Month: August 2023

Categories
abm b2bmarketing demandgeneration outboundsales

Maximizing Your Reach: Innovative Strategies for Targeting Your Audience in Paid Social Advertising

You’ll never reach your entire target audience on paid social.
But here’s how we get as close as possible at Zingtree.

This is a big Venn diagram – Each audience is largely overlapping but slightly unique. So each audience incrementally adds more people we previously didn’t include.

Not only is this good for making sure we market to our whole audience, but…

It’s also good for ensuring we provide full aircover for our Outbound Sales team.

What other sources should we add?
Does this inspire you to add more audiences to your paid social?

Categories
b2bmarketing budgeting marketingstrategy

Mastering 2023 Financial Planning: Top-Down vs. Bottoms-Up Budgeting Strategies Explained

Working through 2023 budgeting?

Look at it 2 ways:
1. Create a top-down budget
2. Create a bottoms-up budget

Top-down: focused on budget needed to hit revenue goals

Bottoms-up: list all of your existing and planned expenses and add them up

Make sure to leave budget for new experiments, even if you don’t know exactly what they’ll be yet.

Categories
b2bmarketing hippo leadership

Escaping the HIPPO Syndrome: Encouraging Collaboration and Open Dialogue in Content Creation

HIPPOs – Highest Paid Person’s Opinion 🦛
They too often run the show with no chance for feedback or dialogue from others. We’ve likely all been there.

Here’s an example regarding content. I’ve had past managers that would provide content edits, & I sometimes disagreed with them.

It felt like I had no choice but to accept them and move on b/c they were the boss – the kind of boss that wasn’t open to changing their mind or hearing other viewpoints 🙅‍♂️

Now that I’m the manager of content creators, I’m intentional about doing the opposite 💡

– If I leave feedback or suggestions, I often invite their thoughts to have a discussion about it. “Thoughts?” “What do you think about this?” “Just an idea to consider.”

– If I feel strongly about something, I’ll explain the reasoning for my opinion and then ask for their thoughts.

– I’ll let the writer decide what the final outcome should be if I don’t feel strongly about something. “Just an idea. You can decide what to do here.”

How do you elicit good collaboration and feedback?
What do you think of my approach?

Categories
b2bmarketing marketingops revops

Unlocking the Secrets of Zingtree’s Affordable Martech Stack: Essential Tools for High-Impact Marketing

Wondering what other Marketing teams use for their tech stack? Here’s Zingtree’s Martech stack. 

It’ll grow a bit next year, but not by much. Many of these vendors cost <$50/month. You don't need to spend a fortune on tools to do great Marketing! Salesforce - CRM HubSpot - Marketing Automation Webflow - website CMS Metadata Metamatch - ad audience building Adobe (Creative Cloud & Figma) - design tools Notion - project management ServiceBell - website engagement BuiltWith - ad audience building ZoomInfo - ad audience building & Sales tool Descript - video transcription & editing LinkedIn ad platforms - ad campaigns Meta ad platforms - ad campaigns Envato - digital assets Shutterstock - digital assets Riverside.fm - podcast recording Buzzsprout - podcast publishing Shield Analytics - LinkedIn analytics Buffer - social media publishing Woodpecker.co - email automation VideoAsk - testimonial recording What is your must-have Martech tool that you don't see here?

Categories
b2bmarketing categorycreation categorymanagement productmarketing

Unlocking Startup Success: Why Your Product Descriptor Matters More Than a Category

You probably don’t need to create a category for your startup yet…

Instead, create a great product descriptor or campaign name. Aka do Marketing.

As Todd Barr has said, if you create a category too early when you’re not the winner, you might be spending money for someone else to win the category.

So how do you choose your name then? Choose something that:
– Gets people excited
– Tells them more about what the company does
– Descriptive enough but not too bland
– Not too broad
– Your company is one of the best at

Agree/disagree?

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration facebookads linkedinads

Mastering Demand Creation: Top Metrics to Track for Optimizing Your Advertising Campaigns

People try to create demand but don’t know how to tell if things are working.

It gets harder when you’ve done 10+ campaigns.

Here are the top platform-level metrics we track to improve performance:

Campaign Name
Ad platforms
Type of ad(s)
Audience(s) included
Audience(s) excluded
Date launched
Date ended

Avg. CTR
1st month frequency
2nd month frequency
Audience size
Reach

$ spent
Cost per 1K member accounts reached
Avg. CPM

What metrics do you like to track inside the platforms for creating demand?

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration revops

Effective SLAs to Boost Follow-up Success After Demo Requests: A Comprehensive Guide

Do you have clear expectations about follow-ups after someone requests a demo or trial?

Here are some examples of SLAs you can track:

▶ All new leads are followed up within “20” hours (excluding weekends and holidays)

▶ All open leads that haven’t emailed you back must have some kind of activity at least every “3” days (email, LinkedIn, phone, etc.)

▶ All open leads must have a LinkedIn outreach or phone call before getting disqualified

▶ All open leads that have responded to you must have some kind of activity at least every “2” weeks (email, LinkedIn, phone, etc.). Even if it’s just sending a helpful article as a way to stay in touch and top of mind.

▶ All open opportunities must have some kind of activity at least every “3” weeks (email, LinkedIn, phone, etc.). Even if it’s just sending a helpful article as a way to stay in touch and top of mind.

What kinds of expectations do you have in place? Or what have you seen work well in the past?

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration facebookads linkedinads

Unlocking Success with 2 Unique Paid Social Strategies: How to Stand Out and Target Effectively

2 paid social plays I don’t see others doing much (that we’re having success with):

1. Run ads that don’t look like ads.
Our minds are better at filtering out & scrolling past ads.
Stand out in the feed or blend in with user posts; just don’t look like an ad.

2. Talk about your integrations and target companies that use that other company you integrate with.
Now you have a more targeted message to a more targeted audience.

Categories
feedback leadership

Boosting Team Performance: A Simple and Structured Approach to Quarterly Employee Check-ins

Are you & your direct reports on the same page with their performance? Do you know how satisfied they are with their job? When is the last time you got a bunch of feedback from them?

Here’s a structured way to get feedback and intentionally check in with your team that Keiko and Christina created that works well. 

I’ve used similar structures in the past, but I like the simplicity of this one. Hope you do too!

>>>Part 1 of the doc: Employee assessment<<< 1. How would you evaluate your performance in Q3?  [ ] Exceeding expectations [ ] Consistently meeting expectations [ ] Inconsistently meeting expectations [ ] Not meeting expectations [ ] Not sure what is expected of me, so it’s hard to answer 2. Overall, are you satisfied with your job? [ ] Extremely satisfied [ ] Frequently satisfied  [ ] Not always satisfied [ ] Not at all satisfied 3. Which 1-2 value(s) did you most exhibit in Q3?

4. Please provide a short explanation (up to 300 words) or bullet points for your answers above. We will discuss more during our check-in.

5. What will you strive to achieve this quarter and how can I help you? (up to 150 words)

6. What feedback or suggestions do you have for me to be a better manager for you? (up to 150 words)

>>>Part 2 of the doc: Manager assessment<<< 1. How would you evaluate your employee’s performance in Q3? [ ] Exceeding expectations [ ] Consistently meeting expectations [ ] Inconsistently meeting expectations [ ] Not meeting expectations 2. Which 1-2 value(s) did your employee most exhibit in Q3?

3. Please provide a short explanation (up to 300 words) or bullet points for your answers above. We will discuss more during our check-in. 

4. What feedback or advice do you have for your employee to continue growing? (up to 150 words) 

————-

Useful? Do you have a structure you like more for quarterly check-ins?

Categories
ChatGPT generativeAI

Mastering ChatGPT: The Essential Guide to Writing Effective Prompts for Enhanced AI Communication

Knowing how to write great prompts in ChatGPT (and others) is a new skill you NEED to learn. 

For instance:

“Translate this text:”

And 

“Rewrite this text in X language in a natural manner”

Give DIFFERENT results. 

This is the new way ✊