Category: Services

A funnel: is a tube or pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom (or my personal favourite description- A funnel: a device in which you drink beer from). However, I am here to talk about the sales and marketing funnel, symmetrical in form which looks at visitors, leads, opportunities, customers (in that order). With the age-old battle of sales vs marketing how does this impact the look of the funnel?

The reality is that the sales/marketing funnel looks more like a figure standing in front of a fun house mirror and not the streamline pipelines every company desires. As a company we know exactly who our customers are, and we know (roughly) how many visitors we have (thanks to the wonderful world of technology tracking our every move). However, if the number of visitors is much to be desired, businesses throw a much wider net and bring in a number of leads, which in turn create an odd-looking funnel.

So how can we better shape our sales & marketing funnel?

• Improve awareness: Before you sell anything, you need to make people aware of your product or service. There are many different tactics and tools that companies use in which to raise awareness to get people in the initial stage of the pipeline.
• Interest: You’ve hooked the fish but now you need to reel it in. People showing initial interest within the company need further nurturing to better their interest.
• Evaluation: Re-look at the target audience, question if these are the right people to be going after. Is the company within the right industry? Do they have the applications to support your product or service? With technology such as intent data and install base it is much easier to narrow down who really is more interested within your offerings and you can decipher your audience much easier.
• Engagement: Make the initial contact. Understand their interest, ask valuable questions to enable you to better assist them. What can you be doing to better assist them? Engagement is a lengthy process (and needs to be done in several stages of nurturing) in order to bring you to…
• Commitment/ purchase (This being the desired outcome for all companies of course)

By focusing on interest, evaluation and engagement in particular it enables you to better depict your ideal target audience rather than just casting your wider net. This in turn should streamline your marketing and sales funnel rather than having a much heavier ‘lead’ stage which should efficiently impact the opportunities and customer stages.

How to craft the perfect conversation with your audience

Everyone is familiar with the acronym BANT and what it stands for; budget, authority, need and timeframe. It was created by IBM back in the 60’s as a tool for sales teams to define whether a lead was of good quality or not. However, at oneninefive we are increasingly seeing that the best way to engage with a prospect via telemarketing, is to curate insightful profiling questions rather than using BANT questioning. We believe you’re able to understand your audience better this way and tailor your marketing accordingly.

By working with our clients to devise profiling questions, it allows us to generate the perfect conversation with their audiences and gain an invaluable understanding into the prospect and where they are in their sales journey.

Why is this happening?

We believe the reason for this move away from BANT questioning is because customers’ needs have changed drastically in the last 20 or so years. It isn’t necessarily appropriate anymore to ask prospects their budgets first off, and more and more there isn’t one decision maker in a team but a group of people, so asking to speak to the singular authoritative person doesn’t match today’s working world.

Need is still necessary and is something that should be explored but something we believe should be crafted into a profiling question rather than included in a full set of BANT questions. Timeframe is the last of the four pillars, and is something needs to be considered however, we find that giving prospects two or three timeframe options we gain better insight into their buying journey. Therefore, we always try to build a question that matches this.

How to design these profiling questions?

With the increasing move away from BANT questioning, there are a few key things we think about when creating profiling questions:

• Firstly, we build a question around the importance of the product that we are discussing. We try and find out from this question, where the prospect is in their mind set about the product.
• Secondly, we create something that focuses on the usage of the product; whether the prospect uses it at all and if so, how often.
• Thirdly, we try and find out the prospect’s timeframe of how often they review their current version of the product we are discussing. This helps us gage whether they are in the market for changing supplier, or version of the product.

For all these questions, we provide a few options in a bracketed style that the prospect can choose from. We find this way more successful in receiving answers from the prospect.

To finish…

Increasingly we are finding there is a move away from BANT questioning and devising profiling questions is what we are seeing more and more of. We believe it is generating better insight too due to customers’ needs developing and the work world changing.

How do we create these questions? There are three main areas that we look to build questions in; the importance, usage and timeframe and always try and provide drop down answers to make it as simple for the prospect to provide insightful information to us quickly.

Generation Z, a buzzword of the moment, is a hot topic in marketing but generally thought to be solidly in the realm of the B2C marketer. But, as the lines between the generations blur, and as Gen Z enters the workforce (and therefore B2B marketplace), what will be the implications for B2B demand generation and tech marketing? 

[Disclaimer – this blog assumes, and refers to ‘Gen Z’ as a single homogenous group of people with exactly the same values and attitudes, which is obviously not the case..] 

Who are Gen Z, and what are they like? 

Generation Z are loosely defined as those born post-1995. They are likely to have grown up with immediate access to information at the touch of a button – they’ll have had hundreds of channels on their TV box (as opposed to millenials, who were used to just 4), and will have been able to chat instantly to their friends before they’d even hit secondary school (unlike millenials, who will have grown up in a household with a landline, and dial-up internet).  

They live in an age of TikTok, PewDiePie, and Fortnite. Given they’ve been obliterated by content since they learnt to read, and are used to instant gratification from content, you can assume that their attention spans are shorter, and more receptive to short-form, fast-paced, engaging content.  

Additionally, this means there is a far greater breadth of opinions. Gen Z are more likely to pride themselves on their unique views, rather than following the herd. 

Gen Z are likely to have grown up in the era of economic downturn and recession, therefore they are far less impulse-driven than Millenials, and more focused on saving, and proving value on something. Gen Z have been communicating with peers over instant messaging, rather than face-to-face, so place less value in ‘real’ relationships, but are far more likely to value the opinion of someone they relate to, such as an influencer or thought leader. 

What does this mean for B2B demand generation? 

Overall, as B2B marketers we need to think about what these seismic societal changes will mean for our marketing tactics. 

Ultratargeted data versus creativity? 

This generation, as ‘digital natives’, will have spent their entire lifetime online. Therefore, there will be rich, microtargeted data techniques that can extract behaviour to give these people the content that is relevant to them. If you don’t give them the content they want, you’re toast. 

Equally however, as they’ve developed in a world over receiving ultra-personalised, AI-driven content, this author believes that there will always be a gap for content that is so brilliantly creative that it stands out against automated content, that even those with narrow attention spans take note. 

Longer versus shorter form content? 

B2B marketing as an industry has a habit of repeating the same old demand generation tactics (BANT, webinars, PDF whitepapers..) 

When Gen Z hits the B2B marketplace, these tactics will need to be deprioritise longer-form content. Webinars will meet their makers – if even someone says they are logged in to one, they are more likely to be playing Candy Crush than actually engaging and digesting the content. 

Interactivity will be essential. As Turtl’s brilliant marketing campaign showed, PDFs are the ‘floppy disk of marketing content’. Hosting content on a flat page, with little responsiveness or reactivity, let alone any sophisticated tracking, will be phased out quickly. 

Video content will continue to rise in value for the B2B customer. Engaging buyers with explainers, case studies, and people-orientated videos will be an effective way of capturing the imagination of time and attention-short Gen Zers. 

Old ‘traditional’ channels versus new channels? 

Social channels come and go, but Gen Z are most likely to jump onto the next bandwagon more quickly than anyone else. Whilst TikTok and Instagram are currently firmly in the realm of the consumer, B2B brands could do well to get ahead of the curve. 

If ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’ is often kids’ first words, how long will it be before ‘Alexa’ is their second or third? For users younger or elder, voice assistants will become an increasingly influential as in inbound marketing channel for all brands. Gen Z won’t want to waste any time searching for content on a particular topic, they’ll simply expect that their voice assistant can provide it instantly. 

Relationships versus value? 

If Gen Z are likely to make more considered decisions, based on more apparent value, then B2B brands need to ensure that their delivery and customer support is fully equipped to hit expectations. Whereas currently many B2B customers are struggling to extract full value out of their tech products,  customers will be less afraid to cancel subscriptions of products that aren’t delivering. 

Equally, purchasing decisions will become far less about relationships, and about full value. The ability to demonstrate clear ROI will be more valuable to a customer than a historic, or personal relationship between brand and customer. 

Knowing that attention spans are going to get shorter, when value has been proven and a decision has been made, ease of purchase will be essential. An effective eCommerce strategy, and marketing tactics borrowed from Direct to Consumer brands will be as critical, offering transparent and cost-effective solutions that can be purchased directly from the source. 

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is growing in popularity due to the flexibility and capability of adapting it to any B2B company’s requirements. It is a great way to focus your B2B Marketing and align your marketing and sales teams so they work together to target the most appropriate accounts, generate demand and close deals quicker; 89% of ABM practitioners saw an improvement in conversion rates of pipeline to closed deals for ABM accounts versus non-ABM accounts (2018 State of Account-Based Marketing Demand Gen Report). It is evidently clear that there are many benefits of account based marketing for those using it. However, there is no one size fits all and evaluating the best-use of ABM for your company is critical to see these benefits.

So, what are the different types of ABM, and how do you decide which is best for you? 

Strategic or 1:1 ABM – this is where you’re working with a handful of high-value accounts on an extremely personalised strategy. This form of ABM requires a large volume of research and time to build and put together, and sales cycles are often long and complex.

ABM Lite or 1: few ABM – this form focuses on accounts that are worth investing time and resource into building a personalised strategy but they don’t hold quite the same amount of value as accounts that you would use Strategic ABM for. For this reason, accounts with shared pain points are often grouped together and a collective strategy built.

Programmatic ABM or 1: many – this is the most scalable form and involves targeting a list of 100 – 1000 accounts that share common traits and business challenges that your product or service can support. The key is to try to keep the target list smaller and have the cycle of campaign planning, execution and review short.

The main thing to take into consideration when thinking about incorporating ABM in your campaign, is the choice of the accounts on your target list. Often companies believe they are carrying out an ABM campaign but are just continuing to “spray and pray” because their target list is too big and has no clear division. This could hinder any possible benefits of account based marketing.

Increasingly too, there is more than one decision-maker within an account. Typically, there are now 7 decision-makers to sign off on your average B2B purchase. Getting to the bottom of every person in the decision-making unit, finding out their unique needs and building engagement is fundamental to successful campaigns. “It comes back to ultimately not thinking campaign-first, then account — but account first, then campaign” (Eric Wittlake, a Senior Analyst for the Marketing Practice at TOPO). Consequently, really understanding the accounts challenges and building something that is aligned with the results of the account’s activity is crucial rather than just measuring the one or two contacts you have within an account (Andre Yee, CEO at Triblio in 2018 Account-Based Marketing Demand Gen Report).

Customer data is the marketing overlord. All sensible marketing decisions nowadays are based on this information. With the rich data marketers can have access to, the focus can be on the individual customer and discovering their intent to buy, with advertising being present at the right place and the right time for the customer, winning over their hearts, minds and money. 

We are of an age where every customer is looking for the better and faster services and products – whatever they may be. Customers like to be understood, heard and their demands met. The marketing world can now leverage the data that the customer puts out into the world. Data is taken from the pages they follow on social media, articles they engage with and products they buy to gain insight into the interests, buying behaviours and intent of potential customers. In theory, they are then able to give them exactly what they want. Intent marketing allows us to listen to what they have to say. We can prioritise prospective customers, target individuals based on their interest and leverage intent to buy your product.

There are two types of ways to collect this data,

1. Engagement with your own digital content, whether that be your website, emails, social media or any other interactivity you put into the world
2. Engagement with 3rd party sites, for example, looking at who your target is following or engaging with similar social media pages or publications and articles and seeing a trend.

So let’s get down to it – how can you harness all this data for good, I hear you cry! Well, there are 5 key benefits to having and using this data to its full potential.

1. It helps when establishing your ideal customer. To make the most of harvesting this intelligent data, you must establish what data will be most beneficial. Establishing a target customer profile based on this data will mean your data and therefore subsequent marketing and engagement pieces are far more valuable as you only engage with established interested parties as opposed to a blanket campaign to many who may not fit your target criteria, and create an individual and personalised journey.
2. Knowing who your customers are. A vital part of not only optimizing your engagement with customers but to answer questions, perhaps ones you may not have even thought of, to help provide insight into who your customers are and why they engage with your brand content and look at their other similar interests. By understanding your customer, you are focusing time and resources into marketing and engagement tools that work, for people will get involved.
3. Establish what parts of your marketing and engagement are most effective – what is overall most popular, what content is bringing in new users and which content is closing the sales. By having all this rich data and knowledge of the market, your customer and their interests, you can target by personalizing the engagement in real-time by advertising your products in the pages that follow the purchase of similar products, with the intent to buy.

Using customer data is all about analysing, tracking and channelling effective marketing tactics to the right people in the most engaging and personalised way. Using intent marketing and utilizing the rich data that can be collected to identify intent of purchase and provide personalised advertising to promote the fast and effective products and services today’s consumers desire, as opposed to the out-dated demographic and assumed interest marketing of the past.

“The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.” – David Oglivy

For many marketers defining their target audience can be difficult to do. However, time and time again companies fail to invest in market research and the importance this research contributes to future strategies and plans. It’s not just small companies that are guilty of this, but large corporations as well.

Companies invest huge budgets into product development, marketing efforts and sales – however one thing so often overlooked is defining their super audience. What is a super audience you ask? A super audience is your ideal client/customer who is essentially made up of the key decision-makers who will buy your service/product. Instead of shooting a fish in a barrel you should be hunting for sitting ducks.

Defining your target audience is one of the oldest struggles marketers face on a day to day basis. Overcoming this struggle, however, isn’t impossible. One of the no. 1 mistakes we make every day is trying to appeal to everyone. We need to narrow our focus, breakthrough distractions and become niche in our targeting. Failing to narrow down your target audience will result in loss of money, energy and time- let’s face it who has time for that?

Ultimately defining your target audience is a key step to marketing success. The objective is often to spend as little money as possible for every sale made. And we can only achieve results and ROI once we see successful conversions. In order to do so, here are some steps to ensure you’re targeting the right people to achieve your goal.

1. Define your persona: Understanding your customer and what they look like. You can’t talk to everyone.
2. Where is your ideal customer located: If you’re based in the UK and your main clientele is here start there. There is not always a need to go out to the wider world if you haven’t exhausted the resources on your very doorstep.
3. Identify your whitespace opportunity – focus on fewer things better.
4. Identify your sweet spot – people want to know about this topic but there is little available. Give your customers something which is of value to them, not just you.
5. Are you clear on how your customer likes to buy – what encourages them to buy and what makes it easy for them.
6. Who do you really want to sell to? – Put the blinkers on. Know who you want to sell to and focus and how to target them.
7. Have empathy for your customers – What are they currently trying to do and how can you solve it.
8. Identify the people who you need to make the journey – decision-maker, influencer or is it a recommender to result in a sale.
9. Look inside the company – what has and hasn’t worked. There’s so much information at your disposal.
10. Finally – Research current trends in your audience base to understand what your customer is currently reading and researching.

Essentially if you fail to identify the correct audience, your marketing efforts will be wasted. The old age adage ‘Customer of King’ may seem outdated. However, marketers today fail to recognize the importance of their customers. Understanding our customers and emphasizing with their needs is the core of any business. Focusing on revenue and failing to take our customer into account will only result in unsuccessful marketing campaigns, short-lived successes and very little loyalty.

A major wave has crashed over the digital industry: the idea that marketers should only use first party instead of third party data, and that there isn’t room for both. “We’ve come to find that first party data performs better than third party data, so we’ve pivoted our focus to first party data and away from third party!” is a sentiment frequently heard at conferences and spoken by C-level management at brands and agencies alike. With GDPR and CCPA added in, the inaccurate perception of third party data as inherently non-compliant has also spread widely. Add insult to injury — the bated breath over the cookie demise has driven many to think of contextual targeting as a third party substitute. 

While all of these — lately hot — topics may express legitimate concerns, many are forgetting that third party data is to acquisition as first party data is to retention. If acquisition is a goal, then it is critical to utilize both first and third party data together. 

First party data is key to understanding and nurturing existing customers — but if that is the only data you use, you’ll be targeting the same people over and over again, with no opportunity to expand the customer pool. If a marketer wants new customers, they need new people and segments to target. Access to high quality third party data — backed by solid analytics — is essential. 

One way of how this might be done is a look-alike model; with this type of model, a seed audience from first party data that behaves in an ideal way, like having a high purchase or response rate, would be used. Algorithms would then find people in a third party database who are “look-alikes” to the seed audience that was selected, meaning they are likely to behave the same way as that ideal group. 

While it may have its place, contextual targeting will not help you with look-alike modeling. It also can’t help you with cross-channel audience targeting, and it certainly can’t help with frequency capping. It is a great tool and has its purpose to target media, but it is not a substitute for privacy-compliant and ethically-sourced data that’s rooted in PII. 

There is still the question of third party data quality. Third party data’s somewhat tarnished reputation is primarily due to “bad actors” who have entered the space. Companies entered the data business without a real data background, offering data sets that were poorly developed and maintained, and thus performed poorly. Many of these companies sold “exhaust data,” data that was a byproduct of a primary business goal — and marketers were burned by bad data that didn’t improve their bottom line. Combine this with the confusion of CCPA, and many marketers are making inaccurate and short-sighted conclusions: that 1st party data is the only audience data that will survive. 

Don’t get us wrong; first party data is gold! MarTech Tracker was built on managing, improving and leveraging first party data. Our proprietary database is made up of transactional first party data from our daily interaction with decision makers via providing the requested content to help support their day to day business challenges . That being said, we also understand the unique value of transforming first party data into a second party — multi-enterprise — view, and enriching it with additional predictive data from trusted third parties. That third party data is key to deepening our knowledge of first-party data. 

The solution to hesitance about third party data is simple — find a select few third party data providers with different strengths you can trust. Curious about how to gauge the quality of third party data? Drop us a line and we’ll talk through how we help 000’s of technology brands, globally, every day.  

“Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they’d like to go.” – Seth Godin

Lead generation, like any marketing channel, requires careful planning and a well thought out road map. However, time and time again we see projects come through which are oftentimes missing essential ingredients to make them a successful marketing endeavor. Not only that, when objectives are misaligned it results in leads going cold or being nurtured incorrectly. In turn missed or broken opportunities are a common occurrence which could have been avoided. Setting up your processes from the beginning will result in sustainable campaigns and positive results.

Here is some steps you should be thinking about before your lead generation campaign goes live:

1. Take your time: Realise that you need to take your time and think before putting together your lead generation campaign, just like any other marketing channel. If you’re unsure speak with your lead generation partner. When choosing your lead generation partner, you should be considering their historical performance and also the relationship which you have with the team. They have the experience, insights and knowledge to be able to advice you on what you need to be considering before setting up your objectives so this relationship is important to consider.
2. Define your objectives: Do you want to feed the top, middle or bottom of your sales funnel? Do you want to understand your current customer base or attract new potential customer? How can you support other marketing efforts currently taking place? What information do you want to gather? Answering these questions is a good way to start considering what your ultimate aim is.
3. Define your target audience: Once you understand what objectives you want to achieve you can look at defining what that audience looks like. It might be a case of analyzing your current customers to understand what additional customers will look like. Or perhaps you want to understand more about your current client base. Make sure that before going live you have a good idea about what your customers look like, who they are, and what they’re interested in. Having this information will ensure you’re asking the right questions and creating content for the right people. Providing an ABM list is also good way of having control of the area which you’re targeting.
4. Nurture your leads: It’s important to know where your leads are going and what the next stage is. Once you have received your leads, knowing the next step is crucial in the success of your campaign. Do you need follow up with an email? Are they being added to a content nurture stream? Are they being called directly by the sales team? These touch points are vital as they ultimately determine the prospects position within the sales cycle. Setting up lead scoring criteria can be a good way to designate leads into the correct stage of the lead lifecycle and nurturing them accordingly with relevant and personalized content. And remember, good content means good conversations.
5. Monitor lead performance: There’s only so much insight your lead generation partner can provide if they are not being informed of how their leads are performing. Closely monitoring the process and lead results will allow step by step optimization, by strategically improving the process based on these results. You also need to put in enough time to see the benefits and generate enough data to gather invaluable data and insights.

Overall lead generation campaigns have the potential to provide powerful and insightful results. Ensuring you are taking the above considerations as part of your campaign ingredients is vital for success. Interacting with prospects in a way which leaves them feeling informed, educated and supported in their needs is the end goal any company should have when implementing lead generation campaigns.

More than half of marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the rapid rate of martech innovation, according to a new study from public relations and digital marketing agency Walker Sands Communications.

The Walker Sands State of Marketing Technology 2018 report, “Maximizing the Value of Martech Innovations,” found that 63 percent of marketers feel the martech landscape has evolved rapidly or at light speed in the last year. Further, only 15 percent of marketers say their company is very agile when it comes to embracing new solutions for their martech stacks.

The study finds that only 28 percent of marketers feel their company’s use of martech has advanced at the same pace as its rapid rate of innovation. Despite that disparity, marketers remain confident in marketing technology and their abilities to utilize it. In fact, over half (53 percent) of marketers feel their tech skills are adequate, while only 6 percent believe they’re missing the skills their current roles demand.

“We’ve seen over the last three years that marketers struggle to keep up with the new marketing technology, and it’s resulted in a lot of frustration in the past,” said Jennifer Mulligan, marketing technology account director at Walker Sands. “Although the rate of innovation hasn’t slowed down, marketers are feeling more confident in their ability to best use new tools. In fact, many marketers believe their companies should invest in more martech to keep up and remain optimistic about the tools’ overall usefulness.”

Additional findings from the report include:

Compared to last year, the number of marketers saying their company invests the right amount in martech has decreased by 7 percent.

• Two-thirds (65 percent) of marketers plan to increase their spend on martech in the next year – only 6 percent plan to decrease this spend.
• Two in five (41 percent) of marketers believe they have exceptional tech skills that benefit the entire department.
• The Walker Sands State of Marketing Technology 2018 study is based on a survey of over 300 marketers conducted in Q1 2018.

To download the full report, visit the State of Martech page on the Walker Sands website.

CMOs, CEOs and CTOs (amongst others) predicted several trends that were set to impact the industry across 2018. HY2 has officially kicked off, but have these prognostications proven to be true?

Machine learning will help deliver personalised content at scale

There is a constant struggle with marketers to produce enough personalised content.  The aim was to use AI to enable a smarter more efficient way to provide stronger content. With the rise of install base campaigns and intent based data we have seen an increase in content provided to individuals that is more focused on their core preferences or focus points within the business. What we are yet to see is more recommended content throughout each touchpoint of the sales funnel that is specifically focused on the individual’s current needs.

Sales and Marketing will join forces

Businesses are looking to operate in a more collaborative way; strategies are more cohesive between teams. The average sales cycle is 3 ½ months, however, with the right content produced by marketing combined with the correct target audience this will mean the cycle can be shortened. Whilst we have still noticed a slight disjoint between the two teams (sales team wanting SQLs and speeding through the lead nurturing process), I believe there needs to be a deeper level of understanding as to how each process works within each team and more in-depth feedback on the content before the two teams work more in-tune.

IT Decision makers will partner for better security communications

The lead up to and post GDPR saw an increase need to better precautions and increase plans for any type of cyber breach. It is imperative that all personnel within an organisation are collaborative within their understanding of ‘what’s next’ if such a breach does happen. Since starting I have seen a large percentage of campaigns focusing mainly on IT decision makers, namely more so involved within security.  Major IT security companies are still riding off the back of the GDPR wave and pushing to better assist other companies to enable full coverage and help prevent such breaches.

So, to sum up….

Whilst we have seen these predictions are starting to fall into place, the industry has a way to go until it is operationally and efficiently functioning in the way they thought it would. In the grand scheme of it all we are only 8 months in, let’s wait and see what the final few months have in store for us.