhaps have less technical knowledge, this can be incredibly helpful in making sure that you tweak the campaigns you're building to really resonate with the audience. So it can be incredibly useful just asking simple questions of a synthetic persona.
But there are risks. So crudely speaking, when you build a synthetic persona, you are basically building it with two things.
What you're trying to do is you're trying to provide actually information around that personality, around that persona, so you're trying to guide the model. But you've also got a large language model, and that will probably pull in data that's been trained on as well. So we're providing data both through the large language model training, which we don't control, that's been done by open AI or somebody else, and also by the The information we provide. And I'll show you how we do this. But the risk is, and a classic programming phrase is, garbage in, garbage out. So the quality of the persona is going to be defined by the quality of what you provided the information.
You do have the risk that AI will make assumptions, and you do have a lot of risk associated with personas and market research, because personas are simply simplifications. They're not actually real people. They're built upon what you understand about those real people. And you don't understand everything, and quite often, you know what you're really doing is basically you can end up feeding in some training and then just regurgitating that training out, in which case you've got no real benefit of using AI other than a nice, chatty interface.
So that's really important. The other issue is that, you know, customers don't necessarily know what they want. So you know, one of the things is, if we look at this, we can ask AI, you know, what did Henry Ford say about faster horses? There is a famous quote according to chatgpt, which says that Henry Ford often said, If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. So synthetic personas, if you program them with what people know, they'll often say what I've got already. But a bit better. Now there's a couple of problems with that, because actually people didn't want faster horses. We haven't turned into a world where everybody is in a horse and cart with much bigger and faster horses. We're all driving cars, as Henry Ford rightly worked out. And also Henry Ford actually never said this. It's a myth. It's a widely propagated myth on the internet. And actually, what's happened is it's so widely propagated that AI has been trained on this myth, and now AI repeats it as though it's fact. It's not true. So you have to be careful with AI, because hallucinations and poor training can result in errors.
So how do we avoid these errors? What are the best practices for developing synthetic personas?
Well, we have six steps to creating a synthetic persona. So six things you need to be successful.
The first thing, the most important thing, is use research rather than intuition. So what you want to do when you build a persona is you want to base it on fact, not on what you assume. If it's just what you assume, you might as well make the decisions yourself, because all you're doing is feeding your biases into an AI and then getting the AI to use those biases to answer questions. Maybe it sounds a bit more credible. It absolutely isn't. It's just using your biases. Is so use facts. Don't use intuition. Do some research. And this is a challenge with synthetic personas, is that you have to do research before you can really build a good persona.
So you have to do research in the real world before you can build that. You can also find research data. And what I'd strongly recommend is using multiple sources of data, so the more information you can get, and the wider range of sources, the better the person is going to be. And we need a demo. We're actually going to do a demo using a single source of data. It's just for convenience. It's not what we recommend.
We certainly recommend generating multiple personas, trying different things in the way you set up personnel. Personas, because that will give you slightly different views. And also, typically, we're all running marketing campaigns that focus on buying committees or decision making units, and those have different people with different motivators, different drivers. And so we want to generate at least personas for each of the members of the of the decision making unit, and ideally multiple personas that reflect some of the subtle differences within each personality. In that decision making unit, you need to eliminate sources of bias. You know, the classic source of bias is, well, I'm going to understand what personas think and why they buy products, and so I'm going to ask my customers.
And that's fine, but you'll get personas based upon people who have already bought your product. You're not going to get personas based on people who are not customers. Typically, if you want to grow your business, what you want to do is understand what the non customers think and how you have to change them to make them buy your product. Very simple, acquire more customers. So surveying your own customers is not necessarily a great way to build synthetic personas. If you're looking to expand market share, definitely validate your persona through human feedback or additional data analysis. You know the least you can do is at least have a chat with your personas to see if it's giving you reasonable answers. And then finally, I would say, don't just rely on a synthetic persona. It sounds like a really easy way to answer all your questions, but you've got to include it in other research methodologies. So you've really got to understand how your persona answers fit with everything else. And other research can be a whole range of things. It can be, you know, surveys you're actually running out to the customer base or to prospects, but it can also be feedback from sales teams and much more anecdotal research as well. So make sure that you are openly discussing the results and getting feedback from people who really understand the customers, because they may be able to spot issues that you don't.
Just a note on the wearing of bias. I mean, I mentioned that, you know, if you ask your customers, you'll get a different response to if you ask non customers. I mean, a very famous case is Amazon. Amazon was very worried about their hiring, because they realized that typically, their management team was built of white men, and basically, you know what they were doing was continuing to hire white men and promote white men. And they realized, just look at the numbers, it couldn't be right. There had to be some bias in there. So being engineers, or having a lot of engineers at Amazon, what they decided to do was use an AI tool to remove that bias completely. So they trained the AI tool by basically supplying it CVs of people who've been successful at Amazon and people who hadn't. And of course, all they did was train the AI tool to realize that if you're white and male, you're going to get promoted, and if you're female or if you're non white, then you're not and so the AI tool then started recruiting white men doing exactly the same thing as what Amazon was doing with humans. So you've got to realize that if humans have biases, training an AI tool needs to remove those biases.
So how do we create a synthetic persona? Well, there's lots of ways to do it. There are more complex approaches. But if you're starting, if you've not done this before, there's a very simple approach you can create, and that's just basically using chat GPT, so you know, probably the most ubiquitous AI tool around there. And what it does is it lets you build a simple synthetic persona. And so what I'm going to try and do is do a quick demo to show you how to build a typical synthetic persona.
So if I open up chat GPT, I can click on explore gpts, and I can click here to create a GPT. Now, suddenly we've got a GPT net. Now this is basically a customized model that's using specific instructions to determine how it behaves.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to magically train it with a marketing persona. So we're going to create a synth marketer here.
So I'm going to paste in some instructions about you're a marketing professional. You love inbound marketing. You're a typical HubSpot user, but you believe in a variety of channels. You work for an engineering company, so we've got a whole explanation here. And also because what I want to do is make this work. Well, I'm going to feed it HubSpot 2025, state of marketing report as well, and tell it to use that. So we're going to put that in there.
And okay, it's uploaded, so now we can start programming it. Chat GPT doesn't always follow the same routes, but I'm really hoping this is going to work well.
So we just have to wait a minute. As you can see, there's a little model here whilst it starts setting up, and it recommends we try it out. So on this side of the screen here, we can try it out. And what we can do is we can ask it questions.
So what I'm going to do is start asking it some questions. Does AI improve marketing?
It's going to have a look. And you know, maybe not surprisingly, AI improves marketing. But what it's doing is it's referring back to the content that we had here. So it's actually telling us, if we look at the state of marketing report, AI's got all these benefits. So this is exactly what we want to do. We've basically skewed the standard chat GPT model to be much more likely to use information that's in the HubSpot model and in the explanation. So this is really super interesting and super important, because what we've done is we've created a persona that is just like, what is the aggregate persona? So the overall result from the state of marketing report, so it's effectively the average of the people that were surveyed in the state of marketing pool.
We can, you know, ask it all sorts of things about that.
But what we could do is, let's say, for example, I want to make millions, and I'm going to do it by creating an email marketing tool. So if I was to offer an email marketing tool including AI feature. Which one AI feature would be most important to include?
And let's see what it says here.
And so here, what it's saying is AI powered personalization and predictive content. Again, this is maybe not that surprising. It's a pretty typical feature, but what HubSpot is doing is explaining why, sorry, what the persona is doing is explaining why it thinks it's a good feature. So you can see, if you're a marketing person, we can create a marketing synthetic persona, and we can get some quite interesting answers.
But what we can do is we can also move away from, perhaps, areas that we're comfortable with, and we can move into other areas. So one of the things I've created previously is an EMI expert persona.
And here what I can do is I can ask the EMI expert something. So I don't know how many people on the call of EMI experts. But you know what we want to do is we work for an EMI company. We make connectors that filter to remove EMI. How do we promote these things? What are the most important things that make you choose one product over another?
I'm guessing some people are going, I'm not really sure on this. However, our synthetic persona definitely has an opinion. And as with all demos, there's a nervous wait, as there's a bit of a delay on Chat GPT, just wait for an answer here.
Okay, and thank you. Chat GPT, you've managed to prove it doesn't always work, so I've just pasted that in, and here we go.
So basically, we now have our synthetic persona, which is an engineer who understands EMI telling us what's most important, and it's telling us in order as well, which is really useful. Now we're going to look at this and we're going to realize that there's not necessarily anything super deep about what it's saying, but that doesn't mean it's not useful. So what we have from our EMI expert synthetic persona is there's three. The three primary things are, firstly insertion, loss, performance and attenuation. Secondly, mechanical, electrical, and thirdly, quality and reliability.
Now this is interesting, because actually what it's doing is it's it's almost working through the process an engineer goes through when they're selecting a product.
So basically the first thing you need to do is get rid of the EMI. And so to get rid of this interference, you have to have something that gets rid of the interference sufficiently to get the interference low enough to meet requirements. And that's what point one says. So the first thing you need to say is, this is the performance in terms of removing EMI.
The second thing it talks about is mechanical and electrical compatibility. So fundamentally, if I've got a space for a connector, this connector has got to fit in there. It's also got to be the right voltage, the right current, and it's also got to meet the right temperature range and things like that. So again, feature based stuff, but important things in that process.
And then lastly, it's talking about quality and reliability, and it's highlighted the importance of supplier reputation and certifications. So if I was building a marketing campaign, you know, I might want to talk about, you know, the performance of our filter, so the insertion loss. I might want to talk about the compatibility with mechanical and electrical, and I might want to talk about my credibility. Now, if you've attended any of our AI webinars before, you'll know that the way AI responds to things is it actually introduces some randomness. And this is really interesting, because the first two answers are pretty much exactly the same as I got this morning when I did a dry run of the webinar. Answer number three, whilst it's a very good answer, it's actually different to what I got this morning. So this morning, you know, the third priority was cost.
So it's often worth asking the same synthetic Persona The question two or three times, because sometimes you can get different answers that can be useful. So even without creating multiple personas, you can get multiple answers, because inherently, in these large language models, there's some randomness.
So hopefully that's got you intrigued. They were very, very simple approaches, so really simple ideas, and what we're trying to do when we create a persona is we're really enhancing that large language model with some specific data and some specific behavior that we know a typical persona will display. And so we're making, in this case, chat GPT, a much better model of what someone who we're trying to reach would actually say, but doing it, as you can see, with relatively little effort. Now, as I said, Generally, we recommend multiple sources of data, a lot more information, rather than just saying, build it all off HubSpot report. But even then, we got some good answers.
So how do we how do we get this information? How do we create it? Well, obviously, you know, the first thing people are going to say is, I'm doing synthetic personas because it's really hard to do surveys and get responses, and you're telling me I've got to get do surveys and get responses before I create the synthetic persona. That kind of feels like it's really difficult, and it is, but the great thing is, is you can pull in lots of information, so you can put in public research. You can do your own research.
You can actually do interviews. You know, one interesting research project I saw a while ago was a university that have basically created a questionnaire, got people to answer it, used AI to summarize and categorize the questionnaires, and then developed multiple synthetic personas from those questionnaires. You can also do AI interviews as well. And again, I saw another research bit more recently, where a university had basically got an AI tool to do 1000 interviews and use that internet interviews as source material to create 1000 different personas. Obviously, all this can be quite time consuming, and quite, you know, difficult to do, but definitely, if you spend the time, you can create really good personas, and you can create personas that represent different customer segments.
There is a lot of information about synthetic personas, so there are a few links here. If you want to grab a screenshot, feel free. Obviously, if you're you know, if you wait when we publish the webinar, we'll give you a link to the replay and also to the slide, so you'll be able to access these as well, but feel free to take a screenshot now and go and learn a bit more about synthetic personas.
So finally, you know, what do we what do we think? Have we found that AI can help you?
Well, if we look at this, you know, marketing research in B to B is really tough. It's hard to get respondents, hard to get panelists. It's time consuming, and, you know, it can be very expensive, and often people don't have the budget to do that, so actually trying to do everything through.
Market research with real customers or real potential customers, is difficult, so synthetic personas is definitely a good way forward. And to make it better, there's data that exists to create synthetic personas. You might be able to find some data. So as an example, quite often, companies will do surveys. I know our clients, for example, have done surveys on attitudes of people who are involved in IoT design, you can very easily take that public survey data and put it into a synthetic persona. But also you can ask sales and one of the easiest ways to create synthetic personas is to get a group of sales people and get them to tell you what they think personas were, you know, actually believe in if you merge that all together, so you take answers from four or five sales people, you merge that all into one briefing, you'll probably get quite a good profile of a typical customer.
Obviously, be careful of bias, and in particular, be careful of being biased to your customers if you're looking to grow your market share, because what you really care about, if you're growing market share, is people who are not your customers. And also, you know, the one thing I'd say is, whilst you can create simple personas, and it's quite fun, and sometimes it can be quite useful, particularly for brainstorming, it's really worth getting some advice, because it's very easy to create personas that actually don't represent your your audience, and if you do that, you can end up making bad decisions, because the people advising you these robot personas actually aren't represented with the people who are going to be your customers.
So thank you very much for listening.
If you're interested, we have another webinar coming up next month, the impact on AI in SEO and search advertising. So this is really talking about the impact of generative AI results that appear at the top of search pages when you search for something you know, Google and other search engines are now trying to give you the answer using AI. What does that mean for your business? Does that mean that mean all your traffic to the website is going to stop? We're going to investigate that now. If anyone's got any questions, please feel free to put them into the chat now, and I'll just take a look and see what we've got and what we can answer.
There's just one question I can see at the moment, so please feel free to add another one.
So I've been asked, how many personas do you need to take to make the project to create, to make the project worthwhile?
And this is a great question, and I think the answer is actually not that easy, because it really depends on what you're trying to do. So if you're trying to create, you know, some qualitative research, you know, maybe trying to say, you know, which headline is better, how would you write this? Actually creating one synthetic persona can be super helpful, particularly if you're not an expert, or the person running the campaigns is not an expert on that market. So sometimes one persona can work really well. If, however, you're looking to build a launch for a new product, or even build product specifications, I'd really say, you know, relying on one synthetic persona, just as asking one customer is incredibly dangerous, so what you need to do is build a portfolio of personas that represent the range of different views in your customer base.
So hopefully that's been helpful. I'm just having a look, and we don't seem to have another question, which, with any luck, means that everybody's found this useful.
We have also reached the end of our half an hour. So what I'd recommend is, if there's questions that come up, or if you'd like to know more about creating synthetic personas, my contact details are here. Email me, Mike at Napier, B to b.com and I'd love to talk about this. Anyone who knows me well knows that I'm a absolute geek, and these technical things, you know, really interest me. We've had some really good positive results from creating synthetic personas, and we've also, to be honest, seen some of their pitfalls as well. So please feel free to get in contact. I'd love to chat to you about it.
Thank you very much for listening to the webinar. I really appreciate it. I hope that we'll get to meet again and the next webinar in March and talk about AI and search results. Thank you very much. Please feel free to send me an email if you've got any questions.
How to Make B2B Marketing Exciting – Dan Ruby – Nobl9
Mike is joined by Dan Ruby, VP of Marketing at Nobl9, a leading reliability platform that helps manage and monitor application reliability. Dan discusses the challenges of marketing a product that aims to keep issues unnoticed by end users and how storytelling can make a traditionally "unexciting" product compelling and engaging.
The conversation also covers the importance of data-driven marketing, balancing brand building with lead generation, and innovative campaign strategies.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Nobl9
Founded in 2019 by ex-Googlers Marcin Kurc and Brian Singer, Nobl9 is the premiere Service Level Objectives-based platform for driving a reliable digital experience. With a strong enterprise customer base as well as strategic investments from Cisco and ServiceNow, Nobl9 is recognized as a bleeding-edge solution to modernizing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) strategies, ensuring that reliability is not measured primarily by availability, but rather by users' ability to do what they expect to be able to do within an application.
About Dan Ruby
Dan is an eighteen year veteran of digital marketing, with the vast majority of his experience coming as the head of marketing for various B2B SaaS organizations in the Boston area. He has been acquired at various points by Google and Snap, and is currently the VP of Marketing for Nobl9, a B2B SaaS platform for user-centric site reliability. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri as well as an MBA from Brandeis University. He occasionally teaches an undergraduate course on marketing at Bentley University.
Throughout his career, Dan has become increasingly stubborn about the fact that marketing must focus on creating value for potential leads, and is quite fond of telling anyone who will listen that "nobody gives a **** about your product, give them valuable information, not product pitches."
Time Stamps
00:00:42 - Dan Ruby's Career Journey
00:02:09 - Overview of Noble9
00:05:48 - Challenges in Marketing a Reliability Product
00:07:03 - Using Stories to Make Marketing Exciting
00:12:43 - Balancing Brand Building and Lead Generation
00:17:07 - Innovative Campaign Example: DORA
00:22:24 - The Importance of Partnerships in Marketing
00:22:41 - Best Marketing Advice Received
00:23:41 - Advice for New Marketing Professionals
00:25:44 - How to Contact Dan Ruby
00:26:18 - Closing Remarks
Quotes
"Marketing is such an interesting field. It takes pretty much any skill set and makes it useful.” Dan Ruby, VP of Marketing at Nobl9
"Nothing is boring if you can make it into a story that resonates." Dan Ruby, VP of Marketing at Nobl9
"You can find partners who believe in your product, believe in your company, believe in your people, who will work with you." Dan Ruby, VP of Marketing at Nobl9
Follow Dan:
Dan Ruby on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielruby/
Nobl9’s website: https://www.nobl9.com/
Nobl9 on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nobl9inc/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Dan Ruby
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Dan Ruby
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Dan Ruby, who's the VP of Marketing at Nobl9. Welcome to the podcast, Dan.
Dan: Hi, Mike. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Really excited to chat with you this morning.
Mike: That's great. Let's start off and find a little bit about you. Can you tell us a little bit about your career and why you've chosen Noble 9 as your current company?
Dan: Yeah, so I did my undergrad in broadcast journalism. That didn't work out, so I got an MBA and kind of fell into marketing just because marketing is such an interesting field. It takes pretty much any skill set and makes it useful. Being in Boston, surrounded by a ton of B2B startups, I've worked for various sizes of B2B enterprise companies, mostly in the tech industry. What brought me to Noble 9 is I basically kind of knew the founders because they had been acquired by Google a couple of months after a company that I had been working for was acquired by Google. So I got introduced. It's a unique product. It's selling to a customer that I know pretty well in the IT operations reliability DevOps space. I've got a really strong team here that I inherited, so it's been a great landing spot for me.
Mike: That sounds great. I mean, I love the thought about, you know, part of the reason for being at a company is actually the team that's there. Um, that's super positive before we go any further. I'm sure that, uh, given I know a little bit about the company, probably a lot of listeners won't be familiar with noble nine. So can you explain what the company does?
Dan: Yeah. So noble nine is a reliability platform. So site reliability, software reliability, app reliability, that kind of thing. And we are, built from the ground up around what's called service level objectives or SLOs. And basically what SLOs do is you set an error budget for a period of time and then you just track in real time as that error budget dwindles down to ideally zero by the end of the period. So what it does is it lets you set up your IT backend and your applications in such a way that errors are acceptable, but you really focus in on the ones that actually impact the user journey. So it's, it's a different way of measuring reliability and kind of allows you to a lot more quickly react to changes in your, what we call the error budget burn rate before they become outages.
Mike: And so presumably the concept behind this is there'll always be problems, there'll always be issues, but what you've got to do is if you keep them below a certain level, then hopefully the end users won't actually notice.
Dan: Right. It lets you do a few things. One is the reliability, you know, monitoring and making sure that your service is reliably performing. And the other is, you know, determining if you're overspending on IT investment. If you're spending a million dollars a month keeping a server at 99.999% uptime, but that's not positively impacting your user experience, you're wasting money. With Google, if Gmail is up, that doesn't mean that every little service connected to it is running perfectly like predictive type. If your predictive email typing is delayed or is not working, you're not likely to notice. So it's all about focusing on the user journey and making sure that that's as free of roadblocks as possible.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. So are you primarily selling this product into IT teams, to IT managers? Who's your primary audience?
Dan: Up until about a year ago, our primary audience was a group of engineers called SRE, Site Reliability Engineers. And they're kind of the first line of defense in any enterprise organization, making sure that their services and their system are reliable. One of the things we found, though, is while they love the product and they're great as advocates, They almost never, or they rarely, I should say, have budget. So what we've been doing is we've been kind of poking around with a couple of different potential key audience profiles or key buyer profiles. And, you know, we're finding that like engineering managers, engineering directors, and product people. will have interest and need and also budget. You know, it all kind of goes back to Bant. Do they have budget? Do they have authority? Do they have a need? Then it's kind of almost up to sales to determine whether or not the timing is right.
Mike: So it sounds like it's, and I hope you don't mind me saying this, maybe not the most exciting product. I mean, basically it's designed so that from a user point of view, nothing happens, nothing goes wrong. I mean, does that present challenges when you're trying to market it and get people excited about the product?
Dan: It does. And it's been doubly challenging because again, up until about a year ago, SLOs as a reliability philosophy, if you will, they weren't mainstream. You know, Google every year puts out the SRE handbook. And Google has been promoting SLOs in that. But if you go into enterprise organizations, up until fairly recently, you'd go in and you'd say, hey, you ever heard of SLOs? And they'd say no. And then the sales and marketing process becomes teaching them about what SLOs are and why they matter. And anything in IT is a reasonably dry subject. So trying to make it exciting is, it's a challenge, but like any enterprise B2B marketing endeavor, you want to show value first and foremost. You want to say, look, if you implement my tool, if you buy my platform, you will see greater productivity, greater revenue, lower, you know, costs, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time, kind of everybody is saying that. So how do you differentiate? So one of the things that we've really kind of focused on is all of the different ways you can use Anensilo. I'm going to kind of jart a little bit here, as my mom would call it, when somebody crosses three lanes of traffic without looking. One of the ways that I've made it exciting is that I've started using them for my own marketing metrics. You know, marketing metrics are the lifeblood of a good modern marketing organization. You have to know what's working. You have to know what's not. You have to know ROI, you have to know ROAS, and a lot of the stuff that would really tell us a story comes in daily snapshots or the static look at something. So one of the cool things about my product is you can take any dataset and feed it in. So what I do is, I'm a big HubSpot user. I used to consult, I used to be a HubSpot implementation consultant for a third party, and I love HubSpot. But what I've done is I've built a private app inside of HubSpot, just for data collection, connected that to Google BigQuery, and then connected BigQuery into our platform, because we have a native BigQuery integration. And what you find about SLOs is they work gangbusters on anything that's a ratio metric. So a couple of the things that I've been kind of piping in there for sales enablement, because I write, you know, the scripts that are outbound sales reps use, you pipe in number of phone calls made, number of pickups, and then number of actual conversations had. You pipe those both in as ratios and set an error budget on that. Say, I expect 10% of pickups to become conversations, on average, over the course of any three-hour period. And so I track my error budget. So every time that SLI, which is Service Level Indicator, is not met, it throws errors, takes errors out of my budget, and I can see that drop down over time. So in real time, I can see, well near real time I should say, I can see kind of the trajectory and I'll also get alerts if all of the sudden my error budget drops precipitously. So I'll get a slack from Noble 9 saying your error budget burn rate has tripled. And you go, oh, crap. Something is wrong with the scripts. Or you can say, same time, you can say, hey, your error budget around connect rate has dropped precipitously. And I say, oh, well, that means the list or the people that we're actually calling were not called the right people. It's really cool to get these real-time alerts around when things aren't going right. Before they become a massive issue, I can quickly pivot and quickly change. And then going back to your actual question that I've kind of spieled well beyond, honestly, that's how I make it exciting as I tell stories about it. How do people use it? How do I use it? How do our engineers use it? We eat a lot of our own dog food. And so we put out case studies and stories and just little best practice guides based on what we've managed to accomplish internally using our own tool set. Nothing is boring if you can make it into a story that resonates. And for the audience that we're talking to, It may be a dry subject, but making a story around it is going to resonate. Because an SRE is going to read that and go, oh my God, yes, I've had that problem. Or a product person is going to read that and say, yes, I have a problem with not knowing why people are churning from my app. And I have to go to seven different places and figure out what metric is relevant. You just got a burn rate. Look at it.
Mike: Fascinating. I mean, it's great. I love the way that you use stories. But the thing that strikes me is clearly stories are an important part of your marketing, but it also sounds like you're very data-driven as well.
Dan: I am extremely data-driven. Yeah. Like I said, I kind of fell into marketing. I had an MBA and a journalism degree. Didn't know S from Shinola. when it came to marketing. So I'm pretty much self-taught since then, but I've always had kind of a engineering mindset. I thought I was going to be a computer engineer. In fact, I thought I was going to do a major in comp sci and journalism, and that almost killed me. There's objectivity to data. And data is like, it's like a puzzle that I like to be able to kind of work through and figure out what's working, what's not, what's right, what's wrong. What does the data tell you? Cause there's, there's that, that cool balance of creativity and just like hard objective metrics that for me is just fun.
Mike: It's like figuring out a puzzle. I love that, you know, almost scientific approach, but I'm interested to know, you know, obviously when you're running marketing for a brand, you've got to look at balancing both brand building and, you know, the more direct measurable, you know, lead generation and use of SDRs. How do you do that? How do you achieve that balance while still being focused on, you know, analyzing and using the data?
Dan: It's hard because, you know, brand building is still kind of nebulous in terms of pulling data. You can say we got this many impressions or you can say you got this particular share of voice. I mean, share of voice is great because I've mostly worked for smaller companies with, you know, startup funding. a particular run rate, I kind of have to default to the generation of leads. But brand building doesn't really move the needle in the spaces that I've worked in nearly as much as lead generation. You want the brand to be prominent, but it's like I'm trying to build the brand with tools and techniques that also can generate leads. So it's about, you know, it's about compelling content. It's about taking, taking our messaging, taking our content beyond the niche that we live in, kind of an overarching view of, you know, DevOps, reliability, SRE, and presenting ourselves as experts in a space. we're very fortunate to have on our team, the guy who literally wrote the book on SLOs, a guy by the name of Alex Hidalgo, he wrote the O'Reilly book on service level objectives. So a lot of it comes down to then leveraging personalities that we have either within our organization or within our broader sphere of influence and working with a lot of partners on co-marketing stuff because, you know, our reach is not that huge. We've got strategic investments from ServiceNow and Cisco who are both massive, you know, the 800-pound gorillas in a lot of the space that we work in. So trying to work with them, trying to work with, you know, we do a lot of webinars where we invite in guests who have their own audiences and who can speak authoritatively. So we've, you know, we've had guests from Deloitte. We've had guests from AWS. And I guess the way it kind of works out for me is I trust that the brand growth will occur organically while I am focused primarily on driving and nurturing leads through the sales cycle. You've got to know what the economic realities of your organization are. If we don't build enough leads, if we don't close enough leads, we've only got so much investment now. We're doing well, I should say, but you've got to build that runway for yourself and let the brand grow semi-organically. As long as you're putting out authoritative content that is interesting to the people that you're wanting to talk to, then you should have some success because they operate in their own little networks as well. And if you write a white paper or do a webinar, that is of interest to one. you want to invite them to share it within their networks. Hey, we just saw this cool thing about, you know, e-commerce getting ready for Black Friday and reliability and go from there.
Mike: I think it's a really interesting discussion, Dan, because you gave a really good overview of those kind of challenges in a startup where you're dealing with limited resources, you don't have unlimited branding budgets, and you're also dealing with really quite compressed timescales to grow the business. So I think for a startup, you gave a really good view there. I love that. I'm interested, you've talked about that at a high level. What about a specific campaign? Do you have an example of a campaign you really felt delivered great results or was particularly innovative?
Dan: Yeah. So you're in the UK, so I assume you're familiar with DORA. I know it's not, UK is not EU anymore, but DORA is a new regular, a banking regulation. And we did a campaign around, it was a multipoint campaign that that was focused on compliance, reliability, and risk people in banks that either were based in the EU or did business in the EU, which is, you know, most of the big ones. And we put together, you know, this was when I said we had Deloitte and AWS as guests. This was a roundtable discussion with Amazon's head of EU regulation, regulatory compliance. and a guy from Deloitte who focuses on the finance industry and has really good insight into the regulatory statutes that either exist or are about to. And so we kind of built this integrated campaign where we would reach out, be it via paid acquisition, not a ton of it, We would talk a lot about it on social. We would take any news articles about Dora coming and share the news article and say, hey, by the way, we're having this roundtable discussion with some real solid experts, wrote some articles about it, worked with our wonderful PR team to kind of seed some conversations about it within the press for Try to get some earned media around it. And then we had the webinar. It was well attended. It was extremely compelling conversation, provided you're interested in, you know, EU banking regulations. And it was really informative, actionable. You know, it was value being created. And then after that, Once it's done, you have the recording. You share the recording with everybody that you know in the banking industry. You cut up the recording into little snippets here and there, and you use them for short-form videos, like Google Shorts or Instagram videos. God help us, TikTok. And, you know, you walk with with your sales team, say, all right, here's a fresh new whole selection of short, medium, long form content that you can share out with your with your contacts, with your leads in the banking and finance industries. And then you make sure that the content that you've created you can repurpose it into as many ways as you can. And I'm still working on a white paper follow-up to that. For people who don't want to watch a video, distill the outcomes, the main points of the webinar into a white paper series of blogs. yada, yada, yada. So you keep hitting that particular campaign, the key notes in that campaign over and over and over again, but with fresh and interesting and compelling stuff. You know, I teach marketing occasionally at a local university. And one of the first things that I want students to understand is that there's a hierarchy of content. There's the very top, there's you know, an industry expert with unique data or unique insights. And then below that is some schmuck like me with unique data or unique insights. Below that is an industry expert with an opinion. Below that is some schmuck like me with an opinion. And then down here, about three feet below the floor, is a pitch about your product. You got to give value. In enterprise B2B, oh my god, is it congested. This isn't 20 years ago when we could just call somebody on the phone and say, hey, I want to tell you about my product. It does this. And they'd be like, yeah, right, tell me. Everybody's so inundated with marketing messaging from every possible angle. You got to give them value. This integrated DORA campaign was so good for us because we focused on very specific, very timely value. That was probably a longer spiel than necessary, but I get a little worked up over content and the difference between good and bad.
Mike: Sorry. I love the enthusiasm, Dan. I mean, I think talking about content in that way is, is awesome and really fascinating where you're talking about mixing kind of a newsjacking tactic alongside using really the brand equity of some of the speakers. I thought it was a great, a great campaign.
Dan: I was very pleased with it. We have wonderful partners. And having people in your corner as a startup or as an enterprise, you can't do it alone. You can find partners who believe in your product, believe in your company, believe in your people, who will work with you. Yes, because it helps them too, but also because they see the value in you and a relationship. You'll go a lot farther.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, partnerships are so important. I mean, Dan, it's been fascinating. I think we've covered a lot of interesting things. Before you go, there's a couple of quick fire questions we always like to ask people. And the first is, you know, I'm always interested to know what's the best piece of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Dan: Best piece of marketing advice? Ironically, it was an insult from a long time ago. like 2009, I worked at a startup and I reported into the CTO and he used to call marketing the last bastion of unaccountable spending. And on top of that, he called me the last bastard of unaccountable spending. And ironically enough, that became the best marketing advice that I ever got because I wanted my spending to be accountable. And that was really the kick in the butt that I needed to get into the whole data-driven side of things.
Mike: That's awesome. I love that the insult became advice. I mean, that's the best revenge, I think, for an insult. The other question we like to ask is about helping people who are new to the industry. So if you were talking to someone who was looking to start a career in marketing, maybe a graduate, what would be your advice to them?
Dan: Think about what your skill set is. What do you do? What do you love to do? Like, if you're trying to get into marketing and you have a passion for coding, great. That's going to fit really well. You can get into marketing operations. You could get into web development. Kind of adjacent to that, Learn enough HTML to be dangerous. Again, this comes from years and years of startup work, but not having to wait for somebody to fix an issue on your website is worth its weight in gold. But think about what you love to do and think about how that can be leveraged to create value for potential customers. You know, that that will help because whether it's podcasting, whether it's coding, whether it's writing, whether it's you know, design work, whether it's just pure strategy, if you can take what you love and hone that to fit or to not to fit because that feels like you're putting it in a box. But if you can hone what you love in such a manner that you can confidently say this will interest and compel potential customers in this kind of industry, you've got a lot stronger of a starting point. I think that marketing, when it comes to marketing, marketing training is secondary to whatever your real passions are and find a way to work that in.
Mike: I love that. I love the idea of using, you know, what you love to actually add value. So Dan, this has been great advice. It's been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate it. If people want to get in contact with you, what's the best way to reach you?
Dan: You can find me on LinkedIn, linkedin.com slash in slash DanielRuby. Pretty easy. You can email me at druby, D-R-U-B-Y, at Nobl9.com. That's pretty much the two easiest ways. I have long since abandoned Twitter.
Mike: Brilliant. Dan, thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. I'm sure there'll be some questions. Thanks so much for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Dan: Thanks for having me, Mike. It was a pleasure.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Navigating the Future of Marketing: Insights from Fractional CMO Andy Culligan
Ever wondered what a Fractional CMO does? Andy Culligan, the latest guest on the podcast, dives into the fascinating world of Fractional CMOs. He walks us through his career journey and explains how his role has become a game-changer in today’s fast-paced marketing landscape.
Andy discusses the benefits of hiring a Fractional CMO compared to a full-time employee and shares valuable insights for businesses aiming to adapt quickly. He also offers his perspectives on the SaaS market, highlighting the importance of speed in marketing and the evolving dynamics shaped by AI and shifting buyer behaviors.
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- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Andy Culligan
Andy Culligan is a marketing leader specializing in revenue growth and scaling SaaS businesses. With close to a decade of experience in both marketing and sales, Andy excels as a Fractional CMO, CRO, and Marketing Advisor. He is known for his straightforward approach to Account-Based Marketing (ABM), aligning marketing and sales teams to drive commercial success. Andy has held key marketing leadership positions at multiple SaaS companies including, Emarsys (acquired by SAP), Exponea (acquired by Bloomreach) & Leadfeeder (now Echobot). He focuses on personalized marketing strategies that create meaningful touchpoints, ultimately boosting revenue for his clients
Time Stamps
00:00:18 - Meet Andy Culligan: Career Journey
00:00:39 - From SDR to Fractional CMO
00:02:58 - Growth and Challenges in SaaS Marketing
00:06:43 - Benefits of Hiring a Fractional CMO
00:12:40 - The Importance of a Marketing Plan
00:14:07 - Evergreen Marketing Tactics
00:19:33 - The Role of Speed in Marketing
00:20:45 - Future of Marketing and AI Impact
00:23:51 - Quickfire Questions: Marketing Advice
00:29:31 - Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:32:05 - Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Quotes
"Speed is something that's important to a lot of companies." Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
"If it's not working for you, then it's not working for me." Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
"If you know your niche, nail it." Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
"A lot of companies don't have a plan." Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
"Creativity always wins." Andy Culligan, Fractional CMO
Follow Andy:
Andy Culligan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-culligan/
Andy’s website: https://andyculligan.com/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Andy Culligan
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Andy Culligan
Mike:
Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Andy Culligan. Andy is a fractional CMO. Welcome to the podcast, Andy.
Andy: Thanks very much.
Mike: Well, like we always do, let's start off by learning a bit about you, Andy. So can you tell us a little bit about your career and how you've ended up being a fractional CMO?
Andy: All right. So I ended up being a fractional CMO by accident, and I'll get into that in a minute. But I started my career, or I grew up in Ireland, right? So I'm clearly Irish. You can hear that from the accent. I moved to Austria in 2009. Basically, my wife is Austrian, so I blame her for living in this beautiful, beautiful country, right? So I've been living here for, since 2009 and, uh, I started my career as an SDR. Then after studying marketing, I wanted to go in more towards the marketing piece. So after being an SDR, which is a sales development rep and also going into account management, I then, when I moved here, wanted to put more of a focus on marketing, then worked at a multinational for a number of years and implemented all of their marketing automation. Back then it was Marketo with the tool that I was using that back in 2010. So that's very early stage of Marketo. Right. So one of the first people I was actually at that point in time is probably the only person in Austria with Marketo experience. Right. And then very quickly for that multinational became like the global champion for Marketo, but I wasn't just running. Those types of programs, I was also running offline programs. I was doing a lot of events and stuff. Learned a huge amount about lead generation, basically, through that company. Then went into the tech space then, and I've been in the tech space ever since. So funny enough story, the chief operating officer for a company called Imarsys was checking out my profile on LinkedIn, and I just pinged him and I said, hey, Ohad, why are you looking at my profile? And that sort of brashness was accepted quite well by the Israelis. It's an Israeli company. The Israelis can be quite brash as well. So he was like, okay, I think we need to work with this guy. They were looking for somebody that had marketing automation experience because they were looking to implement a marketing automation platform themselves. And yeah, so that was my first stint in the tech space. And the multinationals I previously was very slow moving industry. Not much had changed in decades really within that space, very slow moving, and then went into tech where it's like going from a merry-go-round onto a roller coaster. It's wild. And I really enjoyed that and quickly started to go up through the ranks for various reasons. We managed to get a hell of a lot of funding at the same time to go into the US market. So very rapidly, I was learning how to run a global marketing team because I was helping the then CMO build out the marketing team for various reasons. From there, I just kept on progressing and progressing, then had a global team. So all of the leads that were being generated for this large organization were coming through my team, both digital and offline. And then I got offered a job as a VP of marketing for a direct competitor. So I took that, which went down like a cup of cold sick, as you can imagine, for the Imarsys guys. But to be fair, the CEO, Ohad, and myself are still very close and a very good friend, actually. Yeah, so I worked at Exponia then for a number of years and we grew that team rapidly and grew the business rapidly. Then went on to another CMO gig at another company, which was a sales tech called Leadfeeder. And again, rapid growth during a relatively tough time, I would say, because that was during the COVID years. And we managed to grow, that was a volume SaaS business as a comparison to the high ticket sales SaaS that I was in previously, Nemarsis and Exponia. And the volume SaaS play was interesting, very, very different. Your customer acquisition costs need to be remained super low as opposed to the enterprise sale that you'd go into it with the others, with the high ticket sales. And yeah, it was interesting. We were growing MMRR by 5% month on month. while at the same time reducing churn, which was, you know, a challenge. And after COVID, you know, it came to June, 2021, and I'd doing this for almost two years at a tight budget and still growing rapidly. And, and a lot of the, a lot of the business growing through the marketing efforts. I was just exhausted. A young family, five lockdowns or whatever it is we had here. I was just like, I can't do this anymore. For various reasons, I was just spent. So I just knew that if I continued going at the pace I was going at, I was going to burn out. So I just decided to step away from the business. Life's too short, right? Very aligned with the CEO and everything. Very good relationship with him and we still speak. And I just said, look, my heart's just not in it anymore. And I think if I keep going at this pace, it's going to end in trouble for me. fully understood from his side. And I just stepped away from the business without having anything settled, nothing. I just knew that I needed to take a break. And, uh, when people started to find out that I left need feeder, they started to reach out and said, Hey, would you be interested in full-time employment here, et cetera. And, um, I just said, no, not really, but I can maybe help. And that's where this gig came about. And I really was just looking. My plan then was, Hey, I'll give a couple of these companies a bit of a hand, see how I get on. And then maybe one of them is a good fit for me to join as a full-time employee. And that's three years ago. And I've worked with over 20 companies. And now I've built a team around me and so on. So actually that was in June, 2021. And I didn't even have a website until October, 2021. I didn't even have an email address or anything. I was working on my Gmail up until October, 2021. And, um, it just sort of dawned on me after a couple of months of doing this. I was like, Oh, there's actually something in this. And I only knew I was called a fractional CMO when, um, a CEO of a company that I was working for introduced me to their board as a fractional CMO. I just thought I was, I'm a marketing advisor or whatever. And then I was introduced to, I was working with a company in the States and in the States, it was, it was a growing phenomenon, let's say back then. Now it's quite well established, but the, uh, I was introduced as a friend. Hey, this is Andy, our fractional CMO. Oh, great. You have a fractional CMO. And I was like, Oh, that's what I have. Great. And I doubled down on that and that's, that's how I ended up where I am. So I sort of started this business by accident. It wasn't planned. It just sort of happened. Right.
Mike: I love that, that absolute honesty, that there wasn't a plan. It wasn't something you worked out. I think to your credit, you know, what you did was you saw the opportunity and doubled down on it and really took advantage.
Andy: Yeah, absolutely.
Mike: Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about fractional CMOs. I mean, as you mentioned, they're becoming more popular, particularly in the US. What's the benefit of having a fractional CMO versus hiring someone to be your full-time CMO?
Andy: Well, speed is something that's important to a lot of companies. They know if they're going out and looking for an exec, that it's going to take months to probably find the right fit. And also to find the right fit, that will be able to pick up a bag and start running with things relatively quickly. I think that speed thing is is very important. A lot of companies that I work with, for them, it's like, oh, great. You can start tomorrow. Brilliant. We have an existing team in place. This team needs to be managed. This team needs a plan. They need to be pushed forward in the right direction. That's a big thing. The second thing is risk. My contract is very clear and simple. I don't want to work with a customer if the customer is not happy with me. Again, life's too short for me to be trying to prove myself within an organization. If it's not working for you, then it's not working for me. So with that, again, we can cut ties and then that's it. There's no additional costs on top of it. That's again, going back to time being wasted and so on, and also money being wasted in terms of recruitment costs, et cetera. And then maybe a payout as well, if you have a CMO on for a year, for example, trying to get rid of somebody is not that easy. And in some organizations, for example, they're just not ready for a full-time CMO, but they think they are, but they're not ready. And then they figure out after a year, they're like, oh, shoot. Actually, this was not the right time for us, right? If we're talking about in, in the SaaS business, I've seen businesses that even at 40, 50 million ARR and they were recurring revenue that are still quite ready for a CMO based on the team setup that they already have. So I think there's the timing, the risk, and then the cost. So the cost option as well, as I just mentioned, there's a few things that you don't need to worry about any recruitment fees. You have CMO that has the experience of working across multiple organizations at the same time. for a fraction of the cost of what a full-time CMO is gonna cost you. The important thing is though that you have somebody or people on the team that are able to go execute based on how I advise them to go execute. But I'll be the one that will be checking them, making sure they're doing the right things, et cetera, right?
Mike: That's interesting. So I can see some benefits. But I guess the obvious question is, as you live in Austria, and Europe's not always portrayed as being the most dynamic in terms of adopting new approaches, I mean, America's, you know, really leading on the fractional CMOs approach. So is it tough marketing a service like a fractional CMO from within Europe? Or doesn't it matter because you simply work remote for American companies?
Andy: I do both. So like I, I work in Austria. It's funny for a long time, Austria was not really a focus for me. It still isn't too small of a country, right? But right now I have two clients in Austria, which is funny. That just sort of fell on my lap, but not because I was doing any big promotional work for Austria. It just, I have built out a very good network over the past, maybe five years in LinkedIn and LinkedIn basically feeds my inbound. That's where I'm getting all my inbound from. I've also got very good relationships with venture capitalists that I've worked on. at various different organizations. A lot of the companies I've been working with have been BC backed. They know me, they know my style, and it suits them as well to put me in front of some of their portfolio companies. So that's been really like feeding my inbound. But in terms of adoption here, I don't see anybody pushing against it. When I go and speak with an organization, they're always very, very open to it, regardless if they're in the States or of Europe, right? So right now I work with companies in the UK, in Ireland, Germany, Austria. I've been approached by companies in Israel, also the States as well. So I've also been approached by companies in Australia and so on. I just don't want to do that because the phone will never stop if that's the case. So, uh, you know, I don't want to be working around the clock. But yeah, I see it being something that people are open to, even if they're not familiar with the concept. If I bring them through the concept, it makes sense to them, right?
Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. As I understand it, Andy, you focus around SaaS as being your key market. I'm interested to know what the reason for that is. Is it because you believe you can bring the most impact, or is it simply a result of your previous experience?
Andy: I don't think it's just SaaS that I'd be able to bring the most impact. It's just because my experience over the past 10 years has been in SaaS. So people see that, and it's also hard to find SaaS marketers. So I'm very much of the opinion, if you know your niche, nail it. So that's my niche, is in SaaS, just mostly because it's very, very hard to find experienced SaaS marketers, right? Because it's a relatively, in the general scheme of things, new concept. But honestly, the approach that I take should translate across non-SaaS businesses also. There's no reason for it. And it's very simple. I just come in and create a plan alongside the existing team, and then we go execute on that plan. I think the majority of times When I go into a business, one of the core issues is that the team just don't have a plan. It's there's firing from the hip. There's no, there's not a line to any, any target. If there is a target, it's not aligned to company targets. It's not aligned to revenue targets. I think it's, it's aligning the marketing up to the vision of the organization, but also not just to the vision, but also to the target of the organization. And then at the same time, creating a plan around that. You'd be surprised. A lot of companies don't have that.
Mike: That's interesting. I can certainly see the benefit of having that vision and bringing that to your client. I'm interested though, you know, in terms of what you bring, is it transferable skills that are a high level of marketing knowledge and expertise? Or is it, you know, being able to understand the company and come in and, uh, you know, really get under their skin? Is that what matters for a fractional CMO?
Andy: Well, yeah, so I really need to understand the company and the space that they're operating in as well. Right. So a lot of times when I come into an organization, they also need to do a positioning and messaging exercise. So for that, I really need to get to know the space. Like I've just signed a customer. I was actually just starting with them today. And they are trying to be everything to everyone. Right. And I've just said it there a couple of minutes ago. The thing is, what you should really be trying to do is nail your niche. And today your niche, you need to then make sure that you have messaging and positioning, which is suited towards that niche, right? and they've got a lot of work to do on that. And any marketing that they're doing is not going to be as successful if they don't do that exercise alongside the work that they're already doing and try to narrow it down a bit better. And that's the case that's probably 90% of the organizations that I come in and work with. It's very few that come in and say, oh, we have everything perfect and everything's running wonderfully, which is never the case anyway. But normally, if there's a change of guard in marketing or something like that, there's normally The focus from the rest of the C-suite is normally, hey, how can we maybe tailor our message to suit our market better, which is an ongoing exercise anyway. It's never, it's a living exercise. And that happens at every single organization that I come into. So to go to your point, to get to know the org and to get to know the environment and the category that they're operating in is very important.
Mike: So do you have a process for that? Do you have a way that you go in, you learn about the company, their market, understand what they're doing, and then build a plan? You know, is it a fixed approach or is it more flexible?
Andy: I'd say I try to keep it simple, you know, so look at what their customers are saying about them. There's simple platforms. You can look at that in the tech space, at least if you look at G2 or Capterra. So you'd be able to figure out very quickly what people are saying and if they're happy, unhappy, where they're at. And then also look at what their competitors are doing or how their competitors are pushing themselves in comparison to company X. So what are you saying versus what your competitors are saying? And if you're telling me that your competitor is 10 times the size of you, they must be doing something right. So how can we use some of the stuff that they're already doing to bring it forward and do it a bit different? I'm not saying go copy your competitors. But I'd be, I'd be understanding that competitive landscape and how everybody else is positioning themselves and how we benchmark ourselves against that. And then that's really how I would start. And then again, it's about speaking with customers. So getting close to the customer, what's the customer saying about you? What are their grievances? What are they happy about, et cetera, et cetera.
Mike: Yeah, that process kind of makes a lot of sense. One thing I think people would be interested in is, you know, you work in the SaaS market and it has a reputation for focusing a lot of budget on bottom-of-the-funnel tactics like page search. Do you have tactics you feel are evergreen tactics that translate across multiple clients, or is it always a start from scratch and build the plan from the ground up?
Andy: No, it's not always start from scratch and build a plan up. I think there's one thing I've learned and it's, again, this sort of happened by accident as well, because as I mentioned, when I introduced myself and my career, I was in high ticket SaaS, right? So minimum deal sizes of 100 to 200K a year and the type of deals when I was working in my earlier sort of Marses and Exponia, then I went to a volume SaaS business. And when in that volume SaaS business, I sort of brought a mindset of, let's do things that are building brands, not just spending all of our money on Google, right, or paid, which was the case. So when I first went to Leadfeeder, it was like, okay, let's not do anything that's not going to drive trial signups, immediate trial signups, like an immediate sugar rush of trial signups. Why would we do it if we're not going to bring people into a free trial motion immediately? And to me, I just felt as though we were missing something. And, and again, this sort of happened by accident, but COVID hit. And, um, I spoke with a mate of mine who at the time, or I think he still is chief revenue officer and founder of a company called Reachdesk, which is a direct mail tool based out of the UK SaaS business. And we were just chatting and COVID had just hit. And I remember he was sitting in an airport terminal in, uh, in JFK trying to get the hell out of New York. Because they were starting to shut everything down. And I was like, well, this is, this is getting a bit weird. We should try to capitalize on this weird situation and maybe do some content. So we said, okay, let's, let's try to organize a webinar. So, um, we did this maybe on a Thursday we were chatting and we put it in on the Friday. We started promoting it on the Friday for like the following Thursday. And we had like overnight, we were talking, so we put the topic of how to, how to sell during these uncertain times. And man, like people, like we had like 2000 signups in the space of a day or something, you know, which was just unheard of. Right. And I was like, Oh, there's something in this. So I just kept on doing it and getting more and more people on. And we started getting 3000, 4000 registrations in over a couple of space days. And I was like, okay. People were asking me, investors were asking, Hey, is this leading directly to signups? Why is it like, can we track? I'm like, it's not, it's not immediately. You're not gonna be able to track it, but I'm telling you, this is having an impact on the market. And all of our competitors started to try to follow suite, but they were too late and it didn't work for them. So my point being. The playbook that I try to go in, especially if we're going into a volume SaaS business is, of course, go after that, like making sure that you're efficient on your paid spend. So are you getting efficiency metrics right? So is your LTV to CAC, so your lifetime value to customer acquisition costs? Are you operating a three to one on that specific channel, whether it's a Google or whatever, right? That means you're being very profitable, right? If you're over three to one, that's a general rule of thumb, I think. If you're over three to one, so if you're, for every euro you spend, you're getting three back, right? And if you're operating at that, or if you're operating over that, then you can spend more. You can be a bit less efficient, right? But try to aim for three to one. And then at the same time, you should always be trying to do a brand play. And brand play is a long burn. But if you don't do a brand play, the problem is that when the time comes for the prospect to look for a solution like yours, you won't be top of mind. So that's always my thing is, okay, like if you're doing a brand play, make sure you offer some actionable piece of information that doesn't necessarily have to do anything with your product. It just helps them in their role. And then when they have the need, they're gonna come back to you to purchase. And that worked so well for us at Leadfeeder. We've seen it over time. We dropped paid budgets down from 100 grand a month down to 30 grand a month, and we're still seeing the same results. So that was after a couple of months of doing this brand piece. So without being able to fully connect the dots, but I can tell you now that that brand play was massive and had a massive impact on revenue.
Mike: One thing, you know, really interests me about what you said was speed. You mentioned speed a couple of times and you said, Oh, we've decided a webinar. It was the end of the week. And you basically set that webinar up for the following Thursday, turning around the webinar in a week. I mean, I know a lot of our enterprise clients would, you know, imagine trying to do that and they'd freak out if you said it would be a week. So how important is speed? I mean, is it something that's changed, you know, with more uncertainty since when COVID hit or do you think it's always been important? And actually, you know, are there benefits in some organizations being a bit more perhaps thoughtful and slow?
Andy: If you can put thought into it and also have some speed, then I think that's the best mix, right? I understand on an enterprise perspective, it may be harder to get things over the line, but I would still try to have people within that, whoever's leading the team to still put people under pressure to get things delivered quickly. I've been in the enterprise setting whereby it takes months and months and months to get anything over the line and 10 people need to decide on this. And honestly, the outcome is not in any way as successful as the outcome that we would see if we tried to get things over the line quickly. And being very open with those webinars, not everyone was a hit. We had one or two that didn't go well, but we just continued with us. And actually, if I look at that as a whole, we probably did 20 to 25 of them over the space of two years. Right. For example, early on, when I seen that opportunity after initial webinar, as soon as I got off that first one. I called my head of demand, Jen, and was like, we need to organize another one for next Thursday. And he was like, oh, you're kidding me. I was like, yes, we're doing it. We did it, got somebody on from my network, quickly move it over the line. Again, 3,000 people. We actually broke the webinar software because it was too many people trying to get in. And again, to go to your point, does the speed matter here? Is the speed going to impact us? In that case, it 100% did. For enterprise businesses, I still am of the belief that speed is very important in these things because otherwise others are just going to get ahead of you. And as an enterprise, you probably don't care too much about that because nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right? That's the old adage, right? But at the same time, those larger organizations, enterprise organizations that can be quicker to market with things. That are more exciting like they're typically the ones that are more exciting day trigger an emotional response within a community or within a network. That then leads to a sale at some point right and the point from these what we were doing there is without me actually focusing on it we were building a community because the same people were coming back week and week. And if an enterprise brand can build a community like that, that ingrains them with that brand, right? It brings people closer to that brand. So I was working within an enterprise organization. I would still deploy the same tactic week in, week out, let's go. And it would get pushback. Don't get me wrong. 100% pushback. But I think in that specific case, I would still have done the same way.
Mike: I love that, Andy. I think it's great advice, but it's also probably scary, as you suggest to people in the enterprise, to have to push people to go that quickly. I really appreciate you talking about what you've done, Andy, and how you approach being a fractional CMO. Now I'd like to look forward to the future. There's a lot of change in marketing. I mean, you mentioned that you were probably the first Marketo expert in Austria. That was less than 15 years ago. So clearly, things are changing very quickly. There's now a lot of people running Marketo in Austria, as there are everywhere else. Clearly, things have made a big impact in recent years. How do you see things changing in the future? What's going to be the changes for, say, a fractional CMO over the next five to 10 years?
Andy: It's a good question, right? I spoke with somebody about this this morning. Actually, my brother, I spoke with my brother about this this morning. He's a chief product officer at a tech company as well, a SaaS company. So SaaS is in the family, let's say. And he was asking me the same question, like, am I seeing from a, cause I also run sales teams and SDR teams as well as doing the marketing piece. I need questions are you seeing marketers or sellers being replaced by solutions now i seeing that all and my simple answers that was no like across the businesses i'm working with now. Any business there's an example that he brought up was a intercom intercom of doing a lot on the front and. I believe a lot of the stuff that they're doing in product is AI. Instead of having people working on it, their AI is working on it. And they've rolled out an AI product piece, which they've gone all in on, and supposedly it's not getting the uptake that they were expecting. And so I still think there's this wariness around AI. So a lot of people are have been playing around with ChatGPT, right? Which is great, right? And there's certain workflows and stuff that you can create to help. For example, I use ChatGPT if I need to put together a job spec, like something that would in the past taken me a long time to put together, two hours or whatever to put together. I just say to ChatGPT, hey, can you put together a job spec? or, hey, I need a landing page copy for an event that we're running. This is the event. These are the key details. This is what it's about. Can you come up with a landing page copy? And I'll go and just start tailoring it, right? So really, my answer to that is I think it's far too soon to tell how AI is going to impact on things. Other things where I see a bigger impact happening is algorithm related, right? So stuff like, for example, LinkedIn. LinkedIn was a huge driver of marketing leads and decent quality leads over the past years for many businesses, especially when they were doing things like account-based marketing, targeting the accounts that were in their total addressable market and so on, getting email addresses in exchange for eBooks, et cetera. I think that behavior, first of all, the behavior on the buyer side has changed or on the prospect side has changed. And I also think that LinkedIn, based on their algorithm, how they are doing things, first of all, it's got much more expensive cost per lead, and the impression count has gone down rapidly. So they've made some changes there, which have heavily affected how things are going. So I think that's probably playing a bigger role in the immediate future so that marketers need to tailor how they're doing their approach towards marketing and the old channels not working the same way as they did two years ago. And now looking at, okay, what's the best way for me to move forward? And also in the SaaS space, one of the things that's changed significantly in the past six to nine months. is things like people requesting demos. So buyer behavior has changed massively just because of uncertainty due to, for example, the war in the Ukraine and Russia, due to the election in the US, due to inflation, due to instability globally. And with that, people are not going to your website any longer to fill out a form to see your software. Every company that I know has seen a hit in that. However, they're still going and doing their research. So with that, there are tools, for example, like Leadfeeder, but there's also other tools like Sixth Sense and so on that work perfectly as well. There's more for the enterprise, whereby you could see the buyer intent of companies, for example, searching for a specific category of software, and as well also seeing those companies visiting your site. So that then gives your sales team and SDR team, if you have one, a pointer in the right direction to go after these companies and the buying council that you would typically go after, rather than just sitting there and waiting for the requested demos to rain in, right?
Mike: Yeah, I think that's very insightful. And although perhaps you ducked a little bit what impact AI is going to have, I think what you're saying is actually the biggest impact we're probably going to see is behavior over the next 10 years, rather than the actual technology itself. So I really love that.
Andy: With the AI piece, I don't know, to be honest, which is the very answer because it's so early. AI is developing so quickly. If you compare chat GPT to, for example, other technological breakthroughs that we've seen over the past years, for example, smartphone. Like AI is moving so much faster than any smartphone technology did. And it's just, it's so hard to tell which way it's going to go. But there's also things like the Google is a Google, not Google lens, but, um, the Apple computer where you wear the glasses and it's, it's, it's the computer in the, in the glasses, basically. Everybody, I haven't tried it, but everybody that I know has tried is like, that is 100% the future. 100%. This is the way that we're moving. Is that the case? I don't know. It was the same with virtual reality 10 years ago. Did it go that way? No. 3D? 25 years ago, did it move that way? No. I don't know. I just know that right now AI can be helpful in terms of interpreting data, large data sets, finding meaning within data, and also helping from a number of areas, for example, creating copy and stuff like that, and making things a little bit easier just to maybe speed things up on your side that would have taken a lot of manual effort prior. But now it's too early to tell.
Mike: Yeah, that's probably the most realistic way to summarize AI. Andy, I really appreciate your time. I know you're super busy. So before we go, we've got a couple of quickfire questions we'd like to ask people. So I'll dive straight in and ask you the first one. What's the best piece of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Andy: Ah, that's a very good question. So I worked for somebody before that just focused heavily on execution. So as long as you're executing, something is going to work. So the worst thing you can do as a marketer is not execute. And you might not execute because you're maybe not confident enough to do it. You have an idea, you're unsure about it, whatever it is. This, this marketing leader told me, make sure that you're always executing. And that was probably the best piece of advice because people see that you're doing that stuff is coming out, right? That's a, it's first of all, it's a visuals thing. Otherwise it was like, what's marketing doing? Nothing. Secondly, if you continue to do it that way, you will have stuff that will stick. And then an additional piece of advice on that, creativity always wins. So if you're executing and you're being creative with your execution, then you are ultimately going to win eventually. It's not always going to work, but it will work sometimes. And that's the most important thing.
Mike: That's great advice. Love it. The other question we like to ask is if you're talking to someone who's just about to enter marketing as a career, perhaps as a graduate, what would be your advice to them? Don't do it.
Andy: No, I'm joking. So yeah, my advice to them would be make sure that you understand the numbers. So many marketers come in and don't really understand the Table got the old school, might be old school thinking nowadays, but the old school lead gen funnel, as an example, or understand how something is impacting the business goals or how something is going to impact a seller when they're going out to market. If you understand that, then you will ultimately be more successful. And another thing is that people don't, for whatever reason uses common sense, If you're creating, for example, content that's getting eyeballs on it, and those eyeballs are coming from your ICP, but you're not able to maybe connect back the dots to closed one business, that doesn't mean it's not working. So there's so many CEOs that have come across as like, could all content spend because I don't see any deals. I don't see any million euro deals coming from this one blog post. And you need to be able to say, no, This is driving this amount of eyeballs from this particular ICP. Therefore, it is having an impact somewhere in the sales cycle. You're just maybe not going to be able to measure it. And that's okay. You don't need to measure everything. You just need to be able to show the numbers where it matters.
Mike: Yeah, I think that's really helpful for anyone starting in marketing. Hopefully, people won't take the first advice if they don't do it. They'll actually go in and get dug into the numbers and recognize that whilst those numbers are important, they're not the whole story. This has been such a great conversation, Andy. I really appreciate it. It's so insightful. If there's anyone listening who wants to find out more or perhaps even is looking for a fractional CMO, what's the best way to get hold of you?
Andy: You get me on LinkedIn, Andy Culligan, or you get me on my website, andyculligan.com. Yeah, they're probably the best two places to get me.
Mike: Awesome, Andy. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate you being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Andy: Sure. No worries. Thank you.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Building Relationships in Digital PR - Vince Nero - BuzzStream
Vince Nero, Director of Content Marketing at BuzzStream discusses the changing landscape of digital PR and SEO. Learn how BuzzStream helps marketers build strong relationships with journalists and navigate the evolving landscape of digital outreach.
Vince discusses the importance of personalization in email marketing, the impact of recent Google updates on SEO strategies, and the shift towards quality-driven digital PR.
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About BuzzStream
BuzzStream is an email outreach tool for PRs and link builders designed to help build and manage relationships with personalized outreach at scale.
About Vince Nero
Vince is the Director of Content Marketing at Buzzstream. He thinks content marketers should solve for users, not just Google. He also loves finding creative content online. His previous work includes content marketing agency Siege Media for six years, Homebuyer.com, and The Grit Group. Outside of work, you can catch Vince running, playing with his two kids, enjoying some video games, or watching Phillies baseball.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 - Guest Introduction: Vince Nero from BuzzStream
00:03:09 - Understanding BuzzStream's Value for Marketers
00:10:09 - Impact of Google Updates on Marketing Strategies
00:14:23 - Marketing to Two Distinct Audiences: SEO vs. PR
00:19:11 - The Future of Content Marketing and Technology
00:24:00 - Creating New Information: Strategies for Success
00:27:04 - Quality Over Quantity: A Key Marketing Principle
00:27:23 - Best Marketing Advice: Permission Marketing
00:28:20 - Advice for Aspiring Marketers: Seek Internships
00:29:58 - How to Connect with Vince and BuzzStream
Quotes
"There's kind of this thought process in the digital PR space and link building space that is kind of at odds with one another.” Vince Nero, Director of Content Marketing at BuzzStream.
“The recipe for success going forward is pushing as much of your own new information into these large language models.” Vince Nero, Director of Content Marketing at BuzzStream.
“I think we're just finding more and more that people are needing this personalized approach.” Vince Nero, Director of Content Marketing at BuzzStream.
Follow Vince:
Vince Nero on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinnero/
BuzzStream website: https://www.buzzstream.com/
BuzzStream on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/buzzstream/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Vince Nero at BuzzStream
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Vince Nero
Mike:
Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Vince Nero. Vince is the Director of Content Marketing at BuzzStream. Welcome to the podcast, Vince.
Vince: Hey, Mike. Thanks so much for having me.
Mike: Great to have you on. What we like to do with all guests is get you to tell us a little bit about your career and ultimately why you've chosen BuzzStream as your current company. So tell us all about yourself.
Vince: Yeah, I don't want to go back too far, but I actually started when I was in music school. I played the saxophone, tried to make a living as a jazz musician in New York City and found it pretty tough. So I needed to get an actual job and I kind of fell backwards into marketing. Started working with some like the tech in the tech startup space in New York City Gained a lot of connections there and was I kind of able to leverage that into a job with a small consulting firm That actually paid for a course for me called SEO that works. It was a Brian Dean backlink Oh course this was back in like 2014 or something in 2013 and And so I took that course and kind of used that and the stuff I learned there to get a job with Siege Media. And I moved out to San Diego to kind of join up with them. And that's kind of where I cut my teeth, really. And what I do now, I think, is where I learned SEO. I had a great mentor, Ross Hudgens, there, and some other folks at Siege who are great, Alex Hines, Carolyn Gilbert. And so, you know, while I was at Siege, it was content marketing agency focused on SEO. They did digital PR, that sort of thing. And I used BuzzStream the whole time I was there. Eventually, my wife and I had a kid during the pandemic. I was kind of just not feeling the agency life. I wanted a little bit of a change. And I ended up moving out of agency in-house at a company called Homebuyer, then was laid off from there, started another agency, and then ultimately BuzzStream reached out to me and it seemed like a perfect fit given my interests and what they do and my affinity for the The product itself, you know, I really liked it and I had actually, funnily enough, reached out to them when I was leaving Siege Media saying like, hey, this seems like it would be the perfect fit. Are you interested in me at all? And they weren't ready to hire a marketer yet, but eventually they were and I jumped at the chance.
Mike: And you're now based in Connecticut, is that right?
Vince: Yes. Yeah. So I've kind of jumped coasts back and forth.
Mike: You couldn't stand the fantastic winters in San Diego.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. It was pretty rough. I needed, I needed the cold again.
Mike: Well, that's awesome. I mean, it's great that you, you know, come from a background of using a product and then wanting to actually work for the company. You're probably ideally placed then to explain, you know, the problems that Buzzstream solves for marketers.
Vince: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I, it was a really kind of another reason I felt like a perfect fit for this because I was, I am the ideal customer, you know, like the problems that Buzzstream solves are kind of twofold. It acts as kind of like a CRM for, um, digital PRs, essentially. So it lets you personalize emails, but then send them at scale to, you know, actually move the needle. But I think the main focus is on being able to kind of build relationships with journalists and publications. So that seems to be kind of the bigger issue that a lot of people have and there's kind of this thought process in the digital PR space and link building space that is kind of at odds with one another where it's like they call it like the spray and pray technique versus the, you know, personalized sniper tag, you know, if you want to keep using that weird terminology. So, you know, it's like, do I personalize emails or do I just send to a mass list, basically? And so the challenge is doing that at scale. And, you know, I think the agency life, any agency, especially that's doing link building, wants to scale everything, right? Like you're very conscious of the time spent on different tasks. Everything has to be built to a client. It kind of behooves you to work as quickly as possible, but you do that and sometimes it's sacrifice the quality of the emails, you sacrifice building relationships. So there's some agencies that don't like to personalize emails and get into it and build relationships and would rather kind of send out you know, 5,000, 10,000 emails, something like that, just get a list of relevant journalists. But I think we're just finding more and more that people are needing this personalized approach. And there's a couple things that have happened in the past year that have really made me kind of strengthen that argument, I think, and I can get into that. But that's it in a nutshell, I think.
Mike: Well, I mean, let's get into that. Let's find out about those things that have really made you buy into BuzzStream.
Vince: Yeah, I mean, our customer base is kind of split, right? So we have people who are into link building and using it for link building, doing kind of more traditional link building outreach, your maybe resource page building or broken link building, niche edits, link insertions, guest posting outreach. The other half are digital PRs. So it's like that is the two customer segments. I think we're kind of 50-50 when you talk about UK versus the US. And that's interesting there because like the US itself is kind of a few years behind, I think, the UK market in terms of how they think about digital PR. It's kind of tied more into link building and thought of more as a scalable approach, whereas I think a lot of the UK agencies do put more focus on personalization and building relationships more in the vein of like a traditional PR. So, with kind of that in mind, it is kind of like this interesting segmentation of our market, but throw Google into the mix now. In the past year, they've done a handful of very interesting things, and I think, to me, it's really pushing everything towards this almost like more traditional and like brand building focus that marketers should have. So one of them was in February, they put out these new email requirements to kind of cut down on spam emails. So these unpersonalized emails that you get from people and you know, it's like people that send out more than 5,000 emails in a 24-hour period to personal email addresses have to adhere to these stricter guidelines. Like, you know, you need to have that auto-subscribe button in the subject line there. There's certain details that you need and technical things. At its core, what it's doing is pushing people to send more personal emails, right? So, like, that's number one tick towards the personalized and relationship building. The other is there was this massive Google leak, and in it we found a lot of signals that the brand itself, I think, seems to be something that Google looks at more so than people thought, I think. So mentions of a brand, authors affiliated with a brand. The other side of that is there were signals in there that talked about how sites that were updated frequently and had sections that were highly clicked. those links from those sections are potentially more valuable to Google. And those types of sites are inherently just like news sites, the sites that you would get from doing PR work, right? The last thing I'll mention is the helpful content update, I think. And kind of in that is the link spam update. I'll kind of roll those two together. But What we saw from that was a lot of sites basically just dropped off traffic like completely or, you know, were completely decimated, maybe not entirely dropped all their traffic. But the sites that I saw that were most impacted by this were the sites that were basically just spinning out content just to spin out content. They had no real identity. They had no real focus. It were really just these mean like guest posting sites where people would go on and post an article about whatever you'd see. They're kind of like veiled news sites, but not really news sites. They just cover every topic under the sun. But I think those links used to work, and I don't think they are anymore because we're seeing the traffic really going down in those sites. So with those kind of three, well I didn't mention the link spam update, that's kind of tied into that like helpful content thing because what our analysis showed, my analysis showed recently of a lot of those sites that got hit were again like those were sites that didn't really have any core focus or had no like real brand identity and were basically the sites that you would see that were constantly in link exchanges and on these guest posting sites and accepting guest posts or you'd see them on these guest posting databases. So what all that kind of amounts to is this kind of push away from those more traditional link building methods the guest posting, link exchanges, link insertions. Not to say that they don't work, but not at the scale that people used to do it. And on the other side, there's this real focus from Google on like, brand, being an authentic brand, mentioning the brand, seeing mentions of a brand. And kind of to do that, you need to really focus on high-end authoritative news sites and getting coverage there. So that becomes more of the digital PR route. I mean, you can conceivably buy links from those sites, those news sites, but I don't think they're necessarily worth as much as if you were to reach out to a journalist and really cultivate a nice relationship that you can get links for your client or multiple clients if you have an agency. That kind of stuff gets me excited, obviously. I can talk a whole podcast about this and where things are moving. I didn't even mention the impact of AI on this stuff, but I've changed my whole marketing plan because of the tumultuous year that we've had, I think, in Google updates and all these things, those four or five things I just mentioned, that have really caused me to change our focus and lean more heavily into digital PR topics versus covering those more traditional link building type of topics.
Mike: So, I mean, that's interesting. And I think it kind of says to me that, you know, some of the perhaps, I guess, more straightforward SEO tactics are moving into the, you know, more quality orientated digital PR. So do you want to talk a little bit about how BuzzStream helps you get covered in those, you know, higher value publications? Because obviously that's not an easy thing to do.
Vince: Yeah, and you know, I think we do. You still need to be a great PR to get the most out of BuzzStream. I mean, what BuzzStream does is enable you to send and kind of cultivate these relationships. Like I said, you know, when I worked at Siege Media, we use BuzzStream, and kind of the biggest thing was you create a piece of content, you want to build links to it, get coverage for it. So you're reaching out to journalists, finding journalists. BuzzStream does help you find journalists and find contact information for journalists, but it's not necessarily a media database. So you do have to kind of do your own digging and do your own validating to make sure that these journalists are relevant. And that's why I say you do kind of have to be a good PR to to pull that in. But what you get into with BuzzStream is then, okay, now I have my list of people and I can easily kind of personalize each of the emails much more quickly. And then the other end of it is also being able to lean on those repeat journalists and build relationships. So you have the contact history, you can see, oh, this person covered me on a campaign I did two months ago. I'm going to reach back out to them, and you already have a foot in the door because they covered you. Or maybe they rejected you, but they said, you know, contact me again. And it's like, oh, yeah, I have this. relationship with a journalist. I think what a lot of people do these days in PR is they have their kind of top priority list of journalists that they'll reach out to for every single campaign. And, you know, being able to identify those priority journalists for different industries, especially when you're at an agency and you're working in different industries all the time, different clients, or you might even have different people working on different clients at different times. You have that full visibility, and that's where I think the extreme value is, and just being able to kind of have that visibility and then being able to personalize based off of that.
Mike: I love it. I mean, you've alluded to the fact you've really got two sorts of customers a couple of times here. You've got the SEO side of your business, and you've got the digital PR pros. I mean, how do you approach marketing when you've got two different audiences like that?
Vince: Yeah, it's tough. I mean, you know, I was thinking about our newsletter, like I started a newsletter. That was one of the things we did. And I have a great, you know, our editor, our CMO, Stephen Panico, is great at kind of pushing me to focus all my pieces. What's the value here? What's the, you know, the UVP and everything. And one of the things we were struggling with was like, what's the value of this newsletter? What makes it different than, than all the other newsletters? So what I ended up coming down to was like, we kind of bridged that gap between PR and SEO because that is kind of my background, the SEO background with, you know, that's more digital PR. But I think That's kind of how I have to go about doing it is like tell both sides of the story. Right. But like I said, I am making a concerted effort nowadays to go more for the topics and keywords that have to do with. more traditional PR. Just, you know, we're working on a product that's right now a new feature that's kind of more in the traditional space, traditional PR space anyway. So kind of trying to set us up for that. But, you know, it's not to say that like SEO and the link building side is completely forgotten. I mean, I think it's still important to address how those still work, you know, like in their limited capacity, and then also how they can play into the broader kind of brand, the idea of a brand. So I think it's kind of pushing that messaging and kind of doing what I can to tie those two together wherever possible.
Mike: That's interesting, because as a B2B marketer, you seem very focused on building the BuzzStream brand itself. And obviously, you're doing some SEO whilst you do that. But how do you balance the requirement of getting that strong brand, but at the same time, driving some of those bottom of the funnel leads?
Vince: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, tactically, one of the first things I did, and I used to do all the time when I was at the agency, is we'd create these keyword lists. and balance them out based off of like where they appear in the funnel. So I think it's always important to have that mindset of like, you know, this is bottom funnel, this is middle funnel, this is top funnel. And What we would do is like we would use a metric from Ahrefs called traffic value. And so you look at the top ranking posts and see what kind of estimated traffic value they had. The traffic value came from like a PPC calculation. So based on that thought process of like using PPC to guide the value, Typically, the higher value keywords were also kind of more bottom funnel, right? Because those are the keywords that are getting clicked on. They're valuable for people for other sites. So we would use this and do the traffic value divided by the keyword difficulty. So if it's a really difficult keyword, But it's got a lot of traffic value, you know, like maybe we go after that. So it becomes kind of just this this math equation. And I have this whole sheet and I'm actually working on a case study right now for like my last year of where I walk through my exact keyword research process. And I can share that with with you, Mike. But I think it is kind of having that balance, right? Like, for me, if I'm working in a SaaS company, realistically, it's like you want to start with the bottom funnel. And that was what I did. Digital PR tools, email outreach tools, content marketing tools, like these types of posts that people are going to look at before wanting to purchase, right? I wanted to make sure I at least had those shored up before moving up the funnel. Then it became like, you know, you kind of said this earlier, but like, I think there's ways to achieve that brand awareness along with other goals. It's not just like, I'm going to raise my brand awareness. It's like, how am I going to do that? Can I create a post that is going to generate backlinks is going to generate a lot of social shares is going to generate. So I always kind of have that in mind of like, if I'm doing this, is there a way that I can leverage this post in a couple different ways for, you know, not only leads, but also the brand. Can I interview someone to get some quotes behind this? And then that becomes something I can use in social posts or something. So I think it's about kind of having that mindset of like, how can I get multi uses out of all the content that you do?
Mike: Yeah, I love that. I mean, you know, a lot of people talk about content reuse, but I love that concept of being able to use that same blog post to achieve two goals. I think that's a really interesting idea. I just want to switch gears a bit and talk, you know, maybe about things, you know, at a higher level now, more generally in terms of marketing. There's been a lot of change in technology. How do you see that impacting content marketing? And what should content marketers be doing to remain effective and successful over the next five years?
Vince: Well, if things change as rapidly as they did in the last year, for the next five years, it's going to be a very different landscape. But it's interesting. I just read something last week or earlier on. I'm trying to remember where I read this. Basically I said this idea that like chat GPT and AI, like obviously they're the biggest things when you ask that question, Mike, like that's the first thing that popped out is like, you know, AI and how that is going to impact everything. That's where my mind goes. I mean, the other things are probably what like the department of justice is going to do to Google here in the, in the States and how that's going to impact SEO and But for now, let's talk AI, because I think what the thing that I read was basically that like AI is getting to a point where it's like it's getting harder and harder for them to kind of iterate and get better. And I think one of the reasons they said in this article was because they're running out of new information to train on. Right. So there's only so much information out there and that makes up this kind of corpus of information and this large language model that they're pulling from. So I think. What's going to happen in the next few years is just, you know, it's going to almost become like SEO, but for AI, right? Like SEO, AI, whatever you want to call it, AI optimization, where the game is going to be how do you show up in these large language models and The thing that a lot of people talk about is information gain and all of your content. And I think this, this is what I do now and what people should be doing is thinking about how I can always be inserting something new, never just saying something that is already out there and reiterating. So like if you're looking at it from a keywords perspective, like there's going to be keywords out there that AI is going to be able to answer easily. That's going to drive people to do their research on AI. And then when they come to your site, they're going to be more primed to buy. They're going to have all that kind of top level information they're going to need. So with information gain, you want to constantly be feeding new information where that kind of plays into relating it back to like digital PR. And it is this idea of like, data-driven content, whatever you can do to put fresh proprietary data. It doesn't necessarily have to be data. I guess it could also be like expert opinions and quotes from people who are experts. And this is why Google is pushing so much on people might have heard of like the EEAT, experience, authority, expertise, and trust. Google wants that from the content. They don't want you to just regurgitate stuff that already exists out there. So I think the recipe for success going forward is pushing as much of your own new information into these large language models and trying to associate your brand with those as well. So if I'm saying, you know, BuzzStream email outreach tool found whatever XYZ statistic, like that, as many times as I can associate my name with those things, I want people to find BuzzStream, you know, like a email outreach tool, digital PR tool, whatever. that's going to just potentially make me show up more in the large language model. So it's a long way of saying I think the future is going to be optimizing for those. And I think the way to do it is to provide new information that doesn't exist and only you have, only your brand has.
Mike: I love that. I mean, that's quite intimidating as a challenge to keep finding new information, but I think it's something where we can all be optimistic that we can keep adding value and keep winning against AI, which I think for particularly brands and not the market leaders, it sometimes feels quite hard to break through, doesn't it, in an AI model.
Vince: I kind of disagree. Well, let's just say I disagree. Like, I don't think it should be intimidating. And here's why. Because I think there's a couple easy things that any brand can do. And when I talk to journalists, one of the things I always ask them is, if I'm a brand new brand, right? Do you even care about hearing from me? Do you look for the bigger brands when you're sourcing a story? And at the end of the day, the story is what drives any journalist to talk about something. So it doesn't really seem to matter. There are definitely certain industries that might be tough to find compelling stories for, but you just kind of have to shift your mindset. Even with us in digital PR right now, like for BuzzStream, there are so many key players right now in this space. It's like, I can't put out a survey that appeals to like a general audience. I need to put out a survey or data study. I need to put something out that relates to our specific audience. So what I'm doing is this like state of digital PR big study where it's like, you know, I'm creating this data myself by just surveying other expert individuals in the space. So I think really any industry can do that type of survey. It just becomes kind of, you know, you're maybe not to your first question or earlier question of like it, maybe it's not going to be a lead generator for you, but it's going to become like a thought. leadership play, more of a brand play, which isn't always bad. Like I said, it's always important to have that balance of those two things. And sorry, I kind of buried the lead there. The way to actually create this new information, surveys are an easy way that anybody can do it, I think. Getting proprietary data is another one. I think the other one is just gathering expert opinions from thought leaders at your company. that to me is proprietary information. It's maybe not data, but that's proprietary information that doesn't exist anywhere else. So you might be an expert on something very specific, even if you work in whatever construction or something that's like a really, you know, I remember working on like surety bonds here in the States when I was agency and that was really tough. But like there's going to come a time when a journalist needs to know about that. It's just you might have to change your expectations a little bit. It's like you're not going to go out and build a hundred links, get coverage, you know, a hundred different places. But in some of these smaller industries, like think about it from this vantage point, there's probably not a lot of players in these niche industries. So you don't need as much to stand out as well. You know, and think about from the large language model perspective, it's like, again, if you're in a niche industry, there's not going to be probably a ton of information about that. So I think it's doable for pretty much anybody. It's just, yeah, maybe the expectations of those like quality over quantity, I think, is the conversation you have to have then.
Mike: That seems to be a message of the podcast is quality over quantity is what really matters today. Yeah. Vincent has been really interesting. We'd like to finish with a couple of quick fire questions. So first thing I want to ask you is what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given? And I'm not going to let you say quality over quantity.
Vince: You know, I think back to one of the first books I ever read in marketing, it was Seth Godin, Permission Marketing. And just this idea of like, you know, a person's inbox is so important to them, they need to give you permission to interrupt them, right? So like, what value are you going to give them? so that they will give you the permission to interrupt their inbox, their flow, their whatever. I mean, it was written years ago, but I think it really still applies today, and especially in the space that I'm in. But like, you know, I think about all the newsletters. I feel like email newsletters are such a big brand play these days, big marketing play, that it's still 1,000% relevant.
Mike: I love it. That's great. I remember reading that book when it came out as well. The second question we want to ask you is, what advice would you give to somebody who's starting marketing as their career?
Vince: I think as much as I like that course I took, there are so many courses out there to give you bare bones of something, but I wouldn't rely on that 100%. I would try to either build something yourself, which is not always realistic because it takes a lot of time and money and I've been in those places. I think the better play is to try to get a paid internship at an agency because you're going to get exposed to so much stuff and try to find somebody there, a mentor that you can pick their brain and even if it's an unpaid internship and you're in school or something, you're going to get out of it what you bring into it. So like ask as many questions as possible. It's like, you know, they're not going to fire you if you're an unpaid internship, right? So like you should be trying to get invited to meetings, client meetings, ideation meetings. Even if your job is getting coffee, it's like try to insert yourself in as much as possible. Just be a sponge. That's what's really going to make all the difference, I think.
Mike: That's great advice. I mean, at Napier, we're very keen on getting people in. We always pay our interns. And also, in the UK, we have this apprenticeship scheme, which is amazing for marketing. So if anybody is starting their career, please do contact me, and we'd be more than happy to take you on in the UK. Vince, this has been, you know, fascinating. I'm sure people would, you know, probably love some more information, you know, maybe about you, maybe about, you know, finding out more about BuzzStream. So how can people get some more information if they want to contact you and find out more?
Vince: Yeah, I'm very active on LinkedIn. I just got on Blue Sky. So check me out there on either of those. I would say subscribe to our email newsletter. It's something I spend a lot of time, too. We also have a podcast. But yeah, LinkedIn. And like Mike said, if you're new and thinking of internship or just thinking of getting into the industry, my chats are always open. Feel free to reach out. I'm happy to, like, schedule a call and chat through that kind of stuff too. So very open to helping.
Mike: That's very kind. I really appreciate it. I know people who are starting would appreciate that as well. Vince, it's been fascinating. And thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast.
Vince: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Mike. And I really appreciate the time and the chat.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Lead Generation: The Power of Quiz Marketing - Maxwell Nee - ScoreApp
Maxwell Nee, Chief Revenue Officer at ScoreApp, joins Mike to discuss quiz marketing and how businesses can engage potential customers through interactive quizzes that not only entertain but also provide valuable insights into their needs.
Maxwell shares his thoughts on the evolving marketing landscape and emphasizes the importance of personal connections, as audiences increasingly seek authenticity and transparency from the brands they engage with.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About ScoreApp
ScoreApp is a lead generation and customer engagement platform that helps businesses create interactive scorecards to capture valuable data, qualify leads, and personalize user experiences. By using tailored assessments, businesses can gather insights about their audience, streamline onboarding processes, and enhance marketing strategies. This data-driven approach empowers businesses to convert leads into loyal customers effectively. ScoreApp is widely used across various industries, including coaching, finance, and fitness, to boost engagement and drive results
About Maxwell Nee
Maxwell Nee is the Chief Revenue Officer of Scoreapp, a Quiz Marketing Platform with 6,800 paying clients. He's also a multi-award winning entrepreneur, bodybuilder & dancer. He’s been featured in TV, Radio, Forbes, Singapore’s The Business Times & The Australian Business Review.
Time Stamps
00:00:42 - Maxwell Nee's Career Journey
00:01:43 - What is ScoreApp?
00:02:23 - Quiz Marketing Explained
00:06:17 - Setting Up a Campaign with ScoreApp
00:09:41 - Balancing Brand and Lead Generation
00:12:04 - Future of Marketing Tools
00:12:57 - The Importance of Personal Connections
00:17:06 - Actionable Advice for Quiz Marketing
00:18:42 - Key Marketing Advice
00:20:46 - Advice for Young Marketers
00:21:55 - Contact Information and Book Reminder
Quotes
"I totally burnt out, realized I hated it, couldn't be an employee anymore, and jumped into the self-employed world." Maxwell Nee, Chief Revenue Officer at ScoreApp
"It uses quiz marketing. So uses the engagement of filling out like a quiz or like a personal assessment." Maxwell Nee, Chief Revenue Officer at ScoreApp
"Our internal mantra is that we're here to force our customers to be successful." Maxwell Nee, Chief Revenue Officer at ScoreApp
Follow Maxwell:
Maxwell Nee on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwellnee/
ScoreApp website: https://www.scoreapp.com/
ScoreApp on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/scoreapp/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Maxwell Nee at ScoreApp
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Maxwell Nee
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. I'm Mike Maynard, and today I'm joined by Maxwell Nee, who's the Chief Revenue Officer at ScoreApp. Welcome to the podcast, Maxwell.
Max: Hey, Mike. Thank you so much for having me.
Mike: Well, it's great to have you on. I mean, the first thing we'd like to do is let you tell us a bit about your career and how you've got into the role that you're currently holding.
Max: Yeah, good question. So I started off my career in corporate banking for Australia's largest bank, and then totally burnt out, realized I hated it, couldn't be an employee anymore, and jumped into the self-employed world. Started off by launching a digital marketing agency that then evolved into an online education business where we were selling online courses. And, you know, Score app was actually one of the tools that we used to use to help generate leads and sales for our business. So one thing led to another. I invested in the company, you know, was a bit like of a strategic advisor, you know, making introductions to the company. And then most recently came on to the team to help us scale. I live in Singapore, but to help us scale around this area, Asia Pacific.
Mike: Interesting. So, I mean, I think the first question I really need to ask is, you know, what does ScoreApp do? Can you explain what the product offers people?
Max: Yeah, great. So it helps small, big, any size type of business collect data and generate highly qualified leads. So it's a lead generation tool that you can use to generate leads for a personal trainer, for a big enterprise company, for an accounting firm, financial services, all that type of stuff.
Mike: I mean, I've had a play with it. I love the way it works. You know, basically, it does it by doing these rate my activity, whatever it is. So, you know, whether it's looking at energy efficiency for potential enterprise customers or fitness for a personal trainer, I mean, it really is a simple quiz with a ranking at the end. Is that a good summary?
Max: Yeah, so it's a, it uses quiz marketing. So uses the engagement of filling out like a quiz or like a personal assessment. So like a very, very common one is like, find out which Hollywood movie star, your personality is most like, right? Which ones most you that pulls people in because there's a lot of curiosity, there's a lot of intrigue, there's a little bit of vanity. So you know, if you're that person, who am I, right? So there's like a self identification process. And so we offer all of your clients that engaging process for them to become a highly qualified lead for you.
Mike: But as I understand, it doesn't have to be pure fun, you can actually help people assess where they are with, you know, for example, particular processes, Napier could assess, you know, how well potential clients are doing marketing, and then use that to not only drive leads, but also, you know, initiate that discussion. Is that right?
Max: Yeah, 100%. So there's a few different use cases. One use case is using it for lead generation and sales. We have one client testimonial who is a personal branding expert. And branding is, as you would know, a very intangible thing. You can't just walk around saying, oh, your brand is crap because it's a very subjective thing. But she's found a way to help people measure the effectiveness of their personal brand so that she could then go help them. And that's her lead generation and sales tool. And then you've got people that use it as a customer progress thing. So if you work with your customers or your clients, say over a 12-month period, you might give them an assessment at the beginning, middle, and end to track their progress as they move through their work with you.
Mike: That sounds great. I mean, I love that idea of quiz marketing. I've not heard that term before. And I think it's interesting. I think a lot of people, and particularly our clients in the enterprise space, it's harder and harder to do the classic content marketing, offering a white paper behind the registration wall. It sounds like this is a, you know, not necessarily a new approach, but certainly a different approach that could be quite intriguing and also quite fresh from the point of view of prospects.
Max: Yeah, it's, you know, we had one person that was doing something very similar in the States, and we've recently acquired them. So as a result of that, and even before that, there's not many people doing quiz marketing and offering it as a service so other people can use it as well. So it is refreshing, it is unique, and it is, you know, quite special.
Mike: So in terms of actually using the product, I mean, is it a complicated thing or do you literally, you know, just come up with a set of questions and score them? I mean, how does it work?
Max: Yeah, so it used to be quite complicated. You know, the average time it would take someone about a day and a half. That's a bit like setting up a new website, playing around with all the buttons, tools, moving things around, colors, fonts, and all that type of stuff. But now we have plugged in an AI wizard that you just answer a quiz and the AI wizard takes your answers, then comes back and writes six or seven hours of copywriting and writes a whole marketing campaign for you. Now, that's like having your first draft of your assignment, you know, university assignment written for you, then you should go back in there and polish it up.
Mike: And you said there's a broad range. So, you know, I mean, a lot of the people listening to this enterprise marketers in the B2B tech space, you know, presumably, you can offer functionality that large enterprises can't build easily on their website.
Max: Yeah, well, we can, you know, and we're very nimble, nimble, fast, and it's so cheap for what it does. You know, there's there's a free version. There's £29 a month, £59. I think it goes up to about £99 by the end of it. Right. So there's there's really an option for everyone. You could step your way into it as well.
Mike: And can you just walk me through, I mean, what someone might do? I mean, let's say they're trying to build a campaign. What would be the process and how straightforward is it using ScoreApp?
Max: It's just like setting up a Facebook profile, you know, Facebook profile, LinkedIn profile, a website for the first time. You create an account, you jump in, you could use AI wizard or you could set it up yourself. Either way, if you get stuck, our head of customer success in the UK, she does a session every Tuesday, where she sits on Zoom, helps people five to one, 10 to one, sometimes one to one, and helps you to get set up. So, you know, our internal mantra is that we're here to force our customers to be successful. So we're really leaving nothing off the table.
Mike: I love that. That's a great approach. I think there's a lot of customers that love to be forced to be successful.
Max: Yeah, exactly. Right. And especially, I think it's also quite refreshing in the enterprise, you know, software world, right? Because it's very rare, you might get to talk to someone on a zoom call, it's very rare, you get to see the face of someone, you know, on a chat on a webinar or whatever. But we're doing webinars for new existing clients every other week. And plus, we have the setup and score webinar every week.
Mike: One thing I'm interested in is the promotion of these tools. I mean, we see, you know, these kind of quizzes a lot on social. Is social the most effective way or do you see clients or customers of yours, you know, promoting through email or other channels?
Max: I get, you know, this question is more about, you know, what's your business model? You know, is your business model trying to appeal to the masses? Then yeah, you know, the masses aren't social. But if your business model is a little bit more laser focus, you know, one to one type of thing, then that's also very, very, you know, powerful as well. So I'll give you an example. Really high-end personal trainers use their own quiz funnel where, for example, they'll take you in. You say, hey, look, here are my fitness goals. They'll take you in into a body scanning thing, which is basically a quiz funnel, right? And then that body scan will give you a result, and then they'll sit there and work out a really tailored plan for you. And that's very, very one-to-one and high-touch, right? They don't give out the free scans to everyone. Where you promote it comes back to where's your audience? You know, where's your clients? Where's your target audience?
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. And I think, you know, let's switch gears and talk about how you're promoting a score out now. So I guess quiz marketing is one of the ways you're doing this, but can you talk about what your marketing strategy is for score out?
Max: Yeah, so we have a few, right? So we're very effective on YouTube. You know, we've got a lot of YouTube videos that the views on all of them, like the minutes that people are watching them and getting value out of them is compounding, you know, every month, growing by, you know, say 2 to 5% every single month. And then, you know, we've obviously got written articles, because this product is very educational. And we have this book The founder's written a book called Scorecard Marketing and it breaks down why this works, how it works, the psychology of it. So if you're into marketing psychology, it's a great read. And then it gets into the tangibles of what you need to do to make this thing go.
Mike: Awesome. That's really interesting. It sounds like you're actually striking quite a big balance. You're a product that fundamentally is a lead gen product. But it sounds like a lot of what you're doing is around building the brand. So you're getting that balance between brand and lead gen. Is that your goal? Is that what you're trying to achieve?
Max: Yeah, so let me share with you our brand guidelines, you know, like our values and that type of thing. So it's three words. The first word is elegant. The next word is powerful. And the third word is fun. So we want everything we do to be elegant, powerful and fun, you know, so elegant in the terms of Yeah, we want an ecosystem of our brand and our service and everything else. We want to be on YouTube. We want to be on podcasts. We want to be on LinkedIn. We want to be face to face. I'm going to be bringing the brand to the world's largest affiliate marketing conference in Bangkok next weekend. So we want to be at physical events as well. We want to be doing our own events. So, because our product has so many clients, more than 6,500 clients, I picture it as like a waterfall. And then you have the water dripping down into the correct places, right?
Mike: And that's interesting. I mean, you talk about clients and the way you're dripping them down as a waterfall. But I think one of the interesting things is, fundamentally, you're a B2B product. You're selling to other businesses. But your pricing is certainly not at the level that a lot of enterprise products are. So do you think, you know, your approach is somewhat B2C in the way you approach people? Are you seeing people, you know, bringing in ScoreApp into an enterprise almost without permission?
Max: Yeah, you could say that, you know, the vast majority, I'd say at least 90% of our clients make less than half a million dollars a year. Right. So that's, you know, just how the numbers have landed the threshold. You know, it is a very dynamic and malleable tool. It's a bit like, you know, MailChimp or like an email database tool. You know, who can use that? A mom and dad can use that. If you're selling cookies, you could use that, you know, HubSpot can use that, right, or Salesforce. Our tool is a little bit like that. It's up and down the ladder.
Mike: And I think it's interesting as well. I mean, not only is there a trend to kind of treat this B2B sales process a little bit more like B2C, but also I think in B2B customers are spending less time, you know, talking to salespeople, more time doing their own research. And that seems to be driving a big uptake in SaaS tools like ScoreApp. I mean, do you think, you know, your sales process really is taking advantage of the fact that people quite like self-serve today?
Max: I think that people want a choice, to be honest. We have a lot of clients that come in and they say, who could I pay to just set this up for me and I'll pay the money to be able to pick up the phone and talk to someone. So I think that people always have their personal preferences. Me personally, I'm a bit more of a who can I pay type of guy. As long as the price isn't unreasonable, I'm always happy to pay more but just take the problem away because I want to move on to the next thing. Right. So I think that you want to be able to cater to you want to have a service offering that's like, you know, low, medium and high range. Right.
Mike: And do you see those low, medium, high range, do you see them almost stretching across the customers? So any size customer could pick any one of those three options, or are you thinking more like small business, medium business, and enterprise?
Max: No, no, 100%. I think even a small business might just say, I'd rather just pay someone to take this off my hands type of thing. And a big business might say, we'd rather just do it ourselves, right? So it really just comes down to personal preference.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. One interesting thing, I mean, obviously, you know, you're part of this technical change we're seeing in marketing. I mean, the rise of MarTech has been phenomenal. What do you see happening over the next five years in terms of marketing tools? And how is that going to change the role of people that are, you know, actually leading marketing organizations?
Max: I think that we all know where it's going. It's going to this almost dystopian, ultra-digital, ultra-personalized… What's the most effective? The most effective is when I log into Amazon.com, and you log into Amazon.com, we both see completely different websites because it's got 10 years of your buying history, 10 years of my buying history, and our buying histories are different. So it's ultra personalized and that's the most effective because they want to get as many sales out of me as possible and so they should. So they want to personalize my experience. So that's one element. Ultra personalization, AI doing a lot of the administrative heavy lifting, we all already know that's coming. It's actually been here for a while. What I do think that people don't really have an eye on is Donald Trump just won the election, right? And he won it by less than 5 million votes. A few days before voting, like the week before voting week, he was on a few key podcasts, including the Joe Rogan podcast, which got 50 million views within 72 hours, just unheard of. And not a lot of those were from America, but you could say and you could infer that the marketing of the presidential election was swayed. was swayed by one podcast, which is a free piece of media, not controlled by a news corporation, but controlled by just some entrepreneur. How crazy is that? And then if you go deeper into how that works and why it works so well, I think that a lot of people like, yeah, you can watch Donald Trump go at it with Kamala Harris at the debates. Or you could sit there and watch Joe Rogan connect with him as a human being and get to know who the guy actually really is out of the hot spotlights and out of the rehearsed question and answering. I think that's totally underrated.
Mike: I mean, that's fascinating. That again is, you know, to some extent looking at the, if you like the consumerization of B2B marketing, you know, it's becoming, I think if you extend the analogy to B2B, it's important that you get to know the personalities in your supplier and building those relationships, even their parasocial relationships. I think what you're saying is going to be more and more important. Is that right?
Max: Yes, I think that the numbers, those numbers I just shared about Donald Trump winning the election, prove that if the world's making a big purchasing decision, like the decision of who's going to be president, they want to know who that person is, what are they like, outside of all the rehearsed questions and answers. And wouldn't you? Wouldn't I? I do. So that's one example of a purchasing decision. I think that filters down to all purchasing decisions. If someone is buying an enterprise SaaS thing, they want to know, okay, what type of company is this? Is this a company that doesn't care about their carbon footprint? Is it making an effort? Is it a company that's leading that space? It's not. Is it a company that has equal employment rights? It's not. Who's the CEO? Is there a company that represents that they care a lot about this stuff, but the CEO actually doesn't? I think people want to know that stuff and there's not enough urgency on that stuff really matters. It's not nice to have, it matters now and people care about it now and Donald Trump demonstrated that.
Mike: And again, I think that applies to a lot of B2B companies that think it's purely the specs of their product that matter, where actually there's a lot more behind that. I mean, Max, this has been really interesting. One of the things we'd like to do is give listeners something, you know, actionable they can take away. So I'd like to ask you, you know, a couple of questions to get your advice. I mean, the first question I've got to ask is if you're thinking about doing a quiz marketing program, I mean, what would be your advice to create a really effective quiz marketing program?
Max: Well, I can give you something. So this book, Scorecard Marketing, if you go to scoreapp.com forward slash book, we'll get you out a physical copy whilst we can. If you live in the UK, we can. We definitely can. If not, you get a PDF. So that book is a real deeper dive. And some people like to get very technical, really like to understand what's underneath the surface. So that helps you to get what's underneath the surface as to why it works, how it works, and how you can execute it the best way possible. And then, yeah, you know, jump on one of our weekly, bi-weekly webinars so that you can start to see, you know, why we've got, you know, more than 6,500 clients that are winning with this thing. And we know that because they're high paying and long term clients.
Mike: Awesome. No, I think that's good advice. And certainly, you know, getting the book seems like a great start. If we look more generally, though, and let's move away just from quiz marketing, to marketing in general, I'm interested, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Max: Oh, good question. So I think that a lot of businesses, you know, overcomplicate things, or they overestimate things. And what I mean by that is, you know, typically all the answers to how to market your business, what to do and that type of thing, they're already out there. right? And sometimes I think we can get a little bit caught up with trying to find the answer on our own or trying to reinvent the wheel a little bit. When if you just look at some of the big businesses and if you look at them really closely, they found out what works and they do the same thing over and over and over again. I'll give you an example. Apple releases the same products every year. They look a little bit different, there's different colors, but it's the same thing. And everyone knows it's coming, it's no surprise. So there's no need to be constantly painting a new Mona Lisa every year or whatever. It's just repeat what works. And often, you're not special, I'm not special. Our businesses have been invented before, maybe in a different shape. But just take the shape of what worked before and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. Another example is Tesla. Whenever Elon launches a new product, he does the same thing. He launches a wait list, gets some expression of interest, and I'm sure he takes that expression of interest wait list, then goes to the bank, then gets it funded, then builds it. He doesn't build a million road suits, which none of us have one yet. You know what I mean? And that was launched five years ago. He gets the interest, He gets the waiting list, he gets the deposits, and then he works it out after. And he keeps doing that because it keeps working and it's the smartest way to do it. You know, so there's a, there's a smart way that someone's already figured out how to market your business. So I would just take that and run with it.
Mike: Awesome. I think that's great advice. And then the other question we like to ask for, you know, people who are listening, if they're just starting in their careers is what would be your advice to a young person right at the start of their marketing career?
Max: Oh yeah. I left my corporate life in my mid-twenties and chased the entrepreneurial thing. And I've got all these friends that are multi-millionaires, large numbers in front of me. And they all started five years earlier, six years earlier. And so I wish that I jumped into what I really wanted, which is to be an entrepreneur earlier. And yeah, you know, it's hard to do that if you don't have a mentor, like a lot of them had their dads are entrepreneurs. So that was easier. Mine, mine sort of wasn't right. But I wish I had the foresight to just find one, you know, find a mentor to just stick to, which is a challenger within itself. But at least that that makes the action is clear in that case, right?
Mike: Absolutely. I think that's that's great advice. I mean, go for it, I think is the summary there. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Max, I really appreciate your time. I know you're busy. I'm sure people will have questions here, either about marketing using Score app or more general marketing questions. What's the best way for people to contact you if they'd like more information? And maybe you can also throw in a reminder of how to get the book as well.
Max: Yeah, so we'd love to get your copy of the book. You know, you can do physical or digital. It's SCOREAPP.com forward slash book. And then if you want to get a hold of me, I'm addicted to LinkedIn. So Maxwell Knee on LinkedIn. You'll get me there.
Mike: Max, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. I really appreciate it. It's been fascinating.
Max: Perfect. My pleasure. Thanks, Mike.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
From Newsletters to Automation: Maximizing Your Marketing Efforts in a Digital World
Hannah Wehrly and Mike Maynard explore Acton’s innovative AI web agent and examine the often overlooked potential of SMS marketing in B2B communications. The discussion also highlights findings from the Liana State of Marketing Automation Report, including the surprising prioritization of newsletters over advanced tools like A/B testing. In addition, Napier’s A/B testing eBook is mentioned, offering valuable strategies for optimizing your landing pages and emails to boost performance and achieve better results. Finally, the insightful tip of the week offers practical strategies for pitching marketing automation to your boss, focusing on the benefits of increased sales leads, improved efficiency, and significant time savings.
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcast
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Wehrly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
[00:00:00] - Introduction
[00:01:12] - Acton's New AI Web Agent
[00:04:02] - Exploring SMS Marketing in B2B
[00:09:10] - Insights from the Liana State of Marketing Automation Report
[00:15:31] - How to Sell Marketing Automation to Your Boss
[00:17:06] - Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: From Newsletters to Automation: Maximizing Your Marketing Efforts in a Digital World
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wherly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Whaley.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard.
Hannah: Today we discuss the new AI web agent from Acton.
Mike: We debate whether SMS is one way to reach B2B audiences.
Hannah: We discuss a market automation trends report.
Mike: And Hannah explains to me how to sell the concept of market automation to your boss.
Hannah: Hi, Mike. Welcome back to another episode of Market Automation Moment. How are you doing? Are you feeling as tired as I am from Germany last week?
Mike: Yeah, I'm certainly feeling tired, Hannah. It's great to be talking to you, but we did have a whole week last week traipsing around an enormous trade show. I mean, it seems amazing. Here we are talking about market automation, and yet in marketing, you still have to do things like trade shows.
Hannah: Oh, definitely. I think we all thought it was going to die out after COVID, but unfortunately, that wasn't quite the way.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, we did some amazing calculations as to how much money was spent on trade shows. If only a part of that was spent on market automation, I wonder what the results would be.
Hannah: Oh, absolutely. Well, let's dive in, Mike. We've got a few updates to discuss in this week's episode, and I actually want to have a chat about Apton. Now, Apton is a marketing automation platform that we haven't mentioned for a few episodes, but I thought it was really interesting because they've announced some news about their new AI web agent. Now, this is a really fancy way of saying that basically it's an upgrade from chatbots. It's something that can be embedded into their customers' websites. I think it's going to be quite cool. I think they are really promoting kind of like the ease of being able to set it up. You don't have to do all the background stuff that you normally have to do for chatbots, but do you think it's something that customers will use?
Mike: That's a great question, Hannah. I mean, I think definitely people are going to use it. One of the biggest problems with chatbots is all the training. I do notice that, you know, with Acton's materials, they said setting up is a few days, so it's clearly not all automatic. And I think everyone's going to worry about hallucinations. We did recently a webinar on AI, and we had two of the three AIs randomly generating product availability in a sample press release we got them to create. You know, that's going to be a worry if you've got the risk of these hallucinations. Potentially the chatbot might give the wrong answers.
Hannah: Oh, I think that's a great point, Mike. And I mean, I guess it depends on how they are going to program it, because chatbots are programmed for very specific responses. And then it was, you know, reach out to a person. But if this is going to be next level, then are they perhaps going to set up parameters or is it possible to set up those parameters to avoid these hallucinations, to avoid these wrong answers?
Mike: Yeah, I think it'd be interesting to see. I mean, normally, ragging, so looking up data and then the generative AI responding, doesn't generate hallucinations. In fact, I mean, overall, when we tested five different chatbots, we found that it wasn't that bad. But I think for, you know, particularly B2B companies, the potential cost of even one wrong answer could be huge, you know, a loss of a major customer. And so I think people have got to look at it, and I think they've got to be very careful in terms of the testing. I'm not saying don't do it. I think AI is definitely going to drive a lot more interaction in terms of chatbots and websites. And that's not just inevitable, that's a good thing. But I think, you know, the important thing in deployment is to be very careful and to do very controlled testing until you know you can be confident that what the chatbot is saying is correct, and then start rolling it out more broadly.
Hannah: I think that's a great bit of advice, Mike. And I think it's something that companies definitely need to take on board. I mean, even us at Napier, we wouldn't do anything without some thorough testing. So, you know, it's definitely a topic I'd like to pick up maybe early, middle of next year, just to see how it's gone, how this rollout has gone and how people have been finding it.
Mike: Definitely. I think it's a good idea to come back and see some of the success stories. It'd be great to hear how it has helped people.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, let's move on to something slightly different because I actually came across a webinar from MailChimp and you know, to be truthful, the webinar was a few months ago. It's not something new, but I thought it would be a really great piece of conversation for us because the webinar was actually on the power of SMS marketing. So basically texting, you know. And I wanted to have a chat because I think this is a very B2C thing. We have conversations all the time about how B2C tries to encroach on B2B and perhaps the tactics and the activities that B2C use. aren't successful in B2B. But what do we think of texting as part of a marketing tactic? Is it something that's really going to take off in our industry? Is it something that people are just going to ignore? I'm actually on the side of that I don't know how successful this would be, but what do you think?
Mike: I thought you were the young person in this podcast that was supposedly into texting. I still use phones for actually making calls. I'm told people your age don't. I mean, in all seriousness, Hannah, I think it's an interesting question. My personal gut feel is that there's a bit of a problem. because a lot of the time you'll be trying to reach out to people and it'll be their personal mobile that you're reaching out to. So I think that could be an issue for quite a long time, certainly outside of certain groups like, for example, trying to reach salespeople who typically have a company mobile. I think that there is a bit of a a barrier if you try and do some business on somebody's personal device. So I can definitely see that being a problem. I also think probably the biggest issue is, and us B2B marketers have to admit, a lot of B2B campaigns don't have anything that really justifies a text. you know, hey, do you want to read our next white paper? Just put it in email, that's absolutely fine. I'm not going to read your white paper because it's on a PDF. It's so it's clearly not going to be usable on the phone. A text doesn't really work for. So I think it'll be interesting to see where people find use cases. I mean, to me, you know, there's some obvious things we can be doing. And some things people have already started doing, you know, texting people before meetings to remind them. And I think, for example, particularly at trade shows where we've just been, sending an SMS just to let people know that they're due for a meeting, that's probably a very sensible thing to do. And marketing can definitely help sales by doing that.
Hannah: Oh, I think that's a great point, Mike. I guess what you're saying here is that it really depends on the messaging. You know, you send an e-book and sometimes you could send an e-book via email and that gets deleted straight away. But you're right, doing this kind of to their personal phone numbers, you could really risk, you know, upsetting people and really ruining your brand perception. But I think it'd be interesting to see what type of use cases people use it for. You know, I love that trade show idea. That's helpful, but that's not really, in my opinion, I really use an SMS for marketing. So maybe what we're saying is that it's not really necessarily marketing your content out. Maybe it's for real specific uses to support what you're already doing with the contact you're speaking with.
Mike: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Hannah, it's a really good summary. I mean, the problem is, is most of marketing today is driven around content. And if we're honest, most of B2B content looks pretty terrible on a phone, particularly the PDF format content, of which there's a lot. So, you know, generally speaking, the classic, you know, B2B campaign is promote some content, put it into a PDF, put it behind a registration wall. that doesn't really work on mobile unless your content is super friendly to mobile. And that's really hard to do on PDF. So it's going to be interesting to see what people do. I certainly think there's an opportunity for some creative things, you know, around events, as we talked about, and maybe around follow up as well. So in terms of when people download content that's gated, perhaps, you know, SMS is one route to follow up. But it'll be interesting to see, you know, which campaigns actually use SMS in B2B and which of those campaigns are successful. And indeed, you know, which markets it works in and which markets it really doesn't succeed in. And I'm sure there'll be markets, you know, and possibly engineering is one where, you know, engineers can be quite protective over their personal devices and may not want marketing materials sent.
Hannah: Yeah, I think that's a great point Mike and I think the only thing I would add to that is perhaps it is the next stage of outside of marketing and that is sales and maybe SMS marketing can be used to support kind of that sales process and that sales journey and speaking to your prospect to try and close the deal rather than people that you don't know.
Mike: Yeah, you're so right. I think what will happen is absolutely we'll see more and more SMS being used in sales and then that eventually will roll out to marketing and we'll start seeing it impinging on some marketing later. So great point Hannah, love that.
Hannah: Well, Mike, I want to hand over to you because you actually came across a report and I know you had a few views on this. So why don't you share some of the figures and data that you saw and we'll have a chat about it.
Mike: You're talking about the Liana state of marketing automation report. I mean, I think that was a really interesting report for a couple of reasons. It's hard to know exactly, but my gut feel is that probably this isn't necessarily that applicable to a lot of listeners because it's not so enterprise driven. It's much more SME driven. But there's some interesting findings. So, you know, the first thing is, is they asked people who weren't adopting marketing automation, what was holding them back, you know, number one was cost, number two was resources, and number three was skills. But then when they asked people who chose a marketing automation tool, what drove the choice, only about a quarter were driven by price, which I find very interesting. You know, marketing automation is not a cheap tool, you know, particularly if you look at HubSpot, which even for an SME is probably going to be over £1,000 or $1,000 a month. You know, what mattered to people was ease of use and the features that were offered. And then actually third, data visualization analytics, the kind of, you know, pretty eye candy you get from marketing automation. So kind of an interesting message there to marketing automation vendors, really around, you know, they need to be thinking about ease of use And I think although, as I say, the sample here is probably SME driven, perhaps this is something also that buyers in enterprise should think about. You know, buyers in enterprise, I think, look very much on features and integration. And we hear a lot of people talking about that. But actually, ease of use is important in enterprise too, we're all short of resources.
Hannah: Oh, I love this viewpoint, Mike, because I think there's two categories here. And it's really interesting because as you said, you know, the cost is really important and people choose the market automation platform. But once they get over that hurdle, and you know, we'll talk a little bit later in our insightful tip of the week about how to sell market automation to your boss, then it really comes into those nitty gritties. And the truth of the matter is, is that, you know, enterprise companies typically go for someone like Marketo. But actually, I think I'm fair in saying that ease of use isn't probably Marketo's top benefit. And sometimes they get lost in the platform where their activities of what they're doing will be much suited for something like a HubSpot. So it's interesting to see because I don't think people actually go based off of these type of priorities at the moment.
Mike: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. The enterprise decision sometimes is driven by an ideal situation that doesn't exist. There's some other cool stuff in this report as well. Actually, because we do a lot with clients, this isn't a surprise to us. But they asked, what were the activities people did using market automation workflows? And number one was newsletters. And newsletters was so far ahead, the biggest one. I mean, it was two and a half times more frequently used than the next one, which is segmenting contacts, which is a bit scary because it does say that, you know, actually less than half the people who send newsletters bother with any segmentation. So that's a bit worrying. And then if you look at something like A-B testing down at 20%, So 90% send newsletters, only 20% do any A-B testing. And I think, you know, one of the things that we have seen a lot with clients is people buy marketing automation platforms and then they use them as though they're email systems. And so they're paying an awful lot of money and possibly going through a little bit more complexity of use to do something that could be done a lot simpler and a lot cheaper.
Hannah: Well, I think the first thing I'll say, Mike, is we shouldn't knock newsletters. It is a bit of a scary figure, but we run our monthly Napier News newsletter, and I think it's one of the best things that we do. So I do see why that's so high up on the list. I agree. A-B testing being down at 20% scares me as well. And actually what we'll do is we'll drop a link in our notes, but people should check out our A-B testing ebook because we do share some really cool ideas about how you can A-B test your landing pages, your emails. And I think people think it's scarier than it actually is, but it's really simple and it can be really easy. But I think that also relates to what you said that people are just using this as a mass email system. They're not using it with the creativity and really like the benefits that it can provide. And I think people need to be reminded of that every now and again.
Mike: Yeah, and you have a great point on newsletters. You got me again. You know, absolutely. Our newsletter is one of the best marketing tools we have. So yeah, I'm not knocking newsletters, but the fact that it was, you know, basically the one thing everybody was doing, it feels a bit depressing. I do also wonder whether, you know, people realize they're doing things and those things, you know, could be achieved quite a lot more easily. You know, one of the questions that was asked was, you know, how long people have been using marketing automation. And around about a tenth of the people that had used marketing automation for a year or more had actually stopped. It was a little bit less. But that's interesting. I mean, there is definitely now a group of people that have used market automation, and for whatever reason, felt it hasn't worked, and have stopped using it. And I think that's got to be a big concern, not only for the marketing automation vendors, who clearly have lost customers, but for the community as a whole where For some reason, we're not getting people getting the value out marketing automation systems. And that's sad, because, you know, I know you believe it as well, marketing automation could be amazing. It's absolutely magic when it works. I feel sorry for the people who've, you know, clearly felt that it hasn't worked as well as they hope.
Hannah: I really have to agree with you there, Mike, because it is scary and I think maybe it does relate back to our previous point of if people aren't choosing the right market automation platform, then they don't know how to use it. They're scared by all the different things it can do and so they're giving up. So I agree, it is worrying because We know how great market automation can be. We know what it does to enhance our activities and it is sad to hear that people are just giving up rather than giving a try. So if you're a listener and you're one of those people, then please do your research, reach out to us, but choosing that right platform I think is key in then making sure that you're not scared away and you know how to use the platform.
Mike: Absolutely. I think that takes us on to our insightful tip of the week, because we were going to talk about how to sell marketing automation to your boss. So Hannah, I mean, you've obviously had to do this to me and sell marketing automation to me. So what's your view on this?
Hannah: Well, no pressure on my side, but I think the key thing is, is that when you're selling the market automation to your boss, you need to sell the benefits to the business. Now there can be a hundred benefits of market automation. So if we looked at it for Napier, there's really three key areas. It's sales leads. Market automation can help us increase our sales leads. It increases our use of automation so it helps reach a larger amount of people, it helps monitor our database, our contacts and then it also helps with time. So if you're a one-man band, you're trying to do everything, you know you can do so much more and be so much more effective if you've got a system in place that is effectively, you know, automating some of your actions.
Mike: I completely agree. And I actually think that time argument, it's really important. It doesn't just apply to smaller marketing teams. Larger marketing teams as well in big companies are very pressed for time. So I think that's a great point. I really love that. And I think it's important to buy the marketing automation system that does free up time and not buy something that's overly complex and actually cost you more time than it saves.
Hannah: Oh, absolutely, Mike. I think that's spot on.
Mike: I think it's been great, Hannah. It's been a really interesting discussion. I've really enjoyed it. And hopefully people are motivated to do a bit more than their newsletters on market automation and thinking about how they can, you know, perhaps sell market automation to the boss if they haven't already got a system.
Hannah: Absolutely. Thanks for such a great conversation, Mike.
Mike: Thanks. We'll speak soon.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favorite podcast application and we'll see you next time.
The Future of Marketing through Gifting and Direct Mail - Kris Rudeegraap - Sendoso
In this episode of Marketing B2B Tech, Kris Rudeegraap, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Sendoso, shares how his experience in software sales led him to create a platform simplifying personalized gifting and direct mail. With global fulfillment centers and a robust marketplace, Sendoso helps marketers connect with prospects more effectively by leveraging personalization.
Kris highlights Sendoso’s competitive advantages, including enterprise-grade features, data capabilities, and successful campaigns for many brands. He underscores the importance of multi-channel marketing, creative strategies, networking, and long-term brand growth, showcasing how gifting can transform B2B outreach.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Sendoso
Sendoso is a direct marketing automation platform that helps businesses enhance their engagement strategies through personalized gifting. By combining digital and physical sending options, Sendoso enables companies to create meaningful connections with customers, prospects, and employees. With intelligent analytics and tailored campaign solutions, Sendoso supports revenue growth, customer retention, and team recognition initiatives, making it a valuable tool for relationship-driven marketing.
About Kris Rudeepraap
Kris Rudeegraap, a key figure at Sendoso with more than a decade of go-to-market experience, has crafted solutions that resonate with 33,000 B2B tech enthusiasts globally. His insights into the future of marketing are both innovative and client-focused.
Time Stamps
[00:00:36] - Kris's Career Journey and the making of Sendoso.
[00:01:40] - Understanding Sendoso: Corporate Gifting and Direct Mail
[00:03:25] - How Sendoso Simplifies Gifting for Marketers
[00:04:44] - Positioning Sendoso Against Competitors
[00:07:34] - Value Perception: Gifts vs. Bribery
[00:09:38] - Customer Segmentation: Enterprise vs. Smaller Businesses
[00:10:21] - Successful Campaigns: Creative Gifting Examples
[00:12:49] - International Gifting: Overcoming Geographic Challenges
[00:14:27] - The Role of Marketers in Gifting Strategies
[00:15:57] - Future of Marketing: Trends and Technology
[00:19:19] - Final Thoughts: Networking and Career Advice
[00:20:55] - Conclusion and Contact Information
Quotes
"Your network is your net worth. So, don't be scared to go meet with another person.” - Kris Rudeepraap, Co-CEO and Co-Founder
Follow Kris:
Kris Rudeegraap on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rudeegraap/
Sendoso website: https://www.sendoso.com/
Sendoso on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sendoso/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Kris Rudeegraap at Sendoso
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Kris Rudeegraap
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Kris Rudeegraap. Kris is the co-CEO at Sendoso. Welcome to the podcast, Kris. Thank you for having me. So Kris, tell me a little bit about your career and also why, you know, you've decided to really build your career at Sendoso.
Kris: Yeah, of course, Mike. So before starting Sendoso, I spent about a decade in software sales, mostly in individual contributor roles and some sales leadership roles. But I really saw firsthand about a decade ago, email becoming more saturated. There was a tools coming out, making it easier than ever to create sequences and spam your audience. And so I thought, hey, there needs to be some other channels that you can use besides cold calling and social email, which were kind of the three go-tos. And so I started experimenting with sending out handwritten notes or going into our swag closet, packing up boxes in the afternoon, shipping it out, or being on a call and hearing a dog bark and thinking about, hey, maybe I'll go on Amazon, find a crate, a little dog toy and send it out to a prospect. It worked awesome, got me results I needed, but was terribly manual and annoying to go to the post office, to click on tracking links, to create expense reports. And so that really led me to say, hey, there needs to be a better solution for this. Email's only going to get more spammy. And this was a decade ago. I think that's still the case. And so I came up with Sedoso. And for those listeners that don't know what Sedoso is, so we are a corporate gifting and direct mail platform. So we make it really easy to send stuff out, whether it's a bottle of wine, 10,000 Yeti mugs with your logo on it, a handwritten note, anything you could think of. We provide all of the logistics, the sourcing, the procurement, and integrations into your tech stack so that you can click a button inside Salesforce or set up a nomination in HubSpot and things get sent out and tracked and reported on.
Mike: So, I mean, I'm really excited to talk about Sendoso. But before we do, there's another thing I kind of skipped over at the start. You're a co-CEO. So how does that work? I mean, there's two of you. Presumably, you've got to agree all the time, or do you disagree?
Kris: Yeah, so this is something that, you know, I promoted our He came in about a year and a half ago as our chief business officer, promoted him to do a co-CEO role. There's so much you have to do as a CEO. And dividing and conquering on areas of ownership is really helpful as you scale and get to the size that we are. It's also helpful to have somebody that you can go and talk to critical decisions on. Now, you're right. In some cases, there's disagreements. But I think having a healthy debate is really helpful for critical decisions versus one person just being like, yeah, let's do it like that. So I found it being super helpful. It also frees up my time to focus on certain things and frees up his time to certain things that would otherwise maybe not even make it onto the to-do list. So I'm a big fan of it. I think co-founders in early days when you're pre-seed or Series A, I think sometimes act as co-CEOs at times where you divide and conquer. Hey, you focus on this. I'll focus on this and we'll make our own decisions. But once you scale the co-founder relationship, I think can't work the same. You need to have more bifurcated roles. And so I brought that back.
Mike: That's fascinating. Now, let's go back and look at Sendoso because, I mean, people listening to the podcast are going to be marketers, you know, they're going to be really interested. So you described it really simply, you know, you're taking away the pain, I guess, about sending physical things to prospects. I mean, How do you do that? What do you do to make it easy for your customers?
Kris: Yeah, so one is we operate global fulfillment centers and global marketplaces. So it makes it very easy to pack boxes, ship things out, send something from point A to point B. We take care of all the sourcing and procurement, so you don't have to go find suppliers, you don't have to go search for things, making sure they meet standard requirements. We also make it really easy to set up budgeting and reporting. so that you can see all of the results integrated into your tech stack so data flows in and out, which makes it really easy. And ultimately, aside from making it easier, we make it so that you can do more of it. And I think a lot of marketers are in agreeance that, hey, direct mail works. Gifting is a channel that works. I just don't have either the bandwidth to do more of it, or I don't have the time or the skill set to do it. And so we can say, hey, we'll do all that. We help you figure out what's the right thing to send to the right person at the right time with the right message.
Mike: That's interesting that there are a couple of other companies in the space as well. So how would you position yourself versus some of the competitors?
Kris: Where do you Yeah, there's a handful of areas. So I think one is in our infrastructure layer. So we are really one of the only companies that operate these global warehouses versus just P backing on other three PLS. So that's an important factor. We also have the largest marketplace, so selection is a reason why people want to look at us. The enterprise, we focus there. So whether that's security, budgeting features, permission sets, enterprise reporting, branding controls, I think the enterprise-grade feature set. Services is also something that we excel at too. Implementation, we have a campaign services team that will dive into helping you take action and what almost agency-like. And I think the last thing, which is a big topic in recent years, is the data and AI. Because we are, you know, five to 10 times bigger than any of our competitors, we have so much more data. We have hundreds of millions of dollars spent and tens of millions of gifts spent. So, you know, 10x larger, and that gives us 10x more data to help then feedback into our engine to help our customers say, hey, what's the right thing that we should send? Or what's the right message we should write? Or what's the right time we should send something? And I think the data layer is critical nowadays.
Mike: So that's interesting. You're almost saying that there's two challenges. One is physically sending stuff, which is practically difficult. I know we've tried it. But also you're saying that making the decisions is hard. So, you know, why is that? Are people looking for the right value? Or are they looking for, you know, trying to work out what would make an impression? Or is it just there's so much stuff you can send, there's too much
Kris: Yeah, I think it's that. There's a lot of choice. And there's also the personalization is key. So how do you personalize? And we have a smart send feature that will personalize for you. And that could be in the framework that I look at is you can personalize around the person. So, hey, Kris likes golf. Kris has a dog. Kris lives in San Francisco. So I can send something personally to him that would get him to grab his attention and reply. You can also personalize based on the signal. Hey, Kris just changed jobs. I'm going to send him a bottle of champagne to congratulate him. So that's personalized around the signal. And then you can personalize around the action. Like, I want Kris to come to our executive golf event that we're hosting. I'm going to send Kris some branded golf balls, driving him to our event. And so those things take some kind of time and effort to think about. We can shortcut that almost to zero time. There's also then time to say, hey, if I want to source golf balls, I got to go find a vendor. I got to go brand it. Nope, that's just a couple clicks of a button or our campaign service team does it behind the scenes for you. So yeah, I think that's kind of the way to look at it.
Mike: And I mean, one of the things, you know, I'm interested, obviously, you're not talking about necessarily super high value gifts here. But do you have any issues with customers who may be a feeling that, you know, sending out too much that that is a, you know, a gift of some value could be seen in some way as bribery? I mean, do you do you see that issue from any customers?
Kris: Really? I think people, depending on if they use it right, see it as a gesture of goodwill. They also see this as thank yous. I think there's, in some cases, misconceptions around the case that it's bribery, being that if you're sending someone a very expensive thing and expecting a result. But the overall thing that I look at is, hey, you're just using it as a communication medium. You're using it as a reason to break the ice or break into a new account with grabbing attention. And so whether you're sending something that's $5 or $500, I think there's ways to make it feel like it's a part of the buying experience or the customer experience.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, that sounds very sensible. I'm actually quite interested now to ask, you know, you talk about that $5 to $500 range. I mean, where does the majority of the gifting sit? Is it at the lower end or do you see a lot of people at the high end?
Kris: It honestly depends on our customer and usually depends on their ACV or their segmentation of their customer base. If I looked at the entire customers, probably the average I think is around $40. But we have some customers that are very transactional, selling software or product services that are a few thousand dollars. And you could send things that are just a couple bucks. We have some fun, creative ways that you can send a treasure map with a note that says, looking for this golden solution, blah, blah, blah, or an empty pizza box that says, hungry for a new solution, or fake aspirin pills that say, hey, does your current solution give you a headache? Or you can go on the high end in a box that opens up and plays a video or a really nice bottle of wine and some custom branded high end wine glasses. You know, it doesn't have to be expensive. It has to grab their attention. And it could be the creativeness that grabs their attention, not the price tag.
Mike: That's interesting. And what about your customers yourself? I mean, do you tend to work mainly with enterprise? You talked about your focus on enterprise. But do you also have customers in the smaller sector of the industry? Or is it just prohibitive in terms of the cost of running a platform for a customer?
Kris: So again, we work across all segments. I think we've built ourselves for the enterprise, but then it lends itself to be able to have a motion where smaller size businesses that have 10, 50 employees, startups, etc. can use it. We sell really into any marketer, sales leaders, CX leaders. B2B is a big focus, but we have financial services, professional services, hospitality, sports and entertainment. If you think about it, gifting and direct mail at its core is just a communication medium. It's another way to send a message, to grab someone's attention, to thank somebody. And so it really can be applicable in any situation. And we have pricing plans to meet that based on the needs of, you know, a very small company to a Fortune 100 company.
Mike: That sounds good. I'm interested, you know, you've talked about a wide range of gifts, a wide range of values, a wide range of different reasons to send something. Are there some great campaigns that you can talk about where people have done something either very creative or they've been really clever about targeting that have worked really well for your customers?
Kris: Man, I could go on for hours on that. And we actually have some cool case studies and success stories on our website. But some that come to mind, some of our top customers. Gainsight, they send out this customer success book that's generated like 6 million in influence outbound pipeline recently. So that was a really easy send for them. Gong had tremendous success with these piñatas that they sent out that influenced over 30 million in pipeline. And they're just these little piñatas they send out with a fun note. Verkada has sent millions of dollars in mugs, specifically Yeti mugs, which has been a very specific tactic they've used. And they've done a really good job of looking at, for every dollar they spend on a Yeti mug, it generates $4 in ROI. And I think that's a really interesting way to look at it because you can compare that to a dollar spending on ads, a dollar spending on a trade show, and really decide where you want to toggle up and down your spend on these different channels.
Mike: That's amazing. I mean, there's such a mix of things. I think, you know, it really is down to getting the right thing for your customers, isn't it? Rather than necessarily being a magic answer. Totally.
Kris: And it could be many things. You know, if you think about the entire customer journey from the first time they interact with you, when you're trying to book that meeting all the way through the sales pipeline and through many years of being a customer. You want to be able to send different things at different stages, whether that's printed collateral, whether that's customer welcome kits, whether that's meeting makers to book a meeting. So you really want to think about this holistically throughout the entire customer journey.
Mike: That sounds fascinating. I think, you know, one of the things I'm also interested in I can guess how you might market the company, but how do you go about promoting Sendoso?
Kris: Yeah, so you know, we are typical kind of B2B type of company where we focus on inbound marketing and then traditional channels of content, digital ads, web marketing, etc. Outbound, we have a fantastic outbound motion. that we reinvented with AI recently as well. We have a strong partner channel. And then there's a lot of marketing tactics we use within those different strategies. We use that both on the inbound side to drive higher conversion on trials, on inbound demo requests, even on content. We'll offer up a nice little value saying, hey, thanks for downloading this case study. Here's a coffee gift card to enjoy while reading it. And again, not a hard call to action to reply, but just building goodwill so that there's a name and some appreciation reciprocity. And then obviously in outbound, we do that as well and in partner and channel too.
Mike: Yeah. And presumably, I mean, one of the things, you know, you as an international business, but also your customers could do is reach multiple countries. I mean, you mentioned having your own fulfillment centers in different geographies, but I know, for example, you can't buy a Starbucks gift card and then send that to another country because they just don't work. Precisely.
Kris: I'm presuming that's also an issue. Well, it's also a benefit of our platform is the internationalization, the localization, so that you can run these either global programs or campaigns or have synergies where there's a gift card one region you're using, maybe a gift card in a different one, but it's all through the same platform. Or you're sending, you know, macaroons from a local bakery in France, and you're sending these cake pops in Florida. And all that can be tracked the same way, enabled the same way, budgeted the same way. But you as the marketer doesn't have to frantically source these different partners. Or when you're enabling sales teams, you don't have to go out and spend a lot of different effort training. You can just use our platform. Or better yet, we have the recommendation engine so we can say, hey, we know this person's in France, send them the macaroons because we know they like that.
Mike: Absolutely, makes a lot of sense. I'm interested, you mentioned a lot about marketers. Presumably you've got marketers predominantly sending these gifts. Do you think that's a reflection of some of the research that's been done recently showing that customers are actually spending less time with salespeople and more time doing research themselves and therefore more time interacting with marketing materials?
Kris: I'll look at that in two different ways. One is we work with marketers a lot because marketers usually control the budget, want branding controls, and historically have owned more of the channel of direct mail and gifting. That being said, a lot of marketers will enable the sales team and it's a benefit of our platform to say, hey, you sales reps get $1,000 a month and here's some controls and go for it. And sales teams can go and click and send things as they see fit. I think it's a very nice alignment play where marketing can align and enable sales. But to your point, I strongly agree that more of the funnel and more of your audience is researching your products and services without you knowing it or without the assistance of sales. And so we see our solution playing into that where you can see intent data, you can de-anonymize website visitors and send them content in collateral. But we're also tapping into that trend too by investing more in the communities, whether that's these different Slack-based communities where we know our advocates are in, sharing thoughts on Sendoso or even on our website, enabling product tours and other things to enable the buyer to research more before talking to the sales rep.
Mike: That's interesting. I mean, you're investing a lot in technology. So, I mean, how do you see, I mean, I guess, generally, marketing changing going forward? And then particularly, how do you see Sendoso's role changing as the world evolves?
Kris: Yeah, so I think there's new playbooks, specifically, new channels that are less saturated, like gifting. So I think we're going to continue to see a surge in people using this as other channels get more saturated. I think email and ads with the rise of AI are even more spammy. So I think it's going to be more obvious that people are going to respond to less email. So you need to do other things to get in touch with them. I also think that there's a lot of changes in marketing and new marketing leaders are thinking about what's the new playbook for 2025 that is going to work, that tactics we used two years ago didn't work. and marketers are going to have to recruit different types of people. We're trying to stay ahead of this curve by using and leveraging AI in our platform to make it easier to use, to make it more automated, to make it integrate with more other data tools and integrate with your technology stack. But I think at the end of the day, marketing is still how do you grab the attention of a prospect and help them solve a problem they either know they exist or don't know exists yet. And the key there is grab the attention. And I think gifting and direct mail is a creative channel that shouldn't definitely be an attention grabber just because of the uniqueness. And there's some built-in channel fatigue prevention because you spend money on it. You can't go send every one of your 10,000 prospects a $500 iPad because you'd go out of business. You'd be broke. So inherently, you have to be more selective. And then also inherently, your recipients are receiving less of it. So it stands out more.
Mike: So it's that idea of cost is almost presenting saturation.
Kris: It prevents saturation, exactly, which I think has been for and the creativity. There's so many examples we have of like, you know, even sending up an empty pizza box with a hungry for a solution. There's just so many different unique ways that you can make someone smile or get creative. And we see so many of our customers, customers post on social being like, thank you so much for sending me this or wow, that was a super creative gift that I got or wow, this video mailer like really grabbed my attention, which is like, Not too many people will screenshot an email or an ad they see and be like, this was the best I've ever gotten. I love this email. Thank you for sending it to me.
Mike: Yeah, I can't say I've seen many screenshots on LinkedIn of marketing that I know.
Kris: But again, I will preface, I know I talk and smack on email and ads. I think they all have to be done together. B2B is multi-channel, multi-touch, grab the attention at the right time with the right channel and the right message. And they all work together. So I'm not advocating to stop email, to stop ads, to stop events, to stop community. What I am advocating for is think about the mix of it. If you're not doing gifting and direct mail yet, you're missing out or your competitors are, or if you're oversaturating and all your eggs are in the email basket, maybe think about putting more eggs in some of these other baskets.
Mike: Yeah, I think that's wise advice. I guess if I was to play the devil's advocate here, the one thing I know that some people who've tried gifting, particularly if they've tried it themselves to do it in-house, is with a much more remote world, it's hard sometimes to know where to send the gift. Which office is the person working at or are they working at home? Is there anything Sendoso can do to help with that?
Kris: Yeah, so there's a couple of ways that we look at. One is if you have their email address, you can opt them into an address confirmation feature we have. And so then they can confirm their address, making sure it gets to them. So that's a very low hanging fruit because almost everyone has the email address. We also have suggested address data providers that you can use to get mailing address data, and then we're coming out with a feature of beta called smart delivery that will actually optimize and tell you, hey, they're working remote, hey, they're in the office, hey, you should send it here. So make that even easier.
Mike: Sounds exciting. I mean, hopefully people listening are now thinking of different gifts that they can send their prospects. I really appreciate your insight, Kris. I mean, we have a couple of questions we'd love to ask people before they go. So in terms of those quick questions, you know, the first one, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever had?
Kris: Yeah, so really early on, I was given some advice to invest in our category education and invest in channels that have long term more brand awareness benefits than just short term lead gen. And that's been something we've been doing since day one. It's paid off eight years later, focusing early on on events, content, podcasts, and evangelism and educating the market and not feeling like you have to immediately be like, how many leaves we book from this? So I think take the chance on the long shot bet.
Mike: Awesome. The other question we ask is if you're talking to someone who's new into the industry, perhaps a graduate looking to start their marketing career, what advice would you give them to help them have a more successful career?
Kris: Yeah, my short and sweet advice, and I give this to a lot of folks, is it's not what you know, but who you know. And so you maybe just spent the last four years at an amazing university learning business marketing, or you're a couple of years into a career, Make sure you're networking. Go reach out to a random CMO and say, hey, can you be my mentor? Or go ping somebody and say, can we grab coffee? I love that you worked at X company. It's really interesting to me. And build that network. Another thing I like to say is your network is your net worth. And so don't be scared to go meet with another person. Even if you have no agenda other than just hopefully it was an interesting conversation.
Mike: Amazing advice. So hopefully people will take advantage of that and build their networks early in their career. I wish I'd built a network earlier on. I certainly see the benefits. Kris, I really appreciate all your time. You know, I feel like I've had a whistle stop education, not just around Sendoso, but around the benefits of corporate gifting as well. If people are interested to learn more about Sendoso, or want to contact you with some questions, what's the best place to contact you?
Kris: Yeah, they can go to sendoso.com, S-E-N-D-O-S-O.com. Email me directly if you want. That's Kris with a K, K-R-I-S, at sendoso.com. Or look me up on LinkedIn and add me, follow my content. And hey, if you want to network one-on-one, grab coffee in the Bay Area, shoot me a note. Love to meet with people. Love to network.
Mike: That's awesome. I'll definitely drop you a note next time I'm in the Bay Area. Thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Kris: Yeah, thanks for having me on, Mike.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
The Marketing Share Podcast - Storytelling, PR, and ABM Mastery
Mike sat down with hosts Barb VanSomeren and Alec Cheung for an episode of The Market Share Podcast. In the episode, Mike discusses:
- The evolving landscape of PR, storytelling, and Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
- Actionable strategies for navigating challenges like measuring PR effectiveness, building brand credibility, and connecting with customers on a deeper level.
- How ABM levels the playing field for smaller companies
- Why diversity in marketing teams drives innovation
- How storytelling transforms customer engagement
- How the growing overlap between marketing and sales in shaping the customer journey
Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2sQEbB7zr0
Build Trust - The Secret to Closing Sales Effectively - ABB
In this episode of the Marketing B2B Technology podcast, Mike is joined by Sophie Neate, Global Head of Digital Marketing and Content at ABB Electrification. Sophie dives into her career journey and offers a glimpse into the strategies that set ABB apart. She discusses how ABB leverages its strengths across industries to deliver value to a broad audience and how it strategically communicates to different customer segments.
A key focus of the conversation is the buyer’s journey, an important framework Sophie uses to guide potential customers from awareness to decision-making. She discusses her approach to integrating the buyer’s journey into campaign planning, striking a balance between long-term brand building and the immediate priorities of lead generation and sales support.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About ABB
Building on over 140 years of excellence, our more than 105,000 employees worldwide are committed to delivering on our purpose with innovations that create success for ABB and all our stakeholders. Our solutions connect engineering know-how and software to optimize how things are manufactured, moved, powered and operated. In collaboration with our customers, partners and suppliers, we address the world’s energy challenges, transform industries and embed sustainability in everything we do.
About Sophie Neate
Sophie is a senior marketing leader with over 16 years of experience across the entire marketing cycle. Her background includes working for blue-chip companies on an international scale, where she has held global management roles, currently holding the position of Global Head of Digital Marketing and Content for ABB’s Electrification Service division. She has been responsible for establishing marketing teams and key functions, driving initiatives that have consistently delivered successful outcomes.
With extensive knowledge, capability, and a strategic mindset in marketing, Sophie delivers strong commercial results. Sophie holds a Bachelor of Business Studies (BBS) with a major in Marketing.
Time Stamps
[00:43:2] – Sophie provides an overview of her career background.
[03:14.6] – Sophie shares insights into what makes ABB unique.
[05:58:7] – Sophie discusses the importance of the buyer’s journey in creating effective marketing campaigns.
[14:26:9] – Sophie explains the marketing tactics that work best in different scenarios.
[18:20:0] – Sophie talks about balancing the immediate demands of lead generation with the long-term goal of building a strong brand reputation.
[21:18:7] – Sophie discusses AI and how she sees her role evolving alongside advancements in AI.
[22:17:2] – Sophie shares the best piece of marketing advice she’s ever received.
[23:17:2] – Sophie offers advice for those just starting their marketing careers.
Quotes
"My passion lies in providing the best customer experience through innovative solutions and working for a company like ABB who pride themselves on this vision." - Sophie Neate, Global Head of Digital Marketing and Content at ABB.
"The buyer's journey for me is crucial in marketing because it maps out the path that a potential customer takes from becoming aware of the problem to making a purchasing decision." - Sophie Neate, Global Head of Digital Marketing and Content at ABB.
"Segmentation and targeting is key... we're able to build trust and credibility, which enables repeat purchasing and ongoing loyalty." - Sophie Neate, Global Head of Digital Marketing and Content at ABB.
Follow Sophie:
Sophie Neate on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophie-neate-2ba37849/
ABB website: https://global.abb/group/en
ABB on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/abb/posts/?feedView=all
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Sophie Neate at ABB
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sophie Neate
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Sophie Neate, who's the Global Head of Digital Marketing and Content at ABB. Welcome to the podcast, Sophie.
Sophie: Thank you, Mike. Nice to be here.
Mike: It's great to have you on. I mean, one of the first things we like to do is just get a bit of background about your career. So, can you tell us about, how you've got to the point where you're now working at ABB?
Sophie: Yeah, no problem. So, I am a senior marketing leader with over 16 years of experience across the entire marketing cycle. My professional background includes roles with blue chip companies on an international scale where I have held global management positions. My passion lies in providing the best customer experience through innovative solutions and working for a company like ABB who pride themselves on this vision. So, to answer your question, Mike, I chose to work for ABB for a multitude of reasons, but the main ones being that ABB embodies innovation. Sustainability in a customer focused mindset all while providing opportunities for professional growth.
Mike: And your role is Global Head of Digital Marketing and Content at ABB. You know, ABB, which is a pretty big company, that sounds like a huge role. So, can you tell me a little bit more about what you're doing in your current position?
Sophie: Yeah, no problem. So, as you mentioned, I'm the Global Head of Digital Marketing and Content for ABB Electrification Service. So, one of our divisions which sit in the business area of electrification. So, what my role encompasses is focusing on digital activity, whether that be, I'd say SEO, SEM activities, obviously managing and covering the management of our websites, but then also from a content perspective, making sure that we develop compelling content that's going to resonate for our customers. Now with ABB being in over 100 countries and having over 105 talented employees, it definitely is a big global role, but what we tend to focus on is we produce global content, but then we localize it to reflect on the existing market trends for the relevant regions and countries that we cover.
Mike: And that's interesting. So, you're focused on the, the service part of the electrification business. What are the sort of customers that you're addressing, for that part of ABB?
Sophie: Yeah, so our customers can range from, you know, the maintenance or production manager, plant and facility manager. The procurement manager through to your C suite, so like your CEOs, CFOs, for example, but again, it depends on what marketing activity we are doing and what our overall objective is, I would say.
Mike: Yeah. So presumably that's quite a wide range of, people in the audience. So you're producing quite a lot of different types of content, you know, some for more technical, some for, you know, board level people. Is that right?
Sophie: Correct, correct.
Mike: I mean, obviously we work with ABB, I understand it, but probably some of the listeners are maybe less familiar. So, in terms of the electrification business that you're supporting, what is it that ABB does that's really uniquely brilliant?
Sophie: Yeah, this, this is an easy question to answer here. So, you know, I mentioned before we, um, excel in a vast number of disciplines, but the ones that come to my mind are First and foremost, innovation and automation and electrification. So what this is, is around, you know, we're a global leader in industrial automation and electrification offering solutions, enhanced productivity, efficiency and sustainability for industries like manufacturing, Energy and transportation, you know, expertise in robotics, control systems and digital technology, such as AI IOT helps businesses automate processes and optimize operations. Secondly, sustainability and energy efficiency. So we're known for our commitment to sustainability, providing energy efficient solutions and green technologies, especially in areas like, renewable energy, EVs or electric vehicle infrastructure and smart grids. So our technologies help reduce energy consumptions and emissions, supporting industries and cities and their transitions to become more sustainable operations. a thing I mentioned before, you know, we have a global reach with local expertise. So we operate in over a hundred countries, combining our global scale with deep local expertise. So we have a strong focus on research and development with a significant investment in R& D. We continue to push the boundaries of technology, as I mentioned before. And finally, or furthermore, we have a comprehensive digital solution offering, which is called ABB Ability, which integrates cloud based technologies and data analytics to help companies monitor and improve their performance. So, these solutions support predictive maintenance, such as, you know, the division I'm in, electrification service, making us a key player in Industry.
Mike: That's, I mean, that's a lot of areas that we're dealing with, so, yeah, it's complicated. I mean, I'm interested, you know, kind of at a high level, what's your strategy to communicate, all these different areas where ABB have something that's really valuable to what is, as we said earlier, quite a broad audience?
Sophie: Yeah, another great question, Mike. So without giving too much away, um, and at a high level, our strategy really focuses on capitalizing on our strengths in technology, like I just mentioned, innovation and sustainability, whilst aligning with market trends and customer needs, all while ensuring we continue to deliver strong commercial results for the business. So that's kind of it in a nutshell.
Mike: Well, I'm going to dig a bit deeper. So, one of the things I do know is that you're a big fan of the buyer's journey as a way to build marketing strategies. So, can you just explain why you think, building and understanding the buyer's journey is so important to generate great marketing campaigns?
Sophie: Yeah, so the buyer's journey for me is crucial in marketing because it maps out the path that a potential customer takes from becoming aware of the problem to making a purchasing decision. So, understanding this journey allows us marketers to Deliver the right message at the right time. And this is where I'd say segmentation and targeting is key here. You know, we're able to build trust and credibility. So that enables repeat purchasing and ongoing loyalty, which is, of course, important, you know, enhancing the customer experience. So creating that customer centricity or delivering that customer centricity, optimizing resources and efforts so you can evolve to market trends over time, because we all know with market trends, they do evolve. And then, of course, increasing conversion rates of your marketing activities so you can deliver ROI. So, if you can't report an ROI, what you're doing is not necessarily the best way to utilize your resources. Um, and then, of course, which is one which I'm constantly, um, I'd say, communicating and emphasizing is the alignment between sales and marketing. So, which is an initiative, as I mentioned, that is part of. We're placing a really big importance on here at ABB. So ultimately for me, the buyer's journey is important because it allows marketers to be more strategic, targeted, and empathetic in the approach, leading to better business outcomes and more satisfied customers, which is our end goal for any business, to be honest.
Mike: I think you've covered a lot there. I mean, there's a lot of, individual points. Do you have like a, an overall strategy or process to actually make use of that buyer's journey when planning campaigns?
Sophie: That's a big question. So, when planning our campaigns, integrating the buyer's journey helps ensure that each stage of the customer decision making process is addressed effectively. So how we do this at ABB, so first we separate our campaigns into awareness and lead generation. So, our communications teams focus on campaigns in the awareness stage, so all around brand and thought leadership. Whereas Lead generation is covered by the marketing team, which focuses around that commercialization. So, you know, for example, an activity, if you were doing awareness, you would, you know, for example, utilize Google display as part of your strategy. Whereas when it comes down to lead generation, we tend to focus more on Google search because we understand that, you know, customers love to do their research before they reach out to us. And in fact, it's proven that, you know, 65. 70 percent of customers, by the time they come to our websites or interact with us, they've already made up their decision by that amount. So, it's really important we, you know, deliver that content that's going to resonate with them and be at the forefront. So secondly, we identify the value proposition and commercial landscape beach campaigns to ensure that we are segmenting our activities effectively. Thus, identifying our target audience and understanding the maturity of our buyers’ market. Because as I mentioned at the start, dependent on our objective of our activity, we need to understand what the target audience is going to be and obviously the maturity of that market. So, a key thing that we also do is before we launch externally, we also launch internally. So, we must get our customer facing teams, such as sales operations, et cetera, to be on board to ensure that we are all aligned and understand. Because we understand that when we do campaigns, it's a multi touch approach, so they may not, you know, engage with our digital platforms. They may ring up our customer contact center. So, we need to make sure that our customer contact center teams are briefed as well. And so I mentioned with our sales and operation teams. The other thing we do is we implement a multi-channel approach. We also go from, as I mentioned, producing global content, but making sure it's got a local approach. So, we go global, as we like to say. So, we do this to ensure our assets and key messaging, resonates with our audience, which, of course, nurtures leads from marketing, qualified leads to sales, qualified leads, utilizing marketing technologies like we do at ABB. We use Power BI to continuously monitor our performance and adapt where necessary, whether it be on a monthly cadence or quarterly cadence. So, one thing I do also want to state here is that, you know, we at ABB are starting to move away from gating content so we can provide our customers as much information as possible to help them in their decision making phase. So, as I mentioned before, research has shown that by the time customers reach out to us, they've 70 percent made the decision. So, it is our job I believe to give them all the information they need up front, and we do this by putting our value rich content at the forefront instead of a hard sell approach, for example. So, we need to build trust before we close any deals, so to speak. So I believe there is still a place for gated content. However, it just depends on which stage of the marketing fun you're at. So, for example, awareness, the consideration phase, we tend to ungate our content, whereas it gets down to the conversion phase, we tend to gate content, but only, um, under special circumstances, for example. So again, just something to consider when you were, I'd say, Producing content and campaigns dependent on the buyer's journey. The final thing, I do feel that by aligning campaigns with buyer's journey, you ensure that each interaction feels relevant and timely, which not only improves the customer experience, but also increases the likelihood of conversion, which is our objective when we're doing campaigns.
Mike: I thought it was a great answer. You covered so many things there. So, I think I'm going to try and dig in and unpack some of those. at the start you were talking a little bit about some of the platforms you use. and I think, you know, what a lot of marketers, you know, maybe are concerned about now is their Martech stack. It's a very expensive thing to build. do you use that buyer's journey to actually define what tools you have in the Martech stack?
Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. So, the buyers journey is not only central to campaign planning, as I mentioned, but also plays a critical role in shaping our Martech stack. So, the set of marketing technologies that we use to effectively engage, nurture and convert prospects at each stage of the journey. So aligning our Martech stack with the buyers journey, We can optimize each touch point and ensure that our marketing activities are data driven and customer centric. So, for example, at the awareness stage, we use SEO tools, to help drive quality content to our customers at the consideration stage. For example, we use marketing automation platforms and webinar tools to help educate and drive value to our customers. And then finally, at the conversion stage, we use tools that help sales teams convert qualified leads. And then for the post sales stage, for example, we use anything from survey tools, email marketing and retention tools to help retain upsell and nurture our customers
Mike: I love the way you think so clearly about the Martek stack and the tools you need. I mean, what do you think people do wrong when they build Martek stacks that are either ineffective, difficult to use or expensive? What are the mistakes they make?
Sophie: Yeah, I love, I love getting asked this question because I do get asked this question quite a bit. So, this is an easy answer for me. So, you know, I feel that doing and implementing. Everything and anything just because it's a trend as opposed to focusing on the business models and needs of the business is probably the biggest mistake that I see some companies make. So, my advice here is to carefully sleep the technology that's going to compliment your strategy and add value for your customers. So, we need to make sure that customers are always king. put them at the forefront of every decision we make and that includes when we go to select Technology. So, we need to use it wisely and respectfully, because as we know, technology these days is super powerful and if used in the wrong nature, it can be catastrophic. Right? So, in everything we do, we must, like I mentioned, put our customers at the forefront and adopt the mantra of customer is king. And we need to do that while we, I'll say, select the marketing technology that's going to deliver the best outcome for the business, but more importantly, our customers.
Mike: I think that's a great answer. And I love the idea of not following fashion in Martek, but actually looking at what it brings you. So, so that's. In a way kind of obvious, but actually I think something a lot of people forget.
Sophie: I agree.
Mike: You've talked a little bit earlier about the link between marketing tactics and different stages in the customer journey, do you want to delve a little bit deeper into that and talk about which marketing tactics work best for you in different situations?
Sophie: Yeah. So based on my experience, and I have over 16 years of that, account based marketing or ABM. So, for me, why it works is. For high value B2B clients, such as the customers we have at ABB, ABM or account based marketing focuses on personalized campaigns tailored to specific accounts. So, you know, if we are focusing on data center clients or F& B clients, food and beverage clients, for example, we can tailor Content that's going to resonate for them as opposed to doing a stock standard, uh, content base. It's going to resonate across the board. We want to be super specific because that's what's going to get the highest engagement. So, as I mentioned, by crafting highly relevant content and messaging for key decision makers, such as I mentioned before, the C suite, you know, our maintenance manager, facility manager, for example, it drives stronger engagement and higher conversion rates. Secondly, data driven marketing analytics. So, with me, every decision I make is data driven, so to speak. So why it works for me is, um, data driven marketing allows you to track the performance of campaigns and make informed decisions. So, by analyzing customer behavior and campaign metrics, You can continuously refine your approach for better results, which is going to be better for the business as well, right? Thirdly, uh, digital advertising and retargeting. So this is where my main responsibilities lie within the role So why it works, digital ads, such as Google, LinkedIn display ads, allow you to reach targeted audience efficiently, retargeting ads, keep your brand top of mind. For prospects who have already interacted with your website and content. So, the goal is to keep them coming back and wanting more. You want to whet their appetite, right? And how you do that is by utilizing digital, advertising, like I mentioned, to keep driving them back to our web pages or to a particular platform and making sure that each time they visit our website, we position to them a different sort of experience, that's more targeted as they go down the funnel. Fourthly, SEO and inbound marketing. So, SEO, search engine optimization. So why it works is that it ensures that our website ranks for key terms relevant to our audience. So, a solid inbound marketing strategy attracts high quality organic traffic and nurtures leads with valuable content. So, I just want to give an example here, Mike. So, we recently did a customer research survey and found that our customers use our website as one of the top channels to obtain information. So this is along with direct interaction with our sales reps, of course. But the thing that really stood out for me, which, you know, websites, not no longer business cards, for example, they are turning into lead generation machines and this research, outcome proves that, customers are going to our website and doing the research before they interact with us. So, it's a real top channel that we're going to utilize moving forward to, I'll say, drive further content and messaging to our customers. So, this is why we invest quite a lot in our website SEO strategy. So, with our recent ongoing campaign, as I mentioned, what we're doing is driving traffic to our website using both SEO and SEM initiatives. We also found after one year of implementing our SEO strategy, and we all know that SEO strategies, it's a marathon, not a sprint, right? But after one year, we saw a 58 percent in growth year on year. So, as I mentioned, it's a marathon, not a sprint, but it's really good to see that, you know, we can see these positive results and we have also some exciting activities happening next year, which relate to our website. So, uh, stay tuned, right?
Mike: That sounds really exciting. I mean, Again, we've covered quite a lot there. But one of the themes I think was run through this is that you seem to have a very clear differentiation between, building the awareness, building the brand and educating customers to actually generating leads. So can you just dig a little bit deeper about how you balance that long term goal of building brand, and really helping people at the start of their journey, versus driving leads and presumably making your sales team a little happier.
Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. So, balancing the immediate demands of lead generation with longer term goal of building a strong brand reputation requires a strategic approach that integrates both short term and long term marketing objectives. So this is how, this is the approach I take to, you know, have that balance. So, it's all around integrated strategy, right? So, I ensure that both lead generation and brand building activities are aligned. Within an overarching marketing strategy. So, while lead generation campaigns are typically more direct and focused on driving conversions, as I mentioned earlier, they are designed to reflect the brand values, messaging and promise. Like I mentioned around the commercialization, of any strategy that you should set. So, this creates consistency between immediate results. And as I mentioned before, long term brand equity, which is really important. Secondly, developing content that serves both goals. So, for example, a white paper or webinar can establish industry expertise, so brand building, while collecting contact information or driving prospects further down the funnel, which relates to lead generation. So, it's really important that, you know, when you develop content, because content is king, we need to make sure that serving both goals around lead gen is also brand building. reputation as well. So, I keep hopping on, but it's all around data driven optimization as well. So, as I mentioned before, I rely on data analytics to measure and optimize both lead generation and brain building efforts. So, this involves, for example, setting KPIs for each and regularly reviewing performance, whether, as I mentioned before, that be on a monthly basis or quarterly basis. So, by analyzing customer behavior, I can identify opportunities where short term campaigns can support long term brain perception and vice versa, of course. Finally, what I feel is all around getting the equal balance is a customer centric approach. As I keep mentioning, customer is king, right? So a strong focus on understanding the customer journey allows for tailoring marketing efforts that support immediate engagement without losing sight of the brand's long term reputation, for example. So, this means ensuring that even lead focused initiatives deliver value to the customer. Reinforcing the brand promise of quality and expertise is also equally important. So those are the, the four, uh, the four things that I really focus on to get that, uh, balance.
Mike: I think that's great. And I love the way that you link very closely the benefits of brand building and also the lead gen and the fact they work together. They're not two independent things. to move on and talk a little bit, maybe more about looking at the industry in general. and one of the things you've talked a lot about is being driven by data, which really is a relatively new thing, you know, maybe coming over the last decade. so, you know, that's been one change. Obviously, AI is a more recent change. how do you see the role of senior marketers, CMOs, VPs of marketing, changing, perhaps over the next five to 10 years? with technology. I mean, what's going to happen and what's going to change?
Sophie: Yeah, so, I mean, I personally see my role evolving to be a more central driver of business growth and innovation. So, with the rise of AI, as you mentioned, you know, data analytics and other emerging technologies that we touched on, the role will increasingly demand a combination of both strategic leadership, acumen and customer and a customer centric approach. So, with that, obviously, technology is going to support that. But I definitely believe that, you know, instead of it being a more traditional. It will go more into, you know, being a role that's going to be, a center driver of business growth and innovation. So, there's going to be a lot of evolution happening. which is a good thing. So, we need to evolve with the industry and the trends as well.
Mike: Sounds like that's quite a challenge for senior marketers to, take a more business focused role. Um, this has been fascinating. I mean, we've covered, I think, an awful lot of ground in this conversation. there are a couple of questions we'd like to ask people, before we finish off.
So, if I just fire them out at you. The first question is really simple. What's the best piece of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Sophie: I've had a lot of mentors and a lot of advice given to me over the years that I've been in the marketing field. But one of the best pieces that I can recall, is focus on solving customer problems, not just selling a product. So, it emphasizes the need I feel to truly understand your audience, their pain points and how your solution can make their lives easier because, you know, it's all about making everyone's lives easier. And if you can find a solution to do that, marketing activities will be easy, so to speak. So, when marketing is centered on the value it brings, rather than just the features of the product or service, it fosters a deeper connection with our customers. So, you know, it builds trust and ultimately, will drive loyalty, retention, and ongoing sales and opportunities.
Mike: Perfect. I mean, that's great advice that everyone can take advantage of. the other question we like to ask is if you're talking to a young person who's starting out in their career, considering moving into marketing, perhaps a graduate, what would be your advice to them to help build a great career in marketing?
Sophie: Yes, so marketing to me as much as much about psychology is it is about creating and strategizing, so to speak, right? So focus on, you know, understanding what drives people's decisions and emotions, learn about human behavior. Not just about the latest marketing train. So you understand what resonates or what makes a person tick on. And then once you've got that value proposition, as I mentioned in my previous answer, the marketing activities that you employ or implement will will come easy or or fly. So don't just focus on the latest marketing trains. As I mentioned before, don't just focus on the latest marketing technology and apply it. Make sure that you understand and have that deeper connection with your customers and build that trust and loyalty.
Mike: And I think that's a fantastic way to end. We've come back to really understand the customer journey as being the key.
Sophie: Absolutely.
Mike: Thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge and insight. if people would like to get hold of you, what would be the best way for them to contact you to get more information?
Sophie: Yeah. So if you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, if you just Google Sophie Neat, ABB and, uh, I will appear and yeah, please connect. I'm happy to have an offline conversation with, uh, any up and coming marketeer or, uh, marketeer that has been in the business for a while.
Mike: Amazing. That's very generous. Thank you so much for your time, Sophie. I really appreciate you being a guest on the podcast.
Sophie: Great. Thank you, Mike. Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.
Go-To-Market Strategy and Social Media for B2B: Insights from Andy Lambert - Adobe
Andy Lambert, Senior Product Marketing Manager, at Adobe and founder of ContentCal, a social media marketing tool acquired by Adobe in 2021, shares his insights into the intricacies of navigating acquisitions and shares his thoughts on effective go-to-market strategies. He offers some great ideas on how to leverage social media in the B2B space, along with tactical advice on successful campaigns and practical tips to support your own marketing efforts.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Adobe
Adobe is a global leader in digital media and digital marketing solutions with a range of creative apps and services for photography, design, video and more.
About Andy Lambert
Andy is a marketing leader who has spent the last 12 years setting up, scaling and selling multiple software businesses.
In 2016, Andy joined two others as part of the founding team of ContentCal, a social media marketing tool. Over five years, the team raised over $10 million, expanded to serve thousands of customers across more than 100 countries, won numerous awards, and, in late 2021, was acquired by Adobe Inc.
Time Stamps
[00:42.2] – Andy discusses his career from founding ContentCal to joining Adobe.
[03:52.2] – Andy talks about the importance of defining a target audience.
[10:59:1] – Andy explains his take on go-to-market strategies.
[15:39.5] – How can B2B businesses leverage social media?
[20:22.3] – Andy talks about some examples of successful marketing campaigns.
[24:48.7] – Andy discusses how the role of the CMO may change in coming years.
[27:31.3] – Andy shares the best piece of marketing advice he’s heard.
[28:16.9] – Andy offers advice for those just starting their marketing careers.
Quotes
"It's easy to get over enamoured with how quickly you can get stuff done with AI. AI tools are an amazing opportunity to increase your utility and increase your leverage, but it's very important that we balance that… balance it with a deep understanding at an emotional level of what truly drives an audience.”- Andy Lambert, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe.
“I just need to post more on LinkedIn, right? No. 80 percent of the content that happens about our brand on social should not be from us, it should be from other people. So, it's our job to try and find a way to unlock that.” - Andy Lambert, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe.
Follow Andy:
Andy Lambert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyrlambert/
Adobe website: https://www.adobe.com/
Adobe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/adobe/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Andy Lambert at Adobe
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Andy Lambert
Mike: Andy, thanks for listening to marketing B to B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today, welcome to marketing B to B technology, the podcast from Napier today, I'm joined by Andy Lambert, who's a Senior Manager product at Adobe. Welcome to the podcast, Andy,
Andy: Hey Mike, good to be here.
Mike: So Andy, I know that you've had an interesting career and actually ended up at Adobe through an acquisition. So can you just walk us through you know what you've done and what took you ultimately to join Adobe, yeah,
Andy: I’ll keep it short. So my career started in sales, which I fell into by chance also fell into by chance that it was a B to B tech company. And in doing that, found that had a affinity for it, got really into B to B startups and SaaS and all that good stuff. And I thought, like any arrogant salesperson, would you like? How hard could it be to do it for myself? So here I am winning business for another business, fancy doing it for myself. So didn't have either the guts or the financial backing to do it back then. So I found someone who had an idea. Fortunately, we were introduced, and this idea was for the company that would become content Cal, which, as the name suggests, it is a content calendar product, so essentially allows people to organize their content and publish it. So we met in 2016 won the first customer towards the end of that year, and built it over the course of the following five or so years where we got it to maybe about 100 countries, three and a half 1000 customers, something like that. And in December 21 we sold to Adobe, which frankly, made us all fall off our chairs, if we're honest, from like a little company, from reading and London selling to one of the biggest companies on the planet, it's pretty cool. And the vision for for Adobe was that they were really pushing, or they are really pushing, on this product called Adobe Express, which to empower creativity for all. So Adobe obviously known for the Pro Tools in design, Premier Pro Photoshop, yada yada. So Adobe Express is a tool that allows anyone to be creative, even numbers like myself. And the idea here was to connect the design tools that exist in Adobe Express, typically, it's used for social media content creation, and connect that with a distribution platform, naturally would take a bit longer to for them to have built it themselves. So decided to to buy in the expertise, which is why I've now ended up as a senior manager of product Adobe.
Mike: That's fascinating. I mean, it's great to hear about that acquisition. I'm just interested. Was that something you were looking for to sell the business, or was it something where Adobe came to you and asked about purchasing?
Andy: Yes. So given our backing, we had been funded since day one. So raise some angel rounds and raise series A so probably raised about ten million all told. And when you've gone on that journey, you've pretty much you've only got one outcome, which is you're going to have to exit it at some point. So yeah, hands are kind of tied on that one. And of course, those investors all want their money back and then some so, so on that basis, you're really going for a large exit. Now, did we think we would sell as soon as we did? Because we just raised Series A, and we were on the on the path to hit those gross numbers, go to Series B and just just continue. So that happened earlier than we expected, and we were approached, and after a careful review of it, it seemed like the right strategic move for the business stakeholders, etc. So that's what happened.
Mike: That sounds exciting. I mean, presumably, you know, with your work, you've been focused on really selling to people who do marketing with their professional marketers, or people who've got it as a side job, particularly around getting content for social I mean, how do you look at that audience? You know, what do you think these people need? Is it one audience, or is it quite diverse?
Andy: I think initially, we made the very typical mistake of thinking our product was applicable for everyone, and certainly in the early days of building a business, I'm sure many people who've built marketing strategies would think the same or feel the same anyway, where you think, Okay, we've got broad applicability. Let's just go out to everyone. Make the messages fairly generic, so we could appeal to the solopreneur or the, you know, the enterprise, naturally, if you're trying to appeal to everyone, typically appeal to no one. So that was about six months of waste of trying to figure out who we were trying to sell to. So the way we thought about it was through a process that I still live by today. It's called the customer discovery process. Process from my favorite book on startups, called the startup owners manual. It's a very weighty tome, and this customer discovery process kind of flips the early sales process on its head, where you just spend more time sitting with lots of different customer segments and just trying to understand from it's more like a research project rather than like a sales mission, if you will. And that helped us understand that actually, you know, the audience that got us first was those, those smaller agencies and those freelancers that have a bunch of different clients, because they they felt the most pain in terms of content planning, collaborating with clients backwards and forwards on approvals. And that's where we had that initial traction. So we called that our minimum viable audience. This wasn't what we're going to build the whole, you know, multi million dollar vision on, but it was the thing that gave us that sustainable growth to start with. And because you've targeted such a focused audience, it means word of mouth spreads much quicker. So that gave us that nice foundation of growth, and as time went on, we started to add different segments, like going more into like B to B marketers. Does that make any sense?
Mike: No, that sounds really sensible. You know, I love that concept of minimum viable audience. I think that that's a great thing for companies that are growing or just starting out to think about you don't have to hit everybody. Hit the people who are going to be you know the best audience. You talked about this customer discovery process. Could you just explain a little bit more about exactly what you did there to work out what was your ideal audience or your minimum viable audience?
Andy: Yeah, of course. So the first step was, and it's fairly simple, to be honest, it spent a lot of LinkedIn outreach whereby I would approach a certain subset of individuals like we've just spoken about, and said, I'd love to take you out for coffee, because you're very experienced in your space. We're trying to work on something that I think can make an impact to you, but I would love your take on it. And at that point, I've not mentioned a product and not mentioned I'd like to sell to like to sell to you. It's just to find some time, particularly in person as well. Probably makes it sound a bit old school, but like they're nothing beats being in person for those early conversations. So then, when I sat with someone, buy my coffee, have a couple of slides of like. Our thesis of like, this is what we think is the challenge in the space, the challenge that you're facing, does that resonate with you? So it's kind of like validating our marketing proposition at the same time, and then, you know, talk me through what your challenges are, what you wish you could be able to do or achieve, to help you scale or hit your ambitions the other so those very open questions yielded such incredibly rich qualitative data that we could then go, okay, these people started to really resonate when we said these things. And they all connected about like, the pain of sending a spreadsheet or doing WhatsApp approvals, you know, backwards and forwards on content, people started to nod along. It was then, when we're like, all of those insights, then just inform all of our go to market strategy, all of our messaging, because essentially all we're doing is repeating back what people have told us. So it's just, it's a research mission, and yeah, it's always my, my thing is that marketers don't spend anywhere near enough time as they should, directly with customers, and that's where all the gold is.
Mike: I love that process. I think that's something we all could do, not necessarily as a startup, but, you know, wherever we are in our businesses. So I'm interested. You know, you started off you, you know, initially looking at these freelancers, small agencies, as you mentioned, you then grew it. I mean, what was the change that happened when he moved to Adobe? I mean, was that like a massive complete reset, or do you feel you're still doing somewhat the same things,
Andy: Complete reset, if, if we're honest, so which comes with positives and negatives. Essentially, the product, content, Cal is is no more. So as part of the acquisition, it's shut down the business. We're three years post acquisition, so the business shut down, and we focused all of our efforts. A lot of the team, unfortunately had to go. So because snapcha is a lot of duplication of resource, etc, and we've built the functionality from scratch inside of Adobe Express. So it is completely like a complete change that, being said, Adobe, being an amazing acquire, has been very respectful, because there is a lot of upheaval, right? So, you know, whilst it feels like a wonderful achievement to sell a business, I'm still obviously very proud. It's still, there's still some very painful moments and times post sale, as you can imagine, right? You've built a business together, you feel like a family in a startup or so, you know what it's like working in a small business, right? Mike, so you know that that's kind of painful, and it unfortunately, it's just the process it is. It is what it is. So who we're targeting right now is different. So we're targeting much more, smaller businesses that don't necessarily operate. Like agencies, not quite big businesses yet. And essentially we're kind of starting again, if you will, building smaller functionalities that allow like the solopreneurs to do what they need to or individuals. And then we're going to go back on that journey to scale it again, because essentially we've built the product from scratch, and it takes time to develop the product. And what you can't do as a business to say, Oh, well, we haven't got the features yet, or wait till we get the features and then we can grow it. It's like, given our feature set we have now, who can we appeal best to right now? Where's that overlapping? Ben, and that's where kind of the solo printer audience come into it.
Mike: Absolutely. I would just want to move on now to something perhaps less specific about content count and a bit more general. I mean, I'm interested because, you know, if you look at your LinkedIn profile, you talk a lot about go to market. And I have to say I'm a little bit of a cynic. I'm a bit of an old guy. I kind of feel that go to market is sort of marketing, as we used to call it, many years ago. I mean, what's your view? How do you define go to market?
Andy: When you sent this question over, Mike, I chuckled at this one, because I was like, fundamentally, you're right, and us in marketing, where certainly me and others are guilty of giving different names to the same thing. And I think that's often baked in the fact that many people don't understand what marketing actually means. Marketing is kind of a nebulous concept. Many people conflate marketing with promotion. People think, oh, marketing is like doing the tactical bit, and that's why I've typically called it go to market. So when I think about go to market, which you're right, that's, let's just clarify that I'm aligned with you, Mike, it is just marketing, but just for anyone listening when I when I say go to market and contextually, I'm interested to know if, if if you would still call this marketing when I explained it, think about it in three ways. So firstly, this all the market research or the diagnosis, right? All of the analysis, customer discovery, the stuff we've spoken about right at the top, right? So understanding who we're going after. Then the second stage, which is a strategy, and that's understanding, or at least thinking about the story we're going to tell, value proposition, commit, competitive differentiation, reasons to believe all of that go to market strategy, as I would call it. And then the third part is the tactical piece. It's like, how then do we instill that go to market strategy? Do we which does include promotion, clearly, like Google ads, LinkedIn, etc, includes like offline stuff, events or podcasts like this. But also, and this is an important point, and we might talk about this later in the evolving role of a CMO, is that it also factors in the sales decks, right the scripts the sales people use, the battle cards they'll use, also how Customer Success deal with customers, how they work towards upsells and even offboarding process. When people churn, you know, marketing, go to market touched on all of that. If there is any single interaction with a customer, it's in the go to market strategy, or maybe Mike you call it just marketing. How's that sound to you? Does that that resonate?
Mike: I totally agree. And I have to be honest. I mean, I do see a difference in the way people today approach this problem. So back in the day, you know, when I started out marketing, it was about the five Ps, which pretty much cover what you said in go to marketing, you know, price, position, place, people, promotion, isn't it. But the way it was done was you looked at each of those separately. And I think what perhaps go to market has done is it's made it more into a process. People have thought about it, more about a sequence of activities that then impinge on all these things. It impinges on the channels you choose. It impinges on your pricing strategy, your promotion, etc. But I do, I do understand that people today talking about go to market. They're a lot more sophisticated than people talking, you know, maybe 30 years ago about marketing generally. So I do see it as a positive. And I think that's interesting. I mean, do you see it as being, you know, much more of this process you run through, rather than this kind of list of five things you've got to tick off.
Andy: Yeah, it is. It's a continually iterative process. And I think this is, and I can only speak from my limited slice of the world that I've seen in my 38 years, right? So I've only got limited context, but like my strong hypothesis off the back of this is that all of this needs to to tree up to one individual that owns it, Chief Revenue Officer, CMO, whatever role you you want to put in there. Because often we see that kind of bifurcation, where you've got CMO or and a Chief Sales Officer or sales director, where they're kind of little bit at odds, and there's no one true owner of like that narrative messaging and that whole process, because it is an iterative process. You're like, like I said in customer discovery, it's not like we found our Minimal Viable audience. We're gonna have to do the whole darn process again to go for the next segment. So you're absolutely right. This is not a box check exercise. It's not like a like how business plans used to be. You create this. 30 page business plan, which then lives, yeah, in your top draw somewhere, and you never look at it again, right? So it's it needs to have someone looking at it all the time, and an overall owner of it. So yes, it's a short version. And my answer to your question, Mike,
Mike: Brilliant, it's good. We're agreeing. And let's move on to talking a little bit about tactics. And if people you know look at your LinkedIn or Google, they'll find you've got a sub stack all about B to B social media. So I'm really interested to know how you see B to B, or how you see social media fitting into B to B, and what you see the pros and cons of trying to do B to B promotion through social
Andy: I'm with you. So yeah, a couple of caveats on that one to call out the word of like, promotion that you just used like, it's, there's a be a promotional element to it, but like, predominantly, it's, it's not and, and secondly, it's, it's important to know, whilst I'm a huge advocate from my context and experience of social for B to B, it's, it's the only context I know. It doesn't necessarily mean it's applicable to everyone, so just want to caveat that from the outset. But the thing is, I personally and strongly believe it's the way that modern brands certainly B to B's will grow. Because, like we said, in that kind of customer discovery process, it's that when you know who your audiences are, and you know the language that they speak, that means that word of mouth spreads. Word of mouth spreads through online communities. And when I say social media, I don't just mean, oh, we're posting something to our LinkedIn company pages. It's, I mean, I know, you know that, Mike, but just to be just for the purpose of clarity, it's everything that touches social which is the sentiment that's happening on Reddit threads, for example, in Facebook groups, it's all of the communities that are that have your B to B marketers, in which, in our case, or whatever industry that you're in, there will be microcosms of communities online everywhere, and it's our job to have a voice in those or if at least we can't have A voice work with others that can have a voice for us, which then goes into the whole influence of partnerships and partnerships with communities, which was a huge Libra that we pulled on at content Cal, I spent as much time with customers as I did with communities that had access to the types of audiences that we want, and the value exchange there requires a delicacy of touch that's often hard to explain, because it's not just about, oh yeah, here's a couple of grand. Can you post something for us? Most those communities, if they're worth their salt, will say, No. Who are you? You're joking like, if you spend the time to build a relationship with them like you would a customer and go, Okay, so your community is amazing. You've built an incredible thing here. But is there anything that that I can do to help and typically, with those communities like that's interesting. So that, for example, for some communities, I would co create content like, my strong suit is like social media analytics. So I'd create them content to help their audience with how to analyze and define success on social media. I'd also give their community like 90 day free trials on the on the product, so it actually adds value to those communities. And we didn't pay them anything. It's just a value exchange so that they could get something that was good for their community, which in turn makes their community feel better too. So I spent a lot of time doing that. We also had some paid for influencer partnerships. But it's, it's all of those voices that started talking about us is a thing that became successful, and this is, and I'm sorry I'm on the soapbox here, so I'll keep it short, but honestly, that's, the biggest mindset shift and misunderstanding I see in B to B social. Because people are like, Oh, cool. I just need to post more on LinkedIn, right? It's like, no. 80% of the content that happened about our brand on social should not be from us. It should be from other people. So it's our job to try and find a way to unlock that of which is what I wrote my whole book on, to be honest. So yeah, an area I feel very passionate about, as you can probably tell
Mike: Absolutely, and I find it interesting. I mean, I think, like most things with B to B, it feels like social media for B to B is actually quite a bit more complex than social media for consumer I mean, do you agree with that?
Andy: I think it is. It requires a lot more nuance, I would say, yeah, and certainly, as it pertains to the influencer piece, harder to find, harder to work with, because, you know, we're not looking for celebrities to endorse our lipstick, right? We're we're looking for people that are have true domain expertise, that don't have, like, 10s of millions of followers, because there are cyber security experts, so they're not going to but we want to find people that have a deep connection with those CIOs in this example that we really want to reach. So yeah, that's why, yes, in that instance, it takes longer, and you've got to be a lot smarter about how you approach it. Definitely.
Mike: I mean, I do think, you know, sometimes people assume that it's easy. You just contact an influencer and it all works, and it is more complex. I mean, I'm interested. We can steal, perhaps, some of your good ideas here. You know, is there a particular campaign you've run that you think was either innovative or particularly effective, that you know, perhaps has some lessons for some of the people listening to the podcast.
Andy: So I'll do, I'll do two. I'll do one from content Cal days and one from A, B to B, tech company that I have huge respect for. One from content Calc. We not spoken about it so far. One of the most successful things that we did, and we leveraged this all the time, it was the cornerstone of our content strategy, was a simple, humble webinar. The most powerful thing, right? So webinars as a tactic won't be groundbreaking for anyone listening to this, but the thing that we did, that I think, was interesting, is that we paid very close attention to the people who we got on the podcast. So what we didn't do, even though we're appealing, you know, right, right at the outset, we're appealing to those kind of small agencies, etc. Our webinars was all about, how do we have a halo effect for our brand, for who we want to acquire in the future? So that way we invited like the head of social from Monzo or innocent drinks, those kind of brands are hugely respected. No, they weren't customers. But the wonderful thing that happens when you invite great brands in is that people make a mental Association, which are not prompted by us to say, Oh, wow. Like it's content color used by Monzo innocent drinks, Steven Bartlett, wow. They must be good. Weren't used by any of them. But the point is we, we gave a platform for these social media managers to share their strategies, and then we became like the social media strategy people. We just hammered that as a tactic. So on a bad day, our webinars would have 1000 people turn up, and that was our whole funnel based on so that's that one thing that has worked, not groundbreaking, just when we truly understand the audience and who we're trying to serve and where we want to take the business, and just curating appropriately, that's a tactic. And secondly, cognism, one of my favorite B to B Tech brands. They leverage the thought leader ads on LinkedIn, which are a fairly new thing, and basically they they've led into the personality led growth approach we all know like how important that is in B to B and yeah, they're essentially, they're promoting the content of their individual thought leaders, like their CMO or their chief sales officer, etc, and using that as their main content, because they know and you can see the results on their on their page, that's the content that drives the majority of the engagement.
Mike: Yeah, and I guess going back to that first point, we should probably say that Napier isn't the agency for Adobe. We're not working with Adobe. We don't actually work in your sector, but if you want to imagine we're that good, we're very happy that positive conversation. I really appreciate your time. Andy, I mean it, you know, I want to get to some of the questions we ask towards the end, where we try and ask the same questions to people, just to get different points of view on certain topics. And so kind of a bit of a quick fire round. You know, there's been a lot of talk recently, particularly in B to B, about people spending a lot more time researching online, a lot less time engaging with salespeople. You've obviously seen the light and move from sales into marketing, into a more broader product management role. I mean, do you agree that's happening, and what do you think marketers should do to actually take advantage of this and make their roles bigger?
Andy: Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's a lot of data that empirically proves this too. My single suggestion for this, my own personal perspective, is that as marketers, we need to empower the rest of our sales teams to become personalities in their own right online. So again, that personality led growth thing that I lean into quite a lot, and I've seen that just final point on that is that I've seen that play off very well from from me personally. So whenever I went into a sales meeting at content Cal, I'm now still at Adobe, people like, oh, I reckon I follow you, or I read, read your book, or I saw your sub stack, immediately the guard comes down in the conversation, you have suddenly that one to one conversation. So I think that that really will will help educate people earlier on in the funnel, and also when it comes to that decision making process. And if anyone you know sales people are still going to be relevant for some B to B's, and it really helps make those sales conversations work out a lot more positively.
Mike: That's fantastic. And I think we can lead on to the next question now is so you know, obviously you've kind of hinted that the role of marketing is is going to involve really building up the sales team and their brand and their reputation. But what other changes do you think are going to happen? You know, particularly to senior marketing executives. I mean, how's the CMO role going to change? For example?
Andy: Yeah, I think the the modern CMO, yes, like I said earlier, will need to assume responsibility for more than just marketing, right? We've seen the 10 years of. As CMOS, which are at their all time lowest, because typically, I think even CEOs don't understand this, because marketers are brought in as like chief promotion officers quite often, where they're like, oh, look, you didn't move the numbers in a year and a half. Yeah, goodbye. It takes, it takes more time than that. So I think marketers and CMOS, even though they're senior individuals, really need to start staking their claim as to, like, what's the macro impact of marketing and organizational level? What are we trying to do? So, for example, like being able to understand metrics like unaided awareness or share a voice, those elements take it away from especially B to be like lead and opportunities and sales and that kind of stuff, because the most important factor of all of this is that 95% of any given market is not in the market to buy. You'll know this anyway. So marketing needs to elevate the conversation a much more strategic level. That also means that marketers need at the CMO level to be the true experts of a customer. Really represent a customer. Voice know it better than anyone. You should not have a CEO understanding a customer better than you. Everyone should bow down to your knowledge, your deep knowledge of your customer, which will be engendered from those conversations that I spoke about earlier and as well, we've got so many AI driven tools as well to speed up market research, get our sentiment all across Reddit and Facebook groups aggregated into a to a nice dashboard. All of those tools exist, and I think that that modern cmo that's both data informed by all of this sentiment that's happening, and this is even conversations happening at the top of Adobe too, related to this kind of stuff as well. So we know, we know it's incredibly important those that can speak with expertise about the customer and use all of that data, but also bring that, that humanity to the business that we absolutely need. Because we know, fundamentally, despite all of this wonderful data and data driven decision making, fundamentally business is human, and it's a trust based business, so we need to, CMOs still need to be an expert in that kind of humanity and emotional led element of that too. So quite a hard balance to strike. But yeah, that's the future.
Mike: Sounds like the future could be quite challenging, but also quite rewarding. So I think that's super positive. I feel bad, you know, almost asking the next question. You've given us so much advice, so many insights, but is there a piece of market advice, really good piece of market advice we haven't covered, that you'd like to share?
Andy: Yeah, it's probably sounds trite, because I talk about it all the time, but it's the thing that I would have printed on a t shirt if I could, or if I was sad enough, it would be your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. So that is not my quote, or no one said this to me because I'm not friends with Jeff Bezos, but I just I adore it. It speaks to all of the the kind of fluffy, emotional side of of brand. And a brand is just the feelings and the feelings you engender from the promises that you make. And that's it.
Mike: Love it. That's a great quote. And finally, I know you're you know you've been very generous of your time, but if there's a young person listening who's just starting out on their marketing career, what advice would you give them?
Andy: Second question, I would say it's easy to get over enamored with how quickly you can get stuff done with AI. AI tools are an amazing opportunity to increase your utility and increase your leverage, but it's very important, though, that we balance that, and I've said this already, balance it with the humanity and balance it with a deep understanding at an emotional level of what truly drives an audience, and when you combine the kind of the rational and the emotional, that's when you can truly do great work in marketing. So just, just don't get over fixated on all of the shiny tools, because the only thing that matters, nothing else matters other than the person you're trying to serve.
Mike: That's great advice. We nearly got through a whole podcast discussion without mentioning AI, but even managed to come in. Andy, thank you so much. It's been fascinating. It's been, you know, really interesting talking to you. I know there's a lot you do online, but what's the best way if people want to learn a bit more or find out about your views on B to B social, how can I either get hold of you or find out more?
Andy: Yeah, so thanks for the opportunity. Firstly, I'm on LinkedIn. Just search. Andy Lambert, you will also see my book, which is probably behind me somewhere. I don't know if this is going to be on video, but yeah, it's called Social 3.0 and I have a sub stack, which you can join for free. Just search social three dot sub stack.com, and, yeah, all of my ramblings are in those three areas.
Mike: That's awesome. Andy, I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for being a guest on marketing, B to B technology.
Andy: Thank you for having me, Mike. Appreciate it. Bye.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing, B to B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode, and if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierbe to be.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn. You.
Simplifying SEO: How to Demystify Search Engine Optimization - Moz
Ethan Hays, General Manager at Moz, and STAT Analytics dives into the world of SEO. He shares his insights on simplifying SEO and the importance of democratising it within organisations, ensuring all stakeholders recognise its value.
Ethan compares the dynamics of startups and large enterprises, as well as the cultural differences between East and West Coast marketing landscapes. He also explores the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the need for integrating marketing and sales in today’s business environment.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Moz
Moz is a marketing analytics software company that provides tools and resources for search engine optimisation (SEO). The platform offers features like keyword research, link building, and site audits to help businesses improve their online visibility and search rankings. Moz is also known for its educational content, including blogs and guides that simplify SEO for users of all skill levels.
About Ethan
Originally studying sports medicine, Ethan discovered a passion for SEO and has built a successful career over the past two decades. Having held various roles in startups, enterprises and agencies, as well as founding his own agency, he is now the General Manager at Moz and STAT Search Analytics.
Time Stamps
00:04:54 - Ethan's Career Journey: Startups to Agencies
00:08:33 - Cultural Differences: East Coast vs. West Coast
00:13:27 - The Misconceptions of SEO
00:16:30 - Democratizing SEO Within Organizations
00:18:08 - Moz's Approach to Simplifying SEO
00:23:40 - The Impact of Generative AI on SEO
00:32:15 - The Evolving Role of CMOs
00:36:01 - Quick Marketing Advice from Ethan
00:37:27 - Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:40:16 - Contact Information
Quotes
“It shocks me… talking to executives at very large, sophisticated companies who to this day have not even approached SEO as a category. Like it’s too complex….” Ethan Hays General Manager at Moz and STAT Analytics.
“It [SEO] is the single most scalable source of high margin, high intent traffic.” Ethan Hays General Manager at Moz and STAT Analytics.
Follow Ethan:
Ethan Hays on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanhays/
Moz website: https://moz.com/
Moz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz/
STAT Analytics website: https://getstat.com/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Ethan Hays at Moz
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Ethan Hays
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier.
Today, I'm joined by Ethan Hayes. Ethan is the General Manager for Moz and Stats Search Analytics. Welcome to the podcast, Ethan.
Ethan: Very glad to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Mike: So tell me about your career and how someone who studies sports medicine ends up in search.
Ethan: Yeah, you know, you would be shocked at the amount of times that I've heard that exact question. And, you know, it's, it's funny trying to think back and put together all the pieces, you know, I can come up with reasons. I can come up with rationales that the, the honest answer as to how I ended up in SEO is I just fell in love with it. I was working in the Bay Area, in the startup world, sort of just after the first internet bubble burst. And I happened into a job where managing networks of affiliate marketers was my job. the most successful affiliates were really good at organic search. And so I got curious about it. And the more I dug in, the more I found that was fascinating to me. And I just I fell in love and I've been in love ever since that I've been doing it professionally for, you know, 20 plus years. But I I think if I had to go back and say sort of what's the what's the connective tissue or the commonality between my interest in sports medicine and my interest in SEO, I would have to say that it's probably that I have an obsession with complex systems that have a human face. So in the sports medicine world, there's lots of very fundamental laboratory science you can do, right? You can spend your entire day in a white lab coat with a bunch of beakers in the chemistry lab doing various different kinds of chemical reactions. And to me, that was also so abstract that it never really caught my attention. But if you take that same study of chemical reactions and you put it in the context of this is how your body creates energy so you can do a vertical jump or something like that, suddenly it became alive and relatable and interesting to me. And I sort of found a similar thing in the field of SEO, where, of course, the everything behind the search interface, there's so much technical complexity. You know, the original big data was Google trying to, you know, essentially store a copy of the Internet locally. There's so much advance now, you know, with with machine learning and artificial intelligence, all the rest of it. But on its face, It's a very human and understandable pursuit. It's just a regular person like you and me going to the search box, typing in something and hoping to get an answer to their question. And so it was that mix of that complexity with that very sort of relatable human face that really drew me in.
Mike: That's fascinating the way you link those two apparently quite different disciplines together. I mean, clearly your career's in search. You've actually had quite a lot of different experiences. Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to talk about the industries you've worked in? And also I think you've worked both client side as well as working in agencies and even founded agencies. So tell me a little bit about the journey and what ultimately led you to end up at Moz.
Ethan: Yeah. You know, Moz was really a part of my, my SEO journey from the very beginning. I got started in about 2003. Moz sort of popped up in about 2004. And just because of that coincidence of timing, I enjoyed the Moz community. I spent a lot of time there. And so, so Moz was part of my professional journey from the very early days, but. To your question, yes, lots of different industries, lots of different sort of professional environments that I've been in. I spent probably the first 12 years of my career working with technology startups in Silicon Valley. And I absolutely fell in love with the startup space, just the energy of it, getting a small team of people together to solve a hard problem. I love that energy, fell in love with the startup world. But then of course, life happens. I had to move from San Francisco to New York City. And when I moved to New York City, I got my start in the agency world for the first time, worked at a B2B marketing agency called Gyro. They were the largest independent B2B agency in the world at the time. They ended up getting sold to Dentsu later, but got to know the agency world a little bit and just the difference in business culture from the West Coast to the East Coast. It's a very real thing, right? My joke at the time was that hopping on a plane and flying from San Francisco to New York City was like getting in a time machine going back about 10 years. It was just, it was such a different environment because this was, you know, it was about 2012 thereabouts. And I came from Silicon Valley, which is very, it's very technology forward, very data forward. You've got little companies trying to take on big companies. And so if you have a breakout gross channel, like a search engine optimization, you've got the entire organizational line behind it and everybody's pulling in the same direction. And then if you go to the East Coast and we at this B2B marketing agency, we had the very good fortune of being able to work with some very, very large clients, you know, Fortune 100, Fortune 10 in some cases. And the complete step change in the kinds of conversations that I was having was a bit hard to absorb at first, right? It went from, you know, what's the most cutting edge thing that we can do with our technology to increase our SEO performance to sitting down with the chief marketing officer of a fortune 100 company. And their first question to me is, so what is digital? And I'm like, Oh boy, I'm going to have to backtrack a little bit. Right. So it was, it was a very eyeopening experience, but also very necessary because it points to the fact that it is so easy for folks, especially technology folks. we get attracted by puzzles, we get attracted by technology, we tend to go down rabbit holes. And the rest of the world doesn't tend to do that. The rest of the world doesn't have that same sort of obsessive interest. And so the ability to zoom out, to up level, to understand a very different business reality, a very different set of personalities and priorities and calibrate your pitch to meet them where they are. That was a very meaningful step in my career that was facilitated by having to have these conversations with just much larger, much, much more complex companies. And that has served me well to this day. I've continued to work in both sort of a mix of, of startups, but also I've spent quite a bit of time in the past. seven or eight years working in private equity and organizations like that and mergers and acquisitions. And so being able to see so many different aspects of the professional world and start to learn a little bit of their common language and their frameworks for understanding the world has been very beneficial to me. I'm a big advocate for broadening your horizons.
Mike: I love that idea of broadening your horizons. I also really enjoyed the description of the differences between the East and West Coast 10 years ago. You've also worked on agencies and on the client side, as well as for established companies and startups. Do you also see cultural differences there, or is it more geographical? I mean, where are the differences really occurring?
Ethan: I will say that there are, I think, very real differences in sort of basic mindset and posture towards life. You hear people talking about like, oh, the easygoing West coasters and the hard charging East coasters. And to me, there is actually a great deal of signal in that stereotype. I've seen it over and over and over again myself. But to me, that has not been the primary differentiator. The differences seem to be driven mostly by the scale of the company itself. Uh, which is to say in a lot of startup environments, you're primarily working with companies that are, man, let's say at a hundred people, maybe 150 people. And you kind of have that Dunbar's number advantage going for you, where you can generally feel like, you know, most of the people and personalities and the names of folks. And then once you get into the large enterprise world, the scale just blows that out entirely. And you have to, because of the scale of the organization. the views of that organization necessarily become more abstract. So at the last holding company that I was at before, Ziff Davis, I reported directly to the CEO of that company and he had, I forget, 40 something agencies all around the world rolling up to him. His view of those businesses was a spreadsheet. It was your quarterly results. That's what he looked at. That was the data that was presented to him. And the story of that company had to be presentable and understandable in a spreadsheet. That is a very different view of the world than when you're in a small startup and you know everybody on a first name basis.
Mike: I think that's very true. I mean, certainly at Napier, we have the benefit of being small. Everyone knows everyone else. You have those close personal relationships. So as you alluded to, you moved to Moz and then Moz now is part of Ziff Davis. Let's talk about where you are today. And it's interesting because you're actually the first, if you like, repeat guest. So somebody we've had from a company where we've already had another guest. Inga Bubez was a great guest for us talking about SEO. I'm interested, what's your role in Moz and what are you doing to help people with search and search engine optimization?
Ethan: Yeah, you know, it is funny. So this year at Moz, we celebrated our 20th anniversary. So we had MozCon this summer and it was our big 20th anniversary celebration. And that felt wonderful, right? As a longtime member of the community, the fact that Moz has endured for 20 years, Not a lot of companies have a 20 year lifespan, right? So just celebrating that was fantastic. But I am really more focused on the next 20 years, of course. And I still, to this day, see the opportunity for SEO as being in relatively early innings. It shocks me to this day talking to executives at very large sophisticated companies who to this day have not even approached SEO as a category. Like, oh, it's too complex. You've got to find some rock star, some guru, some ninja to help you understand the space. And it's just, it's too much for us. It's too much. And that hurts me deep inside because I know it's not true. I know it's not true. The opportunity for SEO is absolutely massive for any company at scale that approaches it. It is the single most scalable source of high margin, high intent traffic that is broadly available to anyone with a website. That is true today. It was true 20 years ago. That reality has not changed. But unfortunately, The way that our industry has communicated with SEO broadly has continued to contribute to this, this mischaracterization of SEO is this like, you know, this black magic. One of my, one of my very early companies that I, that I worked with in the, in Silicon Valley, I founded the, the SEO and search focused product marketing practice at healthline.com. I was a tiny little company, 30 people when I started. It's now a huge company. It got sold to Red Ventures for $190 million. They do 200 million visits a month. They're a juggernaut. And the fact of the matter with SEO is that it gets sold in as something that is incredibly complex and incredibly technical and therefore regular folks can't do it. You hear these kinds of names in the SEO industry like, oh, I'm an SEO guru or I'm an SEO rockstar. That to me is just absolute poison for the growth of the industry. Back at Healthline, I was trying to introduce SEO to the entire organization. They were a tiny startup. They were taking on WebMD, which was the 800-pound gorilla in the category. Here we are, we're a tiny little team of 30 people, and we need to go out there and get as much traffic as we possibly can as quickly as we can. The CEO brought me in. He's like, okay, I need you to give a presentation to our engineering team about SEO. And the first comment I got from my lead engineer was SEO is witchcraft. That was the start. Right. That was the starting point. And that represented, you know, his experience up to that point in his life. And I realized I was like, oh boy, I've got a lot of work to do. And a lot of that work is actually internal. It's about educating the organization that you are a part of. up leveling that entire team so that they can see, oh, wait, this isn't witchcraft. This is a series of repeatable steps that we could do. And if we do these repeatable steps, the products that we're so excited about building, what should we go out and make more money for the company? And that reflects really positively on my team and my career prospects and my bonus at the end of the year. And it's having those kinds of conversations that are ultimately about democratizing SEO within an organization. For me, overwhelmingly in my career, that is where I see value. That is where I deliver value. That's where I've been able to deliver the biggest step changes in an organization's SEO performance. It's about being that rising tide that lifts all the boats, educating your coworkers, connecting the work that you're asking them to do with things that are materially important to them. Most of the product managers that an SEO team has to, by definition, has to work in partnership with in order to build well-optimized products. That product and engineering team, they are driven by the P&L of that product. That product has financial expectations associated with it. If you can help them understand how this process that you're bringing them along to help you with helps them drive better financial performance, increases their own career prospects, ends up being a gold star on their resume. When you can start drawing those kinds of connections in an organization, all of a sudden SEO becomes not just possible, but something that you have allies everywhere looking to help you. And I know that's possible. I've seen it. I've done it. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the SEO industry pushes pretty hard in the other direction. They push towards this idea of like the lone genius who has all of this magical knowledge and only this person can gift the organization with the precise recipe for success. That's a load of nonsense in my experience.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think Mars from day one has pretty much been renowned as the organization trying to help ordinary people understand how to do SEO and probably trying to simplify it. I mean, do you have some examples of what you're doing today that's helping ordinary marketers actually contribute to SEO and get their web pages, their content ranking higher?
Ethan: Yeah, so one of the things that is that is very, very interesting to me that came out of the recent Google API leaked documents. Of course, there is a ton of technical depth and arcane stuff. And again, I think the industry at large sort of lionizes people who dive the deepest into all the technical arcana. And that's interesting. I'm glad those folks are out there. I'm glad they're doing what they do. But I think from my perspective, I have the humility in working with complex systems to realize that messing with one little part of a complex system doesn't mean you're just changing that one little part. It has cascading effects, right? I tend to want to zoom out and look for sort of large themes and larger levers that are available to us. And a couple of the things that came out of that where Moz has a long history in the marketplace of creating data products that are helpful to working SEOs, right? One aspect of the SEO world is big data and very big data, right? Moz has one of the best link indexes, you know, on the entire internet. I think we have 45 trillion URLs somewhere in there. Other providers may say, oh, we have 46 trillion URLs. OK, great. The point to me is not the number of URLs in your index. It's are you able to look at that massive set of data and look at the ecosystem that it applies to? and abstract out of that something that is simple and easy to understand and can actually be used by SEOs in their day-to-day work to help guide them in helpful directions. And so one of the examples of that, you know, Moz came out with our metric domain authority a long time ago in 2006. He was in response to a very visible and noticeable fact for anybody who spends any amount of time in a particular industry or a particular keyword space. And you will see over time that there are big, powerful domains in that particular space. And it just seems like the rules are applied to them differently some. They just don't get hit as hard by updates. They seem to have a little bit more latitude in the things that they can do. And so Moz created Domain Authority to point to this invisible thing that we could see in the field. Very promptly, Google, of course, came out and began denouncing it. And in sometimes very, very specific terms, we do not use domain authority. We don't have anything that's like a domain authority signal that we use in ranking in any way, shape or form. And then the Google API documents came out and we can now confirm Google does not use domain authority. Their metric is called site authority. It's like when I look at things like that, to me, that is an example of Moz taking all of this complexity, these trillions of links and abstracting out something that is simple and helpful for working SEOs. Similarly, just about a year ago, we launched a metric called brand authority because now we are seeing another dynamic in the search engine results. And that is that sites with a strong brand seem to be treated very differently than sites that do not have a strong brand. And this is actually something that Google has talked about quite openly for a very long time. One of the quotes that sticks out in my mind, this was back in 2008, Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google at that time, said, brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. I was like, wow. It's rare that you get really clear, honest communication from a very senior professional in a very large company. And I thought that was just very clear and the honesty of it appealed to me, always stuck in my head. And so now as we're seeing that dynamic coming to life and brands do in fact appear to be being treated differently, we created this brand authority metric And we are now seeing inside the Google API leak documents that Google does in fact care very much how your brand does or doesn't show up as a brand inside search. This is especially seems to be especially related to how they evaluate sites for being impacted or not impacted by big algorithms like Panda. So That is yet another example in that same vein. And of course, as the Moz product continues to evolve, we're looking to use AI to help summarize some of these key features. Again, forget about the absolutely gigantic loads of data that we have to process to get to it. What is actionable for a working SEO when they're looking at a domain in a new field or looking at their client's domain, right? The client just hired them. It's like, hey, do an audit of our website. We're using AI to summarize the primary topics and secondary topics that are most associated with that domain. That is helpful to me as a working SEO professional when I'm looking at a new client's domain, when I'm looking at a competitor's domain. And now we see from the Google API leaks. Google cares very deeply about the topicality of your website to the extent that they have this metric called state radius, where they essentially, this gets very nasty. They create a vector embedding of the primary topic of your site, and then they measure what they call the site radius. So from that central topic that is most associated with your website's content, Every new piece of content that you launch, they literally measure the distance between that core topic and this new thing that you're talking about. So if you have a client, for example, and you know, most of their content is about pet care or whatever it is, and all of a sudden you see them starting to talk about a bunch of cryptocurrency related stuff on their, their editorial calendar, you're now in a position to sit down and say, Hey, let's talk about your content strategy as it relates to your core user base. Here's a very specific reason that you may not want to start wandering off topics so much. And so that is a sort of a summary of the way that we at Monaz are looking at this. It's not about the size of the data itself. It's about simplifying it. It's about extracting the insight and the signal out of it that helps make sense of all the complexity for our customers.
Mike: I love that. And I'm sure customers are going to be very happy. They don't have to understand metrics like site radius, particularly if they're not SEO specialists. I think looking forward, one of the things a lot of people, both SEO specialists, as well as non-specialist marketers like myself, we're all a little worried about generative AI search results and what's happening there. So on the page of search engines, they're trying to give you the answer that really you want to give by routing people to your own page on your website. So how do you see this impacting SEO in the future?
Ethan: Yeah, I mean, that is certainly an extremely hot topic. You know, at the moment, I think that the world is having generative AI shoved down our throats a little bit, because I believe If I look back over the last two years, to me, one of the most important developments in sort of what I've come to call the LLM wars, right, because you have these factions and they're, you know, they're these guys against the other guys and everybody's, everybody's very combative. One of the first shots fired in the LLM wars was back in February of 2003. And that was when Satya Nadella came out in that interview and promised to make Google dance, right? I'm going to make them dance. And that came across to me very weird. It was almost like a, like a schoolyard deer, right? But that sort of set the tone. It let Google know. Bing is going to be all in on this generative AI stuff. They're going to push it as hard as they can. And they're specifically doing it to take share from Google because in Satya's math, every single point of search share they take away from Google is worth a billion dollars to them as a business, right? That was one of the opening shots in the LLM wars. And ever since then, to me, Google has basically been on the back foot. They've had LLM technology for years and years and years. Why didn't they, why didn't they launch it ahead of OpenAI? Well, for perhaps to me, the most understandable reason possible, which is that unleashing large language models in an environment like search creates a heidel wave. of LLM spam that Google is going to have to fight. That is the nature of the technology. Sundar Pichai actually had a quote to that effect. He's like, oh yeah, anytime you have a massive new technology release like AI, it's going to affect the search ecosystem. And this one's a bit different. This one is just very focused on the meat and potatoes of the search industry, which is words on a page. And so to me, everything that has happened in the LLM war since then has basically been Google on their back foot. trying to number one, mitigate the obvious negative effects that LLM driven content would have on the search comments. But then also now that they have been dragged into the war, they must make it look like it was a strategic decision. Right. And so now all Google talks about is AI this, AI that. Oh, it's so wonderful. You know, their last earnings called, you know, Sundar is talking about, Oh, our users love AI overviews and it's better and better and better. That may be true in the aggregate. From my perspective, I don't know. I talked to everyday folks. I'm really curious about their reactions to things like, you know, large language models, every regular person that I've seen that I've shown a large language model to, to kind of like They're like, Oh, so it just makes up a bunch of words. Yeah, pretty much. Like you could do it in clever ways. I can, you know, tell it to make it, you know, uh, you know, made it right as a sonnet or, you know, make it a, you know, whatever. People don't seem very excited about it. Right. I don't think there has been a, you know, a killer app, certainly a consumer facing killer app in the space of LLMs yet. And so Google is going to continue representing that they love generative AI and everybody loves generative AI and they're going to give it to everybody. And I think in the background, you are going to see Google do what they should do as a business, which is focus on the business itself and how this new technology does or doesn't add to that business. So, for example, in, I think it was in May, right after they did sort of the big public release of AI Overviews, one guy was tracking the prevalence of AI Overviews based on the value of the AdWords market associated with that query. And what he found was that after the big AI Overviews public release, The prevalence of AI overviews in keyword markets where the average cost per click was $5 or more went down by 98%. Because of course it did, right? It's going to steal attention. It's going to steal clicks away from the money-making engine of Google. And so they're not going to make, they're not going to make a press release about that. But I think that if you are a careful observer of the search comments, I think you're going to see more and more of that. AI overviews are going to continue to feature, and especially in informational queries, the more you get towards transactional and commercial stuff, I think the less of it you're going to see over time.
Mike: Well, that's probably good news. Hopefully there's less for us to worry about than we all think. Another thing that's changed, I think this is really something that goes back to your description of the East Coast, West Coast differences, is that CMOs and marketing executives have really changed, and particularly the role of the CMOs changed quite dramatically in the last decade. So how do you see it going forward, Ethan?
Ethan: Well, I think the story, especially the chief marketing officer's role over the last 10 years, CMOs have been challenged. And by that, I mean, as of, I think this was maybe five years ago, so this may have changed, but directionally, I believe it's accurate. As of about five years ago, CMOs were the role with the shortest average tenure in the C-suite. Right. They get, they get booted out of the sea sleep for one reason or another, more than other, uh, chief, you know, chief executives do. And, and I believe that the reason for that is very straightforward. It is that marketing leaders are now expected to be revenue leaders back in the day, different rules, right? Different rules, marketing. in some organizations, especially very large organizations was just looked at as a cost center, right? It's like, Oh, we got to go out there. We got to spend the money. And everybody's heard the quote, Oh, we spend, you know, a hundred percent of our marketing budget, 50% of its wasted. Don't know which 50%. Ha ha ha. Well, that leads to the instability that we're seeing in the career path of a lot of CMOs. I have known that the classic tension that I see in large organizations is actually between the CMO and the chief sales officer who start smashing up head to head saying, well, the sales leader will say, hey, you give me that same million dollars you just gave to the CMO. I'm going to buy four Ferraris for our four biggest clients and I'm going to drive another $20 million in sales. What are you going to do? Right. Like they see exaggerated. Right. But you literally have those kinds of conversations in very large organizations. And so there has weirdly been a very, very consistent tension between marketing and sales. And I think that the future is pointing towards much more integration between those roles because in a properly functioning high-performance sales and marketing organization, those two functions fit together like hand in glove. They have to. They have to, right? You have to have good communication across those functions. You have to have, in some cases, service level agreements negotiated between those functions such that when marketing generates their marketing qualified leads, they are sent to a place in the sales, in the sales team where they know to look for them. And there is a specific expectation that those leads will be serviced in somewhere between five minutes and 30 minutes or maybe a day on the outside. But creating those structured partnerships such that that entire machine marketing, which is tasked with generating that sales pipeline, And then sales, which is taking that pipeline and turning it into close one revenue. You need to, you need that entire machine to flow smoothly. And that is the direction that I am seeing more and more organizations go. Marketing leaders are now expected to be revenue leaders.
Mike: You've given us some great insights and been incredibly generous with your time, Ethan. But before we go, we like to ask people a couple of quick questions. So the first one is, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Ethan: The best bit of marketing advice I've ever been given? It's probably the simplest one. Talk to your customers. Talk to your customers. Like read feedback from your customer service folks, sit down with them, talk with your customer service folks, ask them how real human beings interact, what their problems are, what their pain points are, what their friction is, what they love about the product. But even that is secondhand. Actually set up a customer development process in your company where you are talking with real people on a regular basis. consolidating those insights and pushing them back out into other parts of the organization. There is nothing that is a replacement for literally talking with your customers, understanding how your product does or doesn't deliver value in their lives.
Mike: That's great. I think it's really, really important. The other question we ask our guests is really for the listeners who are embarking on their careers. So what would be your advice if you're talking to someone who maybe just graduated and was thinking of entering marketing as their career?
Ethan: Wow. Well, you know, I say one of the, one of the things that is becoming available now as the, the, you know, the internet, especially in all the tools related to the internet are maturing. Is that it used to be back in the day that in a lot of cases, in order to get valuable professional experience, you had to be part of a company for somebody had to hire you. And she had this weird chicken and the egg thing, right? I certainly had that coming out of college with a sports medicine degree, which is completely illegible to anybody in the corporate world. They couldn't care any less about it. And so trying to get my foot in the door at all, I figured out a way. And that was how I was able to start building those successes and stories that laddered up into my career. That was necessary 25 years ago. Today, You don't need that. You don't need permission. You don't need someone choosing you and saying, yes, we're hiring you for XYZ role to go out there and do marketing. Some of the most interesting and compelling folks are solopreneurs, they're freelancers. They have found a particular part of the world that fascinates them and they develop their marketing skills in order to in essentially in order to service their own natural fascination with a particular thing. That is a wonderful thing that the Internet has made possible that was never possible before. Got a colleague of mine years back who was, he was a talented web developer, but he wanted to, he wanted to do more. He wanted to build his career in marketing. The thing that he really loved doing was he was a music producer. He loved creating beats for hip hop. I was like, what you should do is create a course on how to create beats and then go out there and talk to people in the community and market that course and get your name out there. And that's exactly what he did. And he has a fantastic business today because he learned marketing as a way of connecting with people in an area that he was already passionately interested about. Any person, whether you've gone to college or not gone to college, you have that ability today, thanks to the internet. And that is an absolute game changer for what you can do.
Mike: That's amazing advice, Ethan. Thank you. Thank you again for your time and all your amazing insights. If anyone's listening to this, they'd like to get in contact or find out more about Moz and Stat, what would be the best place for them to go?
Ethan: Oh, sure. Of course. Our websites are the obvious point, Moz.com and GetStat.com. On Twitter, if you would like to connect with me, I'm at Ethan Hayes, that's E-T-H-A-N-H-A-Y-S, and my DMs are open. I'd love to hear from you.
Mike: Thank you, Ethan. That's perfect. And thanks for being a guest on the Marketing B2B Technology Podcast.
Ethan: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.