Pieterjan Bouten - The Data Driven Marketing Team

My name is PJ. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Showpad, a sales enablement platform. I'm here at the Saster in a panel with Jason and some other founder CEOs. It's called CEO Confidential, so we're going to talk about some stories about successes and also maybe some failures when growing, scaling, starting a company. I think it's a natural format for people to consume. I think it's spurred by Facebook, Instagram. A lot of people watch videos all day in their free time and so also I think for business purposes it's becoming more and more an important format. I would say make sure the production is high quality. Think about the message you want to deliver in a video because also in video people have a short attention span. And also think about your audience. I would say who do you want to reach, what message do you want to bring. I think those are some of the important things there. So the marketing team of 2019. That's a tough question. I think marketing the next coming years will be increasingly about video but also about what do you do with all that data. I think the big challenge for marketers today is you get so much measurements, so much data points, but what can you actually do with it? How can you actually leverage that knowledge, that data to improve your product, improve your service and ultimately generate more revenue. I think it's important for marketers if they think about video content and if they think about making sure that they can have their sales team present and share the right content at the right time or if somebody visits your website that actually relevant content shows up. I think it's about really understanding your buyer, your customer, really understanding where a prospect or somebody is in the buyer journey and then adapting. Making sure that tailored or personalized or relevant content is available. I think marketing teams miss out on some of the potential to improve their content. If they don't understand if it's just about views or likes, then I think you're missing engagement metrics or more really understanding when does my audience stop looking, where are they more engaged, what triggers next actions. I think it's really important to understand that and measure that. My outlook on measuring video would be that it's just going to be increasingly important to do it. For marketers also to understand what are the possibilities there and how they can use and leverage that data to actually be more productive, to be able to spend your marketing dollars in a more effective way. At Chopper we do a combination of both live webinars and then we make them available on demand. It's one of the best content strategies or most effective content strategies to generate new leads, new opportunities but also to reach our existing customers or administrators of our platform. We create a lot of content, we create a lot of videos and for us we're going to continue to invest in that just because it's a great format. People can watch it and view it whenever they want. We also are able to measure it, understand how it's impacting our sales cycles and our opportunities. We're going to keep investing in it. I think the important thing is to make sure the content is so we have to think about the format, who are the speakers, what is the topic, have an eye for the quality of production and then also how do you leverage into your marketing strategy but also customer service even or customer success relations can be impacted by those webinars and videos. We use webinars at all stages of the funnel and even when our customers are already or when prospects have become customers we're using webinars to interact and communicate at scale with them. But for sure there's, I would say, definitely top of the funnel. It's interesting to just create awareness and talk about the vision of Showpad, what we do, introduce our solution. Mostly what we do is either have industry experts or existing customers or a combination interact with each other so that definitely works. And then we also have very targeted webinars focused for example on Showpad administrators who know our platform very well and want to gain more in-depth knowledge of what we do. We have a lot of metrics in place there so obviously I would say depending on the goal of the webinar either we will measure how many leads or opportunities that it generates and so that will be important but also then evaluating afterwards the quality of the webinar that we gave. Like so how many people started but at which stage maybe people dropped off the webinar or when was their most interaction in terms of questions being asked or stuff like that. So we'll always have a, every webinar we do we have a short evaluation with the team. It doesn't have to be long, 15 to 30 minutes just going through some of the metrics discussing what we can do better next time but also what really worked and what was successful. So we have a section on our website, a resource section where we, I would say most of our webinars are made available to everybody. So there's a public section on our website where people can find thought leadership webinars, expert webinars or sometimes it's me and my co-founder talking about the long-term strategy of the company so we make them publicly available. Sometimes you have to leave an email address to get access to it, sometimes not or so we also do some data capturing or try to generate new leads and then there's, we have also a support help center for our customers so there's also a closed section in our platform where then only customers can access certain product or in-depth webinars. So the reason why it's important for marketers to have an integrated view combining data from a sales force and a marketo with their solutions is the fact that for me ultimately it's about the buyer, it's about understanding your customer and there's a similar, Showpad's vision for example is the best buyer experience wins and so ultimately sales force and marketo have important data points where there's customer information or prospect information that is relevant to make sure that if you want to deliver a message to your potential buyer or customer that you can leverage customer data or CRM data in sales force or maybe data from marketo where there have been customer interactions. You always have to look at if you're buying software or if you're investing in certain marketing campaigns make sure you can leverage data from existing platforms. So it's useful for marketers to use video marketing automation just to add scale, being able to manage how you leverage video in the marketing mix, get data, get reporting and make sure that you can be more efficient and productive when it comes to marketing.