S3
Episode 6
How to Drive Performance With B2B Marketing
About This Episode
Learn tactics for driving B2B marketing performance, how to define a full-funnel strategy, and programmatic strategies for B2B campaigns.
Mohan Ram | Head of Global Field Marketing, Digital Ocean
Mike Partin | Sr. Director of Demand Gen, Digital Ocean
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
The best B2B marketers for the next 10 years would look like the best testers constantly testing new strategies, especially with a lot of the changes that we’re seeing around, which limits the audience that we can cater to effectively using what’s at hand, but also developing new tools that will help us target audiences in a more effective way. Be that through lookalike audiences using existing tools, but also I think email is going to continue to remain that much more important in the years to come.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:26)
But then you think about the social landscape, the research and data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touchpoints that long-term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales,gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart. You’re tuning in to How Agencies Thrive podcast.
Matt (00:00:52)
Hello, and welcome to the How Agencies Thrive podcast. My name is Matt, and I’m on the education and development team at StackAdapt. And today, we have a very special episode centered around all things B2B. Now typically, we showcase agencies that work with StackAdapt, or partners that we have. But on this episode, we’re really excited to welcome in Mohan and Mike from DigitalOcean to talk about their experiences as a brand running in the B2B space, and how they’ve effectively been able to drive awareness and conversions online using cutting-edge tactics. As always, we’re gonna have our guests introduce themselves. So starting with you, Mike, we’d love to hear a little bit about what DigitalOcean does as well as your areas of expertise in the space.
Mike (00:01:32)
Yeah, great to be here. My name is Mike Partin, I am the director of demand generation at DigitalOcean. And DigitalOcean is a cloud computing cloud infrastructure company that really focuses on serving the SMB and startup world. Our mission is to bring modern app development with technical and economic reached for anyone in the world. So we offer computing, networking and storage solutions so that developers can build on a reliable simple infrastructure and focus on creating the next great path. My role, specifically, I run the demand generation department, which focuses a lot on the top-of-funnel marketing, if you will, of bringing people to the website and converting all those customers on the website. So that includes everything from paid media to website optimizations, and various marketing campaigns and events.
Matt (00:02:27)
Fantastic. Thanks so much, Mike. Now, Mohan, on to you. Tell us a little bit about your role in areas of expertise.
Mohan (00:02:34)
Yeah. Hello, everyone. I work with Mike at DigitalOcean. I lead up our global field marketing efforts. I’ve been with DigitalOcean for about six and a half years previously, I’ve done other roles, including rolling out our international go-to-market strategy in India, helping build our global startup program called Hatch, and managing sales in the Asia-Pacific region. And in global Field Marketing, there are two aspects to it. One is rolling out traditional field marketing tactics like events, conferences, roundtables, PR in different regions for DigitalOcean, and also thinking about regional marketing efforts where we continue to do dedicated marketing efforts in regions or countries of interest. So yeah, I think overall, our focus is on building brand awareness for DigitalOcean in various regions, and also supporting regional lead-generation efforts.
Matt (00:03:28)
Fantastic. Well, thank you to both of you for joining. And this one’s exciting, because we don’t typically see a ton of brands on the podcast, we’ve always just worked with agencies or partners, and it’ll be cool to see from your perspective, especially as a B2B company. So on that note, you know, from your perspective, what does modern-day B2B marketing look like? And how did the tactics for success differentiate from a B2C strategy?
Mike (00:03:56)
Yeah, well, I’ll start off here. Umm, I think that there are a lot of similarities in B2B and B2C, when you look at the different strategies, but one of the big differentiators that’s always stood out to me is in the B2C world, you’re gonna see a lot more emotional style marketing, where a brand will focus on how it makes the customer feel. When I was first starting out my career, little over a decade ago, I was at an ad agency that was working on the Mazda account, and we were actually the account that created the tagline “Zoom Zoom.” And the whole focus on that messaging was the feeling you get when you drive a car. And it was very emotional, creative. You don’t really see that in the B2B world. Everything is much more rational or like, I like to say, it’s all about the facts. What problem does the product solve? What’s the cost or pricing structure? How complicated is it? What’s the ROI? So something to keep in mind when you’re marketing the business is that the emotional aspect that you see in the B2C world doesn’t really exist because you generally are talking to a group of people that are looking at how is this going to benefit the business? And what are the actual numbers behind it. And in some aspects, it’s really not just about marketing, but also about the product itself, it’s essential that you really have a really good product in the marketing and the B2B marketing world, because if you don’t, you’re going to lose out the customers if you’re relying solely on messaging. And so I’ve seen companies try this and it never really works, you know, businesses will always focus on the product and the value it provides. So a DigitalOcean, we’ve found it, the primary things businesses are looking for is a product that’s easy to use. It’s affordable, reliable, and secure. So we focus a lot of our messaging around those very specific points. And I also add that another important aspect in the B2B spaces the idea of providing valuable information to a prospect in exchange for their attention and contact information. It’s also something you don’t really see too much in the B2C world is the idea in B2B of, I need to provide information and learning to a prospect or potential customer in exchange for their email address so that I can continue pulling them through the funnel, if you will, and talking to them and maintaining that constant communication. There’s a lot of competition out there. And so one of the ways that we really try to stand out is various tactics around webinars and best practice guides and white papers, blogs, or even a podcast like this one, where you’re really focused on providing valuable information in exchange for contact information or traffic to your website.
Mohan (00:06:44)
Yeah, and adding to what Mike said, I think at DigitalOcean we’ve seen that interesting transition, right? I think DigitalOcean started off as the cloud for developers speaking more directly to B2C audiences. But then over time, as our product portfolio has matured, really kind of transitioning beyond B2C and also directly speaking to B2B audiences in startups and midsize businesses, and helping position ourselves as the cloud for small and medium businesses. So very similar to what Mike said, I think in addition to all the emotional aspects that you appeal to with B2C Marketing, I think there’s a need for a lot of credibility building one with your own messaging and data and statistics, but also leveraging third party sources like a Gartner like a Forrester like how our 3rd-party research reports speaking about you, how are you positioned in the industry? So I think those are certain things that differentiate B2B and B2C.
Matt (00:07:42)
Fantastic. Now, both of you, I think, mentioned the marketing funnel. And that’s sort of what our second question was here, you know, with a full-funnel, B2B strategy, what drives success? And what are those key elements that you need to have to, you know, from starting to drive awareness to even getting conversions? Or, in most cases, with software? It’s alright, how can we book a demo? How can we get in front of that customer and start to talk to them one one-on-one? What’s the secret to success here?
Mike (00:08:14)
Yeah, well, the strategies can differ a lot depending on the type of product you’re selling the target market, and the barriers to entry. But if we wanted to take a broad look at the traditional funnel of awareness, consideration conversion, a few common themes kind of start to stand out. If we start with awareness at the very top, the general strategy comes down to getting your brand in front of the right audience and moving them from an unknown person to a known prospect. So a lot of that really relies on producing quality content, and includes both ungated content that drives users to your website via SEO and digital marketing efforts, as well as gated content that turns an unknown visitor into a known email address. So it’s important to have a good mix of ungated content like blog posts or tutorials and gated content like webinars, newsletters, and guides and known user then will move from the awareness stage of the funnel into the consideration stage of the funnel. And this is the area where you start setting up constant communication with that product that can be through an email nurture series or newsletters that constantly provide valuable information and keep your brand almost top of mind. This is also where some retargeting comes into place. A lot of digital marketers will start using retargeting various display ads or paid social. Once again, the idea being keep your brand top of mind and continue to try to bring that user back to the website. This is a good point that to reiterate the value proposition that your product provides and why your product differentiates from the competition. Now, as a side note, as we look into the potential of a cookieless future that all digital marketers are faced with. This is a future without pixel retargeting. My personal stance is email list matching is going to become more important as we move towards that. And so the whole idea of turning those unknown visitors into known visitors is going to be even more important in the future, then when we get to the last stage of the funnel, before conversion, the conversion state is where the sale really comes into play. And here are the strategies will vary depending on the type of company you have, do you have a sales lead motion, where the prospects need to talk to a salesperson and kind of move through that flow of MQL, SQL opportunity closed one, whatnot, or, you know, another company that would and a lot of other companies we see in the tech space is more of the self serve motion, where customers don’t really want to talk to a salesperson, they’re going to sign up for a product, try it out, see if they like it, and then you kind of build on that into a pricing model as they start using it more. And so depending on which type of company you have, the conversion state is going to be a little different. At DigitalOcean, we have a big self serve motion here, where we offer a free trial. So potential customer can try out our product for 60 days with a certain number of credits to try out different product lines. And we focus a lot then on optimizing the website to improve those conversions and getting more people to sign up and into that funnel. Once someone does sign up, and they start trying the product, this is where the lifecycle stage comes in. And you can use different strategies on that stage to move them through their lifecycle journey of your product. And that can include sales reaching out to them if it’s a more of a product lead growth strategy, or it can include a nurtured email series and various tactics to prevent churn. Those are kind of some of the common themes I see within the funnel strategies.
Mohan (00:11:53)
Yeah, maybe, I think Mike kind of very nicely laid out sort of like the funnel structure that is our mental model and guiding us in a lot of our strategies. I think adding to that is would be, especially with B2B audiences. One is there is a generic sort of like messaging you could do if you’re serving all B2B customers, but then that’s more broad B2B, right? If you also want to carve out niche B2B, especially if it’s certain verticals, certain industries, then, you know, you can also kind of get to the next level of targeting your audience. And that would in some way kind of inform and change the tactics you would use. For example, Mike spoke about the sales strategy, right? I think this could be for very niche B2B audiences. And also, at some point, you need to start bringing in the ARPU value of the customer as well, whether it’s a high ARPU, whether it’s a low ARPU, and what are the tactics you would use? For example, sometimes LinkedIn can be super expensive, like, where are you kind of like consciously using that to target certain niche B2B audiences who have the potential to deliver higher ARPU and ARPU being average revenue per user? Right. So I think those are certain things that we kind of like think about, as we structure our campaigns.
Matt (00:13:10)
Fantastic. Now, what we wanted to ask both of you about is the topic of global markets as a B2B company, how do your marketing tactics translate across different markets? You know, what remains constant? What has to change based on how business is conducted in different areas of the world? So, you know, under that, what are some challenges? What are some best practices? And what have you found from firsthand experience with this?
Mohan (00:13:39)
I can take a shot, Mike, and then feel free to jump in with some thoughts. So especially as we at DigitalOcean, for all practical purposes, we are a global company. So a lot of our campaigns are global in nature. So I think, from a branding perspective, from the acids that we use from our messaging, which we feel is sort of global, in its appeal to users around the world. I think a lot of that remains constant. But especially what we try to intentionally do when we specifically try to go to be very focused on certain regions and markets is one is just understanding how those markets are performing what’s resonating there, who are our local competitors? What’s the impression share? What’s the messaging that would potentially resonate with certain audiences? For example, in certain markets, users might be more price-conscious than in other markets. So how are we specifically calling out the cost savings aspects of our products in certain markets? And also, one thing that’s really important as we appeal to local audiences in different parts is building local customer stories. In some cases, we know there is a need for localization and translation of content. So I think that’s still very early stages for us. We haven’t yet got there, but we know that’s important. And in some cases, there is also the product aspect of it. Which is users trying to look for payment options in local currencies or local price options and things like that. Some of those are more product, kind of development aspects. But I think marketing really has its ears to the ground in terms of what we can funnel back into our product strategy as well, in terms of challenges itself, I think just trying to understand the different markets, what’s playing out, for example, in certain European markets, we know GDPR is extremely important. So complying with some of that, and the changing cookie policies and the algorithm changes from Google or Facebook, things like that are what we need to be really kind of like paying a lot of attention to. Mike, did you have other things you wanted to add?
Mike (00:15:45)
Yeah, that was a great explanation of some of the challenges and constants. Some of the things I’ve noticed myself is that when it comes to the different global markets, the most important thing is testing. So every there’s going to be nuances with every market. And so it’s important to test everything from translating to localized languages, to the various digital marketing platforms that are more popular in those areas. So you know, some of the things I’ve found in my own career having not just at DigitalOcean, but before working at Twilio, and SendGrid is that even things as simple as email can vary, depending on some market, some markets really like HTML based emails, other ones really preferred straight text emails. And so some of those small changes is important to test and find out. But in terms of what is constant, I kind of cut my teeth in marketing as a search guy. So I’ve noticed that search is always one of those things that’s always constant throughout and actually not only is constant and a good source for potential customers and traffic, but it gives you a lot of information when you can really understand what people are searching for in a market. They’re telling you what they want. And that provides valuable information for you to then go and communicate back. And that’s something that we see across all markets. So I like to default to search as one of the constants to really learn and understand what’s going on in the various markets and then start testing to some of our the other things that I’d mentioned before that no one mentioned.
Matt (00:17:18)
So to both of you, whoever wants to jump on this first, what are some best practices when building a media mix model when it comes to B2B marketing?
Mike (00:17:29)
Yeah, so I can jump in here. And when I build a media mix model, I usually view it as its own funnel of sorts apart from our separate signup funnel, and I take a bottoms-up approach. So I mentioned before that I was a search guy when I started out. And that’s kind of where I start, when I build that media mix model is from both a paid and organic side, I want to really make sure that we are buttoned up and covering everything we can, from that side of the media, you know, it gives us a lot of insight into potentially what customers are looking for. And it’s also the lowest-hanging fruit. Because people are already looking for your product or solution, all you have to do is really stand up, raise your hand say hey, I’m right here I have what you’re looking for. So it’s a lot easier to you know, bring to find potential customers and bring them into your funnel when they’re already looking for you. Then I start to work my way up from that bottom of that funnel into more the consideration set if you will, things like retargeting across display and paid social email, nurture series, affiliate marketing, with influencers, all of those next level up, that still has fairly good conversion rates, not as strong as the bottom of the funnel. But we want to make sure we capitalize on all of that. And then I’m moving to the awareness stage at the very top. And that media can run the gamut between display ads, paid social ads, video sponsorships, even out-of-home stuff that we see some companies, specifically tech companies and certain metros do of course, all this varies on the goals that each individual company has. And so it’s going to change the way you do a media mix, depending on those goals. But that’s how I view and that’s how I kind of structure our campaigns.
Mohan (00:19:16)
Yeah, I think Mike answered it perfectly. I don’t have much to add.
Matt (00:19:20)
Awesome. Well, we’ll move on to the next question here. And, what we’re wondering is, if either of you be willing to share any personal experience from B2B success, so whether that was at DigitalOcean, or it’s been something you’ve seen in the wild, where have you really seen success in a B2B campaign?
Mike (00:19:39)
One of the most successful campaigns I would say was when I was at Twilio, and they did the Ask Your Developer Campaign, and I thought this was really an ingenious campaign because it’s spoked to different people within your target customer base. Ask Your Developer was almost speaking to the decision maker or the higher up and telling them to go ask your developer about this company, but it was also a little bit of a nod to the expertise that the end users, the developer will have. And, you know, we push that campaign out pretty broadly. And we got some really good, interesting feedback from it and I’ve found a lot of success through it as well, to the point where I’m totally maintained a giant billboard in San Francisco, just the word to Ask Your Developer on it. And that one, you know, I think it really helped break into both the enterprise-level target audience as well as some of the startups and SMBs. Because if you’re a founder and you saw that message, you may be a developer yourself. And if you’re not aware of who Twilio is, you’re gonna think, Ask Your Developer, I should know about this, because people are going to be asked me about it. So they’re gonna go out and look it up. And then if you were an enterprise, you may be wondering, an enterprise executive, you may be wondering, what is this Twilio thing, and you’ll find out more, and it built a lot of really good awareness for Twilio. And then the company has grown a lot since then. So that was one of my favourite B2B campaigns.
Mohan (00:21:13)
Yeah, I think for me, one of the favourite campaigns, and, you know, I’m going to do a shout-out for something that we do at DigitalOcean is a program called Hacktoberfest, which is all about open source and celebration of open source, right, and we’re in the month of October and Hacktoberfest is running currently. So one of the company values that we have is, or one of the most important things is we are very supportive of open source, we use a lot of open source technologies internally, but also, that’s part of our product strategy, as well, we try to build a lot of integration with some of the best open source technologies, so users can pick and choose what they want for their tech stack, instead of being locked into what the vendor is offering, which is the case in the industry. So Hacktoberfest has been a program that started off really small, but over the years, we’ve had hundreds of 1000s of developers participate in it, and why I think it’s kind of like an effective program is one, I think it really speaks to what’s important for DigitalOcean. And it really aligns very well with our product strategy and our values, but also just building mindshare with developers who are working across enterprises, across businesses, for them to understand what is this cool program that they can contribute to and participate in. And the success has been with a lot of other companies kicking off their own initiatives supporting Hacktoberfest. So I think that’s a program that we started off. Of course, it wasn’t engineered to be what it is. But I think it’s really turned out to be a very successful program for DigitalOcean.
Matt (00:22:45)
Fantastic. Now that we’re at this stage in the episode, I’d like to know from both of you, if we think forward, let’s call it 15 months we’re in Q4, now we’ve got the rest of 2022, well into 2023. What does the future of the B2B vertical look like, by this time next year?
Mike (00:23:05)
That’s an interesting question. Because I believe that we are at a point where a lot of things are changing in the B2B market space. And a lot of things are changing due to a lot of the privacy regulations that are coming out around the world. And as well, as we’ve heard of things like Chrome is going to be, they keep pushing back, but they talk about, you know, no more pixels and a cookieless future and all that stuff. You know, I think one of the big challenges that we’ve always had is tracking and analytics. And you see this in both the B2B space and but also the B2C space. But when you realize that a customer’s journey is not just one single marketing touchpoint, they don’t see one ad and generally sign up, they’ll see multiple ads, they’ll see multiple pieces of content, they’ll see it across different devices, you may read something on your phone, and then go on your computer and do more research. And so the tracking has always been a struggle. And losing out on pixel tracking makes everything even more complicated. So I really think that 15 months from now, almost taking a step back in marketing. Well, we’re not going to have as much data that we used to have in the marketers almost we’re relying on. And it’s going to be important to start thinking of new ways to track that data and to prove out spend, prove that ROI, identify new and different types of KPIs that lead people through the funnel. So I think there’s gonna be a lot of changes we’re going to see in this space within this next year. And its potential to have an opportunity for new companies to start up with options and opportunities to solve these challenges. But it’s also going to be important for marketers to be flexible and be able to both pivot into new strategies, but as well as really become good at communicating these strategies up the chain of command, so really communicate to your executives, what’s changing why we don’t have the data that we used to have? And what are some new ideas and tactics and things we’re gonna test to try to get that data?
Mohan (00:25:210
Yeah, I think, Mike kind of like put it really well, right? Maybe just to kind of like, round up that voting. Rebecca Karen, from a partner at Union Square Ventures, I think the best B2B marketers for the next 10 years would look like the best testers, right, I think, constantly testing, testing new strategies, especially with a lot of the changes that we’re seeing around which in some way limits the audience that we can cater to then effectively using what’s at hand, but also developing new tools that will help us target our audiences in a more effective way. Be that through sort of building lookalike audiences using existing tools on Google and Facebook, but also I think email is going to continue to remain that much more important in the years to come.
Mike (00:26:08)
Yeah, I know, we’re going to be focused a lot on turning all those unknown website users and unknown users. So we have our own 1st-party data, to continually communicate with them. But to Mohan’s point, there’s testing is going to be huge. And I think we’re going to be looking at some media mix modeling, for testing, where instead of relying on a pixel to tell us if someone clicked we look at all the different things we’ve invested in. And as we change that up, what does it do to total revenue numbers, almost taking a step back and looking at it more holistically?
Matt (00:26:40)
Absolutely. Now, before we head out, I wanted to ask both of you, and we ask this to all of our guests, what’s a resource—could be a book, a podcast, a website, could be a blog, could be anything within your space—that you would recommend for anybody who’s looking to excel in B2B marketing.
Mike (00:27:00)
So, I’m really bad. And I don’t follow too many podcasts. But I will say that, when it comes to books, there’s a lot of the marketing world changes so fast, especially digital marketing will change so fast. So it’s really hard to find a really good book that goes into digital marketing, Rise of the Revenue Marketer was a good book. And it’s kind of we are both Mohan and I are under the overall umbrella of a revenue marketing team, which is something we’re starting to see in more and more companies as its marketing that’s focused on driving revenue. So that’s a good one. But I also am a fan of following specific people that are kind of experts that have gotten to know throughout the years. So some of my three favorite people that I like to follow the Will Reynolds who founded the agency Seer, he’s always got like really good ideas and tests really good stuff. Rand Fishkin, who founded Moz, used to have his thing I think he still does called Whiteboard Fridays, where a lot of really good insight and information there. And then, Marty Weintraub, he also founded an agency. And he speaks at a lot of various digital marketing conferences. And his talks are always almost genius level where some of the ways that he thinks about testing and finding new things.
Mohan (00:28:11)
I, to be honest, I don’t think I follow a lot of like, podcasts. But I want to do a shout out to a book that I read many years back. And that’s kind of stuck with me. That’s Positioning. I know, it doesn’t necessarily speak to digital marketing. But I think just going back to the basics, right, I think it’s called positioning a battle for your mind by agrees I think that has some fantastic examples of positioning, right? I think that’s the basic that all marketers digital, traditional marketers need to get to while selling to users finding that unique positioning that differentiates you in a very crowded market. So that’s a book that remains an all-time favourite for me.
Matt (00:28:51)
Well, Mike and Mohan, this has been fantastic. It’s been great to have you on the episode to any of our listeners who are working in the B2B space. We hope that you took a lot away from this episode. So until then, thank you to our guests for joining. This has been how agencies Thrive podcast, and we’ll see you in the next episode.
Episode Outro (00:29:14)
Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can find us at stackadapt.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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