So you want to get some more “at bats” for your sales team? Technology providers and marketing agencies will promise the moon, but the reality is that there is nothing auto-magical about creating qualified leads. Demand generation is a multifaceted process, and a discipline that can take years to develop. So, where do you start?
Join us for a recorded webinar crafted for growing businesses and their executives (CEOs and revenue leaders). Our panel of CMOs and digital experts will take the mystery out of marketing, and equip you with actionable insights to help your business confidently take the next right step.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding the customer journey is essential; different stages may require different types of conversions to track user interest and intent effectively.
- Regular feedback loops and meetings between sales and marketing foster collaboration, allowing teams to adjust strategies based on real-time data and improve overall performance in lead generation and conversion.
- Marketing should be viewed as a process that requires ongoing iteration and collaboration between teams rather than a one-time product purchase.
- Successful demand generation requires time for strategies to be implemented, tested, and refined to achieve optimal outcomes.
Links & Resources Mentioned
- Does your business need more leads? Balance quick wins with building a demand generation strategy
- Demand Generation 101: Build a foundation for a strong program
- Getting real about demand generation: Expectation vs. reality
- Glossary: Revenue Team Roles
Full Episode Transcription
Introduction
Jennifer Zick: All right, without any further ado, I’m exactly on time panel. You should be proud of me. 1205, we’re getting to the fun stuff. I promised them that I would not belabor the housekeeping. So panelists, please come off mute. Join me here live with your voices. I am so delighted to spend this hour with some of my favorite brilliant marketers, but also some of my dear friends. I’m excited to let them introduce themselves to you and share briefly who they are, what they do, but by name. I’ll just ask you to wave. Ruth Glaser is our Authentic CMO consultant representative on today’s panel. Ryan Ruud is the CEO and founder of Lake One, one of our Ally Network providers, and Ben Theis is the founder and owner of Skol Marketing and also one of our Ally Network providers.
So Ruth, I’ll ask you to start with an intro. Ryan can follow and Ben can wrap us up.
Ruth Glaser: Sure. Thanks, Jen. I am an entrepreneur at heart and have experience starting my own business and I think that leads to my passion for working with emerging companies and people who are in growth oriented environments. And right now, my most recent clients have been really focused in the e-commerce space. But I also have extensive experience in the b two b, and I’m really pleased to be here talking to y’all today.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks, Ruth.
Ryan Ruud: Hi everybody. It’s great to e meet you. So I started Lake One in 2014. We primarily support B2B organizations and manufacturing, tech and professional services. I like to save organizations that have really gnarly sales and marketing challenges. We help them solve those challenges with technology and strategy aligned solutions. Usually we’re working strategically and hands on embedded with our partners on things like marketing automation, CRM consulting, digital advertising, web and app development, and data management and integrations. So excited to be here.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks, Ryan.
Ben Theis: Yeah. And hey guys, I’m Ben Theis. As Jennifer said, owner and director of Skol Marketing, we’ve been around for eight and a half years and we love to create relationships to help people with digital marketing with kind of establishing their online presence of that’s like with web development or edits on your site, going into user experience and then more building your online presence with things like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, advertising and social media. And so we love working with Jen and partnering with great people like Ruth and Ryan to give you guys a lot of great information.
I know a lot of you guys. I’m looking at the attendee list. I have attended some of our workshops and it’s great to have you back and it’s also great to be introduced and to be in front of a lot of people I don’t know. So thanks for having me.
Building a Foundation for Demand
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. Yes, thanks, everybody. Now we’re going to really get diving in and we’ve got a series of questions prepared that we hope are going to really provide a broad swath over the topic of demand gen. Because the truth is, for every one of the questions we’re going to cover today, we could have a separate webinar and go really deep. So we’re hoping to paint a good picture that shows all of the pieces that have to work together, gives you a good holistic lay of the land, and brings all these interesting, unique perspectives from our partners and leaders that are activating these strategies. So let me just start by saying, in the work we do at Authentic with small and growing businesses, I can’t tell you how many times I hear the phrase like, we need to get more at bats for our sales team.
That’s a really common start to an engagement conversation with a prospect. And a lot of these business leaders and revenue leaders are at the point of frustration because they’ve seen a lot of shiny technology, demos of marketing automation that looks like it should be easy and automagical. Maybe they’ve put dollars toward agency services and seen leads come through that aren’t qualified. They’re just wondering, what are we doing wrong? Right? So let’s dig in.
And Ben, I’m going to start with you. I’m going to lob a question your way. What big picture do you think it really takes to build a foundation for successful demand? Ben, if you break it down into simple terms, what ingredients need to be part of that mix?
Ben Theis: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think what we normally see a lot of times with small and even medium to large sized businesses are two kinds of main misconceptions or kinds of mistakes. The first is that we always, because marketing does get exciting because we’re like, hey, this is going to, this is a shiny thing. We’re going to get more at bats, going to get more leads to our sales teams that a lot of times we rush it too much, we start running before we walk. And so that’s where the first part is laying the foundation and laying all of these components out. And really that kind of brings me to my next point, which is, okay, what does that mean? Or what is that about? And really we like to kind of split that into two main types of things.
One is your different demographics and what you want each of them to do. And so what I mean by that is obviously every single one of us that is listening to this have different demographics, but they’re valued differently. You know, again, like, there are different types of businesses that I’d love to work with. There are also ones that I would work with, but obviously I’m going to prioritize them differently. So a lot of times, like, what we like to do is to start with businesses is to say, okay, hey, give me your top five to ten clients you would want to work with, and let’s prioritize them. It gives us an idea of who we can go after. And as a marketer, even internally, externally, we start to realize, you know, again, these are the high value people that we want to go after.
And then it gets into, you know, again, the strategy revolving around them. Well, that brings us kind of that to that second point within that second bullet that we were just kind of talking about, which is, what do we want them to do? This is one that I see a lot of times people get confused on is that, you know, again, well, I’ll ask that question to people is, well, what do you want a user to do? Or what is a conversion in your mind? Well, a lot of times I get back, well, I want a sale and it’s like, okay, great, but let’s break that down a little bit. Like, you know, how are people going to get a sale? Like, if you have, if you are selling a widget on your site, well, that’s really easy.
But a sale, if it’s more of a service, is probably going to go through different types of steps. So what does someone need to do to actually get to those steps? And also taking that further, realizing that there’s sometimes if someone doesn’t do exactly what you want to do with that high value of purchasing something, maybe scheduling, like, hey, I want to inquire more about your services. Those are obviously very high level and high value leads. Well, there’s a lot of other things that people could be doing on your site or within your marketing or with, or engaging with your business that are values that I think a lot of people don’t give credence to. And that goes with part of the foundation.
So to give you an example of some of these that we could be looking at, obviously there is value in someone actually purchasing something if that’s through a website, if that’s through a phone number. Also doing a demo, again, that’s going to have value. Filling out a contact form, maybe if it’s downloading a PDF or a white paper, signing up for a newsletter, they may spend a certain amount of time on your site. We can actually track that, obviously with different metrics. If we have a very high quality white paper that’s not downloaded and we want to track how long they’re actually staying on, that might give us a little bit more information of are people actually doing what we want on the site, maybe viewing a video or registering for an event?
Really what I’m trying to get across here is that you want to set up your demographics and prioritize them, and then also realize what you want them to do kind of long term or at the end of the goal, but then kind of backtrack and realize that there’s a lot of different things that people can do to engage, not only with your website, with your business as a whole that are going to have value, and it’s making sure that you have those user paths or plans of action for marketing that we can take care of all of them. Again, we’re going to prioritize them. We obviously want the sales. We want probably the demos or the contact forms first, but we shouldn’t negate the other ones that are there.
And that’s a huge misconception or mistake that I feel like people make when they’re laying that foundation.
Jennifer Zick: That’s great. So foundation starts with knowing who you want to matter to and how you measure whether you’re mattering to them in a lot of different ways that lead up to the sale. Ryan or Ruth, do you have anything that you’d like to add in terms of what’s part of the mix of the foundation?
Ryan Ruud: I add just one, like, beyond the, you know, the tactical marketing elements of it. I think as we talk about revenue teams, there’s a personality trait, too, that needs to be a key part of the foundational mix, and that’s patience. I think that all of us here, and those attending, especially those in the marketing seats, have had the challenge of setting the expectation for demand generation, and that it’s not a switch that just gets flipped on and that all of a sudden all of the sales problems are solved overnight. So there has to be an element of having some patience in the leadership team that this takes time. All of those things that Ben just talked about, those things don’t happen overnight and they don’t immediately work coming out of the gate. So patience is a critical piece of the foundation.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you. And you’re speaking into a piece that we’re going to dive deeper on in another question. But you’re right. Like, if that switch existed that we could flip on and guarantee qualified leads in a certain amount of time. We would already, all of us here and many on this call, be rich and retired, wouldn’t we, if it were that simple? Ruth, is there anything you want to chime in on this?
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with what Ryan and Ben have both said. I talked to. When I’m speaking with clients initially, we talk a lot about slowing down to speed up. And what I mean by that is, do we have a good grasp of who our ideal customer is? What are the characteristics that make them an ideal customer? Really understanding who we’re trying to replicate and go after so that we can cast that net out there and then also getting our brand story straight. What are our key differentiators? What’s our brand narrative? Where are we trying to own the marketplace? So really looking at why should someone care about us? So those are a couple things sometimes that you have to spend a little bit of time on before you can even start to move into your tactical plans.
Common Pitfalls in Demand Generation
Jennifer Zick: Oh, you’re so right. And that’s a perfect plug. If that theme, if that question isn’t answered for your business, you should definitely join us for April’s webinar because we’re going to go into story message. How do you get to what matters, who matters, and how do you matter to them? So, thanks, Ruth. I’m going to circle right back to you again. All three of you have been leading businesses in this space around demandgen for quite some time now. So, Ben, you already started to point out some of the common mistakes and misconceptions, but what are some of the, like, most frequent assumptions, incorrect assumptions that you find that lead businesses, particularly CEOs, CFOs, Heads of Sales, to be frustrated in their demand gen efforts?
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I think it comes down to what a lead is. And like Ben started us off with, what are we expecting someone to do? It would be great if every lead we delivered was ready to write the check and sign on the bottom line, but then we wouldn’t need salespeople. We went, you know, it’d be so much easier. Right? But that’s not the reality. In most sales cycles. It takes some nurturing. It takes some, you know, connecting the dots for people and helping really to drive home the benefits to them. And so one of the things that I see people commonly do is really not have identified what are the steps in this marketing sales cycle, the customer life cycle. So what qualifies someone as a marketing lead? And then what events need to happen?
What activities do they need to go through in order to be passed on to the sales team? And then once they’re with the sales team, what does follow up look like? So I have a company that stands out in my mind where we had some really great lead generation going for them, and we delivered all kinds of new leads to them. And so then what you want to do is follow up and say, how are the leads? Where are they in the pipeline? How many did we close so we can continue to refine that? Well, as we had that conversation with their leadership team and their sales team, we found that the follow up had consisted only of the sales people sending an email, you know, basically saying, let me know if you have any questions.
So, you know, we could deliver all the sales or all the leads in the world, but if the sales process isn’t aligned with that and there aren’t clear steps on what should happen next, no amount of lead generation is going to fix that. And then another thing that sort of goes hand in hand with that is valuing the leads themselves. So really understanding what each lead means to us. Another example that comes to mind is a company that we worked with, and they. Everybody always wants more leads, right? More leads are great. And so we did a little digging into, okay, well, how many? What’s the disposition of these leads? You know, what? And it turned out that one of them ended up in a sale.
And so it was only one sale, but that sale was worth half a million dollars annually, so it represented a significant portion of their revenue. And the ROI on that Washington was fantastic. So really understanding, okay, what do we want? What value are we placing on this lead? And then how much do we need to invest in order to hit our revenue goals based on that?
Jennifer Zick: Well, that’s fantastic. Ryan, I have heard you speak with our clients before about service level agreements between sales and marketing. Sla’s. This might be a new concept for some on this call. Can you give us a little perspective on how you’ve seen that, like, agreement and conversation helps smooth things out?
Ryan Ruud: Yeah, I mean, it’s basically, it solves a lot of the problems that Ruth is talking about. It gets the revenue teams together to say, what is. What is the terminology that we’re agreeing to around a lead? Get everybody speaking the same language. Because sales may think an MQL is something completely different than marketing does. And then going further and saying, okay, if marketing is giving you a lead, sales, these are the things we’re expecting you to do as follow up. And this is what marketing is going to do to get the leads in the pipeline for you. It’s basically just putting the two down across from each other at a table and saying, I’ll do this if you agree to do this, and then let’s come back together. We try to encourage, at a minimum, monthly.
Some of the best teams do this weekly where sales and marketing come back together and have feedback meetings weekly to say, here’s how it’s working, here’s what’s happening in real time, knowing that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. So the SLA is really just designed to say, this is what we agree to. Now let’s put it into practice and every week come back together and say, here’s what we’re seeing from our side. Here’s what we’re seeing from our side. How do we work and advance this forward as a team, as a unified team?
Setting Appropriate Conversion Expectations
Jennifer Zick: And you just brought to surface so many sub themes that could be their own webinars in terms of sales and marketing, alignment, formal feedback loops, partnership pointing in the same direction, having common goals, common language, common expectations and accountability between the teams. We don’t have this in script today, but I’m taking some mental notes about future conversations we might have on these particular deeper dives. But Ryan, I’m going to tee this next question back to you again. We’ve started touch into this, but, and I see some questions already coming in the q and a, like, well then how long will this take? Right? You ask us to be patient. How long is it? Let’s talk about expectations on conversion. What needs to happen to define lead quality? And then how long should a company expect it will take?
From the beginning of, like, we’ve started creating some content and we’re looking to create leads so we finally have viable prospects coming through and revenue. What’s that look like?
Ryan Ruud: Awesome question. So the first piece of it that I say is the alignment needs to happen in terms of lead quality in order to get to lead quality. It’s a result of the alignment because you can’t define a quality lead if everybody is not in agreement on what in the heck is a quality lead. So alignment has to happen in order to be able to actually get to what is a quality conversion and what does that conversion look like? And conversion can take all sorts of forms, like Ben said at the opening, from that kind of going forward as far as what does timeline through the funnel look like? That can vary across all sorts of businesses. I mean, some businesses have really quick funnels, some have really long ones.
But in terms of that first conversion, that kind of comes down to channel. So if you’re just creating some content, you’re putting it out there organically and then do nothing with it. It’s probably going to take you a really long time. Frankly, I push our team really hard to put more energy and effort not just into the content creation, but into thinking about content promotion. And then at that point, it comes down to the channel. Whether you’re doing paid to promote it and support it, that’s a way to grease the wheels really fast to start seeing can we get some conversions? Our thoughts and our initial thinking, from a strategy perspective, accurately measure it against what that lead definition is that everybody said. So when I say be patient, that’s not to say nothing’s going to happen.
If you’re coming at this from a strategic perspective where everybody agrees on what a lead is, you have some research and some strategy behind the content, and you have a mix that promotes it quickly. You can get things moving through the funnel really rapidly. And Ben’s probably going to kill me when I say this is, you can throw some pay per click behind it if you want to start getting some really fast traffic behind it, to be able to at least test those assumptions. So I’m not saying by no means am I saying be patient. In other words, just sit there and twiddle your thumbs waiting for an agency partner to bring the heat. You can get things moving really fast. It really comes down to the channel at that point.
But the first piece is you have to have lead quality and definition upfront, otherwise the conversions aren’t going to matter. And I’ve said this to clients for years and years, and I’ve said this in house as a marketer, if you just want conversions, I can get you some really cheap traffic, but it’s not going to matter.
Jennifer Zick: I think a lot of our attendees, I think a lot of our attendees have been there. They’ve heard agencies promise, I can get you x quote quantities of leads by this date. Right, right. And they’re really frustrated that those leads don’t align at all. And now they’ve wasted a ton of follow up sales effort to try to qualify them and now they’re spending more money.
Ryan Ruud: Exactly. So let me give you an example of this on the organic side, from a content perspective, and this is something that I think a lot, especially emerging marketers, or marketers that maybe don’t fully understand the search side of things, have a hard time wrapping their head around is if we do keyword research, why would we go down here where there’s something that maybe only has ten or 50 searches from an organic perspective, when there’s searches appear for a phrase that has thousands and thousands, but it’s a really broad term. When you go down here to something that’s really specific and really targeted to your demographic, to your buyer, to your persona, do you care if it’s only 50 searches?
If those 50 searches have a high propensity to buy from you, and especially if you have a high value, high priced item, if you have a six figure, you know, seven figure product or service, you probably only need two or three of those to convert to all of a sudden, make your whole marketing program pay for itself and then some. So that’s where it’s the quantity over quality or the quality over quantity.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. Ben or Ruth, any thoughts on this topic? Benjen?
Ben Theis: Yeah, so, no, honestly, I really second, and actually, Ryan, no, I agree that SEO, or, excuse me, SEM can be a quicker way to kind of get there. I’ll actually talk about that a little bit later here. But I think going off of what Ryan’s kind of been talking about is when we ask for a timeline, it is kind of hard. And again, I hate sometimes being on webinars myself when we kind of have vague answers, but it’s also realistic that we have 90 people on here right now. And it’s kind of talking about every single industry and every single marketing effort or strategy should be different, is going to be different because we have different demographics and things like that.
So a couple things that I like to kind of tell people that when we’re talking about timelines and Ryan was saying is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to have to say it’s going to take six months to get the lead. Now, again, depending on what you’re selling, you know, if I’m selling this pen, you know, obviously the, you know, again, the lead cycle to get, you know, again, or the sales cycle on this pen is going to be a lot different than if I’m selling a house. And so it’s also realizing kind of, you know, again, within there.
And so if we break down some of those timelines, a lot of times what we start with is if we don’t have a foundation that we talked about here, if we don’t have a plan, then we have to start somewhere and start kind of doing that. A lot of times that is going to take a few months, you know, depending on how, again, how maybe disorganized or, you know, again, the different departments, it is going to take months for that. But like what Ryan said, too, and I love what, you know, again, you said earlier, Ryan, is that no matter what you’re doing, you should still be getting value.
And this is what we try to preach to a lot of our clients, is that just because we’re not at the highest ROI that we’re going to be maybe six months, twelve months down the road, we still should be seeing a value. Anything you’re doing right now should still at least be getting a value. If that is, you know, honing on your market research, finding some things that maybe don’t work to kind of get a better ROI, finding out which, you know, where your specific demographics are on the different channels that we’ve been talking about, the different marketing kinds of things.
So sometimes it is like, okay, yes, I know the long term goal is to get sales, but sometimes, as Ruth said, we have to slow down to speed up to make sure that we can kind of catapult or slingshot ourselves there. So unfortunately, there’s not an exact time. Now, again, if we went through all 90 participants and were talking about your specific, you know, marketing strategy or what you’re selling, you know, again, then we can, you know, we can give you some more timelines. You know, we have some clients that within 30 days we’re going. We have some that it’s within a year and it gets going again. It all depends on so many factors with your foundation, with your demographic, with your conversion and your sales and marketing teams.
Jennifer Zick: Yes. And if I may steal 30 seconds of thunder here to share a little bit from our own personal case study at Authentic and give you a little bit of nuance on why these things have. And it depends. Like a lot of our conversation today is focused on B2B, marketing, which is very different from B2C, marketing to sell a pen, which is very straight line. I google for what I need. I find it, I purchased it. Easy decision, one person making it. B two b sales are very different. We’re in b two b, professional services. We’re a four year old company. We’ve been creating content since the very beginning of time.
We have four years of organic, rich, deep blog content and we’ve done some other marketing things and we’ve had four years of selling and getting to know our audience. Right. So I have metrics that tell me, you know, based on a referral that comes to our business, which is a highly qualified, right now need what that conversion looks like in my pipeline. Right? But this is the year that at authentic brand, we’re turning on some of these other mechanisms. Now we have a strong foundation. We know our audience, we know our story. We’re turning on some paid media, we’re turning on some digital nurturing campaigns. We’re getting some other activation going with some of the partners on this very call.
And my expectations as a marketer and business owner start with the understanding that the best time to plant a tree is five years ago. Okay? This is seed planting. And I’ve been planting seeds, we’ve been planting seeds for four years to create the kind of content that if you land on our site, we hope will be sticky. And then now we get to amplify all of that effort. And I have ROI calculations based on our pipeline data that tell me that between twelve and 24 months from when we start to invest is when I’m going to see revenue. Okay? So my level of patience is this could take two years of learning and tweaking and fine tuning before it’s dollars back in my business. But when those dollars start coming in, they’re very meaningful, very highly qualified. Right?
Striking the Balance Between Owned and Paid Media
Jennifer Zick: So that’s just a little bit of perspective. Mary, to try to answer your question, how long do you stay patient with your agency partners? It depends. How much time do you need to build the foundation that gives something somewhere to come to and land and be sticky and engaged? So that’s my next question. And Ben, this is coming back to you. I have seen this happen time and time again, that a lot of business leaders, they’re struggling. They’ve been a sales driven organization. They’ve got a great product or service, and now they want to amplify that. We’re going to turn on that marketing switch and start lead gen because we hear that’s what we need to do next.
So they think we need to get the technology, we need to get an agency partner, and we need to throw paid dollars to get the media going, and this will open the pipeline. But what they don’t understand is how much content is required to fuel these programs, to give that engaged person something to look at, to get to know your brand. So we know, those of us here, that doing digital well, in demand gen well, requires a ton of content. There’s nothing automagical about it. And that piece of it can be really hard to just outsource. Right? So share with us, Ben, and then others chime in. How have you seen organizations be successful in striking the balance between paid media and amplification and their owned media, their own blogs, videos, white papers, branded thought leadership? Like, what’s that look like?
How do you get that right?
Ben Theis: Yeah, and what’s kind of nice is we’ve kind of, you know, again done a little previews or little tidbits already throughout this workshop, kind of alluding to some of these things and I’ll kind of pull back some of that kind of stuff. But really what it comes down to is you absolutely need a balance, but you ultimately should be doing both or all of the above. You know, again, as we get going now, again being realistic that if maybe we’re a smaller business, if we maybe have some apprehensiveness, you know, again inside a business for it, we obviously have to be strategic on potentially how we lay it out. You know, a lot of times the best strategy isn’t just to, like Jennifer said, flip a switch.
Let’s just start, you know, pouring hundreds or thousands of dollars at SEM just so we can pat ourselves on the back and say we got this many clicks. Again, going back to what Ruth was talking about is its quality over quantity. And so really when we look at this it’s also kind of understanding sometimes how the system works or again, kind of setting up kind of the plan. Again, at the end of the day, we want both owned media and paid media. I will say the best long term benefit, and Jen, you kind of talked about this with Authentic, is going to be owned media. Now, owned media is essentially like owning your own real estate instead of renting it. Like what is paid or SEM from Google or Bing or wherever.
We’re kind of running ads, social media and all that kind of stuff. So this is going to be a much better long term effect, really. At the end of the day, what you’re doing from a brand perspective and from a, you know, again, online perspective is you’re trying to cement yourself as an industry expert. And how you do that is by creating content so that Google and search engines know that when you know, again, you obviously can use social media to help influence that. And people can also kind of be able to see that as well. So a lot of times what we tell people is that obviously depending on sometimes the eagerness or being realistic about timelines is you really actually want to start building your foundation with owned media.
Knowing that it’s probably going to take three, six, nine, twelve, eighteen months, four years to start to kind of see some of those benefits. It is going to be dependent on your, you know, again, your competition. You know, you’re also your strategy. Ryan brought up a fantastic strategy that we a lot of times use with clients that, you know, again, some, you know, once you maybe want to be number one for the 20 searches every single month for this word, instead of trying to fight 100 people to be one of the top ten on the first page for something that’s searched a thousand times. And so it’s kind of being more strategic about that and kind. And we can also look at low hanging fruit, you know, again, if we have lower competition for certain words, we can obviously get people in there.
But really what it comes down to is, again, laying that foundation with owned media, creating enough content. Now, again, enough is going to be dependent on your industry, on your demographic, on your services, on your competition. So it’s going to have to come up with building that foundation and building that plan. But what’s also really kind of nice is when we start to add paid media or SEM, and our social media advertising and stuff like that is what I like to kind of tell people is here’s the philosophical difference a lot of times between the two is that paid is going to be something that’s very quick and, you know, can be much more maneuverable. So a lot of times what we want to do is want to build owned media with a lot of our core services.
And obviously, we all do a lot of those other types of services that are kind of in between. Well paid can be a great way to kind of be an auxiliary benefit or kind of just enhance upon it. But really what we’re looking for is long term, you want your own media equity to kind of grow so that we can either, you know, again, potentially lower, you know, again, paid SEM or, you know, again, be much more maneuverable with it and try different types of lower priority services or things like that. They feed off of each other as well. I think that’s another misconception, too, is that the reason you want to do both is they feed so well off of each other. The other thing, too, is sometimes I will get people that say, well, Ben, why would I do SEM ads?
Because I never click on ads. I don’t even click on ads on social. I don’t click on ads here. And I say, okay, that’s great for you. But you’re also missing the point that the reason these platforms are around is because they work. And again, we’ve literally been able to do case studies and kind of show this, and if you think about it, makes sense, let’s just use Google Ads for an example. But there’s obviously other ones out there, such as when someone decides to click on an ad on Google, when someone does a search for plumber in Minnesota, hypothetically. Well, again, they didn’t scroll down to see the organic. They didn’t go onto social media to see it. So you would have missed that opportunity if you weren’t even in the game for it. And that’s just, again, a one small example.
But really, the thing, if you want to take away from this, from my opinion, is to lay the foundation to your whole strategy with this, with owned media, and then start building on top of that and then using paid media to really kind of just be, you know, supplemental kind of factor to it. Now, again, the one caveat is what Ryan brought up is that sometimes speed can be a factor, and you may have to do SEM first to start getting going with stuff and then kind of peel it back.
Marketing Investment and Return
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. This is yet another webinar we could go deep on is paid, earned, owned, shared media. There’s a lot to unpack here. Thank you for that. We’re going to buy back a little bit of time with these last two formal panel questions. So, Ryan, I’m going to jump right in with yours, and I’m going to say let’s try to keep like four minutes for the next couple. So we’ve got some time for audience Q+A. Some smart questions are coming in. Let me remind you. Attendees, drop your questions, please, into the Q+A, rather into the group chat. That will help us to sort them through from just comments. So if you throw a question into chat, bring it on over to Q+A so we can look at it there, too.
So, Ryan, one of the most common conversations, and you and I have talked at length about this, that I have with business owners. I often talk with CEO’s and CFO’s who say, listen, I actually have an unlimited marketing budget. If you can just tell me for every dollar that I put in at the top of this machine, how many dollars will I get out the bottom and how fast? Right? And then I’ll just keep reinvesting. Again, if that was just a formula, we’d all be like, on a beach somewhere right now, not here freezing our butts off in Minnesota, but here we are. So let’s discuss, how do you answer that question? How do you help advise business leaders to think about investment and return?
And I think part of this answer, it kind of circles back to where we started this conversation that sometimes the return on investments, not just revenue, there are other things being influenced. But how would you answer that? You’re on mute, my dear. Let’s get you off mute.
Ryan Ruud: I swear that when the pandemic is over, it’s all going to boil down to one phrase: You’re on mute.
So yeah, I think elements of this have already kind of been answered. It has to start with what is the value of the lead to be able to start to do some of those formulations for us, we always try when we engage with a client very early on, is to start having KPI discussions that get as close to the revenue as possible. And a lot of organizations sometimes get really uncomfortable when the marketing partner or the marketing agency is asking these questions and we’re not doing it because like, I want, you know, to look behind the curtain and like, get all of your business secrets. I’m doing it because as a marketing partner, I want to help you get to the ROI calculation. I don’t want to be giving you stupid reports on clicks and views and impressions that mean nothing.
Because at the executive level, I want to gouge my eyes out when I see reports like that. The vanity metrics are the dumbest ones on earth. But if there are no benchmarks, if your business doesn’t have the ability to say, this is what it means, this is what the value of a lead is, this is what our sales cycle is like. You still have to start somewhere with some best guess estimates and start to try to build an ROI formula and keep it simple. It doesn’t need to be, you know, six different attribution models. First click, last click. Just keep it simple. Somebody came into a website sourced by marketing. Did they convert to revenue? What was the revenue? I mean, it’s very basic arithmetic, but that’s the way I try to approach it.
And I think sometimes, especially when I’m having that conversation, similar to you, Jen, with CEO’s and CFO’s, it’s like, is it really that simple? Because I feel like marketing has been trying to make it really complicated. It is that simple. So. And I think Ruth also has some good thoughts on this too, sitting from the kind of the CMO seat too, with several clients.
Ruth Glaser: Yeah. Thanks, Ryan. I think the ROI question sometimes can be premature and there is an investment required sometimes to create some assets. You know, if you think about it, like, if you’re setting up manufacturing, you’ve got to invest in that manufacturing line, and then you start to amortize that cost over time. Well, the same is true in marketing. And I think, Jen, your example a couple questions ago was just something I’ve seen over and over again, which is what I call hockey stick growth. Right. You’re chugging along for a few years, and then you finally get that traction and you start to see the growth really accelerate. So I like to think when you’re creating those assets and that content initially, if done well and done right, it’s going to deliver day after day, month after month, year after year.
So you’re really creating annuity. You’re investing in an annuity that’s going to enable you to run campaigns, enable you to do some of these different tactics, to start generating some of those leads. But that’s not the starting point. And that’s sometimes the hard thing to understand, is you’ve got to build that foundation and invest in that foundation first.
Jennifer Zick: That’s awesome. Ruth. Ben, I think you had something you wanted to add to this.
Ben Theis: Yeah, I just want to quickly add to kind of both of those where I’d kind of like put that and kind of say that is, I think a lot of times people come to, you know, cmos, digital marketers, and they’re thinking that it’s a digital marketing, or just, let’s just say marketing. They’re thinking it’s a marketing product that we’re buying. You’re buying a marketing process that, you know, again, everybody’s is going to be different, it’s not just a product that we can, you know, again, yes, I’ve been doing this for years. Ryan’s been doing this for years and Ruth has been doing this for years. But everybody is different.
I think sometimes that is, you know, again, something that I like to try to teach people is that, again, it’s not just a marketing product and it’s just out of the box and we get it and we flip a switch. It’s a marketing process that we have to go through and that we know and that we can offer expertise with that or you can do internally, too.
Jennifer Zick: Super helpful. Well, we have just a few more minutes, and I want to flip this last question back to you, Ruth, because it’s a perfect segue from your concept of building annuities. That was beautiful. And I would love for you to write a blog on that.
Ruth Glaser: That was great.
Customer Retention & Expansion Strategies
Jennifer Zick: But on that point, I see a lot of growing businesses have an imbalance in the way that they think about investment in their marketing programs. They think about marketing simply as top of the funnel, creating leads, demand gen and sales as closing and account management and customer retention and account growth. But really, marketing and the assets that you create as part of your owned content in that universe can be leveraged into customer retention, expansion. Can you talk to us a little bit about how that investment that can be, that powers our demand gen can also power and reinforce retention and advocacy downstream?
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, absolutely. And if you’ve done like Ryan suggested and you’ve got this well integrated kind of flywheel with sales, marketing, customer service, you’re all feeding each other and leveraging learnings and knowledge in those different areas. So I think a great example when you’re looking at content is really to think holistically, not just about one specific piece and where it might be used, but how that might be used throughout a campaign. And I love the example of a webinar, for instance. So we’re recording this webinar and you might take the deck, the outline and create a blog from that and optimize it for those keywords. Now you’re starting to attract people. You may then ask for their email address so that you can send them the recording.
So now you’re nurturing and you’re moving them through the funnel a little bit and then down the line. A salesperson might be on the phone with this, with another contact and they say, oh, you know what? We did a webinar last quarter that I think you might really be interested in. So now the sales enablement piece that they can send the recording to a prospect. So really working that whole lifecycle off of one concept of a webinar. Another example I love, there’s a great company called Databox. And what they do is they aggregate metrics from a variety of different sources and they create these beautiful dashboards so you can see how your business is doing. Well, their customer service works with their clients to create these dashboards. They then take those and make them templates which they make available on their website.
So I saw a tweet last week from their president that said top 100 marketing dashboard templates. And so of course I went there. So this marketing content that got me to their website originated from the customer service team working with a client to implement their solution. So being very creative and holistic about, hey, this content works in this area, but we can repurpose it and use it in this area as well.
Jennifer Zick: Brilliant. That’s how you stretch your resources and you get more bang for your buck. We are now right on time for the audience Q+A portion, and there are so many directions we can go with this. I did hear from one attendee that the Q+A wasn’t working for her. And so we’ve captured a couple questions right in the chat that I think are super great questions because we actually hear these quite a bit from our clients. So I want to throw this out to the team. First one, KPI’s. We hear a lot about KPIs metrics, insights, analytics, data and how do we know what’s working, what’s not working, and ultimately ROI. So the question here is, what do you find to be the most effective type of KPI to measure? We’ve heard about customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost.
There are other things that can be measured. How would you weigh in on that? And let’s contextualize that within a B2B framework.
Ryan Ruud: Go for it.
Ben Theis: Just jumping in. Okay, well, yeah, so I was gonna preface it by saying, obviously it is gonna be a little bit different and understanding what our conversion is. But a lot of times, you know, again, like, we are actually looking at both of those as two huge ones, the LTV of what that value is going to be. And I think, like this person actually, or Jen, if you put that in there, is, I think the LTV is one of the most important ones to kind of look at because sometimes we do, you know, again, like within companies and whatnot, we get a little bit of short sighted that, oh, again, we got that sale.
But again, like, if we know what the LTV of that person is, that long term value, that lifetime value of that client, obviously that’s going to be, again, going back to prioritizing our different conversions or prioritizing our different demographics, it’s going to help kind of with that also then balancing that with the customer acquisition cost, it’s kind of obviously, just like most things in marketing, it’s finding that sweet spot of being able to, again, it comes back to ROI. So I think it’s a matter of balancing both of them. But really, I think that before you can really even answer that and just start throwing out, oh, well, it has to be LTV. It has to be the client acquisition cost. You have to get the plan down and start prioritizing your conversions first and then start putting some values to those.
And we even work with clients where we almost put an arbitrary value. And you can do that within, you know, so many metric systems that if there’s not an actual sale, we can actually start to put some type of value there so we can start to even measure those things that aren’t, you know, again in the moment. Like if someone downloaded a PDF, you could, you know, again, attribute some type of value to that so you can at least start to, you know, again calculate some of those other things.
Ryan Ruud: Yeah, go ahead.
Ruth Glaser: Well, I just got to say, lifetime value is a great metric, I think, because you’re looking at the long term value of that customer. But the other one that I think is often overlooked in b two b, especially in complex sales environments, is speed of sale. So if marketing can help to reduce the sales cycle, there should be a value placed on that. Right. And that’s what good marketing can do. So that’s another one. Like I say, it’s often overlooked, but I think a really valuable one to take a look at.
Jennifer Zick: Ryan, did you want to chime in real quick on that?
Ryan Ruud: No, Ruth took my answer.
Ruth Glaser: We’re going to roll.
Jennifer Zick: Next question. We talked quite a bit already today about patience and expectation and how long it can take depending on your model, your pipeline, the velocity, all of those things. But Mary asked a question about how long one should be patient with their marketing firm or their agents? See, when looking for sales results, what does that mean? 60 days, six months, six years? I hear companies all the time saying, we’re going to give this agency a 90 day trial. Talk with me a little bit about how you manage and navigate. I’m asking this of Ben and Ryan. That conversation with would be clients, how do you help set their expectations? And then also, how can a client know when they’re working with an agency that really doesn’t get it and isn’t doing things that are going to be helpful to their business.
Ryan Ruud: Yeah. So for me, it’s really important early on with the client that you have, like I said before, KPI discussions, and that you understand together on both sides what you’re working towards, what success looks like, but also understanding that at the end of the goal line here, obviously is revenue. But to Ben’s point, marketing is a process, not a product. And that in order to get to that goal line of sales or goal line of revenue, there’s going to be some iteration along the way to figure that out. Jan, I think your comment about four years of content development and looking at metrics and putting together an ROI model for paid media that’s looking at a return in two years is spot on. And that’s not to say that every business takes that long.
But it’s an understanding between client and agency that it’s a relationship and there should be honesty in that relationship. And if there is not, and you are not having conversations on the agency side or on the client side about metrics, what is happening, what is working, what is not working, how you are progressing towards that goal together, ditch them. Because to me, it’s not about do we wait 60 days, do we wait six months, do we wait six years? It’s about do I have a partnership with somebody that I believe in that is helping me move the needle towards the goal? Because it is a process, it’s not a product. So that’s my approach to it. Ben, I don’t know if you have other thoughts, but no, honestly, like.
Ben Theis: I would just kind of reiterate some of what you’re kind of talking about in that, you know, again, another kind of key indicator that we’ve had people come to us that have been upset with other clients, too, is again, like, within the digital agency, it’s, again, it’s when a digital agency treats marketing like a product, really, it’s the same thing over and over again. And you start seeing, hey, I can guarantee you this. No one should really say that. The only thing we can really guarantee is that honestly, we should, you know, we should be able to see improvement or you should be able to see work, but it comes down to critical thinking and communication. So again, you know, going to that question, can I get you leads within 30 to 60 days?
Yes, but it, again, it’s going to depend on do we have the foundation already set? When are we coming in? Are you selling a pen or a house? You know, again, there’s so many different kinds of factors in there. And then the other thing, too, is a lot of times that we work with our clients on is understanding. Again, the best part about this is digital marketing should only the leads and everything that goes with it should only get better and better as we go along. Again, I might be able to get you know, the leads in 30 to 60 days, but we’re also going to say, hey, that’s just setting that benchmark, and we’re only going to get better and better as we go along. So kind of reiterating what Ryan’s saying is it has to be a relationship.
But what I would just say is, you know, again, how you sometimes can tell when it’s a product, not a process, is when we start hearing things of just guaranteeing and just hitting numbers just to hit numbers again, it doesn’t matter. You know, again, if we’re just hitting those, we really need to look at, again, the LTV, look at the client acquisition. Ruth made a fantastic point about the speed of it and pretty much it’s the opportunity cost of all those and bringing all that value together and have that critical thinking to be able to push it forward.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. So if you’re hearing of would be or a current agency partner, just guarantee vanity and engagement metrics, but wash their hands of any responsibility to work with you on what that means in terms of impact your business run away.
And also, if you as the customer are approaching an agency with an expectation that we’re just going to give you our money and we expect you to give us sales back, you’re not ready and you’re not in the right mindset and that agency should run away from you because this will need to be, it needs to be a partnership where you’re invested and willing to be transparent, to share learnings back and forth, to have a that depth of conversation and be willing to adapt what you’re learning and let it change your organization, let it change how you approach the customer experience in that journey. Right. So it has to come both directions. So thank you for that honest perspective. Okay, we’ve got a couple other minutes here. There’s a couple other questions coming in.
One that came in through our chat that didn’t get to the Q and A, but I think it’s really relevant and interesting was a question about dating content. So forcing viewers of your website to give you their information before they can access content, whether that’s an email address or more, this person’s like, I hate gated content. We all hate running into gates. Right? But when is it appropriate and valuable? Where should it be used and where should it not be used? Help us out, Ryan, I’m going to pick on you first.
Ryan Ruud: Yeah, I saw that question come into the chat that sat out of the corner of my eyes. I was hoping it would get surfaced.
Jennifer Zick: There you are.
Ryan Ruud: So I totally agree. I think that the problem is why people hate gated content now, and this is coming from a HubSpot solution partner. So I’m blaming HubSpot for this because inbound marketing came up, came blasting onto the scene like ten years ago, and everybody’s like, oh, put a gate up. We get all these email addresses and then all of a sudden people are like, what? I got all my information and I got this crappy piece of content that’s the problem. So you’ve got to marry the value of what you’re giving to why you’re asking for an email address.
And I honestly think that’s the biggest problem, is that people are still putting up crappy content and then expecting people to be stupid and be like, oh, I’m going to fill out all of these forms and then get like a one page thing that was basically, like, plagiarized off of somebody else’s website. And it’s like, I’ve seen this piece of content 20 times. What I will say is that there are some really cool tools and technology out there now that are making it easier to provide gated content and make it easier on the user. Like Clearbit Zoom info makes it where there’s third party data that will connect lead data to it. So all you literally have to ask is email address and that’s it. Like, don’t make it laborious.
But if you have high value content, like I presume, and I hope that authentic brand is going to gate the evergreen version of this webinar.
Jennifer Zick: Yes, we will.
Ryan Ruud: Good. A gate is worthwhile because at the end of the day, it’s still one of the major mechanisms for which you can make a website turn it into a lead machine. Because. Because people don’t really like filling out contact forms either. Because then they feel like sales is going to be harassing them nonstop. So that’s my thought.
Jennifer Zick: That was brilliant. I don’t think there’s much that we can add to that truth bomb. Thank you for that. And thank you for the person who asked about gates. I think all of you have shared so many wonderful, valuable little nuggets of wisdom today that I hope that everybody who’s on this webinar feels it was worthwhile to share your email address to get here today. And we absolutely will put a gate on it if anybody else wants access to all this wisdom. So with that, we always want to end on time because we don’t want to erode the trust of our visitors. I know there are questions in the audience we didn’t get today. We are still here for you.
Even when this event wraps up, all of you have Monica’s email in your inbox as a confirmation on today’s event and with your invitation. If you would like to get in touch with any of our panelists with specific questions, just reach out to us. We would love to put you directly in touch. And I know that all of our panelists would be thrilled to be a resource for you and Ben thank you for dropping your email address out publicly. You are a brave soul. If anyone wants to do the same, please do. This is your moment. So we are now at the wrap part of the meeting and I want to just mention a couple quick things. My utmost love, thanks, appreciation, and gratitude to all of you brilliant panelists.
I’m just so grateful that you are part of our authentic brand circle and community. And we are. I love the work you’re all doing for our clients and friends, and you’re all game changers in the space of marketing. And I’m grateful to know you and learn from you. So thank you for being with us today. Thank you to my production team here at authentic brand who makes all of this possible. It’s a simple Zoom meeting, but there’s nothing simple about getting this all pulled together. So especially to Monica sitting off in the wings here. Thank you for that. Thank you to all of you who were here with us today live and those who registered to watch later. We appreciate you and the opportunity to be part of your circle as well.
Finally, don’t forget to register for our next event coming up in April, where we’ll have a couple of our cmos and another of our brilliant allies on the webinar to talk about messaging moments in your business as you evolve. Monica will make sure you get that invitation, coming really soon with this recap. And finally, as this event closes at the top of the hour on time, we ask you just to take that brief moment, 5 seconds, answer three quick questions, give us feedback, and if you’ve got specific feedback about what you learned today or what you would like to learn in a future growth webinar growth marketing webinar, please email Monica. We’re going to take all of those requests very seriously as we map out the content for the coming months ahead. So have a wonderful, beautiful, brilliant afternoon.
Blessings on all of your marketing teams and programs and results and KPI’s and Rois and demand gen efforts. We’re so grateful to be here with you. Thanks so much, Ruth, Ryan and Ben. Really appreciate you guys.
Interested in learning more about building a demand generation strategy for your business? Check out this blog post!
