Month: August 2023

Categories
b2bmarketing gtmstrategy productmarketing

How to Define your ICP with “ICP Rings”: A New Framework for Finding Your Best Customers

I’ve developed a new framework for defining ICPs & your GTM focus called the “ICP Rings”.

Most companies COULD serve many types of customers, but there’s a smaller subset of them that is your SWEET SPOT.

Using concentric circles, you can align everyone on the different levels & definitions of your ICP.

Each ring is a tighter, better fit ICP for your company. Add the characteristics that are most important for each level. I gave examples of them in the image.

Size your market so that you know the potential TAM of each ICP ring.

Then as a leadership team decide what level you want your GTM motions to focus on.

ICP template slide here.

Why is this valuable?

  • It bridges the gap between everyone you could serve and who you should really focus on acquiring
  • By getting explicit alignment on which ring(s) you want to go after, you’ll reduce friction and misalignment between departments and teams.

Think you could use this in your org?

Categories
b2bmarketing marketingstrategy

3 Proven Strategies to Skyrocket Your Revenue Growth: A Deep Dive into Zingtree’s Unique Marketing Thesis

Here’s our Marketing thesis at Zingtree:

3 things will drive pipeline and revenue growth for us:

1. Create & refine a compelling, differentiated story – carve out our unique PoV

2. Grow our awareness – If we grow the awareness of our PoV, we’ll grow pipeline

3. Convert interested & in-market ICPs – move them through the funnel quickly in a personalized way

What’s your summarized Marketing thesis?
What do you think of mine?

Categories
b2bmarketing productmarketing sentimentanalysis

Unlocking Free Sentiment Analysis & Text Summarization with ChatGPT: Revolutionize Your Business Feedback Analysis

Sentiment analysis & summarizing large amounts of text is now FREE. How? ChatGPT.  
Use this on surveys, customer interviews, product feedback, sales calls, etc.

Here are some examples we’ve recently done:

– I took a bunch of feedback from our target customers gathered through Wynter and created summaries of the responses to each question.

– I also did sentiment analysis on every response.

– Brandon Anderson summarized Zingtree’s recent G2 reviews into a paragraph and shared it internally.

Sentiment analysis and summarization like this was never possible without paying lots of money or having data science skills. 
Now that’s changed.

What types of text might you summarize with ChatGPT?

Categories
b2bmarketing creative demandgeneration

Revolutionize Your B2B Social Ads with Midjourney AI: A Step-by-Step Guide to Unleashing Creativity

“One of the coolest ads I’ve ever seen in b2b out of thousands I’ve seen lol” – a quote from our demand gen agency

To stand out in the feed, get creative! And use Midjourney AI to help.

Here’s one of Zingtree’s new paid social ads that Omar I. Hamoda created with the help of Midjourney (an AI text to image generator).

How to do it yourself:
1. Enter a prompt into Midjourney.
2. Choose your favorite output.
3. Make edits to it in an image editing tool (if needed).
You’re done! And you saved hours of design time.

Categories
b2bmarketing design rebrand

Unveiling Zingtree’s Vibrant New Brand Identity: A Blend of Human Connection and Visual Appeal

BIG UPDATE for Zingtree

We rebranded to a new visual identity! 🎉

It highlights the real human connection our product creates, looks more visually appealing, and was based on many ICP meetings & research performed by Marketing & Product Design. 

Big shoutout to Omar I. Hamoda for leading the effort internally. You’re a rockstar, Omar!

Categories
competitiveintelligence demandgeneration productmarketing

Maximizing Competitive Research: 2 Powerful Strategies to Boost Sales and Demand Generation

People talk about how to do competitive research but there’s not enough about what to DO with it. 

Here are 2 simple ways to 1) Equip your Sales team with it & 2) Use it for Demand Gen

1) Equip your Sales team with it
Give Sales the exact talking points for what to say. Literally script it out, but keep it short.

“Hooli is great for x, but there are 3 key areas that Zingtree is better. 
”

B/c it’s so short, Sales can memorize this or have it pulled up & read verbatim. If a prospect really wants to go deep, then you can pull in a Sales Engineer, PM, or CI Marketer.

2)) Use it for Demand Gen
Turn your insights into a competitive comparison web page. If your web team is really backed up, do it as a blog post first. 

Then add it to your top-level website navigation or footer so you can educate your web visitors who may be evaluating both of you.

Also, test paid search for “Hooli alternative” type keywords. 
If you have enough budget, you can test “Hooli”, “Hooli pricing”, “Hooli support”, etc. 

Then try paid social if you have even more budget.
You can try to take competitor customers by running paid social ads to accounts that use competitors. Your ad messaging will be highly targeted & relevant. Just keep in mind this is a long play if their customers are locked in annual contracts.

As you may have guessed, we’re near the end of this process for 3 competitors. Externally facing pages coming soon!

What competitive plays do you like to ship fast?

Categories
bingads demandgeneration googleads

Boosting Leads While Slashing Budget: Our Successful Strategy with High-Intent Paid Search Keywords

Last year, we cut our paid search budget by 50% after doing the “split the funnel analysis”. Pipeline from paid search even went up the month after! That’s b/c we only cut keywords that had never produced an opp or customer.

But wait, there’s more! We just added new paid search keywords.
Specifically adding more high-intent paid search keywords that we have never tried bidding on in the past.

We found these new keywords to add from:
1. People mentioning the terms in the “How did you hear about us” required free text field
2. Conversations with ICPs & our internal employees

After we did this:
We immediately saw a jump in the # of leads from paid search.

Now we’ll wait and see which turn into opportunities. If these new keywords never produce an opp after a period of time, then we’ll prune them.

Moral of the story: keep doing the dance with paid search keywords

Categories
culture leadership

Mastering Leadership: A Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Cultural Differences

Navigating cultural differences is a critical skill of a leader.

Here’s an example:
Some cultures never say “yes” the first time they’re offered help. If you don’t know this, you may take their first answer as their true intention. Whereas actually, they expect to be asked again once or twice before they’re “allowed” to say yes.

There can be a give and take:
The person asking can ask more than once
The person getting asked can say their true intentions the first time they’re asked

Two books I recommend for learning more about navigating cultural differences: 
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
Foreign to Familiar by Sarah Lanier

What resources do you like on this topic?
How have you seen issues come up because of cultural misunderstandings? 

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration retargeting

Unlocking the Power of Retargeting: A Comprehensive Guide to LinkedIn, Facebook/Instagram, and YouTube Strategies

We’re retargeting people across LinkedIn, FB/IG, and YouTube.

See our strategy below. Steal it yourself or tell me how we can improve it 😊

On LinkedIn, we are retargeting users that have done the following AND match our target job titles:
– 180 Day Website Visitors
– 180 Day Company Page Visitors
– LI Ad Clicks (Updated Monthly with new campaigns)
We’re also excluding customers and competitors.

—

On Facebook/Instagram, we are retargeting website users that have hit our Marketing website. We are excluding customers and competitors from the Metadata Metamatch audiences. We also exclude actual web app product users.

—

On YouTube, we are retargeting all website visitors who have visited our marketing website. We exclude actual web app product users.

—

So… try this out yourself! And/or tell me how we can make it better!

Shoutout to Blake Strozyk / Bull Media for helping us co-create these strategies and execute them.

Categories
b2bmarketing competitiveintelligence productmarketing

Unlocking the Secrets of Effective Competitor Comparison: A Step-by-Step Guide by Kirill Kurmytskiy

We just launched 3 competitor comparison articles, big kudos to Kirill Kurmytskiy for his work on these! Here’s a breakdown of the structure and key elements he used:

– Don’t make it totally one-sided. Prospects can sniff that out.

– Use images to convey the differences (Venn diagram, radar chart, product screenshots, etc.)

– Talk about different product philosophies / focuses (if applicable)

– Explain key product capability differences & differentiators

– Include positive G2 examples from both

– Show a feature matrix

– Add links to sources of info

– Talk about how both products could be used together (if applicable)

What would you add or change to these? How do you like to structure competitor comparisons?

P.S. if you don’t mind, ask your Customer Support leader to consider using Zingtree 🙂