[Mani Iyer] Yes. Ready to get going. Hi. This. Welcome to Focus Roundtable-B2B Engagement Marketing and Social Media Strategies. Focus.com's 5,000 industry experts help millions of professionals make better business and technology decisions. By answering questions, publishing research and speaking at events.
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So let's get started. My name is Mani Iyer and I will be your moderator today. We have brought together some top Focus experts in this area to share their insights on B2B Engagement Marketing and Social Media Strategies. So, we'll start with quick introductions, 30 seconds or so and let me turn it over to the first of our experts here, Rajiv Parikh.
Rajiv.
[Rajiv Parikh] Hi. Thank you, Mani, and thank you all for joining us today. Let me tell you. I can tell you a little bit about myself. I'm the CEO of Position2. We are a search and social media marketing firm. We have been working with leading edge clients like Amazon, Mirez, and Monova to the last and been in business for over five years.
We have a brand monitor, social media listening and engagement tool that has been adopted by a number of companies like Barnes and Noble and Sitecore and Dollar Tree. And what I'm really excited about today is to talk to with you folks about some of the experiences that we've had and what we've seen with various folks in terms of really successful campaigns that they've run and successful engagement that they've had in the B2B field, which I think is really exciting for social media and how it's, you know, really transforming the way people engage with their customers as prospects and influences.
[Mani Iyer] Great, thanks, Rajiv. [Rajiv Parikh] So, I look forward to. [Mani Iyer] So, let me now send it over to Mark. Mark Lang. Mark.
[Mark Lange] Thank you Mani, and I consider myself more of a student than an expert but I'm really delighted to be out here to share some ideas. I'm a career marketing. I have helped found several companies and have also done tours at places like PeopleSoft and SAP and I'm now with the Cloud IT management services company.
I'm formally CEO of a performance marketing campaign management tools company where we enabled one-to-one recommendations across the social graph product recommendations. So, I'm keenly interested in applying Engagement Marketing and word-of-mouth recommendations in the business to business context. That's where I'm pretty keenest right now.
[Mani Iyer] Right, and Mark, just to fill in a little bit. I know you mentioned <span class="STsearchMatch">Nimsoft</span>, you're responsible for campaigns across lots of different channels. And wanted to say a little bit about the company and team and so on? [Mark Lange] Sure. Yeah. Sure. You know, for anybody who's here as a fellow traveler from an operative standpoint in marketing, we are a company that will be about a 100 million this year.
We're doubling revenue, have the last three years. Revenue this quarter will be about 93% above the same prior quarter. We're doubled the number of employees. So, for any of you experiencing a high growth company, we've got all of the growing pains that you might imagine and that you're probably living with.
We sell direct as well as through channels. We have about 420 additional partners for our technology. Nimsoft is a IT management as a service company, right? So this is essentially what an IT organization uses to manage the whole spinal cord for the company. Right track all apps to make sure everything is working properly in data base and servers and switches and routers and make sure everything works.
So, I'm responsible for go-to market and marketing. Got a marketing team of, I guess, about 18 at this point, plus six contractors. And along with our direct customer base of about 450, we have, at this point, about 15,000 corporate end customers for our technology. So we are both direct sold and channel and growing like a weed.
And part of that is because of social media and we are hoping to get ever smarter and more effective about it.
[Mark Lange] Okay, great. Thanks, Mark. And real quick, by way of introduction myself again, the goal here is to provide some context to, you know, the folks who are listening in. So, my name again is Mani Iyer, CEO of a company called Kwanzoo. And what we do is really multi-channel engagement marketing campaign for clients that span B2B, B2C, also conference and event marketers.
Some of our clients are SAP. We worked at Oracle. Again, mid-market clients like Clickability, Proof Point. Also just starting some campaigns for UBM, Techweb, and so on. So with that, let me actually provide some context to the way our discussion's gonna proceed. If you look at what we summarize as the points we want to address, we are going to talk about how B2B engagement and Mark, what it is first.
What is B2B engagement marketing and social media strategies? And specifically we'll try to obviously cover three key questions.
One is new ways to engage prospects that can drive conversions, second is tactics and strategies that are working and of course then we'll also talk about, you know, factors that you want to consider when you finalize a campaign concept. What channels to and so forth and you know, social obviously is gonna be a team that's gonna cut right through, you know, regardless of what channels we discuss.
And one of the other things, Mark, I guess you and Rajiv and I talked about was to keep this discussion, you know, easy for folks all along. We are going to really, you know, drill down into different channels and what are some tactics specific to B2B and how that's been changing lately.
So, first of let me ask Rajiv. Does Rajiv, when you think of Engagement Marketing what does that mean to you? I mean, what does the term mean to you? [Rajiv Parikh] Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great way to set the table. Engagement marketing is really the sort of the holy grail of what you're trying to do in marketing.
The way people have marketed in the past is very much of a one-way oriented method of marketing where they would basically pump out messages and then hope you receive them. And then when a salesperson comes calling, especially in the B2B market, they're hoping that you hear something about that brand so that you can relate to it.
And, really, Engagement Marketing, especially in the B2B phase is all about how to put the appropriate messages out there. Put the appropriate information collateral methods for learning about a company, in a way that really drives more of a QA behavior. So most people if you look at them, the studies out there they talk about the 80% of people you know when they buy something in the B2B space, they tend to seek out something as opposite to being found and.
[Mani Iyer] Right. Right.
[Rajiv Parikh] So, engagement really about that, right it's how to. Go ahead.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah, that's a great one, Rajiv. And I was going to ask Mark real quick if you have anything to add to what Rajiv just said?
[Mark Lange] Yeah, I know. I think that's right. It's totally different framework in some ways, you know, while I believe it demands the same level of analytical discipline that more "traditional marketing" has had to apply. This business of not just sort of blasting, you know, in a one too many way, but in fact try to generate communities and sub-communities of interest that are based on, you know, the currency on the web which is content, right, and the exchange of content.
And part of the way we think about Engagement Marketing is both engagement by the individual, right with a core piece of conflict of interest to them which may be entirely independent of us as a company right, that is about the domain. Really rich, provocative, interesting content but they are engaged to literally and that they engage others in their professional community with. So that there's this sort of experience of exchanging really high quality, high valued information between people.
And then so that by the time we get to the engagement cycle that has to do with our technology and it's relevance to that potential prospect, we've already had this process of mutual discovery, right, and mutual self-selection as to the point Rajiv makes. It's really a matter of their being interested as opposed to our pushing.
[Mani Iyer] Okay. No, no, that's great and. [Rajiv Parikh] Yes. Yes, I think. [Mani Iyer] That's great.
[Rajiv Parikh] Yeah. I think it really sort of changes the way we do business. And that's where sort of these social channels as Mark talks about is really interesting, where it's more than a one-way communication or even a one-to-one communication. It's a sense of sharing amongst that community. And that's really where these social technologies are aiding it, you know, aiding what is really just a natural thing that we all want to happen.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah, no, very true. But yeah. Just I wanted to just call out, you know, one of these responses that I posted those very much along these lines that I talked about, you know, how it's all about eliciting a high level of participation and then in the process of business is learning also about what that prospect's specific needs are and they're able to deliver much, you know, greater relevance in their messages, offers, content.
So, we cover that.
Now let's move on and talk about channels. Right? So B2B marketing, there have been some of the more traditional channels for engagement. They're obviously offline channels. And I know Rajiv, you mentioned this. Communal events or telemarketing or for direct mail and so forth. And then there's a slew of online channels, right?
I mean, social being the newest in the mix. You know, you've obviously have emails, the corporate website, social, display, and paid media-type of channels. How do you think engagement marketing is shaking things up or at least to practice, approach, discipline if you will of doing more of an engagement or into approach to marketing.
Anything you want to comment around that classic. Which do you think we should hit first? Why don't we hit email? Email, what are your views on email of a channel for B2B marketing and special engagement marketing? [Rajiv Parikh] I'm sorry. At least from.
[Mani Iyer] Rajiv, Do you want to take that one first?
[Rajiv Parikh] Sure. At least some of the clients that we have in the B2B space. What we see is that for, you know, social media is a really powerful, fast-emerging mechanism, what we see at that email is still, you know, is still very substantial and very important in how businesses market to each other. It's still important to build, well, a list of people can sell stuffs into or people can opt into using the various other channels that you may have, so, whether it's a trade show, or an event or a Webinar, you know, using. You still want to call those emails together along with their social profiles to engage with them, you know, with your corporate communication.
Right, so email is still very strong and you can even see that with a number of the companies like Responses. You know, companies like that who have gone public, that are doing extremely well in this market because businesses are utilizing still utilizing that channel.
[Mani Iyer] Right.
[Rajiv Parikh] It's not like what you had before when you might be spamming folks, but it's much more of a. You have to provide. Yeah, as Mark was talking about earlier, much more interesting content when you are going to engage in email marketing. [Mani Iyer] So, Mark, is there anything new, anything different you have tried with the email marketing you do for an <span class="STsearchMatch">Nimsoft</span>?
[Mark Lange] Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We are using it less and less as a channel for corporate communication per se, you know, typical response being you know, anywhere from a point to a point and a half and that's if you're pretty good. If you're talking about yourself. We're finding it much more effective and the response rates and the subsequent conversion into deals and opportunities in the pipeline. Right, which is what it's all about. Much, much higher when the email that we send out is telling somebody something they really want to know and something they didn't know before. Right?
Which is a totally different standard. For the most part, they probably don't want to know about your solution, right? They're not checking into email to find out about your product or your Webinar or, you know, anything to do with you the company or what it is you happen to have to sell. So, more and more, we're using email as a channel, a way to start the conversation with an individual based on this, at this point, this, you know, really high quality third party information or content.
And I could give you a couple of examples if that's useful.
[Mani Iyer] Okay, so if you're saying content is turning out to be the key hook in.
[Mark Lange] Yeah, yeah.
[Mani Iyer] You know, it's.
[Mark Lange] And generally content, you know, developed by really valid, highly respected third parties, right? So, we do you know, the classic white paper. Sure, we do some of those. We do eBooks. We do, you know, web casts that are based on the substantive domain as opposed to anything specific about our products that essentially are really valuable to the IT. In this case,
that's our buyer, end user or customer. And that gets us into a phase of essentially self selection and mutual qualification where if we're in a domain that has to do with cloud monitoring for example, which is where our technology serves, and the people that are responding and attending and reading and downloading and tracking everything obviously through analytics.
The story gets really interesting only after they've started to engage for that content, because then we have a basis to start a meaningful conversation before anyone gets near the telephone.
[Mani Iyer] Okay, excellent, and yeah. So, one thing I wanted to add on especially email as a channel and, you know, a couple of the tactics that we have recommended and that seems to be working quite well is one of the idea of more interactivity, you know, that we're able to now embed inside email that hasn't been possible in the past. The one, you know, one of the approaches, one of our large clients SAPs trying is in email polls, we've had in email polls, in email surveys as a way to engage users, you know, different than your typical, you know, click a button and you know, lead them on to a lending page.
It turns out, yeah, those have interactive approaches seem to actually increase the number of clicks coming out of your, you know, typical email. I mean, people have been optimizing email open rates a long while, you know. So now it's about, how do you increase engagement and then in the click rates and more relevant clicks, if you will, coming out the email?
All right. So.
[Mark Lange] You know, the survey is such a fascinating tool, right, because it does rise to the standard of telling them something they don't know and they're actually part of the creation of the content, right? In terms of the survey results, we work very hard to develop surveys where the end point will be something truly provocative about the IT, the discipline of IT, or the industry.
And we're finding surveys very effective, both live during webcasts as well as in email. We're also, by the way, finding that video which you can now embed in PDFs and other media and formats make the experience a lot more interesting. [Mani Iyer] Right, right, right. [Rajiv Parikh] Fantastic. [Mani Iyer] I mean, one of the..
[Rajiv Parikh] We even had a. Right. Go ahead. [Mani Iyer] I'm so sorry. Let me, let me explain.
[Rajiv Parikh] One of our kind. I guess we're kind of. One of the things that's interesting about this kind of Roundtable is that we're not in the same room, right, we're all coming in over different areas. So, I apologize for that, Mani, but one of the things that I want to add to that was that one of our clients even used the survey to totally reset their, you know, their company tagline and their company focus by putting out some these surveys.
And by even driving that survey across multiple media as Mani talked about they actually were able to change their, you know, they changed the key focus of the business to what people wanted to hear about how they can engage more effectively with that company.
[Mani Iyer] That's very interesting. So they're in fact using the prospect from their customers to tell them what they should be selling.
[Rajiv Parikh] Yeah, here's what you should be selling. No more blindfolded market. [Mani Iyer] It's very interesting.
[Mark Lange] You know, I think that's really important if I could just add. It's so important because it is a reciprocal process, a process of reciprocal sense making with your customer. And they're out there already on these networks talking about you, right, whether you know it or not. And to the degree that they're enlisted and engaged and actually a part of driving your direction. You're probably doing the right thing.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah. So one other thing especially on the email channel, I thought I should mentioned given now we have to hit on social and, you know where email meets social. We found that it's actually very effective and certainly we've had success at conferences and events, and marketing conferences and events, where you know.
You know, you use emails that touch folks you can reach for prospects and then you can then get them to spread the word for you in the process of them making a decision around attending a particular paid conference or event.
So, we've had so called word-of-mouth marketing or referral marketing that's been triggered with a tell-a-friend, tell-a-colleague kind of flow inside an email, and which has been incentivised.
So it's like, hey, tell a friend and get a $100, you know, for this particular event. So, o you all have any idea how to approach this? [Mark Lange] You know, I could. Right. [Mani Iyer] Or what do you think? [Mark Lange] Well, so I'd offer one story that might be amusing.
We were Tweetcasting a live event and of course it's done properly, right? You're using social media and applying them across all of your methods and means and channels and marketing, right? And the holy grail is to have it all really integrated and tied together. We were. We had a guy Tweetcasting on the floor at a big trade show, and a guy from the UK weighed in and said, "Look, you know, I can't get to the floor right now. I'm over in the UK but would somebody please give me a call?"
[Rajiv Parikh] That's great. [Mani Iyer] That's interesting. [Rajiv Parikh] That's funny. I mean, I think that's probably the point of the tweet cast, to make sure that when we're doing that kind of Tweetcasting to be able to monitor or to be able to understand what people are saying, right? About your brand and thenthat's really the critical part of engagement, right?
Is how do you make sure that you find those types of conversations and then jump on top of it.
[Mani Iyer] Right. So I think we pretty much could have. I think we've hit a lot of the key points around email. All right. The classic email marketing, how that's changing with social, how you can drive engagement through email, you know, how you can again spread the word, if you will. Right? So you connect email into social. So with that, let's talk about social.
When you think social media, and now let's talk specifically in the B2B context. Mark, what all comes to mind for you, at least, you know, as an operating CMO? You know, when you think social, what's social for you?
[Mark Lange] Well, you know, I found that, you know, in its early evolution, right, we are all so excited about it's potential, and yet a lot of the way it's being applied and I'd include us in this camp, is really more in service to awareness, right? A lot of generalities about building a community or a following.
And I've been looking at that with a fairly critical eye. It's because ultimately it has to boil down to cost per qualified lead. Right? And what is it costing us to generate a qualified contact that is going to be associated with an opportunity in the sales pipeline. And we're investing, actually, quite a lot for a company of our size in the social media and we're trying to do it in a way that we have a really disciplined, closed loop where we're able to track and associate the behavior that we generate through social media exchange, you know, between individuals, and associate that with whatever we have to do to get it started to prime that pump, and have tied back to, specifically, from the sales pipeline.
And I'll tell you just briefly what that's meant for us, is an enormous amount of effort in terms of the marketing automation systems and tools on the back end and what we're having to wire together to be able to do that properly. It 's one thing to say that your Twitter following is growing and, you know, you're very active and got this presence but it's so easy in business to mistake activity for outcomes and you can put an awful lot of staff time and activity in the social media and have statistics that sound reassuring but they're aren't directly associated with revenue and deal velocity and so that's probably my principle focus around social media is time tying all of our efforts back to what it's doing for our salespeople.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah, absolutely. And so again I just want to set the stage here so when we think social I'm assuming and please correct me on this as we're talking about you know, Facebook as a place to have a social presence and a channel, if you will, for engaging your prospect. LinkedIn you know, we should maybe touch up on different things people might be doing on LinkedIn.
There's Twitter obviously. And then you have your own blog. Do you put blogging in the social bucket or blogging is separate for you?
[Mark Lange] Well, I would just from a journeyman marketing standpoint. In order of Business to Business relevance for us at least our experience has been that Twitter is number one.
[Mani Iyer] Okay.
[Mark Lange] And LinkedIn is number two. And Facebook is off the screen for us, you know, a B2C an entirely different experience. Very focused and specialized IT networks and destinations which often include blogs provided the commentary thread that's generated can be something that we can direct or engage and track you know, our own right as opposed to having it just persist on that other destination.
Professional, very narrowly focused professional destinations can be really helpful. But I do not find everyone happy. Go ahead.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah no, no, I was just gonna ask Rajiv to add, you know, when he looks at. Well, Rajiv, when you look at your B2B clients, you know what are, what are some of the things they think about, they worry about B2B social media? What are they kind of prioritizing as things that they need to get to, you know, quickly versus, you know, because this is important versus this is you know, down the road.
[Rajiv Parikh] All right then. Yeah, Mani. So, I think that, you know, a lot of what Mark touched upon was very salient here. You know, you can engage in a ton of activities in the social media space and have a very difficult time tying it back to the things that the B2B space people really care about which is how it drives to a qualified lead or a qualified opportunity.
And so in the B2B space we're finding increasingly that they're able to justify their effort in social media by attributing it to various parts of the decision cycle. So, you know, you may, there are multiple things but you, most of the B2B sales and especially B2B technologies sales are multi-point, multi-touch sort of efforts.
So someone may be found via email or they may download a piece of content and then they're going to talk with you again or mention something about that campaign or engage with you using Twitter or engage with you by downloading the presentation and slide show, or maybe being in a conversation with them.
Those efforts together will help improve your sort of score in the marketing automation systems to make it a more and more sort of qualified opportunity. Some of the things that we're seeing on the B2B side specifically is like, especially when people use our social media monitoring, you know, technology of brand monitor, is that they look for conversations in their market versus their competition where people may have some intent to learn more about it and this is a point in which, you know, somebody might say "I'm evaluating x, y and z type of product", or "I'm looking at, you know, the fusion iode ST RAM technology".
Well that's it, for a competitor to them, or even for them, that's an opportunity to say that "well look someones further down in our cycle, they're actually looking at our product", or for their competitor to look and understand that,well somebody's looking at a product in this area. It's not just a cold lead.
Maybe I should kick-off and engage with them because they are showing some intent to learn more, or they might say.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah. [Rajiv Parikh] Or if there might be, yeah. So there's that as a person who may be evaluating the purchase, or they may be more of an influencer, that as a marketer that you want to work with so that instant you'll be evaluating multiple things and you want to touch upon them when they're in that evaluation process.
And so these are the things you can do with social that you couldn't do before.
[Mani Iyer] Right. So, real quick, so they are having a few different questions that are specifically about what are the best ways to engage customers? On I think Facebook, for one. So, you know, I can speak to at least one of the tactics we have one of our B2B clients have been using quite successfully, I mean, it's still early they've had some good success in the early stages.
They've actually had very well designed again polls, I mean, polls that worked well. You know, polls where depending on response of the user or the prospect have been able to present, you know, a targeted, you know, offer, marketing offer method.
And then of course in the process they are having to collect that marketing asset, you know, they end up dropping some lead data. So they've been collecting, what they call, you know, Level One leads which is basically an email address by engaging you to a poll inside Facebook pages. Along those lines other tactics that Mark either you or Rajiv you've tried whether it's Facebook, Linkedin that, that, that specific tactics you might recommend for people for B2B.
[Mark Lange] Well one of the things we're just experimenting with now and I'm sure there are others out there who are more sophisticated in either of you may have a solution for this but it's, you have, we have a pretty substantial contact file at this point about something over 620,000 records, unique contact records, within IT, within prospects of the segments in which we're interested.
And these email addresses they're, you know, they are of value only to the degree that we don't over use them. We're doing a fair amount of work to try to, you know, link those email addresses to LinkedIn profiles and Twitter handles for those individuals. You know, often means to go solicit them for our technology because that's obviously not the spirit they had in mind when they joined any one of those networks.
But, expressly to use those handles and those other social media avenues to expose them to content by means of their peers who are most interested in specific pieces of content so that it's not actually coming from us, the idea that we generate that engagement model that has to do with, in our case, the IT professional who's particularly passionate about a given piece of information or give them best practice.
The simplest way for us to do this--and I'll end this in just a second is through our product itself, right, our end users because there we've got a desktop, right, that they're interacting with all day, and the prospect that we engineer our product so that it is itself a way for our IT pros to exchange information, that's one practice.
But in the case of a prospect, business to business marketing, that linking those two worlds between email and the various social handles and persona people have out there that's something we're still struggling with. [Mani Iyer] That's an interesting idea. So yeah. That's very clear, very specific, Mark said.
That's a good one. So Rajiv, do you have anything, you've had some good success in terms of specific engagement tactic.
[Rajiv Parikh] Yes.
[Mani Iyer] Or you know, on any social channels be it LinkedIn, be it Twitter, Facebook, what have you? Right. So, to Mark's point, I'll tell you, as we're developing our brand monitor platform. That's one of the most important things, is that when we find. So when we find, one of the tactics, specific tactics, is that, you know, if someone talks about that they're interested in a particular type of technology or particular field and it's relevant to you as a company, listening to those conversations and then and then coming in in a very friendly way and a very straight up and authentic and a certain way and saying, well, I understand that you're talking about this.
How can I help you? And then, engaging with them, with some relevant content. Now as part of that, what we want to do, is deliver, is also give that company as part of that, not only that lead and that contact, but also that whole social profile behind it and that's no means cheap because the data matching is not perfect, but it's one of the.
It's not a 100% , but we strive to do this as part of giving the company, the client, better, just a better overall, a faster way to interact with someone quickly, so, that's a, you know, a clear way, in which people have jumped in and actually have found, especially for some larger B to B opportunities, chances to work with, connect with customers that have intend.
[Mani Iyer] Okay, let me bring up two to three other tactics that. You know, people have generally talked about, I want to see, if you, you know, what is been, what your view, what has been your success, if you know, again were talking. Engagement, engagement marketing, B2 B, you know, around, say, different social channels.
Let's talk about maybe the use of things like video or promotion of difference of play was. What are your views on that, what has worked and what has not. Mark, do you want go first? [Mark Lange] Yeah, I know the videos been really helpful for us, and we essentially have three different flavors, if you will, one is the more traditional classic, high production value video, where you've got someone bearing witness, right to the power of your technology, and you know, well executed, I think people look at them.
You know, our website stat's suggest that they certainly generate a lot of interest. They're not a serious qualification tool, but they're helpful from the standpoint of conveying information and credibility, so that's one, the second, which we are doing more of, you see the man in the street video right, were we've got, some camera equipment with interesting lenses and you're walking trade shows and you know acting with IT people and, and have much more informal exchange.
And what happens It's in those settings we think it's likely to be far more serendipitous and interesting, honestly. And the hardest facet there is it's an investment. Obviously, A and B, we have to be careful to set up the questions and set up the context, in a way that it's useful, to the person that may be looking at that man in the street video.
The third, which is a bull's eye for us, is a more participatory learning video, where someone in IT is sharing a best practice. We do this for our customers in terms of how to use our own technology and we are increasingly soliciting it from the service providers that use our technology for corporate IT.
Essentially video as a learning tool, that's just what just been phenomenally helpful. We're going to push a lot more on it. So these are essentially the three way's that we are using it now.
[Mani Iyer] Okay, that's great. So that video and these are the means to engage obviously prospects and existing customers. And, you know, another one which people are Also, trying in different degrees, different flavors is, promotions, you know promotions, referral marketing, you know different ways to get this idea or the existing customer or the prospect to spread the word for you.
Anything you have seen there and what's working and what's not, Rajiv? What sort of promotions have you seen that. [Rajiv Parikh] Yeah, I mean I think the promotions. Yeah I think the promotions that work It's always easy to give that promotion where you know, if you do x y and z, you get a free iPad or something. And you know, while that's. I consider that kind of very hit or miss in terms of value. I mean it's much more valuable, at least with the clients that I've seen, where you're providing people content, and you are providing people content or educational content, content that matters.
So for taking, you know taking an action, like you've said earlier, they get a discount off from some event, or they might get additional content, additional white paper content, or admission to an online event, or even a real straight forward, sort of physical event. So all these things add more value then, at least in my opinion, from what I've seen, you know versus a sort of that Travian Giveaway.
Charlie could be they end up getting more better qualified leads if you will, more relevant Because they're truly interested in your field. As opposed to just getting you know picking up some catch deals over at a trade show booth.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah, and Mark have you tried anything along these lines and any success or misses that you want to share?
[Mark Lange] Yeah. I mean we. You know, we experiment with various promotions that involve something irrelevant frankly like an iPad, a toy, something that will draw their attention. It does not lead to particularly qualified conversations. It generates interest. So, I'm, I'm very skeptical about those, we still test them now and then.
You know at live events. The promotion that I think is much more relevant in social media is, you know, candidly the self promotion that any individual has, has a stake in to the degree that when they share to resource point, when they share a really interesting piece of content for a new site or some acid or resource, when they share that with somebody else or with fifty other people their brand goes up right?
Their stock goes up they get more influence, you know within their community, the subculture this is just a universe of little affinity groups. So, for us the promotion has more to do with how do we promote the interest of that individual what's the currency well it would likely content a certain kind of expertise they aren't seen as a maven, they're seen as an expert.
They get a charge out of that. And if we're with them at their elbow helping enable that charge that, they till when they suddenly come across something that we helped introduce them to by way of somebody else in the IP community, in our case. That's just a beautiful thing. It's in whether they're a, you know, in framework or either a maven, you may like to be an expert, they feel good about that, or they are a connector, they just get a big charge out of being connected to a lot of people.
All the time which is more the Facebook alley if you're going to generalize. And where we try to list both psychological motivation but what we find is the promotional impact of being an expert, being seen as on to something really hot were particularly very effective in IT, that's an enormously powerful motivation and it's a much more powerful incentive than a economic consideration or free training hours or an iPad in terms of a qualified prospect.
[Mani Iyer] So, no that's the great one. So, in terms of, you know, people being able to tout their own expertise, I mean that's where I know that, that, that you know some of the tactics are, you can have specific groups are then LinkedIn and then, you know, give a forum for people to be able to express that. Company manage forums is one tactic I know off.
[Mark Lange] Well, when you think about why we're here, right? Well, we're in fact on this particular call because we get a charge out of you know, showing what we're learning and learning more in the act of doing so, right? It's just a fundamental human interest. And yeah, we think that's really, really powerful.
And it's one of the reasons that we're not getting a lot of traction or putting much investment in Facebook, 'cause that doesn't feel like the context for that kind of activity, at least in the business to business world. Unless we're missing something. I don't know.
[Rajiv Parikh] But I think in terms of the. [Mark Lange] No, I think. [Rajiv Parikh] I mean, to your point about in the, to your point, Mark, it's, you know, when you find that expert, you find that person, you know, that's a person you can add to your advisory council, right? That's a person that you will quote or that's a person that you will as a company help promote, right?
And there are great forums for that. As Mani mentioned, there's some of these LinkedIn groups. But I'll tell you, one of my, you know, one of my favorite areas is Core Out Forum for discussing having high quality conversations with experts. You're getting teams to reward those folks who tend to offer more objective quality contents, so you know as an expert there you're more likely to be touted and promoted and then sort of lies above folks, which you're dishing out the export to get those psychic benefits that you talked about.
[Mani Iyer] While talking forum, I'll probably be there on Focus Roundtable we should talk about focus. It being another avenue for exactly that. The one thing that I thought I should mention since there are so many questions on B2B and engagement on B2B for, you know, tapping customers and prospects on Facebook. The comment I wanted to make was, as I said, the one type of campaign we run.
Can you all hear me?
[Mark Lange] Yes, go ahead. [Rajiv Parikh] Yup. I mean yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah. So, what I was saying was the one type of campaign that we run for folks like SAP that has been around them driving traffic from a Linkedin from Twitter, from a variety of different placements to their Facebook page that they have interesting we have engaged them in a poll that leads to an asset Those are the kind of tactics that we have seen that seem to work and essentially Facebook pages end up serving, end up serving as a landing page and sort of hosting the landing page on your own company website, you use Facebook for that purpose.
That seems to be the simple thing going on there. [Mark Lange] Is that simply, is that because it's really easy for you, to set up polls or set up. Is it because.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. It's really easier not dealing with the company's own IT department and you know, going through lots of hoops. So, it's more decentralized, there's more control for different social media groups within a large company. So, I think that's seems to be the driver more than anything else. The other thing is that. [Mark Lange] I think the. [Mani Iyer] We talked about. Sorry. Sorry.
[Mark Lange] No. I was just going to say the other good part about Facebook is that you can also, once they. Once they like you or once you get access to them, you also get some profile information about them that can be very helpful to you to get a better picture of that prospect. Wow, and so that's another really interesting place. Really interesting to know and an easier platform to develop to, but it's also.
it adds to that profile of information.
[Mani Iyer] Yeah, so we only have a few minutes left so I want to now move onto the next key channel that we need to add, which is display advertising. What are you seeing in terms of display advertising, Rajiv, and, you know, what's working, what's not, and how does it, you know, work. What are tactics for driving more engagement, you know, for display advertising?
[Rajiv Parikh] Yeah, so I mean most of the time you would think that display doesn't work, right? And that's typically the. Most people would say, "Oh, why do I want to invest in display?" You know I think that's a lot of times that's generally because of the generalized of display and the notion of CPMs and impressions and not necessarily driving towards leads.
So what we've seen that works is more of an approach where you create interesting ad units that have some of the things that Monty talked about earlier where you provide information, data, or even a visual polls or even a visualization of what you have. So, say you have a software tool that cuts the amount of bugs that you'll have in that software.
Imagine, you know, if you take that same, you know, that same notion, turn it into a set of pictures or a set of graphic displays, and then put in on a highly focused site that you can identify via various content networks that you...you know, like the Google content network, you find which areas work within a specific field and then just choose those specific sites.
You can then. We actually find that the lead, you can generate a good volume of quality leads that can be sometimes as effective or even more effective than a typical text-based Google search. So, it's a really interesting, you know, you usually don't think of it in that way, but it's how you create. It's creating an ad that has high engagement oriented content, interactive content, that's when you pinpoint the site that's directly in that user's area of interest or market.
So if it's a software developer, make it a software development site. but it's very specific to their interests and you can identify those by studying a generalized campaign in that field and then just basically going through and targeting it. You're knocking off the ones that don't get you a lot of response and going after the ones who do.
It's kind of a filtered approach.
[Mani Iyer] Nice and so one thing I wanted to add on this, is we are actually launching some pretty interesting campaigns that some large business to be clients. And what we have, what we've figured out, is that is there's ways to improve, make these ad units be a lot more data driven.
But now we've innovated from some data from some data providers where based on the IP address to the person who is viewing the ad. It's possible now to figure out what company are they from what industry are they from. So in fact, you can have the ads be, you know, be their standard display or banner ads, or you know, or polls, interesting polls where you can deliver assets and so forth, that can be targeted based on, as I said, the company and the messaging and the content can be extremely highly targeted and drive for higher ROI.
And the other thing we are also doing some innovative work around is, innovating some information from marketing automation tools. You know, obviously in a marketing automation tool you know what stage the buyer is or where the prospect is in the buying process: early stage, education stage, you know, buying stage and so forth; and then being able to map the appropriate ad based on what stage, you folks from that company are at.
You end up delivering better targeting on top of it. Mark, how about you in terms of display? Anything you want to add there?
[Mark Lange] Well, what you're both describing sounds very interesting up to this point it's on display targeted enough for us, so it sounds as there may be more we could be doing on display. We can add words, buys, and that whole bidding process we turn out to a fairly by country, because those have been actually very effective for us on a cost per basis, display, you know, we've tested banners and really, really targeted for a IT destination that are squarely in the sweet spot of our buyers and they've still wound up being pretty expensive on a cost per lead basis so they are not as often associated with a dollar in the sales pipeline.
And this, to me is actually one of the singular challenges in marketing, right? And I'm imagining anybody who, would have would have dialed into this or this recording would identify with it, which is, you know, so often we try to figure out, how much of any one of our marketing tactics, social otherwise, are causing a deal to get in the pipeline in B2P, or the origination of a lead and what we're finding actually that the analysis is a lot easier if you focus on the association of any one of these factors with that dollar in the pipeline.
Right, it amounts to viewing our squared analysis and I'm surprised at how rarely that's done, but it provides a much better picture so just a hint for folks out there who might have a statistician come on as a contractor for a week and see what you learn.
[Mani Iyer] All right. That's certainly and the other thing, I know there are people, another topic we haven't touched upon is really, you know, cross channel attribution, like where you can actually track where did the initial engagement really occur with the brand, and then, you know, when you have an ultimate, you know, a conversion event, you can tie back, as you said Mark, to the that original span on something really help facilitate this conversion.
So, with that, you know, we're pretty much at the end of the time here so let me maybe ask each of you to maybe offer a like a final closing thought, closing comment on this whole topic of, you know, B2B engagement marketing and social media strategies. What is a key take away you think people should leave?
Rajiv, to you first.
[Rajiv Parikh] I really do take away is that a basically ensure that, you know, you are, in fact, engaged in this particular area looking at the different channels that you have, score, try to score what's working and, you know, see how they all work together in an integrated fashion. You know, listen to what people saying about you and your brand and your competitors and then take advantage of that through all the tools and technology we talked about.
[Mani Iyer] Great. Mark?
[Mark Lange] Yeah, I would re-emphasize what Rajiv has just said and add that it's hard to overstate the importance of focusing on facts particularly with social media. You know, if you're interested in getting your senior leadership supportive of anything you want to do in social media and in marketing generally, to the degree that you're really careful about getting closed loop analytics in place so you understand how any one of your programs, tactics, means, methods, media are associated with generating a dollar in sales pipeline and are associated with deal velocity.
You'll do really well. It's traffic,you know, very often people sort of traffic in opinion or an opinion that sounds like a facts. If you've got data that you can point to out of your sales for instance, out of Marketo, you know, out of any of the analytic tools that you use to assess marketing efficiency, you're always going to be learning and always going to be doing better.
[Mani Iyer] Right. Right and let me just finish up by saying, you know what we've seen, it would, some of our clients are really being successful in terms of trying something new is that they're willing and able to allocate a small slice if they will of their time and resource, after trying some something new. So that the idea is, try something new, try something different and you might be surprised every once in a while.
So with that I want thank you all, and hopefully our listeners here also get some good, good value for this entire discussion. Mark and Rajiv. Thank you. Thank you very much for being a part of this Roundtable.
[Mark Lange] Thanks guys.
[Rajiv Parikh] Thank you Mani. And thank you, Mark.
[Mark Lange] Okay. All right. Bye-bye
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