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Episode 4

Current Trends in B2B Digital Marketing

Cover Art of How Agencies Thrive podcast

About This Episode

May 27, 2020

We discuss the latest trends in B2B digital marketing, reveal the biggest opportunities, and share insights on what mistakes to avoid in your next B2B campaign.

Nick Rennard | Director of Paid Media & Search Engine Marketing, Digital Reach Agency

Andrew Seidman | COO, Co-Founder, Digital Reach Agency

Alex MacArthur | Account Director, Team Lead, StackAdapt

00:00

Transcript

Episode Introduction (00:00:00)

You know, companies are in different positions. So like some companies might have like a lot of money and they’re like, you know, if you’re a huge enterprise you might be this is kind of like a blip for you in the near term. And you’re still thinking about like, what your overall like two year goals look like or something. If you are a, you know, a smaller, like a funded startup whose all their revenue just dried up, and their runway, just shorten from two years to three months, you know, like leaning into the paid curve might not really work out very well for you if you just need to be alive in six months. And so I think for anyone that can I think Nick’s advice is great, like, lean into the curve as much as you can, because there actually is a bunch of opportunity available right now a ton of people are online, a ton of people suddenly have business problems they need to address very quickly. So like you have, you know, if you’re selling a solution to those like this is a good time to market so I think there’s there’s something to be said for that.

How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:01:02)

Curious to know what industry leading marketers are looking to achieve and the ever evolving digital landscape that How Agencies Thrive podcast by StackAdapt is dedicated to helping the new breed of forward thinking savvy, lean and mean marketers win in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Time to thrive.

Vitaly (00:01:31)

My name is Vitaly Pecherskiy, and I’m the host of this podcast. Today we have a really great episode for you. Business to business companies are forced to rapidly reinvent how they go to market, obviously with lock downs due to COVID-19. It means that b2b companies can do business or attend conferences in person which affects how they generate leads. And aside from this fact, how business decision makers buy has already been rapidly evolving over the last few years. Increasingly, they’re more stakeholders involved. Often software is adopted first by the line employees and then being pushed out to the management rather than the other way around being bought by the management and push to the line employees. And with increased competition buyers just do so much more research before they buy it. In this episode, Alex McArthur from StackAdapt sat down with Digital Research Agency to work with many software and b2b companies to discuss strategies companies can take to grow despite these new market dynamics. What I found really cool is that DRA is an entirely virtual company already. So they first share some really great insights based on their own experience into how to adapt to the new norm going forward and incorporate remote work. And then the rest of the episode they discuss Account Based Marketing, attribution methodologies, and how to build a holistic marketing funnel strategy. I couldn’t be more excited for this episode. And now it’s time to welcome Nick and Andrew from Digital Reach agency.

Nick (00:02:51)

All right. Hey, everyone. My name is Nick Renard. I’m the director of paid media here at digital reach agency. I manage a team of strategists and texts, to help companies with their paid media marketing strategies. We focus primarily with b2b clients, the platforms that we utilize the most, but certainly not limited to Google LinkedIn ads. And then we also do a lot through programmatic and DSP technology.

Andrew (00:03:23)

Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Seidman. I’m the co founder and head of operations for digital reach. I have a fair number of different responsibilities. But one of my key focuses is on Account Based Marketing, both from a martech stack perspective as well as from a strategic perspective. So yeah, looking forward to talking about that, how programmatic affects ABM and much more. So happy to be here.

Alex (00:03:51)

Hey, I’m Alex McArthur. I’m an account director at StackAdapt had been there for around two years. You know, I come from a background of mobile, programmatic and publisher direct kind of deck desktop stuff. I guess partway through the career, I wanted to merge my two passions, which was advertising and technology. So a DSP that’s an omni channel, covering all areas of the web, make the most sense. And then I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to work with Nick and Andrew for some time now. And they’ve been teaching me lots about how programmatic can be tied into ABM strategies. I mean, the elephant in the room COVID spin a hot topic. As of late I mean, I’ve been stuck at home quarantining, we’ve seen so much of an impact economically on small businesses, large brick and mortar operations. Financial markets, obviously been affected by that and some emotional response. I mean, we’re here today to talk about b2b advertising, especially when it comes to you know, programmatic and funnel position. In terms of SAS and tech in the b2b realm. Those are in a pretty unique position. And now I know you guys are Jira, you guys focus primarily on b2b. And SaaS and tech make up a big portion of that. So, in turn in times of uncertainty like we have right now, like, What’s your perspective on b2b marketing?

Nick (00:05:13)

Yeah, I think there are, in terms of how COVID has affected businesses, I think that it’s easy to look at that by narrowly in that, there’s sort of like two categories, there are some people that are really devastated by what happened. And we’ve already seen a lot of small business and retail and stuff like that, just straight up, go under right away. There are when you mentioned that certain companies like SAS and tech and whatnot are a little less affected, I think it’s a dangerous statement to say that they’re not affected. I mean, it’s easy to look at digital reach, for example, and say, Oh, they were already a remote company, they work with a lot of b2b, it has a little direct effect on them on them. But there’s a large, indirect effect on us in how that affects our clients and their customers as well. So there’s really no one that isn’t affected by this. I think one of the important things to think about in terms of the impact of COVID. And how we are reacting to it is, even if you are in an industry that is quote unquote, fine or, you know, not not devastated by what happened, you’re still going to have to make some moves with you strategically to adapt to what has happened.

Alex (00:06:25)

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, a lots changed. And it’d be kind of short sighted to say that business can carry on as usual. But I mean, with a pivot and strategy and maybe a refinement of messaging, I think there’s still an opportunity for success. In terms of like working remotely, I know you guys have been remote for so long now always just working from home. What’s that been like? And have you noticed, like your clients reaching out for tips on how to kind of handle the current situation like.

Nick (00:06:57)

Yeah, it’s interesting that you’ve read it right when the COVID thing happened. I know as it started ramping up, we started making announcements with our team, Andrew did a really good job of sort of like helping keep our team educated about what was going on. As we talked about digital reach was already remote. We have been full time remote for almost a decade now. So started. Yeah, since since the dawn of dra. So there, we released a blog post I know about trying to help clients that were making the transition. I think that kind of going back to what you mentioned previously, about how is that affecting other companies, I do think that even of the companies that are the industries that are not as affected or not devastated by COVID, that the fact that their whole teams are going to work from home. Now, I think that’s one of the biggest transitions that people are going to have to adapt to because some people are very good at being able to do that. Other people really struggle with the level of like self discipline and whatnot, it takes to just be self driven enough to work 40 hour weeks without being in an office setting.

Alex (00:08:09)

Yeah, I mean, I’ve definitely experienced a bit of a groundhog day kind of situation, it’s hard to get used to the change in routine. But you know, now that I’m settling into a groove, it’s definitely been a lot easier to stay motivated and focused. Yeah. And you guys are pros at that.

Nick (00:08:28)

So, Andrew, I know you were sort of like monitoring the whole COVID-19 giving updates and whatnot to our team and sort of keeping up with that. I don’t know if you have anything you want to add in there.

Vitaly (00:08:39)

Yeah, for sure. First, to answer Alex’s question of our clients and things reaching out for tips I wish they did more often. We have like a huge wealth of experience and extra some great documentation out there, from Zapier, which has been an all remote company from their beginning as well, I think online like it’s a whole guide they wrote to how to run a remote company. So I think that’s, I wish that they came to us for more advice. Because we have so much experience doing this. There’s a whole bunch of technologies that companies can leverage from like we use Asana for task management, obviously, Zoom is stock has like tripled or quadrupled since this whole thing started. There’s a ton of tech stack stuff that you can do to make this stuff work. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of organizations didn’t return from the work from home thing, fully two offices after they build this infrastructure. Because in a lot of ways work from home is more efficient. You don’t have the overhead of large offices you have actually one thing I find valuable is you have a written record of everything. So like you know every communication request documented in Asana or in Slack or whatever it might be. You can find everything super easily. So you actually have a lot less information loss. There’s a little bit less dynamism in working remotely. You can sort of like get some energy from being in a room with someone But the thing that I would note, just in addition from this, for what Nick said is that in our hiring over the years, we’ve really seen a pretty binary situation, in terms of working remotely or working from home, that like some people really thrive in that circumstance, and other people don’t. And it’s been very, very binary. So we usually look for people who have like some kind of really significant reason to want to work from home, like a family or a pet, or, you know, like a hobby, or traveling or whatever. They love doing. Yeah, some kind of a passion. And so that kind of passion, I think, helps sort of settle people in there. So we, we thought a lot about what it means to work from home. So it’s kind of crazy that everyone else is getting forced onto the on the bandwagon.

Nick (00:10:47)

I think drilling into that even just sort of like, I don’t know, on a psychological level to in terms of why that is, because I’ve spent a lot of time in terms of there have been some people that I’ve had to let go from my team where I didn’t, I didn’t let them go, because they weren’t confident they weren’t good at their job, it really was that when you put them behind a desk where no one was micromanaging them, their productivities, productivity levels tanked. And I think that part of how the sort of normal progression of how we grow up in society where even from a very young age, you have teachers and coaches and parents and bosses and managers, and etc, that are constantly pressuring us to act when we’re not acting. I think that that habit is going to affect a lot of companies that are trying to make that transition to work from home in a negative way. And going back to what I said about adaptability, I think that’s where managers really need to come in and implement a lot of the things that Andrew was mentioning of like, having a task system that’s intuitive and stuff like that, to be able to adapt to the new metagame where the level that you can micromanagement people is significantly lower.

Alex (00:11:57)

Yeah, it’s definitely a new meta, it’s a great term. So I mean, I guess from like a b2b marketer standpoint, obviously, productivity at the workplace is directly intertwined with performance, you would get from like a b2b campaign, people need to be pushing through, like discovery and adoption of new technologies in order for, you know, b2b marketing campaigns to kind of convert, so they need to be an online taking action. So you guys finding that this shift in workstyle is affecting the performance of campaigns?

Nick (00:12:33)

It’s a little early to really tell the long term effects like we’ve been running in quarantine for about a month. And the results are as many things with lots of data are a little bit murky. At this point. Campaigns, or certain clients have actually performed like way outperformed past history. So we’ve done and there’s some reasons for this, I think like number one is, there’s a ton of engagement surrounding COVID as a subject itself. So like, we’re here talking about it on the podcast, like we’re running webinars about it. Everyone is basically online, trying to learn about how this big black swan event is affecting their business. And so all of the COVID related campaigns that we’ve done, have, like had unbelievable results, in terms of getting people to think about how your problem or your product rather, might solve their COVID related problems. And so I think there’s something really valuable there. On the other hand, a lot of our clients exist in industries that are getting hammered by this whole thing. Like, it doesn’t matter how effective your marketing is, if you sell airplane tickets, or, you know, restaurant food, or and we don’t really work with a lot of like restaurants, but like we work with some travel oriented b2b companies or things like that. If anything, I view it as kind of a great opportunity for a lot of accounts to basically prove out definitively that digital campaigns outperform non digital ones, which I think is like likely to be true in most cases, and has been something digital marketers have been harping on forever. But But yeah, I would say it’s a little too hard to say at the moment. If it’s like definitively like a terrible thing, or a good thing that’s probably more like, you know, by criteria depends. But people are definitely spending a lot more time online than they ever have been before. So it can’t be all a loss.

Alex (00:14:22)

Yeah, no, I mean, I think it’d be short sighted to go either way on that question, in terms of like a benefit or a loss. But it’s definitely an opportunity to really prove out digital because I know that so many strategy pivots are happening within these organizations that have a 360 kind of plan for their b2b strategies. And the channel that is active and growing right now is digital people are spending so much time online. I mean, I know on our side, we’ve noticed a giant spike in inventory and a reduction in CPC CPM. And that’s based on just there being more available inventory. supply and demand. There’s more out there and you’re competing against less.

Nick (00:15:04)

Yeah, I would echo what Andrew said on the, the kind of the, the analogy that I would draw there is that when we run campaigns for clients, let’s say we’re running a campaign that’s supposed to spend $10,000 a month, if you ask me three days after the campaign launches, what’s the performance? Like? How are things doing what’s good, what’s bad, it’s just too early to tell, we’re going to need to let it run for a little bit, we’re going to need to adapt to some of the metrics that we see, I think that’s a similar analogy to what we’re dealing with COVID, that we’re sort of making some predictions with the information that we have. But we will have to see how this pans out and adapt from there. One thing that I wanted to this is sort of a tangent on your question, but kind of relating back to what we were talking about in terms of like managing your teams, I do think that one of the big shifts that is happening with this crisis is that people in general, are not spending as much like social time with each other. That much is obvious. One of the things that I think is important, I know that we value a very highly foundationally culture is a huge thing for us. And so I think that it may sound silly, but I think setting up like even like game nights with your team, we do something that we call fam chats where we randomly pair people with other people to get them to just chat for 30 minutes casually about their lives and what’s going on and stuff like that. I think that that void that people are having socially with not being able to go out, and whatnot is sort of an opportunity for us as managers to set up events like that to help our team feel that like, you know, our company is sort of part of filling the gap for them on that. So I think that’s something that you can help enhance your the morale of your team, the culture of your team by implementing little things like those, even though you know, that’s sort of outside the spectrum of like a b2b marketing strategy or something like that. So that that’s as a manager, like some of the things that I focus on.

Alex (00:17:04)

Yeah, I mean, I definitely have experienced this weird gray area between Sunday and Mondays. Typically, I get into the office on Mondays and I get that rush of I’m at work, it’s time to go. Like, let’s get this ball rolling. But now there’s not that social kind of stimulation of getting in there and seeing everyone after the weekend. So it’s harder to pick up and go on Mondays. So I mean, social kind of scheduled time like that, between employees definitely helped boost productivity.

Nick (00:17:35)

You know, like you when you were a little kid and you were playing video games all day, and your parents would yell at you. It’s like, now we’re forced into that situation. Now, we have to find ways to like make ourselves as adults, difficult to do.

Alex (00:17:48)

That’s funny. Definitely, I’ve experienced with that.

Jason (00:17:54)

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Alex (00:18:31)

I liked the you mentioned analogies before because I mean, the purpose of this podcast is to really touch on, you know, ABM or Account Based Marketing, attribution measurement and funnel structuring. You’ve always had this great analogy that talks about the shape of a funnel relating to sports. I was wondering if you could drop that on us.

Nick (00:18:56)

Yeah, this actually came up originally, like, I think I was in a weekly lecture, and I just started rambling about it. And then it just kind of stuck. But I was talking about a the difference between a good sort of like holistic marketing strategy versus some of the common pitfalls and where people have like failed holistic marketing strategies. I related it to a soccer game, and it could really be any sport, it could be lacrosse, or whatever. But if you look at a little kid soccer game versus an adult soccer game, in a little kids soccer game, everyone chases the ball, and it’s a huge cluster around the ball. Whereas in an adult game, it’s much more like zone defense where everyone’s kind of like playing their role on the field. We have. I would say that in the little kids soccer game, the analogy that I drew there was that there are a lot of directors of marketing or marketing managers, whatever, that get pressures from their CEOs to say, I need more opportunities in my pipeline. So a lot of times they react fearfully that if they don’t pump more opportunities immediately that they’re going to get fired. So what they do is they line up all of their campaigns, they sort them by which one has the best cost per opportunity. And then they invest all of their money into that one campaign that has the best cost per opportunity. And that’s a problem. Because when you’re doing that you’re essentially cluster it’s like the little kid soccer game where you’re clustering all of your resources into that, that one part of the funnel. But a successful holistic marketing strategy is not about just doing one thing. It’s not there’s it’s not, there’s not one secret sauce element that you invest all of your resources into it. And that’s what makes it successful. It really is like a team game where everyone sort of has to play their zone, you have top funnel assets, that are focused on awareness and getting, you know, engagement, stuff like that. You have mid funnel stuff that incorporates remarketing and nurture. The sales team gets involved as you start getting closer to bottom funneling and closing it. And you start using more aggressive assets like free trials and, and demo requests and stuff like that, rather than trying to serve them free content like you would in top of funnel. So that was sort of the analogy that we drew of the little kids soccer game versus the adult soccer game.

Alex (00:21:13)

Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. Just playing purely hockey for so many years, you get a lot of out of position stuff. And when that starts happening, you start losing the game. Andrew, I mean, we were talking earlier this week, and you really mentioned some interesting stuff about, you know, account funnels and lead funnels, I was wondering, like, how is Deray tackling this topic and kind of bridging that knowledge gap with b2b marketers?

Vitaly (00:21:39)

Yeah, so the the kind of initial frameshift. That is, I think, fundamental to Account Based Marketing is that sort of traditional, and you can see this in the way that like Salesforce or other CRMs are built, they’re all built around the lead model, like the leads are the individual people that you’re trying to, to make relationships with. And then ideally, you progress from those leads into Contacts, the contacts work at an account, and then you kind of like work your way from the bottom up. In an Account Based Marketing, you’re actually thinking about things from the top down, like you’re thinking about what’s important to the account on the whole, who are the different players in that account, how does like an account make choices rather than an individual make choices, ultimately, you still will be interacting with individuals like accounts, and people are all part of the same ecosystem there. But when we set up like an account based funnel, for example, we’re looking at a lot of those qualifications on the account level. So we’re rolling up scores from individual leads to like create an account score, we’re using that account score to create like an account lifecycle. So often, if you have like a lead lifecycle, it’s doing something like, you know, going from prospect to lead to MQL, SQL opportunity, customer evangelist in accounts, you can have the exact same thing, you can have an account that goes from being a unengaged account, like a prospect account, to a engaged account, to a marketing qualified account to a sales, qualified account, and so forth, which basically kind of reflects the same things as being like the sum accumulation of their parts. And so I think this sort of can relate to, even in a more complex way to more sophisticated way to a NICUs thing, which is like, within an account, you might actually have people at varying stages. So you might have some people who are really like in the information gathering phase, you have some people who are, who are like even not even aware that they have a problem or that you have a solution for their problem. And then you may have other people who are already champions who are trying to like buy your product now. And so rather than trying to, you know, act like these are all independent actors, you sort of attack the account on the whole, but fit the content that you need to those individual experiences. So that kind of like progress. The whole accounts with a funnel is one big unit. And that’s that’s usually the strategy that I tried to report on in ABM is to say, like, our KPI is how are the the accounts themselves moving through the account funnel? Rather than like, how are the leads moving through it, if that makes sense?

Alex (00:24:09)

Yeah, that does make sense. I mean, Nick, in terms of like, activating or executing on some of the overarching strategies that Andrew works, to kind of build out a plan for like, what are some tactics that you’ve been using to kind of engage accounts as a whole? And Andrew, I mean, if there’s anything on your side as well, just just unique kind of strategies, tactics? datatypes. Like, what’s that looking like for you guys?

Speaker 1 (00:24:38)

Yeah, I mean, Nick, I think you should jump in and talk to us about pay for a second because paid is like the most dynamic and flexible all of these mechanisms. And then I can talk a little bit about some of the other other mediums that we use.

Nick (00:24:50)

Yeah, I think I think a lot of the Andrew what you were talking about, there are great questions for people to be asking themselves about their own company. They are their own sales funnel in terms of I think a lot of people start looking for agencies to like manage their Google ad spend or something like that without even knowing the answers to the questions of like, how are leads being nurtured from one stage to another, asking those kinds of questions and figuring that out. And understanding sort of where the bottlenecks are in your funnel is extremely important. If you figure out that all, you know, maybe you’re pumping a ton of leads into your funnel from a campaign that you’re running on Google or LinkedIn, or whatever. But you don’t have anything in place to sort of catch those leads as they’re going down into the mid funnel, and you’re having, you know, massive drops in conversion rates and stuff like that. That’s something that you need to identify. And I think that, um, you can kind of see that in the structure of if you look at like the, the lifespan of digital reach when we first started, we first started as just a paid media company. And we slowly started branching out into doing SEO and web dev and design and marketing, automation, and CRO and all this other stuff. And the reason we did that was because we realized exactly that, that to nurture all the way through the funnel, and these long sales cycles for you know, b2b, SaaS, tech, etc. We really do need to be able to address those issues on a lot of different levels. So everyone knows about Google search, that’s a big focus of ours, we invest a lot of research resources into Google search. So that that’s something that is definitely a strategy that we utilize a lot remarketing. And a lot of different forums on a lot of different platforms is also a strategy that we implement a lot, I would consider both Google search and remarketing to be very low hanging fruit. So if you’re just starting to ask those questions about your company, maybe you’re sort of revamping your marketing or onboarding new directors of demand gen and stuff like that for your company. I think that those are, those are good questions to sort of ask yourself, and if you’re restructuring your campaigns that you’re using, those are good places to start. Stuff that’s been working lately, for us really well. So one of the pain points that we’ve had with a lot of clients is landing pages, landing pages take, they take good designers, and not everybody really has access to those. It also if you want to hire a good designer, that’s typically pretty expensive. And also creating it and getting the content for it. And everything is generally a relatively time consuming process. So LinkedIn recently rolled out with what they call lead gen forms. And I know they’re rolling out on Google and some other platforms as well. And what those are, is, instead of clicking the link and going straight to a landing page, you know, where you insert your URL, the form just pops up on the page itself, where you can submit your information and you can capture the lead that way, it’s much it’s much simpler. Now, with paid media, the typical best practice for a landing page is to put the call to action right in the person’s face as they’re landing on the page that form submission needs to be above the fold. I’m sure a lot of people already kind of know the best practices of landing pages they have experienced with it. This is sort of like the quintessence of that where it’s like, that’s literally all it is, is the form. There are some complications with that we’ve ran into with being able to attribute those forms into people’s CRMs. It is doable, but since it’s relatively new technology and the way depending on the CRM that you’re using, there can be complications there. But we have seen in terms of being able to capture leads, Legion forms have been something that we’ve been having extreme success lately, Andrew and on. On some of the accounts that have been working with you on we’ve we’ve been running those for clients, and the conversion rates are insane. I don’t I don’t know if you have anything you want to add into that?

Vitaly (00:29:02)

Yeah, for sure. I think lead gen forms are like at the forefront of effective new technology, especially in alleviating the bandwidth issues that a lot of companies have to get their web development teams up and running and make great landing pages and manage them and tie them into the form handlers and apart marketing automation side of things. And there’s a lot going on that a LinkedIn lead form or another Google lead form, whatever can alleviate, which I think is like super, it’s super amazing, as well as just making it a better user experience for the client or for the prospect. Like they just want to access that piece of information from you. Now they can just get it you know, right on their platform that they utilize already. Rather than otherwise, there’s sort of one downside to it. There’s a little bit of a lower threshold of qualification. You know, when somebody comes to, you know, goes to your site fills out the form, they’re like they tend to be they often are going to be using their like business email address, whereas like somebody On LinkedIn is often using their Gmail address or something like that. So there is some qualification there. But I think it’s kind of hard to argue with the lead quantity and the low cost per acquisition are pretty strong on this thing. So I definitely say that’s part of it. I would also just note, outside of paid or paid media, it’s been interesting during COVID-19, how it’s affected our ability to do like multi channel marketing campaigns. So you know, in the past, you would include something like direct mail, well, direct mail, no one’s in the office, like you can’t really mail something to an office where no one is, and expect it to actually get to where it’s going. There’s, you know, Field Marketing is a huge component, like one of the some of our clients have been dumping a ton of extra money into paid media now, because they can’t run their multimillion dollar conference that they were going to run, or they can’t send their their field marketing and sales teams out to these places. So you know, with those reduction of possible outlets of marketing touches, basically, you really see it focused more on this array of email, paid to degree organic, but organic is a lot harder to target in the near term, like you can build organic, but you can’t really be like, Oh, we’re going to drive 10,000 Organic leads, you know, for this campaign that we’re gonna run for three weeks. So you know, you can do like organic, long run, but really, like paid email and social are like common, the only ways that you can, you know, COVID land that you can, like, quickly connect with your prospects. And so I think those like, between investing in those things, if you need to keep the leads coming, and then investing honestly, usually, in this time as for like architectural purposes, there’s a ton of architecture problems that prevent people from having good ABM or good multi channel campaigns, like problems on the website, like problems on the, you know, within the marketing, automation, or CRM or your data set, or like, is your data clean? Or when’s the last time you actually sat down and looked at your content gaps and so forth? So there’s a ton of architectural things I think people can use the time to improve on but from a campaign perspective, yeah, paid is kind of like, gotta carry a lot of the load here that plus like email and social.

Alex (00:32:09)

Yeah, I mean, emails is going to be huge in the near future, and is already quite an effective tactic. I mean, for people that have built up large CRM files that contain like 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of like, segmented emails, that are just like broken out into exactly who they want to target. Leveraging first party email targeting, whether it’s direct email or through like, syncing and matching with the audience graph has to graphs to make them targetable through programmatic channels, that’s something that’s incredibly valuable to a marketer, and just owning your own data, from that sense is, is the strategy that a lot of people hopefully are working on getting in place now. Or just working on collecting as much as they can. I know, there’s just been a huge shift in things you mentioned, like field or conference marketing, and as well, any sort of like direct mail, like mailing stuff to actual addresses, those channels, I guess, are effectively gone until people are back in the offense, or they’re allowing conferences to happen again. I mean, I know in our side, over at StackAdapt, some of the IP or ISP, Internet Service Provider targeting we’ve been doing for corporate IPS just isn’t as effective right now, people are just not there. And then as well, like physical conference, digital support, so like, kind of pie in the sky, targeting these large b2b conferences with either geofencing or geo capturing has been like a historical tactic that’s worked really well. Fortunately, I mean, a lot of the geo capturing that we’ve done is still available, and advertisers can still use those stored segments based on historical presence at a conference. But the geofencing aspect is gone, because there’s no, there’s no actual conference happening. So it’s definitely an interesting shift. In terms of like, keeping things going, Yeah, I think the the channels you mentioned earlier, are going to be extremely effective during this time.

Nick (00:34:13)

Yeah. And I think that’s a great example of sort of when we were talking about adapting your marketing strategy that that’s a great you ask the question about, like, what’s working right now, talking about what’s not working as well. That’s a good example of like, okay, so let’s say we’re investing X amount of dollars per month into the strategy like that, how are we flexing those dollars? And where are we flexing those dollars into other strategies? I do think that what I have seen is I think a lot of people with their marketing strategies, since there’s been a big scare with COVID. A lot of people are just tightening up and cutting those entirely. I think that if you are in the spectrum of companies that is not devastated by COVID that I would encourage people to, rather than just cut all of your expenses. And tighten up, at least have the discussion of like, strategically, how could we reallocate those funds into another sort of like, Next Level meta strategy? With our marketing? I do think that’s a healthy thing to consider, rather than just kind of reacting out of fear and just trying to sort of hoard your money.

Alex (00:35:19)

Yeah, I mean, I know that some of the like, the premier b2b data providers are likely rejoicing right now a lot of people who are having to pivot away from those traditional physical, or even IP based strategies are going to be looking towards like a Bombora, or Dun and Bradstreet, to use business record data to reach people on the devices that they’ve taken home because they’re no longer at the office. So I mean, there’s definitely still tactics available, it’s just up to marketers to sit down, kind of do a, I guess, even like a SWOT analysis of what’s possible for them right now. And if there’s an opportunity for them to continue to see success during the like the pandemic times, break it all down and spell it out and look to where you can spend and deliver intelligently.

Vitaly (00:36:11)

Basically, I will, I will say just quickly that, you know, companies are in different positions. So like, some companies might have like a lot of money and they’re like, you know, if you’re a huge enterprise, you might be this is kind of like a blip for you in the near term. And you’re still thinking about, like, what your overall like two year goals look like or something, if you are a, you know, a smaller, like a funded startup whose all their revenue just dried up, and their runway, just shorten from two years to three months, you know, like leaning into the paid curve might not really work out very well for you if you just need to be alive in six months. And so I think, you know, for anyone that can, I would read, I think Nick’s advice is great, like read, you know, lean into the curve as much as you can, because there actually is a bunch of opportunity available right now a ton of people are online, a ton of people suddenly have business problems, they need to address very quickly. So like you have, you know, if you’re selling a solution to those, like this is a good time to market. So I think there’s there’s something to be said for that. But it really it really happens on like a kind of like a case by case basis. And then also, like from the you mentioned, kind of IP targeting, I really do feel like right now is the time for like device targeting to really like surge to the forefront. You know, somebody like Bombora, who is has an amazing intent service intent data service, like is relying a lot on, you know, how on people to be filling out forms from known IPs. And when you lose the known IP factor, people, you have to get creative in this kind of targeting. So now, I am confident the market is pretty flexible and very sharp and very intelligent as to solve some of these things. But it’s definitely kind of, at least in the near term, kind of a new horizon for how we provide the best possible targeting. That said, it’s still like any kind of like really high level programmatic targeting is still going to provide like way better targeting than any sort of like untargeted, or medium targeted, like classic Google display. So there’s kind of a spectrum here. And generally, I’d recommend, like, if you have the money to spend right now, you probably should spend it because everyone’s online looking for looking for how can I solve my business problem in the age of?

Alex (00:38:27)

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. In terms of spending intelligently? Like if you can do it, definitely do it. I mean, once let’s say like, there’s no playbook right now. There’s no set guideline that you can put in place that’s going to blanket cover your business, it is definitely up to marketers and people like yourselves to help marketers understand how they have the best chance of success. But let’s say you’ve you’ve carved out a pretty good plan and, you know, it starts to take get traction and start working in terms of like measuring and attribution, like beyond just like a cookie based conversion from a lead gen form, like what type of like attribution or marketing technologies are you guys utilizing to sift through like the bulk data and understand how performance is occurring at like, an account level at a quality level? Like what’s that look like for you guys?

Vitaly (00:39:25)

Yeah, I’ll jump in for that one. First of all, there’s lots of different like attribution methodologies that you can utilize to, to get a picture here. I tend to think that like, the distance between zero and one is much greater than the distance between one and two, which is to say the like having no functional attribution is so much worse than, you know, having like, let’s say first and last touch, relative to the difference between having first and last versus like robust multi touch. So I would say for most people, if you look at this and you’re like, I don’t have a super clear picture of Like, let’s say the key touches of my closed one or my opportunity pipeline, than just getting anything installed is such a victory that it’s worth it. It’s kind of no matter what level you are at in the marketing department, like, if you’re on the director level, and you’re trying to report this, like, this is the report you need. If you’re like a tactician and trying to, you know, optimize an account, like being able to see what actually generates pipeline is way more valuable than being able to see what generates leads. And so, you know, there’s, there’s a lot to be said, for just getting any kind of attribution. But if you are at that level already, and you’re looking sort of into the future, real credit is way better applied via multi touch systems, like you can get from visible or lean data or many other providers. But the idea of that being like, you know, okay, let’s say that, like Nick said before about the soccer field analogy, right? If you are just focused entirely on the bottom of the funnel, like you might just be looking for these like converting touches, you might miss the fact that, you know, a huge percentage of the overall touches, you know, occurred via organic, right. And it’s just like, oh, really organic is driving 70% of your valuable touches. And it’s just like this last one that comes in through paid, you get a clearer picture of how that works. And then I ideally just like roll this up to the account level, and be able to say, what were the key touches as the account. But what caused the account to go from being an unengaged account to an engaged one will cause them to go from to an MQ M QA, market marketing qualified account to like an S QA, and be able to say, okay, these key transition moments align that these touches, like that’s kind of the the overall attribution plan, if that makes sense. But it’s not easy to set up like I kind of noted before, you really need some architecture, in your automation and in your data to be able to actually report on that kind of thing.

Nick (00:41:51)

Do you have any recommendations of someone who maybe feels like their company is at a zero and trying to go from zero to one of how to address or implement that?

Vitaly (00:42:00)

Yeah, I mean, like, first and foremost, like, find yourself a CRM, and or a marketing automation admin, who knows this stuff, I’d say probably the most common problem that you get on attribution, actually stems deeper and happens because people assume that Salesforce or you know, Marketo, or Pardot, or whatever, are like plug and play software that you can just like sit down in and get started with no experience, or with minimal experience, actually, kind of amazing people will spend like $50,000, on Marketo, and then give it to their intern, it’s, it’s like very, kind of crazy. And so just finding somebody that actually understands how these systems work, the actual setup of an attribution system isn’t very hard. If you’re somebody with any experience in it, like you literally click some buttons, you install a piece of software that you either buy from, you know, a provider, like visible or that you, you get from like a an agency like ours, we have our own attribution software. But like, you know, you basically have somebody who knows how to set this up. Once you have that piece of code. It’s literally just like you, you create some fields in your CRM, and then you plug in this code, you run a test, and it’s good to go. But if you don’t have that pre existing expertise, it’s really hard. So yeah, my advice for if you don’t have the attribution you need is you probably just need to bite the bullet and get some professional help. Like if your car, you know, started making a squealing noise and smoking. Like, if you’re not a mechanic yourself, like you probably need to take it to a mechanic who knows what’s going on. And I think that that is true of of like all these technically challenging things, including getting attribution setup.

Alex (00:43:40)

Yeah, I’m from personal experience, like I obviously I use Salesforce and beyond like some of the reports that have been provided to me building out some of my own custom reporting dashboards has been a lot of Google searching on like, very deep threads within forums, to understand the right formulas that go into place. And in terms of like your guys’s proprietary, like attribution script. Like, I know you guys have developed one. I don’t obviously know what comprises it. And I wouldn’t expect you guys to explain that. But in terms of like, building that, like, how is it like an ongoing process? Like how long have you guys been doing that for us? Definitely unique that you guys have your own script.

Nick (00:44:22)

We’ve been doing it for many years. It actually was like super core to our business. The most common thing you get in b2b is just like, Okay, but how do I show that this actually makes money? And if you can’t answer that question, then you’re pretty liquid to get fired. And you can’t answer that question without attribution. So in b2b and b2c, you can just look in Google Analytics and see hey, like we ran these paid campaigns that lead to this much money, but it’s more abstract and b2b like Nick can run your next team can run like a beautiful campaign that you know, creates, like hundreds of form submissions that are very cheap rate or whatever it is 1000 means, and somebody might still be like, where’s the money, you know what I mean? Or they might, let’s say, have gotten five opportunities this quarter, and they were expecting 10. And they’re like, this is total garbage. But then like, if you have attribution, you look and you see that all five came from paid. This is like, oh, maybe paid is actually the only thing that’s working for you. So a bit sort of mission critical part of our business to get that up and running, it actually is pretty easy to explain how it works. Basically, what happens is like, when someone submits a form on your site, they, you know, enter, like some fields, right? They enter their name, their email, address, their company, their title. But when they arrived on this site, Google and a few other cookies on your browser are tracking too much information like that’s where analytics is getting its info is like, you know, What page did I come from, and how did I get here, and so forth. And we basically just take all that information, and then add it to the form in a hidden field. So when they hit enter, not only do they submit their email, they submit the medium that they came from, but they never have to see that or it doesn’t disrupt the the flow of their user experience. And then all that info just comes attached with the lead into the CRM. So you can see oh, there was a touch here from this person that came from this medium. And so like, if we want to see how our StackAdapt campaigns are doing on a client, we can just look and see this based on the UTM criteria, like, No, this is a StackAdapt form submission that came through at this time via this page via that campaign. And then we can sort of track it all the way through to get not only just like, how much how many leads? Or what’s our cost per lead, but also like, what’s our value per lead? Or what’s our value per opportunity? Because we can see exactly how many, how many dollars we won, based off of a StackAdapt influence, for example. So having that kind of transparency, I think is like, it’s fundamental to what Nick does fundamental to what our SEO and other teams do. I think it’s just like, a critical piece of the puzzle.

Alex (00:46:45)

Absolutely. Extremely important. It’s, I mean, what’s the point of collecting all this information if you’re not set up to be able to like, analyze it, right? So in terms of like, the martec piece, it sounds like, you guys have that covered from like, zero to one standpoint, and then one to two, what what would really I mean, mentioned multi touch, like what’s involved in one to two.

Nick (00:47:08)

So you can think about the example I just gave, right, like the first and last touch are basically being saved as like these fields on on like a specific person. So like, oh, Andrew showed up, and he started off here, and then his most recent one was there. And that’s all the information you get, there’s like when you install some, like more advanced software, and get it running, you basically get to see each individual touch that gets saved there in kind of like its own custom module that the like, let’s say, like lean data, for example, is going to track for you. So in this case, you can get a sense of you could run like a bi touch report. So you can basically say like, show me all of the organic touches no matter who who did them, you could I think the most valuable thing for me is to be able to when you get that data is to see like a like, assume like an even value touch model, like where do the majority of what like what percentage of my touches come from each medium, and be able to get a sense from that, there’s like literally infinite number of possible models that you can use the probably like 10 really popular ones for doing this kind of thing. So that like really heavily weighed first or last, I think like, it’s probably like, what’s right to do is something like a slightly higher weight towards probably the highest weight towards first touch. And then like a collection of kind of like middling values, like average middle value, and then like a little bit more for the last touch, but like doesn’t really matter that much. The idea being to see, you know, what are the ratios of how often people are engaging with different types of mediums. And so you can really kind of see where your investment is best suited, and ideally, like, even down to like the keyword level. In fact, like, these keywords are driving the majority of our touches, and then filter that data back the rest of your team ever. Salespeople know that kind of thing. And then you get into like the ABM world where everything has to be totally aligned. But I think that just with that kind of data, you can do really cool stuff.

Alex (00:48:57)

Yeah, it sounds like an incredibly complex, I guess, balance of information and strategies all kind of intertwining into one. I mean, you’re you’re talking about like MQL is opportunities, SQL is what type of scoring, like how does scoring occur and sort of keep picking your brain on this? Your knowledge is so far advanced compared to mine?

Nick (00:49:20)

No, I, I think that all of this is extremely relevant to all of the clients that we work with. So and I know, Andrew, this is very much your expertise, I believe that you were actually involved in writing that original script that we use. Yeah. And so you’re a good candidate for talking about this, for sure.

Nick (00:49:35)

And actually, I’ll tie scoring into kind of what Nick does as well, because I think that it’s underutilized in a lot of ways. So scoring, you know, ideally on a leader or prospect level, is designed to show you engagement, right it’s designed to show you quality or value of a lead. I think there’s always like default modules in the marketing automation platforms like HubSpot or Pardot whatever they have these, like, out of the box scoring systems that are all like, pretty busted, in my opinion.

Alex (00:50:06)

They’re like a little 50, grand, 50. Grand. Exactly.

Nick (00:50:09)

So I always prefer to do these things at least partially customized. And so the idea is that, at least like in the model that I set up usually is you have a mix of water, someone’s pre qualification. So they’re like demographic score, which might be based on their title, their industry, something like that. And those don’t change, those stay static. And then somebody’s behavioral score, which is a measurement of their engagement, like what forms do they fill out pages, they visit, things like that. And then those things end up getting summed to sort of like whatever your current active score is. And then the engagement score is decay. So like, if I visited a page A month ago, that score stays for awhile, and then goes away. So ideally, your salespeople look at a ranked list of highest to lowest scores of their MQL is, let’s say, and then they can sort of prospect in order of highest value. This has some problems on an account based level, because like, you might have 10 people from a Microsoft buying committee, who all have 10 points, and one super fan who’s got like, 1000 points, and you might think she’s more valuable than your Microsoft team. But on an account score level, you could look at this and see like, oh, well, Microsoft has a lot of points right now, like these guys are pretty engaged. So that’s from a scoring perspective, like how I usually set it up, it does require some know how within the CRM and marketing automation to do, but the part that I think is really cool is when you have those scores, which are isn’t like quite literally scores of someone’s qualification or someone’s quality, you can then pull those over into remarketing lists. So like, you know, for someone who’s like running display advertising, or match lists, like being able to say these 1000 people are our highest score people, and then these 5000 people are like the next tier of scoring. And so what, so there’s like a time with paid in scoring there as well, for sure.

Alex 51:59

Yeah, I mean, being able to target those high score people directly or even create local lakes is definitely like, a huge win, especially, you know, right now, and a lot of traditional strategies are kind of on hold, right. So, I mean, being able to see into that, it’s definitely a little bit beyond me, just from lack of experience with working with such advanced tools. But sounds like you guys have an incredible handle on that.

Nick (00:52:24)

A lot of it, I know that a lot of this is like seemingly advanced. And I would say that for sort of a lot of people entering into this for the first time, it sounds very complicated. I do think that in terms of where we’re at with attribution, in general, for being able to track this kind of stuff, I think that marketing is still sort of in the development phases of developing attribution. Obviously, when Google Ads was first released, we were measuring conversions. But with people who are using using longer sales cycles, measuring just conversions is not nearly enough, we’ll always tell clients, or really anyone something that we preach is that if we invest money into paid media, without some form of attribution, that’s typically going to be wasted money, we can’t go spending a quarter million of a client’s budget with a one year sales cycle. And then after a year goes by of spending that money on, you know, monthly or quarterly basis, not being able to tell them how many leads and opportunities and stuff that that’s converted into. I do agree with what Andrew said that sort of what zero to one is more of a vital step and one to two, I do think that like, what I’m hoping if we’re looking like five to 10 years in the future, in terms of how we attribute things in, in marketing in general, is that we’re not really debating about whether to do first touch and last touch, but that we’ve developed more elaborate models that do take multi touch into account. What we’ve seen with leads and what we know about nurturing leads through long sales cycles is that they often have like 10s, or hundreds of touches between organic and paid and everything. And so there are a lot of things to give credit to how we develop an algorithm to be able to track that and give the proper amount of credit is still sort of up in the air, I hope is that in the future, we’re talking less about like, Oh, you want to run a campaign on x, let’s set up conversion tracking, but more that we’re talking about as part of the basic setup, being implementing that full scale attribution for anyone on any platform. I think that would be a really cool tool to see. I just I just don’t really think that we’re there yet. So we do have to use a lot of these sort of like, third party vendors and software’s and stuff like that to be able to strategically craft this together to be able to show it to our clients.

Alex (00:54:48)

Yeah, the industry always changing. I mean, I’m not going to get into this topic, but I think as because it’s just a whole nother can of worms, maybe another episode of this but as we transition more and more towards like a universal tracking ID for all devices, all users. I mean, privacy aside, like whatever happens there happens there. But if there is a solution that comes into place that still respects the privacy of users, we may see that kind of leap from zero to two all the time, sort of just zero to one is the starting point. So yeah, I’m definitely like excited about the future with what’s going to happen with cookies, IP device IDs, even like desktop device IDs. I heard that might be a thing. Who knows, though? But yeah, I mean, we touched on a lot. This has been fantastic. From COVID to know ABM funnel strategies, the legendary soccer field analogy, and then martech to close it out. I’m super happy with this, guys. And I really appreciate you guys jumping on. I know you guys have lots of clients to get back to you. So I guess we can just call it a day.

Nick (00:55:56)

Yeah. I appreciate you having us here.

Vitaly (00:55:57)

Thanks so much, Alex. I appreciate it. Yeah.

Episode Outro (00:56:01)

Thank you very much for tuning into this episode today. If you like what you heard, it would mean the world to us. If you do these three things. Subscribe to the show and leave us a review. If you’re listening to this and know someone who would find this episode valuable. Please share it with them. And finally, please share it on LinkedIn. If you have questions or feedback or would love to learn how agencies or brands work with StackAdapt, find at www.stackadapt.com Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

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