Scaling B2B Marketing Challenges through an Omnichannel Lens
In this enlightening episode, industry leaders discuss the complex challenges and solutions related to scaling B2B marketing on a global scale through an omnichannel lens. Topics covered include localising messaging for diverse markets, striking the right balance between data-driven strategies and creative approaches, as well as the intricacies of attribution at scale.
Key Takeaways:
Localization is Crucial: The importance of localising messaging and content rather than just translating them to resonate with each market's cultural nuances was emphasised.
Data-Driven Scaling with Caution: The episode warns against solely relying on third-party data and recommends a balanced approach that includes first-party data and primary research.
Efficient Customisation: A middle ground between completely bespoke content for each market and reusing core assets to save time and resources is advocated.
Metrics May Vary: Different data points can indicate success when comparing large to small companies.
Attribution at Scale: Automation is key for effective multi-touch attribution in B2B's complex and lengthy buyer journeys.
Don't Neglect Creativity: The value of big brand ideas and emotional storytelling in crafting memorable B2B campaigns is underlined.
Tune in to learn how B2B marketers can adapt their strategies for global success while retaining brand essence and measuring performance effectively.
Guests
Mariette Ferreira, CMO at 11:FS
David Reid, VP of Global Growth at Transmission
Jonathan Connor, Marketing Specialist at Nvidia
Liam Bartholomew, VP of Marketing at Cognism
Well, so welcome, everyone, to another episode of The Future of B2B Digital Marketing podcast. Today we are diving deep into the into the omnichannel universe in B2B. So let's kick off defining what omnichannel really means in our context. Okay. In B2B, Omnichannel refers to multi-channel sales and marketing approach that aims to provide seamless customer experience regardless of the channel or device. The goal is to engage potential clients or existing customers at multiple points along their buyer journey. So, for example, if a client might first hear about a product through a LinkedIn ad, then attend a webinar, receive a series of personalized emails, and finally engage in a 1 to 1 meeting before making a purchase decision in a omnichannel strategy. Each of these touchpoints would be interconnected. Okay. But of course, life is not that simple. It's full of challenges. That's why we are here to discuss this particular challenges. For example, when scaling, going to other geographies, different business verticals, etcetera, so how we attain that omnichannel strategy. But before we start, let's do a quick round of introduction. Mariette, would you like to start?
Yeah, of course. Um, my name is Maria Ferreira. I'm CMO at 1111, is a fintech consultancy operating out of the UK, but with clients globally.
Pleased to meet you.
Thank you for it, David.
Hi, everyone. I'm David Reid. I'm VP of Global Growth at Transmission. Transmission are a global B2B specialist marketing agency and we cover all geos from us, Amea, APAC, and we're coming up to ten years old this year.
And congratulations about the Adweek Award.
We mentioned that. Yeah, Yeah. Really great. Adweek Agency of the Year. We're really proud. Congratulations.
Amazing. Jonathan.
Over here. This. My name is Jonathan. Jonathan Connor. I currently work at Nvidia and I'm a marketing specialist and my special sort of topics are alliance and partner marketing. Looking at how we can best leverage our ecosystem and bring together, bring together that ecosystem and form that into go to market campaigns.
Brilliant Liam?
Yeah. Hi.
I'm Liam Bartholomew, VP of Marketing at Cognizant, and we're a global B2B data platform headquartered in the UK, but with presence globally as well.
Thank you. And Tom.
And my name is Tom Gatton and I'm the chief executive and founder of Ads Act, which is a B2B ad platform.
Thank you. Well, and I'm Joaquin Dominguez, and I'm head of marketing of Artsact. So let's kick off. Now that we've framed our discussion in the omnichannel context, let's delve into our first talent, which is scaling global resonance. So how do we adapt our messaging across multiple channels to resonate on a global scale? Of course, I give this open for discussion. Feel free to interrupt yourself. Make questions. Who wants to go first?
Or maybe I'll have a go with you if you like.
Thank you.
So. Having quite a bit of experience, having to work across multiple channels and different cultures and doing things both on a global but also on a on a regional basis. Sometimes, you know, teams can fall into the trap of it's about translation. So we've created something at corporate, we translate it and, and you know, we ship that out into France, Germany, Japan, wherever. But you know, experience has shown that really you need to you really need to understand the culture and look at localization. So for scaling into, you know, to gain that sort of global resonance, it's about having consistency message, making sure the brand is truly represented. It doesn't conflict in the culture you're going into, but really understanding the, you know, that culture, the preferences, the behavior of the market that you're entering into. And again, from experience, a straightforward translation really, really doesn't cut the mustard taking on that. Local expertise is really important.
I'm presumably not everyone uses the same channels all around the world, I suppose, as well. So an omnichannel strategy that might rely on, I don't know, LinkedIn might just simply not work in certain countries.
Yeah, I can.
I can agree with that. Like we found that. Yeah. More than just taking the same content and translating it, which is what's so like is like I suppose like the standard at the time. Um, we found that you just have to do content for that market and it just, it takes the, obviously the pain of that is it takes so much more time, um, to be able to like go away and create specific content per market, like, you know, separate rather than even just having an English podcast. We have like a stand up podcast for each regions in natural language talking about the things that those like regions like care about more from influences as well that they're, they're listening to. But we've even found it goes as far as not just in like so that's like we'll do that for like the Dach region for like Germany and we'll do that for the like for France in French. But even thinking about it when we go to the US, it's been a massive change for us. Like it's like being told that some of our ads in the UK accent like were quite jarring in the US market. And then people thought that, you know, it wasn't a product for them. So then we just like reworked a lot of these ads. Did new voice overs with American voices, changed the content to be from like, uh, again influences that they care about, talking about problems that are maybe more focused on the US as like for our product. They're more solution aware that there's a ton more competitors and that those were a couple changes that we actually started doing in the last three, three, four months. And we've already seen like now in the last two months our best record months of pipeline for for the US, which we struggled with. I mean, there's lots of other changes going on at the same time. But I definitely think that that's, that's played an, a part in, in like in, like getting traction.
I think you have to have a global standard, right? I think when we, when we the word global audience is a truly global audience as well, a persona level. Yes, there are things that are relevant to someone and that are going to take an interest. But I think what everyone was saying is how do I make that relevant? How do I make that resonate with them? And that's where the things like cultural impact and local insights really play a role. And I think for me, where I've seen success is when you have you create a, a standard of content, your standard of campaign. These are the things that we want to talk to our audience about. This is how we want to influence them at different stages. And then it's enabling those markets to be able to add their local flavor to it. And so what you're doing is getting consistency and also just thinking about budget and time, you know, creating everything in each geo takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of marketing dollars to get there. So if you if we build it at a point of saying, well, these this is the campaign, this is the content, but your responsibility now is to add that flavor. And that might be just something quite simple as the opening, the opening kind of premise to the to the piece of content. It may be adapting things like the tone and how it's delivered. So, you know, us to EMEA and APAC is jarring in the same way as we go the other way. And we do see that a lot certainly with global US kind of HQ organizations, the the meal audiences almost jar a little bit to that you know, Americanisms and and colloquial terms or just visually um, you know and so you immediately know you're going to have a struggle going to market with that. And I think someone mentioned about the channels is absolutely right. And certainly, you know, maybe less so in terms of us to EMEA because okay, if it's not a LinkedIn, it's going to be using and I.
Think the channels are basically the same channel mix expectations of channel mix are the same.
I think broadly speaking, I think, you know, you're looking at social displays, you're looking at content syndication and things like channels like that. You know, you know how someone consumes it I think can take that kind of insight and go, Well, where's my weighting here? How am I going to balance my my activation channel? But when you go into APAC, I think that's when it becomes a really big channel, certainly to markets where things like WeChat. So China and the likes. Um, you know, people don't respond in the same way to digital advertising in those kind of places. So your, your, your marketing completely has to, to change. So I always go back to that saying, is there is there a truly a global audience? Probably not, but there are there's certainly a basis of people within functions, within roles in organizations that we can we can tailor this for.
I think there's there's definitely one difference I've observed between the US and the UK in terms of channel mix and effectiveness. I sat in once for two days with some American Express telemarketers in Florida to. Were doing. Dialing out there was massive. Like it was like giant building, like a sideways. Skyscraper. And there was this one massive room that had about 250 telemarketers in there. They were selling gold and platinum card and services around it to businesses in the US. And they were doing a lot of dials a day, like hundreds of dials a day. And but it was just and I've done the same with in the UK sitting with telesales teams in the UK. B2B telesales teams and it was night and day in terms of the response they got. Their attitude was also totally different, like they. They don't know. It's like they really it's a very prestigious job in the US. It's it's much more prestigious than it is here. I think in the UK we see telesales as a bit degrading, but they absolutely did not think like that. They were kings on top of the world. They got like prizes. Everyone celebrating when someone sold something and the response they got over the phone for people they would call randomly was so generous and people would genuinely take the time to just chat with them about loads of stuff, tell them really openly about their finances, like what cards they had, what challenges they had and like would speak the biggest difference. They would just speak with them for hours. Whereas when I've done it in the UK, every single person wants to get you off the phone immediately. Always. But you know what I mean. The difference was super night and day. In that sense it's still the case post-pandemic because this was pre-pandemic.
But I think to David's point, if we all had our way, then we would, you know, have the budgets and the resources to customise and personalise to the nth degree. But, you know, you hit a point where you have to I'm a big fan of repurposing. So to David's example, you sort of have your, your core channels, your core messaging, and then you maybe that layer of personalised or localisation rather happens with your local experts, people that understand the customer nuances of how they relate to your product, how you know the language they use literally, but also, you know, the the way they express themselves because the reality is just, you know, from channels, messaging go to market. You know, if you're not a if you don't have an unlimited budget that you're going to have to repurpose and take those learnings and scale it. And then the the challenge is just how you do that effectively rather than trying to do it differently for everyone.
It sounds like it's very clear that you need to have like a brand global perspective that then you implement locally according to the different channels. Messaging go to market depending on different realities. What about the key considerations when scaling from an ABM approach where you know very well the the pain points of a particular organization, for example, to a broader strategy when you go to go after, I don't know, hundreds or thousand companies in a new market, from an omnichannel perspective, it's like kind of a long question.
Um, most examples I hear people are trying to go the other way. They're trying to go broad. You know, from a broad strategy to ABM rather than from ABM broader. So but but I suppose, you know, it's it's almost just the challenge reverse. But, you know, if you have a very good sense of your customers, that's a great place to be. And then you can really tap into those pain points, those jobs to be done, the learnings that you've had and and scale that. Um, yeah. So I'd rather have that problem.
Yeah. I was going to say, we're probably more in the position of being broad and wanting to, to, to go narrow and go somewhere like an ABM approach, like for some of our, some of our segments. And then but I would say that going wide again and what we've learned like starting casting that wide and then having some sort of like control over it again, is that. At first be like, do this hard, like target everyone with everything all of the time, build our eyes like ICP and just go like product messaging, content messaging, thought leadership, social proof. They get everything with the idea that they, you know, you never know when what part of the sales cycle they're in. Yeah. Obviously going for these super huge audiences. We then actually did have to like edit them a bit, so we had like, yeah, it's great, you know, the advice of the audience CPMs and you know, but then what we did find is that like there were some organizations and industries that are taking up huge amounts of impression share and all of these like and they're like, you know, and actually and then if we dig back into the CRM, they're not converting very well. So where that's like you go wide again, but then you need to start editing back down again. So then we have like a nice process of like going through these companies, removing them out and testing, bringing them back in. Sometimes, you know, things change. So I think actually everything that you learn and probably do in which is being specific, thinking about it, you then have to apply still when you're wide, you just yeah, it's just like a maybe like the, the messaging and the content side of it is broader. Again, rather than being like super specific to that, that audience.
And I think there's a remedy to that. I think, yeah, I'm in the line of very much, you know, take from scale and zero in and really you know using zero in on for ABM is you know who are the accounts that matter most in terms of you know are there strategic accounts and you know where are they in their deal cycle and and what's the opportunity worth and getting that balance. But I think when you when you're scaling out, being able to determine those those customers that are in passive buying motion so or or brand, you know, they're very much interested in what we can sell to them, but then perhaps not there in terms of that need and those who are in the demand motions, those are in active buying motions and, you know, getting that balance between the two keeps you well, getting to your point where you're not going, someone's sucking up all my my budget because they're the ones that you should be then as a journey going right well there's interest there active what is that and and that connection between marketing and sales is really where ABM comes alive. So that's a great conversation for sales to say, look, we're getting a load of engagement here. Is anything that you know, okay, I'm making that quite simplified, but you know, you move that into, well, let's let's do something targeting these guys. Let's identify those critical decision makers. I think when when when people go for ABM outwards, the challenge is, is that you're forgetting all the people that that you need to be aware and and influence within that that journey even though they may not be the one to pull the trigger. And so the way going down into it, which is, you know, kind of against where we were going with ABM because the flip the funnel kind of thing. But when you can kind of zero in, I think your dollars are going to be more effective because you're not only going for those those accounts that are worthwhile to spend personalized content and marketing dollars on, it's a great chance for success, great chance of winning. So we're very much, well, you know, pushing and using data to identify those audiences and then allowing your dollars just to write their own brand motion. Let's just keep them aware. Let's keep them interested and engaged and what we're talking about. And then when they hit that demand motion, that's when you can start recognizing, well, I'm not now wasting that money on people who aren't going to be interested in the in the in the product right now, the service right now because they're not in motion. And that's a that's always a difficult point to what data can you use that audience intelligence to be able to split those audiences and a lot of the time, Liam, you were saying it's just a continuous review, you know, and it's trying to pick up on signals. And so I think, you know, that that helps again, with that global resonance. It's you're talking to me about something that's relevant to me and where I am, not only geographically, but then where I am in my buying journey.
I definitely think some metrics just mean different things when you're going after big companies and small companies. And a really common mistake is to lump big companies and small companies into the same audience and advertise to them in the same way. Because don't think click through rate means the same thing when you're targeting big companies, because you can only generate an opportunity a couple of times a year with the same company, let's say. I don't know, let's be generous and say that you might have to create and close five opportunities with a client before finally they actually close one, you know, in a year. But the number of employees at a company can vary a lot more than just one, two, three or 4 or 5. It can be tens of thousands. And it can. Massively suck up impressions, as you said. Liam and clicks like there are some companies that that just have thousands of people sitting around being served, loads of ads clicking on loads of them, and they never buy and they're massive vampires of budget. And yeah, you need to just click through, you can have a massively high click through rate and be hugely failing in your ads.
I guess that comes back to that point. But you may, you may be failing if you're thinking about those people you want them to buy. But the reality is they're interested and they're interested in your brand. So when it comes to that point of purchase and need, I'd rather my my cognitive ads are the ones that they're remembering because they've been clicking on it and they're interested. And I think that's that's the point I was going to make. And I was going like, let's just determine those because we can then determine what our budget goes towards and we're not going to we're not going to have media wastage. But even if they are clicking, I think it just comes to that when we got it later. Attribution, what does it mean? What does it mean to us? Clicks are good, but let's not let's not assume those clicks or turn into hype and into revenue. Yeah.
That'll always get.
I was like a.
Royal Air Force is one in the UK. Clicks on billions of ads. It's really common to see people a Royal Air Force in their LinkedIn, like most common accounts that are engaging.
And they will know. They've got a.
Lot of people sitting around not flying planes.
Yeah, Jonathan, I think we have a good conversation about ABM and its evolution. Like you've seen like ABM really focused on winning this mega deal, but also now like a new approach more around automation.
Yeah, I think.
Not that. Not that I'm that old, but. But I've seen it kind of turn on its head, so I guess, I don't know. Nearly 20 years ago when I first heard about account based marketing and was sent on these training courses and everything, it was really all about about how do how do we put together a, a campaign that is really just going to focus on the one mega deal. So, you know, it could be a huge global bank or a global conglomerate. And how do we bring together all of these different components and how do we deliver it? And how do we make sure that we influence the right people in this organization? Anything from having, you know, somebody juggling in the reception of their multistory headquarters office to how do we how do we reach the CEO and what content, what message and who should be delivering that message at a board level, etcetera. So right away from that sort of complexity of, you know, spending a huge amount of money and a huge amount of resources on one opportunity. So kind of the the automated flow where, you know, my experience has been that that, you know, the smaller you can you can make your focus account list for ABM and you have that marketing and sales alignment which from experience again is not always easy to achieve. And then having the right content delivered to the who we believe to be the right personas in those organizations. So, you know, I've seen it turn around and go from kind of this really sort of manual hands on approach resources, a huge amount of money to kind of an automated platform where, you know, it really, really does rely hugely on the data that goes in at the front end and then how you manage that data and how the system actually modifies the data and the models you have in order to achieve, you know, the kinds of results that the guys are talking about that, you know, that we're getting the clicks from the right people, that we're hitting the right influencers, that we're actually being able to move this opportunity through the pipe from not just sort of an exposure or awareness to to something where we can see an engagement and then moving from sort of reading an ad to to well, now they now they've just spent, you know, half an hour reading a white paper on something. We have, you know, this is demonstrating the amount of engagement. So yeah, I've I've seen things change quite a lot and probably for the for the good because, you know, these huge ABM campaigns of 20 years ago, some you win, some you lose. And when you lose it, it hurts bad where it's a huge amount. But you know, the automated approaches with the platforms now and using AI etcetera, in order to help you make the right decisions is certainly a big improvement. But you still, you know, you still need to, in my experience, you still need to have a very limited number of target accounts. The more you put in, the more data you generate, the more distraction it has and the harder it becomes to actually get to that stage of creating opportunity and pipe.
Yeah.
And let's talk about creativity within B2B marketing, within ABM. I know, Mariette, we talk about how much you have invested in your brand. And David Will talk about the use of creativity within ABM The use of brand partnerships. Please feel free to to talk about those topics and how they can contribute in this omnichannel strategy.
Um, one thing I was thinking whilst everyone was talking about sort of the, you know, the challenges and, you know, how we scale and, um, you know, tying that back to the point earlier about the sort of channel selection is, I think when you try to go from ABM and go broader, there is definitely a consideration around channels that might become relevant. That and even I suppose more cost effective than if you were in sort of a pure ABM mode. So, you know, using 11:FS as an example, we have a we have a podcast, fintech insider podcast which helps us build relationships and helps us influence those direct as well as those indirect decision makers. And it's super effective. But if I was purely focusing on an ABM strategy, we probably wouldn't have done that. Um, because there's more cost effective ways of, of reaching those people and building those relationships. So I think from a that sort of creativity perspective and how you leverage your brand also come there's also a consideration around which channels allow you to cut through. I mean, when we started seven years ago, podcasts was still was not the, the uh, the active space that it is now. So there's more sort of room to cut through. So if I had to start again now, I'd be thinking, which you know, which channels give me that opportunity to cut through, to reach a wider audience and really build that brand resonance in a creative way. What are you guys doing? David?
Well, maybe not necessarily us, but our clients. I think first and foremost, I think when we talk about creativity, different kind of lenses to it, I think, you know. Visual creativity and words and design, in my experience, typically gets left to the last kind of point of ABM. ABM being such a strategic motion, you know, rooted in deep research and insights into accounts and people within that, that's where your time wants to be spent. But I think we miss that point of like, what what emotions do I want someone to feel when I now talk to them in such a personalized way? And, you know, I see stuff go out and I'm like, you know, that could have been a little bit more inspiring. But I get it because you've spent so much time investing in in who it is and what you want to say. It's a real shame, but I think I has a great opportunity to help us kind of streamline those things, you know, whether we can use, you know, data points. You know, we know there's there's great advancement with with, you know, content creation, copy creation that maybe it gets a point and going, well, you know, now we save some time and effort. Let's do something that's really going to have a lasting impact on someone. They're going to remember that time where that company targeted them, something that's really valuable. And, you know, and I think that's, you know, creativity in that side. But also just, you know, what we do, I think that goes into hand in hand. Like, what's the idea and how do we make it resonate? And, you know, I think that comes on to what Jonathan's talking about in terms of the number of accounts that you can select and what ABM means to you as an organization. We've got some clients that are really invested 1 to 1. That's it. That's ABM for us. And so that's a long journey. You know, it's not a tactical piece of work. Then you go, Hey, have we got any pipeline from it? You know, you're typically working over a two year period of time. It's painstaking. And at the end of that two years, you might actually win anything. And, you know, so if it's talking about ABM with a little bit more scale and a more, I think that's where, you know, I'd like to see a little bit more emphasis on the brand and the creative idea that allows us to, you know, really leave something lasting and has a long a longer term view and and the impact and the efficacy and the feeling that you get from that brand.
So we on that, like I suppose we tried to implement well, we implemented this content strategy that was called Easy mode last year that tries to help us think about all of these things to be sort of like creative going out to market. And we started off very broad, like one for each persona sales, marketing, rev ops for us. And then now we're thinking about how we could break that down and say we're going tighter and then we'll have like for enterprise, maybe certain industries. And the idea that helps with creativity is you take like a top, you take a top like a, like top opinion that your company believes. So we'll say like B2B buying behaviors changed and then we'll create certain point of views off of that that will test to see if they resonate with the market. So might be like for marketers, we might say marketers need to be more than just sales support. And then from beneath that you can come up with lots of different like subject matters to that point about how you can be more than just sales support to your salespeople, like to to your sales team. And then within that we then break down the content into creating it for top down, middle out, bottom up. So evangelizing users and then convincing the people who have also got the purchasing decisions and the managers who can solve can massively influence it and then into three different content types as well, which is type one, type two and type three. So type one being informative, Type two being informative with an interesting spin on it. So you could be like giving the information through a quiz show and then like type three being that edutainment content, which we're not quite there with yet being that great at. But there's loads of inspiration on LinkedIn, but the idea is it's supposed to, within your campaign that you put out, it's supposed to inspire that creativity, right? You don't just take a content topic, release a whitepaper, put it out there. You really think about what are the issues that's resonating with your audience. Break it down into point of views and then you create that content where you can for each of the people that you need to influence in different in exciting ways. Especially you can then think about, you know, being a bit more than just doing another talking head video and being informative. You can think about maybe those type twos and type threes. It's taken a lot of work and like I feel like it's a lot that we're still working on, but it helps us sort of like get that creativity, I suppose, at scale with different campaigns.
Yeah, definitely sounds like a huge challenge. But everything starts from from a very clear strategy of putting your client at the center, focusing on their focusing on your vision around your clients. We had a couple of months ago the the VP of marketing from HubSpot, and he told us we don't sell software, we create careers. If you and they they truly believe that, you know, they have invested such a large amount of time and effort in creating HubSpot Academy. And you realize after, I don't know, maybe years of learning from HubSpot Academy that the CRM. Right. And finally then you buy their their product. So yeah, it's a it's a huge challenge and journey. David I wanted to, to ask you something about the challenges when when you adapt to new markets or verticals. You gave me a great example about Maersk, which is a shipping company, but actually they are selling a software, something like that.
Well, like a lot of businesses that have come from, you know, legacy kind of analog of want of a better description services and they need to move through. And so um, you know, one of the when you're moving into new category, I think that's what I was discussing with Maersk is the, you know, they're not known for that, right? They have legacy, they have history. They're, you know, they've got relationships of what they deliver and what they provide to their customers. And so when you start to shift into new categories, it's really important, you know, to do that, that basis of research. What does that category look like? Who are the players, who who are who are winning that category? And ultimately, what's our foundation of success? Where do we go and win? You know, it's great to be able to think that you can enter a new category and then just be immediately successful. It'd be easy for everyone to do that. And it's not be the case because we've seen a lot of a lot of brands kind of move into something and and it fail. And so, you know, I think whether it's Maersk or anybody else, you know, using intelligence, you know, researching on the on the competitor base, looking at the category and the opportunities, who are the leaders, who are the laggards and and identifying within the audience exactly where you're going to win, but also sizing that audience effectively so you can go and spend dollars marketing dollars to influence them, you know, to be able to shout about that, that new category, that new service and.
A brand like HP is quite an interesting one because, you know, we know them as a, you know, laptops, hardware, you know, they're moving back into software or they're moving into other hardware spaces is a real big challenge because. Why would I buy from you over Somebody I already know is in this category. So 3D printing. Why would I buy a 3D printer from HP? You're just another big brand. Coming to a new virtual in it. I think that's a really challenging thing for brands to be able to do that without the right foundations of the research in terms of where's our opportunities to win?
But where YouGov on the podcast recently and their problem is everyone thinks they're part of the government. They don't even think they're a company.
But that's.
That's a real challenge. I mean, my example of that is excuse me, um, I was in an event recently and Adobe is doing some work in financial services targeting FinTech. Apologies to anyone from Adobe listening or work with Adobe. And someone said to the Adobe guy, Why are you here? You guys just do PDFs, don't you? So I mean, partly tongue in cheek, but partly like that is their perception of their view of how they interact with Adobe. So if they then try. Adobe tries to just take that credibility that they've built up with a design and maybe a marketing audience and transfer that into financial services, you know, and you assume that that just translates as never mind the sort of product, product education. I think that David's point of, you know, there's definitely some of your brand strengths and credibility, etcetera, that you can borrow, but you need to really deeply understand whether that translates into your new category, You know, if that's something they care about, like do they care about the fact that you are high tech when you're moving into a category that actually just cares about trust. So it's understanding which levers you need to pull when you move into their category. And I think that's your positioning and your storytelling. You don't have to reinvent yourself, but you just need to understand which bits you need to dial up and what you need to dial down.
I would strongly agree with that as well. I think it's it's when the brand has a good understanding of where it's been and what its values are, they move into a into a new category. It could be, you know, just some company. They've been involved in logistics and transportation, for instance, not using the name Maersk, but something like that. And then they maybe move into data management or something. So they're moving large bits of information around and managing it as opposed to physical entities. But but if they reflect on the the values they had and the integrity they had and the quality they had, and then somehow translate that into this new service, I think that's where examples like that is where I have seen success. But if you if you sort of jump into something and suddenly, you know, you're you're a brand new fellow and you've got these new values, this, this, this brand, which means nothing. And when you're researchers in it and the people you're trying to influence, look you up and they give you a quick Google, they think, well, you know, it just doesn't make sense, does it? So I think so. Knowing your values and integrity, yeah.
Adobe would have had to dig a bit deeper into it's not just what are the things we can emphasize that are other things that people like about it without it being a high tech, you know? Yeah.
Not just the PDF creator or converter and all the other things that they stand for. For sure.
Sorry again, Adobe.
Fix on Adobe.
Yeah, but David, you were mentioning before about the research that you need to do how do we ensure that data quality when when we are scaling? It's an open question.
Well.
That's a really good how can you validate data quality? It's most definitely difficult if you're only. Looking at one source of data, I guess. I mean, depending on what you're looking to use the data for. But I think everyone on this call no value in third party data. You know, it has to be massively scrutinized in terms of its validity and the timing of it. You know, the quality of your first party data. And, you know, I've seen some clients have got phenomenal data lakes and, you know, collected all this data and it's what can I do with it? You know, and some that I've had real challenges. And I think when you're making decisions off off the back of data. I think look, for me, if we're talking about those moving into new areas and really knowing your brand truth in order to be able to land somewhere there, it's, you know, looking at things like market share, you know, things that are actually out there that we don't always look at. You know, what is the market share, what's our market share, what's our competitors, you know, and then trying to balance out with things like share of voice, right? Can we make a big enough noise in order to move the needle? Because all the other components in terms of active buyers and who's in consuming what, it kind of has to follow the basis of the opportunity that I was mentioning. So when I talk about market share, I was like, well, if we have zero market share and we've got no market share of voice, no one knows that we do this, how do we that's that's the starting block, You know, that's an investment in, in getting your name out there. And the reality is getting revenue off the back of that is going to be really, really challenging. And so you start measuring kind of impact of share of voice and then you start plugging in, okay, does it have a contribution? Is it, you know, is it measurable to to bottom line business? And and so the types of data, I think is multitude of using good old fashioned research into markets and and into audiences and then looking at what data you've got available about the organizations and the people within those that you know, you can go to start building almost like an addressable market. So probably don't answer that in the simplest way that you may have intended. But I think for me it's always what we've learned over the last ten, 15 years is that there's been insurgence of multiple data points and fantastic data. But unless you have a real clear vision and idea of what you want to do, that use that data for, it's just data and it just sits and is not addressable and is not usable and it's just and you just get into this notion of building more and more data without really helping you turn, you know, the screw on one particular thing you're trying to do.
Liam might have a perspective on that given your working at Cognism.
Yeah, I mean, that's true. Like, and we find that like you basically what we it's the whole idea that like at the moment as well of measuring everything or like absolutely everything because you need to know every data point to make any decision. But then the second challenge then you come is to say like, well, how do I use it? Or do I find the team builds tons of reports without really thinking about first the question that they're trying to answer. So then we've got these reports. They just say something and I'm like, But you know what? What does that mean? What are you trying to trying to get from that? I think something that's helped us is just like creating, um, like with it scaling as well is just creating a real, like a structure. So if we add in a new region, we know that we want, we like in terms of like the, the first party data we're collecting, we know that we want to set it up in the exact same way, get the, you know, run like paid for a certain amount of time to then build like a dynamic benchmark sheet that we can then have benchmarks for those regions. Then we'll have like certain reports that we know that we're setting up and how we're and so we can track pipeline and then and also on the other side engagement and try and make links and inferences between the two. And then if we have those structure and we follow it and then we have additional questions on that, on top of that, then we can then go back to the data that we have got or go externally to try and find those answers. But I think the the most important thing to us is just having some sort of repeatable structure around reporting and data so that we can sort of get those get the core answers that we need and then not maybe worry ourselves with all these all the possible things we could ask, could ask ourselves. Um, but yeah, obviously having something like Cognism as well, where you can enrich data points that are quite easy as an internal resource is great. So that aside.
Yeah, I think it almost sometimes gets a bit worse when people are working from home because unless you're regularly like we met up recently as a whole marketing and sales department and think we came away with much better idea of what we should be measuring because otherwise people working at home in their own little worlds get really concerned about certain things that might not move the needle for the next step down the pipeline.
I just I find it's like between like that we have as well. It's like it's different departments measuring things in different ways and like using like between like rev ups and marketing and then.
Having an.
MQL.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, great discussion about data. Let's focus on on attribution through omnichannel lens. So how do you attribute success through various channels when our campaigns grow in size and complexity? Marriott We talk about the importance of brand and so how can also you bring brand into into into the attribution equation when you're talking about different markets and different channels.
Well, can you asking all the easy questions today, solving data quality and attribution on one on one podcast?
Uh, well.
Um, I mean, I raise this because, you know, this was on my mind with just, you know, challenges that, that we're facing because, you know, as a business that does invest quite heavily in content and brand, we by no means have that attribution nailed. Um, so I'm always looking to learn, but also always looking to sort of improve and build on what we have. You know, as with any B2B business, our challenge is that, you know, as our sales cycle, so something that happened three years ago and the guy that did that doesn't work here anymore now led to something. And how is that tracked and how do you how do you do more of that? So, I mean, for me, you know, my my sort of mindset is just automate as much as you can. And what I mean by that is, you know, the, let's again use the HubSpot example, but you know where you are able to, automate tracking of data points or actions or triggers or whatever so that you're not asking a salesperson to manually go in and, you know, flag where they met this person, just automate as much as possible. Um, and then, yeah, this is maybe slightly contradictory to, you know, which I just agreed with everyone. Don't you know, use data, have data for the sake of data. But I think there's a lot to be said for data collection so that you can use that, you know, in more sophisticated models. So track what you know as much as you can. Don't get sort of sidetracked with that data. But then, um, automate it as much as you can. That's just my way. My head is.
I would agree. I would agree.
With Maria as well. I think the automation I think is really important. So you sort of take take all the all the variables away from from from individuals and you can sort of preset, if you like, and and centrally you can adjust those presets. I think collecting that data it's and you know, a while back I worked for a CEO of a of an MSP and his catchphrase was always the data doesn't lie. But actually it was really difficult to, to take the volume of data and make it meaningful. But you know, we have the advantage today, I guess, where we can collect large amounts of data and not particularly in a in a low cost way, but using machine learning and so on, You can extrapolate a lot of very valuable information to maybe adjust the automated approach from that data. And there are platforms that will do that, right?
So it'd be a pretty good way to encourage stars to use the CRM because then you can say, well, look, there's a huge history of them engaging on the website and then you book them as a sale right away, but you didn't didn't do anything in between. So I'm going to attribute that to the website marketing value.
That's what it is.
Exactly.
And from a campaign configuration. We had a very interesting episode a couple of weeks ago about campaign campaign focused versus always on. And one of the chaps there was saying you can't attribute if you if you are running always on campaigns, it's impossible almost to show attribution if you are dividing your budget thinly through the year because you don't know if the if an account is converting at a certain point of the year because of the of the always on campaign. He he he told us no, you need to create campaign focused campaigns and see if if an account is converting is because it passed from awareness consideration and finally conversion. What do you think about that?
Um, well, I would disagree, but I.
Think same.
Here. I would disagree as well.
I don't think you can get like. Yeah, like okay, so it won't ever be as easy as if you're going for like a linear approach that they're going to interact with your campaign and your calls them up and books are meeting and now they've become then they grow and then they yeah, and then they're finally closed one. And it's like, that's beautifully linear and great, but like we actually know the reality of like marketing doesn't work that way. So I feel like you can limit yourself, like trying to like, squash everyone into the funnel that you want so it looks nice in your CRM. Um, I just think we would ask so we'd have the automated parts of attribution. So, uh, you know, traditional attribution collecting like your, you're like last touch Utm's first touch Utm's And obviously that will give you one view from your campaigns, which is often all of your performance marketing is, is king But then also we'll have like on the, on the thank you page of After our form, we'll have how do you hear about us? So then you can pick up a lot of your campaigns after that. And that's like obviously that self-reported attribution. Um, and then we we use hockey stack as well. So like on top of that to then try to track all of those extra touches that we can to try and spell out a journey, you know, whether they came through an SEO page first and then viewed a ton of LinkedIn ads and then came back and it's yeah in reality is messy like and it's messy to do that and you can't actually most of the time we'll just rely on some self-reported attribution and uh, like traditional attribution to tell us something. We'll just take a quick snapshot. But then when we've got these big enterprise journeys, then we'll delve into hockey stack and do the messy work. But if you want to actually know how everything is coming together, it's messy in the first place. So it has how you record it is then messy backwards.
I think there might.
Be something to be said for the idea of a big idea in marketing. Like, you know, in the B2C world. I don't know Marlboro Man or, I don't know, pick your kind of mega, um, kind of brand successful thing. And there's probably something to be said for promoting creativity in the team by encouraging them to have this big idea and then have a massive comprehensive campaign and then see how much can be attributed to this thing. Probably otherwise, otherwise marketing just keeps being incremental. And yeah, everything's messy and perhaps it doesn't promote that big idea idea.
I think it's definitely not enough of that kind of thinking goes into, you know, whether it be the Marlboro Man, but something of that you can, you know, hang your hat on from from who we are, right. And what we stand for and how and what we're going to be. I think the difficulty in B2B is everyone know is that it's you're selling something that's complex. Um, and, and it's pretty serious. It's responsibility in some cases you're spending millions. So, you know, trying to get that fine edge of, um, you know, telling a story and investing in that, but also where those moments where you educate and really get into the detail and, you know, getting that tone right from that thing that caught your attention with, you know, you ask a question of our favorite campaigns, you know, to put out there. One of them was Workday Rockstar, which I just love because it's entertaining and it's just different. And but, you know, does that influence people's decision at the I don't know because I'm not a decision maker, so I don't see anything other than the thing on YouTube. And I think the other one was the Autodesk Autodesk um, thing they did at the Oscars. Right about Autodesk is actually everywhere. You just don't know it. And I thought that was quite nice. But other than that, you know, I won't see this stuff because I'm not a decision maker. And I imagine if I was beyond that, you know, we're getting into pretty technical information and it's really hard to get that balance.
I do agree, though, there a lot to be said for having breakthrough elements to your whether it's always on or whether it's sort of cyclical campaigns. Not just from a sort of messaging perspective, but literally you need something to break through on those channels so you can just put some momentum. You need a little bit of that. How do you draw eyeballs to a big moment? And then you have your long tail because you are we're all competing with every single content creator on LinkedIn, so give yourself something to fight with. But then to to David's point around the campaigns, I mean, it's interesting because maybe this is all of our interpretations of what a campaign is because, um, Liam, we're already a customer, so I'm not fishing for, for discount here. But actually I sort of cognizant because that was actually an ad that got sent around my team and I don't know if that was a campaign. It was maybe it was tasting, who knows? But, um, you know, for me that was, you know, a nice piece of content, a nice message got sent around and people were like, This is cool. We should do this. There you go.
Cognism does LinkedIn very well.
Yeah, yeah. Great content. Great, Great content. Well, we are coming to an end. I need to thank you, all of you. It's been a great, great conversation. We will be in touch very soon. I don't know if you want to say a word, please feel free to.
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thanks. Thank you. Great. Thanks, guys. Cheers. Bye. See you soon. Bye. Bye bye.
