How the Right Content & Delivery Strategies Double Demand Gen ROI

Transcription

1 How the Right Content & Delivery Strategies Double Demand Gen ROI John Steinert, CMO at TechTarget Zak Pines, VP of Marketing at Bedrock Data October 2017

2 Agenda Where we are and how we got here What we were seeing and our study results Implications and next steps for you 2

3 In marketing as a whole, there were once two very distinct groups of thought. There were people intently focused on strengthening awareness of the brand and how that helped, and there were people concentrating specifically on converting product demand into sales pipeline. If you re a large enough company, this might still be the case to some extent. 3

4 Now in the classical period, these two groups had pretty separate perspectives and methodologies and they operated, more or less, in different philosophical universes. There wasn t a whole heck of a lot of available connective tissue to knit them together, very few systems, etc. The concept of integration was conceptual, theoretical, super hard to do. 4

5 Well as you all know, with the growth in available technology, Marketing has taken off for B2B. It s now an important element in the toolkit of B2B companies of all sizes. Everybody knows this; we re probably all products of it. But while there s been huge growth in demand gen practices in B2B, maybe because of the availability of helpful frameworks and systems. At the same time, for many companies, there s been relatively little growth in branding investment in comparison and in many companies there s been significant divestment. And we re all familiar with the common criticisms of traditional dis-integrated brand advertising. If you do much reading about Programmatic as a whole, you can see there are a lot of challenges. 5

6 While Branding has been bumping along, at the same time, something else is happening. At a lot of companies, certainly in the enterprise tech space where we play, over the past several years, we noticed marketers starting to get really caught up in a very limited and inflexible set of KPIs. Simultaneously, relative to their past successes, many are seeing the performance of their tried and true techniques starting to stagnate. From a business perspective, if we assume their market is growing, that means they re having increasing difficulty winning their share of the total demand out there. They are becoming less competitively effective. Now, this situation leads to obvious problems for a lot of marketers, and it creates some common symptoms that we call Demand Gen Tunnel Vision. 6

7 In these companies where Demand Gen performance is stagnating, tunnel vision symptoms look like this. 1. We often see an accelerating focus on volume inputs especially at the top of the funnel. If they simply buy more inputs for the top, things will get better at the bottom. 2. We see Marketers feeling serious pressure to reduce cost pers Cost per contact, cost per lead for example. Lots of pressure on cost. 3. At a minimum, instead of better integration, we see further disconnection between brand thinking and demand activity. There s even less of a coming together of these two ideas. Less serious thinking about integration. 4. And lastly, more than ever, there s always too little time too little time to figure out what s the root cause of the problem, too little time to think about different points of leverage. Too little time to integrate plans, investments, and most importantly, targeting and execution. 7

8 In contrast to this, what we see among our client base of 1,200 enterprise tech companies, especially with those who are super fast, is that companies who are outperforming their market tend to have a more holistic view of how to pull the different levers in their marketing toolkit. They ve somehow gained a different perspective than their peers of how to improve their tactics at an individual level and to build up the impact of their whole program. It was observations of examples like this that caused us to do an in-depth analysis to see if we could quantify some of what was going on to make it more accessible to larger numbers. So basically what we are trying to do is clear away the emotional fog around branding and demand as completely different, and try to help more Marketers better see the power in integrating both the forest and the trees. 8

9 So we built a pretty robust study to look at 3 key questions about what happens when you integrate Brand and Demand as we see top performing companies doing. We asked the data to tell us: 1. What, if any, is the quantifiable impact of branding on consideration? 2. Can branding cause changes in consideration over time? 3. Does consideration have any effect on the standard KPIs that matter to demand gen marketers, specifically, on things like clickthrough rate? 9

10 What do we mean by consideration? It s nothing mysterious. 10

11 We sell a product called Qualified Sales Opportunities for which we use our purchase intent data to identify actual deals taking place and then we do research on them to discover exactly what s what in the decision making process. Among the questions we ask the buyers is which vendors are you considering for purchase? The company s answer to this question tells us exactly which companies are considering for their purchase. It s as simple as that. 11

12 So we looked at a large number of deals, we looked at the companies being considered in them, and we looked at the advertising that was run to those companies during the period. Since this is enterprise technology, the sell cycle is long and the marketing programs tend to run for multiple quarters. What we found is that consistent advertisers increased their consideration performance in the deals by 25% versus like companies. Over the same period, in the same types of deals, sporadic advertisers generated some lift when they were running ads, but significantly less overall. And the companies not doing brand work actually saw their performance going down compared to their peers. They lost ground against their competition. This is clear as day. It s the power of integrated marketing at work. 12

13 While it s clear that branding impacts consideration rates in the deals themselves, can we see an effect of this in the measures that demand marketers typically rely on? The answer lies in when you run advertising to the same people in the same accounts at the same time that you re running campaigns to them. Their improving consideration also drives up their clickthrough rates their direct, measurable engagement with you on average by 22%. 13

14 So to better communicate the implications of what we found, to put it together in one integrated place, we built this generic model showing two programs running for a year, one demand gen only, one with demand gen plus consistent investment in integrate branding, Again, integrated branding means advertising of various types done to exactly the same targets the ones receiving the using the same purchase intent data. There you see it all together on the right: the consideration improvement growing clickthroughs by 22% and then impacting conversions lower in the funnel, 25% each step of the way from lead to MQL to SQL. Until at last, at the opportunity stage, the result is more than twice the pipeline, all for a relatively small investment in the right kind of branding. 14

15 To make this super simple for you to use in your planning, here s the math we use in our generic model. The conversion rates come from two industry standard sources, Marketo and Sirius. The big numbers show the Marketo and SiriusDecisions averages. The small numbers in parentheses cover the improvement in CTR and the 25% lift driven by consistent, targeted advertising. 15

16 Here s the net-net on how to achieve this. I like to do it with reference to the new SiriusDecisions Demand Unit Waterfall, because it covers the critical elements very well. The net-net is that consistent advertising, to the right targets, executed together with demand gen, is proven to be a really great way to maximize your outcomes. CTRs up 22%, lower funnel conversion up 25% at each step, 2X improvement in ROI. Note that this is not simple Programmatic volume advertising. This is integrated advertising done to an audience you ve defined really well, an audience that you target using both technographic and intent data to take advantage of precise fit and real, relevant activity. You use the same data source to integrate your advertising with your demand gen so they both reach exactly the same people people who you know are consuming content precisely relevant to what you sell. When you can do that, you can get a pretty incredible lift. 16

17 There are and lots of phrases and buzzwords around marketing, but one thing that is key to this is integrated marketing, which is really what we are talking about here. Bedrock Data is a software to help companies connect and integrate technologies. One of our common use cases is if you are using a whole range of CRM systems and having connected and consistent data between that CRM system and your marketing automations. That background is important as we explain some of the targeting we have done successfully in our demand generation approach. 17

18 A nice phrase to tie this all together is Brand + Demand. The most important profile for us is not size of company, or demographics, but technographics what technologies they have. This makes sense given our business that we are an integration. It s the systems where there isn t an easy way to connect the systems but there is a need to connect them that makes up our target audience. For example, it could be a company that has Marketo and NetSuite, or Hubspot and Microsoft Dynamics. There is also a lead role which typically includes a lead marketer for a small marketing team or a marketing operations or demand gen role for larger marketing teams. As we sought out to build brand + demand programs, we took a cross-channel targeting approach which included a blend of technographics and specific accounts. We looked for people searching on these integration pairings (i.e. Marketo and NetSuite), or technographic targeting through search. We are targeted individual accounts based on a technographic profile with the assistance of HG Data. We had targeted contextual ads to people looking at content specific to an integration. Other channels were and phone based targeting to the account. In all cases, there is technographic targeting. In some cases it is targeting through a specific account, and in other cases it is based on the context or content they are consuming online. 18

19 We built out a set of integrated creative and messages across each channel. For example, the top one is a Facebook ad and the bottom ad is more of an all-purpose digital ad across a whole range of publishers. We thought of this as brand + demand meaning that it was important to us that the Bedrock Data logo was prominent, that there was a consistency across mediums with a call to action. But we didn t view the KPIs on this around CTRs or Cost Per Direct Leads, we took a longer view expectant that through consistent level of advertising to these accounts, we thought there would be a view-through impact and an additional benefit to this level of advertising beyond just a straight up, traditional cost-per-lead type of metric. 19

20 From a content perspective, we then took this approach toward the content we were driving the audience to consume. The content itself was packaged up as an expert guide as well as well smaller content snippets that could be easily consumed through social media, blog posts, etc. The foundation for the content was the essence of what we do we help people connect varying systems, namely specific marketing systems. That became the pillar content around which we built expert guides. When we were building out specific targeting and messaging, we explored things like: What might a customer be connecting HubSpot to and what would be some of the specific pain points they may be experiencing? So the execution was a single content asset, but it was used as a wrapper towards this second system. Here is a more general way to think about the approach desribed related to content marketing strategy: There may be central points of content strategy around topic and those topics may be further tailored towards more specific pain points and/or sub topics. 20

21 Here we show a specific example: If you are talking about HubSpot in your CRM, there is very specific HubSpot terminology related to Powering your Lead Source Report with sales data. Pardot, for example, refers to this same thing as a Product Lifecycle Report, so we would use this specific terminology in an or social post that would be speaking to that specific issue for a very specific audience. 21

22 Here another example of testing different ads: When marketing a piece of content, would putting the actual piece of content in that ad be different than showing say, a male or a female, and would those results vary based on the audience? 22

23 Here are the results: This showcases real-life examples of the notion of view-through or impact beyond just click-through in an ad. The first example was a company we were targeting based on the fact that they had HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics. Over the course of a month, we served 28 different ads to them across 17 websites, and we got an inbound phone call from that company. For all these examples, there are different ways that company chose to connect with us. Whether it was picking up the phone, or a website chat, or an embedded form on the site, in all cases, a stream of ads were served up to these companies (via The Big Willow) and we were able to tie that back to downstream action and consideration. 23

24 To tie this back to the example TechTarget provided earlier in their presentation (slide 15), we took a look at how the conversion rates we got compare to those industry standards. To give you a sense of what is possible here: We targeted 673 accounts. A lead is someone who showed engagement, meaning they registered for one of these expert guides or engaged through chat or another form of conversation. We saw a conversion of 6% there. Relatively small sample size here, but here you see we are talking about a 2.5-6x to as much as 12x versus what you would consider traditional conversion rates. It is very powerful in terms of the impact that brand can have on overall demand metrics especially when they are viewed in totality with the real outcomes being pipeline and new customers from a target set of accounts that fit your ideal profile. 24

25 In summary, we will also revisit one of TechTarget s slides from earlier (slide 16). Here are 2 wrap-up takeways: 1. The advancements in the SiriusDecisions demand model are very useful The notion of Target Demand is where it all starts. For us, technographics are very important here to define this. Further, we look at some combination of demographics, industry, company size and other characteristics. Start out with a target definition however that my apply to you. 2. As you work people through the funnel, an integrated marketing approach is important TechTarget has this huge study and Bedrock has this single case study, but everything about these two examples is telling us that an integrated marketing, cross-channel and/or brand+demand approach is the one take and is the one to invest in. You must have patience with this approach, but ultimately you will be able to measure the payback on the strategy. Tools like HG Data and other sources like TechTarget and The Big Willow help enable this approach for your company. 2x is a great goal to have here to improve the impact of your efforts. These examples show that 2x can be a very real number to achieve. 25

26 About TechTarget TechTarget (Nasdaq: TTGT) is the global leader in purchase intentdriven marketing and sales services that deliver business impact for enterprise technology companies. By creating abundant, high-quality editorial content across more than 140 highly targeted technology-specific websites, TechTarget attracts and nurtures communities of technology buyers researching their companies information technology needs. By understanding these buyers content consumption behaviors, TechTarget creates the purchase intent insights that fuel efficient and effective marketing and sales activities for clients around the world. TechTarget has offices in Boston, London, Munich, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore and Sydney. For more information, visit techtarget.com and follow us on TechTarget. All rights reserved. The TechTarget logo is a registered trademark of TechTarget. All other logos are trademarks of their respective owners. TechTarget reserves the right to make changes in specifications and other information contained in this document without prior notice. The reader should in all cases consult TechTarget to determine whether any such changes have been made. Updated 1/18 26