Marketing Nation Summit

What are the sales goals of your marketing strategy? Well, I think if you're a marketer and you want to accelerate your sales pipeline, it's really important that you first understand what the sales goals are. It's important that you understand the mechanics of your sales pipeline. How many leads do you need to convert into X number of opportunities? How many opportunities do you need to get to a certain number of closed deals? Also critically important that you really understand your buyer, right? And not just understand the companies you're going after, but the people within those companies you're selling. And it's usually somewhat of a sort of internal buying committee that makes decisions about what they're going to move forward on. So knowing the roles of people inside those companies, knowing the stages they go through as part of their buying process. I mean, that's fundamental to good sales and marketing in general. But those become the building blocks that you can build campaigns and build process and results from. Top tips, I think experience is one of the trickiest things. It's hard to get your arms around everything that makes up the experience. It's the sum total of all of your brand touch points. So it can get daunting because it's very, very small things and it can be very, very big things, too. So I think kind of mapping out that experience is key. I invite people to use concentric circles and to start with the center circle of some of your core brand DNA, your logo, your brand promise, and then your product and service brand touch points. So the things that are connected with product and service delivery. And then the outer circles of your marketing communications, both your static analog touch points and your interactive digital touch points. And then beyond that, kind of the outermost circle would be how you can engage senses like touch and smell and all sorts of interesting things. In the last couple of years, we've seen an explosion in the use of video in B2B marketing. It provides such a richer environment to communicate not just a logical message, but an emotional message as well. We're seeing sales organizations embrace video to create better resonance between prospects and SDRs and inside sales reps. We're seeing marketing teams embrace not just big high production videos, but simple, shorter, more casual videos to engage their prospects. It's just such a more immersive experience that in many cases can can accelerate the path to awareness and interest and discovery for the prospects you care about the most. Everything you can do to try to link to revenue is always good. So the more you have your buyer journey mapped out and understanding awareness level video will generally look more at volume. That's where you're more quantitative. Are you getting are you getting people viewing it? Are they sharing it? You know, is it getting the attention that it needs? As you get through the consideration and decision, you want to get quantitative metrics have a way of being very easily gained. You can always throw more traffic on it that is the right traffic. Can I also get some quantitative metrics in there? Can I see how the video itself is performing in the larger context of a page? Are people actually getting to the end of the video? Are you creating a call to action within that video that's being followed up on? You know, and also there's a time component, right? You know, which is is this speeding up my sales cycle? Is it something that's actually causing people to make that next step in their journey? That's something that we find is really important. And video is is really, really important format because the great thing about it is it forces you to watch it continuously. Text can be asynchronous. I can stop reading a book and pick it up right where I left off. It's harder to do that with some videos, especially shorter ones. So you need to have the full attention of the of the viewer. They have to be watching. They have to be listening. And there's very rare moments where you actually get people's full attention these days. And so video is a great way to make that message come through, especially in kind of the transition points, getting them into a funnel or getting them to make a decision. Video can be a very, very useful tool. But you want to make sure you've got a mix of your quantitative and qualitative metrics because it's very easy to play with one of the two. Making sure both go up is the hard part. You know, ultimately, you're measuring things that you can buy a beer with, right? It's closed deals. It's retention, it's lifetime value of your customers. I mean, a lot of what marketing does is leading indicators of that, whether it's awareness or traffic or leads or, you know, pipeline creation. I think, you know, a good first step for many marketers that haven't really sort of embraced full revenue responsibility is to at least migrate from focusing on MQLs to focusing on SQLs. You know, don't just focus on generating a bunch of form fills. Focus on generating qualified short term opportunities that your sales team can take from there. You know, the closer you can get to the metrics you can buy a beer with as a marketer, the better. I think it's interesting when you think about videos prevalence and content marketing, because we started out with all of this content that is read, blog posts, ebooks, all of that stuff that's kind of a flat or cold medium. And then we started as podcasts have gained popularity. We're actually talking to people were in their ears while they're on their commute, on their run. And then with video, we engage even more senses. So all of a sudden we have the content, but we also have the sound and we have the site. So I think thinking about how you can use that to tell very personal stories and coming full circle back to stand out brands that stand for something. I think that's why it's important to understand what aspect of your customer's life your brand appeals to. And video can be a powerful tool for helping you deliver that brand promise. I think you have to know what it is you're trying to do. We have a different measurement problem, I think, than our than the previous generation of marketers who it was all about. I know half my marketing is working. I don't know which half because it was hard to measure. Now we have no shortage of numbers, but what's hard is actually connecting them back to something that matters. We have all sorts of vanity metrics. We have views. We have followers. We have subscriptions. We have all of these things. But unless that's actually connected to something that moves the needle for your business, they're just numbers going up. So I think it's important to remember to eat your vegetables, strategically speaking, and to know why you're doing this in the first place. I think the future of video marketing has a lot more to do with the hardware in some ways than the software. Video is very portable. I can pull my phone out now and watch it. So I think the question is, mobile is becoming a bigger issue for buyers. We're seeing it so much in B2C, which is where it's starting first, but it's now creeping into B2B enormously. How do you engage people with mobile? Obviously, folks are pushing things like AR and VR. And I'd love to have the Google glasses where I can see video. I might start walking into things. There's probably some complications around that. But how do I break through? And it's more of a cocktail. Nothing's going to work 100% of the time. You can't have a strategy that is just text-based. You can't have a strategy that is just video-based. You've got to figure out what are my personas doing and what resonates the most with them. And so getting in front of folks, especially because video quality is something that's hard to fake, you can have a pretty beautifully designed web page with some pretty bad text content on it, but video production is something that shines through. And I think from a brand perspective, with high-quality videos, you can show, hey, these people put some work into this. And from a buyer perspective, if you say, I appreciate and understand the message, it helps me. And these people seem to care. That's a great way to build credibility. It's a great way to build a heart share and mind share in the view of buyers. And so I expect, you know, I think videos should be used more now than it is, but it's certainly all going up. I think we're going to continue to see an explosion in the use of video in marketing. I think as more and more marketers understand its power, but also understand how approachable it is as a channel. I think a lot of marketers, especially more traditional marketers, see video as something that, you know, you have to have a whole full studio and a big production crew. And we're literally filming this with an iPhone, right? So consumers today and buyers are used to seeing lower production cost videos. They're used to seeing shorter, more casual videos. In many cases, I've seen evidence that they prefer that kind of format versus something that's too flossy and doesn't really resonate as well. So I think we're going to see more use of video overall as part of the marketing mix. I think we're going to see more use of video as part of sales development efforts, as part of what inside sales team and field sales teams are doing to drive response from their prospects. We've got this democratization of these very powerful tools in the form of video to appeal to the hearts and minds of our customer. So I think that we can do some pretty amazing things.