Jen Spencer

My name is Jen Spencer. I am the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for SmartBug Media. We're a full-service digital marketing agency focused on intelligent inbound for revenue growth and we're a HubSpot Diamond Partner. So my talk at Inbound was called Wait, Are You Human? Delivering Authentic Experiences in an Age of Mass Automation. And it's a topic I'm just particularly passionate about because I love technology and I love all of the tools and the automation tools that we have at our fingertips. That's marketing automation, sales automation, video tools. There's cool AI and chatbots that are available to us. But what I find is that sometimes those things get abused and we're not thinking about the fact that our buyers are human beings. And so that's really what it was about. And it was a little bit about exposing some of that abuse that I'm seeing in the market. But then also talking about some ideas I have for how you can actually start putting a human element back into your human interactions through things like personalized videos, podcasts, and small events. So I think when you're wanting to create a personal message and that human connection and you want to do it at scale, sometimes there's things that are not going to be scalable. It's just the way it is. So you just have to decide what you're going to scale and what is going to have to take a little bit more time, I think. The other thing is to start from the beginning with your buyer personas. Really understand those buyers, understand, recognize that they're human beings. beings that they have great they have good days they have bad days where they want to crawl back in bed right they have days where they spill coffee all over their shirts um and um and they like to laugh and you know they get sick and they're they're just they're human beings like like we are you know um and i think that's really important to know what what is going to be um what's going to matter to them and to and to to recognize that that they're not perfect either when you think about them how do you how are you going to deliver some kind of a value back to them what do they actually care about um the other thing i think is and this you know comes down to scale it's on not being afraid to give your brand a voice and a face and a personality and i meet so many organizations we people at working organizations we say well we're b2b and we've got a very serious brand and you know we sell a serious product and i i get it but your buyers are human beings and so how are you going to connect with them um i think people are looking for that kind of connection so you know some of the tips you know for example it's like if you do an event um don't have the event be about yourself think about well what would that buyer person what's going to matter how can i provide value to that person is it getting their hands on something new before anyone else gets it is it on being able to hear from a peer is it like networking and getting to build connections that have nothing to do with the product or service that you that you have but maybe it's just getting the right people together in a room podcasting i think can be is very scalable it can be a really intimate experience you know when you think about that when when i i used to host a podcast and my last Heavy residence when the and say, you know, thank you. And, you know, what else can we be talking about? How else can I help you? And then take their feedback and actually use it. And I think that's really important because a lot of times as organizations, we will ask for feedback, but then what do we actually do with it? Do we do anything with it? Do we, do we show those, you know, that that audience that we're actually listening? Who, who does it well? So I think like, I think Terminus as a company, um, they, what they've done really well is develop a whole community around the methodology that they're, that they're evangelizing their, their flip my funnel community. Um, so I think they do it exceptionally well from that perspective of really trying to add value and teach and kind of nourish, um, the minds of their ideal buyers, um, and keep their product sort of out of, out of it. I think they do that really well. Well, I've seen them do, you know, some of the things that I've just shared, you know, I've seen them, um, do those kinds of small events, um, even some larger events too, but lots of small events, building communities, um, all across the country. Um, I've seen them use video, um, where people can share their stories and their experiences. Um, so those, those for sure. Um, also seeing them, um, really identify influencers in the market and, and build those kinds of connections with those influencers and leverage those individuals to help grow the community more. It's someone who doesn't work for your company who can also kind of share that message and, you know, talk to more people about, um, about what they're doing and how it's working. So I think anytime we think about, you know, I wanted to go to dinner. I wanted to go to a nice Italian restaurant in the North end when I was here in Boston. What did I do? Right. I, well, first I went to Yelp and I was overwhelmed because there were hundreds. I mean, there's so many restaurants. So then I thought, Oh, you know, I know someone who used to live here. And so I texted her and said, Hey, where, where's a good place I can go out for Italian food in the North end. She immediately sent me three, three, you know, recommendations. And those are the recommendations I went with because it was someone I trusted who was recommending this for me. And it was a great, it was, great experience. There are so many marketing automation tools and sales, sales automation, and, you know, AI technologies that we can use to really scale our businesses. I think the most important thing is to, um, first figure out how we're going to use the technology to better understand our buyer, not just how we're going to make it easier for ourselves to get our message to the buyer, but how we're going to really understand the way that they think. Um, and what's important to them and use the technology for what it's been made for. So for example, HubSpot, right? If you've got your website built on HubSpot's platform, if you're offering content, you have the ability to keep track of what content an individual person is consuming, what blogs they're reading, what pieces they're downloading, of course, what emails they're opening or clicking on. Okay. Now as businesses, we tend to be way more aware of how many, the quantity, how many emails, Oh, this person's opened all my emails, or this person's clicked five times, or this person, you know, has an instant subscript subscription to the blog. Okay. The buyer that, that person who's reading and consuming, isn't thinking about the quantity, the quantity they're thinking about the actual context of what is actually what they're learning about. So we need to shift our thinking and start to set up our marketing automation and sales automation tools. So that those are optimized to respond to the types of content that that individual is consuming, not just the quantity of content. So for example, if you have lead scoring set up in your system, what are you looking at? Are you looking at it? How many times does a person come back to the website maybe? Or, you know, like I said, like how many emails they open or blogs they read. That is not as, that is not as valuable as what people are reading. So that's, that's, that's, And again, that's a great source of information to get more taste and understanding of what's, what's going sales and the marketing side of things. It's because an email, you know, it's, it's, they're words on a page, right? With video, you can see, you know, you could probably see I have, I have purple hair, right? That might, that's going to tell you something about my personality, right? So it's, you, you learn, you learn more about like the context of a person. One of my favorite ways to use video is actually in the sales process. So today or this week I've met over a hundred, I've had over a hundred conversations with people as my voice is showing you. And I need to follow up with them and, you know, how am I going to do that? And how are they going to remember me of all the people that they were communicating with, right? Well, I'm going to send personal videos to people who I want to, you know, continue the conversation with because they'll go, Oh yeah, I remember her. I remember talking to her. I remember, I remember her purple hair, you know, or I remember she had, her voice was, you know, really raspy from talking too much. So it's just another way of continuing. It's continuing that relationship, but it can also be used if you've never met somebody before and you want to introduce yourself to somebody, or you want to introduce your team to somebody, you can show them who you are, as opposed to, you know, just sending a one off email. The other thing is we're, we're smart. We can see, you know, we can see, you know, between, read between the lines. We know when things are sort of like canned like, Oh, I got this email. It seems personal, but I mean, how many other people got this too? If you really, if you use video in a lot of cases, you're showing people that you've taken the time to invest in trying to reach out to them. I think the best advice. can give marketers around video is to relax. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be overly produced. It can be on the fly, right? In fact, I think the more polished and produced the video becomes, the less authentic it seems. People don't mind if you kind of stumble over your words here and there, you know. They don't mind if, you know, someone walks by in the background you know. I think if right now if a cat jumped on the back of this chair, I think people would love that, you know. It's because it's just, it's more human. So when I think about in 2018 what's ahead, specifically for inbound marketers, it's going to be a lot of ungated content and value first. So we're going to start to see things like pillar pages that curate content together and different kinds, videos, infographics, you know, blog content, ebooks that are all in one location and that are openly accessible. And it's going to be harder for us. We can't put it behind a wall. We can't put it behind a form and say, nope, you got to give us this information before you can learn. We're not going to be able to do that anymore. Buyers expect you to teach them, give them something before they're going to give you anything. So we have to up our game. I think there's that. And also I think the cool opportunity we have as marketers is to start curating actual user-generated content into one place. And that's going to be our goal. The benefit is putting it in one place to make it easily accessible for others and to optimize for SEO. That's redundant for search engine optimization. But I think that that's, as we're seeing more and more people kind of create their, make their own content, right? Whether they are doing Instagram stories or they're using Snapchat or they're live tweeting, you know, our job as marketers is how are we going to take that and leverage it, you know, pull it together into, sort of like one, one place where we can repurpose it for our audiences and continue to provide more value, not from ourselves, but not from ourselves as companies, but from other peers, other buyer personas. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm seeing into the future. I'm looking into my crystal ball. What is to come? No, I don't, I don't, I don't know. I don't know quite yet. I think it's just, it's our challenge. It's our challenge to figure out how to make it happen. You know, it's our challenge to figure out, you know, I think in the last couple of years, the focus has been on getting users to generate their own content on user generated content. Now as marketers, we have to figure out, okay, what are we doing with it? How are we going to pull it together? I think we have an opportunity with just simple, you know, landing page landing pages or, you know, on our, on our websites, um, to pull that content in, you know, together. Um, it just means it's, it's not static. It's going to be very dynamic. We're constantly have to have to be, um, changing it out and we're not going to be able to just like make, you know, write an ebook and publish it and put it on a landing page and put a form on there. Like we're just not going to, yes, that will always exist, but I just think we're going to have to start being a lot more creative, um, and how we do it and who's going to do it well. And I don't know, hopefully smart bug will.