We had a brainstorming session on new ad copy today, and the number of new ideas was spectacular!
Make sure to invite people outside of Marketing as optional to get other perspectives. For instance, Ryan Peterson from Sales joined and had terrific contributions 🔥
Sales people can have excellent insights b/c they’re talking with prospects often and usually doing cold outbound email, which requires creative copy testing.
There are 4 secrets about self-reported attribution that every Marketing leader should know before implementing “How did you hear about us?” on their forms…
1️⃣ You need to create a second field to categorize and bucket the free-form answers.
This second field with grouped categories is what you’ll use for reporting purposes. You can do this manually or through automation. I prefer manual b/c I like to review every lead to find new insights & it only takes 5-10 seconds to populate the second field with the category.
2️⃣ You should test the exact language on your form.
We changed it to “How did you hear about Zingtree? Please provide as much detail as possible.”, and it greatly increased the length of answers and insights we could get from the field.
3️⃣ It’s not perfect when someone says they heard about you through multiple sources.
E.g. LinkedIn and Google search. Unless you want to do very advanced & often convoluted reporting with a bunch of (If field contains “word”, then show in this report), then you should only put one answer into the field. Which means you’re losing some of the data in your reporting using the second field.
4️⃣ Setup syncing between your MAP to CRM so that the field can carry through to the opportunity too.
This enables you to do reporting at the lead, opp, and customer level.
What would you add to the list?
Any questions about these?
Want to expand the countries you target in paid media? Here are a few considerations:
1️⃣ If you’re just targeting the US right now, consider adding other English-speaking countries. (Same applies for whatever language you use.)
2️⃣ Then expand outside of English-speaking countries but only for English speakers.
Use your existing audience or campaigns and add extra countries but keep it so that their primary profile language is set to English.
3️⃣ If you have people who can speak other languages:
Take a web page, translate it to a different language, and run ads to that page for relevant countries.
→ Important general note:
Make sure your Sales & Support team is ready take meetings in the business hours of that country.
Steal this framework and add it to your Board deck or exec QBR for summarizing key GTM initiatives👇
I presented this slide in our last Board meeting as a way to show where things are today and where we plan to get to in 6 months.
Key parts:
– List all major GTM programs
Choose <15 so it’s consumable by others
- Rank each initiative’s current state
Be brutally honest here. People will see through if you’re inflating your answers to look good.
- Show the targeted future state
Ideal is showing where you’ll be in 6 months. Be aggressive but realistic b/c they’ll likely remember what you targeted. Plan to move some programs ahead 1-2 stages, while others might not move at all.
Now you have a succinct way to show where you are today and where you hope to be.
Btw, check the comments for a Google Slides version you can copy and use yourself 🙂
Shoutout to Chris Walker for the idea of using stages to represent the current state of programs. I built upon his idea and visualized the future state with it. And shoutout to Brandon Anderson for creating a great idea for how to visualize all of it in one appealing slide.
Think this is useful? What would you change?
Direct response for B2B Marketing is basically dead. 🤕 Why?
B/c people have changed how they buy B2B software.
Easy example to prove this: Look at your leads that become closed won customers. I bet that most of them viewed 5, 10, 40+ pages before submitting a demo request form.
The leads that only saw your 1 landing page before submitting the form? Their conversion rate to opportunity and especially to closed won is probably way lower. 🤷♂️
Who disagrees and why? Who agrees?
If your software ARR is > $10K, DO NOT use landing pages with no top-level menu.
Give people the option to easily read your customer stories, check out your pricing, review your integrations, etc.
If someone is going to spend that much, they want to educate themselves before talking to Sales.
Agree/disagree?
We grew pipeline 54% QoQ last quarter 🎉 Here’s how and why:
1️⃣ The initiatives from the previous interim head of Marketing, Keiko Tokuda, and the rest of the Marketing team started taking effect more (I joined 4.5 months ago at Zingtree so I can’t take all the credit 😊)
2️⃣ We changed our positioning & messaging to be more relevant to our target audience & created related content
3️⃣ Optimized Google and Bing ads (particularly turning off low-performing campaigns)
4️⃣ Started to create demand (especially through educational distribution-focused paid social ads)
5️⃣ We exhibited at a tradeshow event and created extra opps in comparison to normal
6️⃣ We had more 6-figure deals come inbound than previous quarters
We have a 30% opp to closed won rate for our pipeline, so this isn’t just fluffy pipe increase.
👉 What has helped you grow your pipeline lately?
I met a CMO last night that said sponsoring tradeshows is her best-performing channel 🤯
2 takeaways for me:
1. Distribution-focused, educational paid social would probably work great for them and become a better performing channel than events.
–> Why? People obviously are interested when they see their booth & chat. When reaching a bigger audience on paid social, it’s like scaling that booth interest to their whole target audience. And getting in front of these people 7-10 times per month rather than for one two-day event.
2. Every company is different, so you have to take advice with a grain of salt. Tradeshows are a money-sink for many companies but not all as proven by this example.
I’m super honored and excited to have been on the Stacking Growth podcast with Sidney Waterfall and Sam Kuehnle!
Great conversation about:
– How to assess Marketing performance
– Strategies to implement a modern demand gen strategy
– How to present results to the Board and C-Suite
– Rollout planning
– Experimentation tactics
– LinkedIn and Facebook paid & organic strategies
– And more!
Give it a listen and tag someone that might like it 😊
Link in comments below
We believe we have a demand creation gap, not a demand capture gap.
There just aren’t many people searching Google for what we do b/c we’re sort of creating a new category.
So we must start creating demand and educating people to move them from solution unaware to solution aware.
And of course, positioning ourselves as the best option for when that trigger event happens in their company for them to actively start buying.