0:04
Jennifer Gutman
All right.
0:04
Shanie Zimerman
Hi everyone. I'm Shani. I manage Oktopost Strategic Partners. Thank you all so much for joining today in our sixth episode of our from the Experts series. Joining me today are Jen Gutman, Oktopost Director of Social Strategy. And we have a very special guest. We have Weeb Knossen. He is the head of global demand generation over at Antidote. And the two of these, Jen. And we will be taking everyone through social media's role in a successful demand generation strategy. I do just want to remind everyone that you are on mute if you have any questions at all. There's a really nice Q and A box right in the Zoom meeting. Feel free to drop your questions in there and we will be sure to get to them just after. All right, Weave, I'd love to get started with you. I want to thank you again for taking the time to join us today. Weeb, as I mentioned, you are the head of Global Demand Gen over at Anandote. But before this, you did have a couple of stints and a couple of other successful high tech companies like Panaya mobileye Graduate. And I'm sure that list goes, goes on and on with all of that experience. I'm sure you've created some sort of solid experience within marketing inside of the high tech space. Would you be willing to tell us a little bit about your role and what it takes to develop a successful demand generation strategy?
1:28
Weeb Cnossen
Yeah. Pleasure. Nice to be here. It's the first webinar in a long, long time. I'm actually sitting on the other side of the mixing table. So yeah, I always use this particular image.
1:52
Shanie Zimerman
I'm trying to get it up for you.
1:54
Weeb Cnossen
Yeah, I've had that image. Let's talk about this mystery image. For a number of years, every presentation that I try to explain, outbound versus inbound, that's.
2:11
Shanie Zimerman
We'll have to do it while you're talking to it. I'm going to fix this.
2:15
Weeb Cnossen
I'll tell you what the image is. It shows a huge with a load of pots and pans on it and it exemplifies basically what is outbound. When you try to explain what is outbound versus inbound, then you load up everything on your truck and you drive to your customers. And at the same time you had bakeries and butchers, etc. And that was more an example of inbound. So inbound and outbound always exist together like yin and yang. And in the past years in digital marketing, we've more and more focused on moving from outbound to inbound. Why would you do this? Because it has the biggest chance of being cheaper and potentially also more efficient than traveling around the world. Ah, there it is. I don't know if that's a Dutch number plate, but could have been straight from my youth. I'm that old, so. But it's. This is it. Yeah, this is typical outland. A nice start of the explanation of where marketing started and where we moved it into a digital, digital age. So what do we do nowadays when you move to inbound? You mean that you try to capture the audience in a way that they find you online, they look at you and they come to you instead of you having to run after them. How do we do this? We try and create content and we use specific channels and we try and meet our audience on the digital platform, so to speak. So in the early days, let's just go back one more step because I had this funny thought when I was preparing for this. Basically we only had, as far as I remember, when I was young, you know, events, cold calling, which was called telemarketing, and direct mailing. And the direct mailing even still went with mail, literally mail. You still remember those things, stamps and those direct mails. They were printed and they just found out how to do this. And the best way to do this was to stick the name of your, of this addressee, of this person as many times as you could in the content. So you've got an email or a real letter that read like, Dear Mr. Peterson. We thought he'd send you this letter because only for you, Mr. Peterson, we have this amazing offer if you, Mr. Peterson and so forth. This is literally how it went. It was hilarious. You can't imagine that it even worked, that stuff. But that's how they did it. Then we went to the fax. Who doesn't know the fax? Loads of people don't know the facts anymore. After that came email marketing. And also with email marketing, we didn't really do a superb job. It worked, but we basically abused it as marketeers. And nowadays we've got all the GDPR and other regulations. Even in California, they now started with regulations and it sort of killed the tool entirely. So marketing is looking for other ways to start doing the job. In the past years, we've moved to more ethical marketing, more thought leadership, content that drives engagement. We started looking at the funnel. What does that look like? People had an idea, the funnel as some sort of wonder of alchemy. Whatever you threw in at the top created gold at the bottom. That was not true and still isn't True. People thought that the funnel was linear where you in actual effect you can come in halfway and you can move first up and then you move down. It is not that rigid as we always present it. So we had events. That's a really tough situation right now. I don't want to talk about it too much, but it really impacts a lot of companies. It's also a testament to why we're sitting here. This is the way that we now do it. Zoom, webinars, virtual events, however you want to call was an interesting stint with events. I hope it's going to come back because it does serve a purpose to meet face to face. It is a nice part of my job. It's also a nice part for companies to have a day off and wander around the booth and, and get all the giveaways and so forth. So we'll see where that develops to. So summing it up, successful demand generation strategy combines paid and organic channels. So in this slide, specifically paid social and organic social. We need engaging content and we need to tailor this to the particular stage of the funnel of the people that we want to talk to and we need to know that audience. So some companies have different or multiple lines of business and then they have different audiences and they need to tailor all of their material not only to the, to the funnel, but it becomes like a 3D matrix. So your geographies and all the different titles and then also the different stages of the funnel funnel. So you need proper planning for this and you can't almost do this anymore without any form of marketing automation and other tools like the tool that you will introduce. You need to build good journeys for those audiences. And you use nowadays the buzzwords, storytelling. You try and catch the people where they live, whether that is on LinkedIn or Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, whatever it is nowadays. I'm getting too old for this. So a social demand generation strategy basically has all of that. It is the thing that we now do with marketing that is our task. I thought of one more thing which is basically, I think a lot of people confuse social as the paid side of the platform. You know, where we use the whole platform for paid advertising and we miss out on the origin of it. So the true use of social for conversation, for interaction, it is already in the words, you know, being social means that you talk to your audience and interact with them on that social media and people should take it into account, make it part of their leads machine, if you will, to not only use it for in a paid way, but Also to use the organic side, the real side. That's basically how I look at social demand generation strategy. It was a big muscle.
9:55
Shanie Zimerman
That was really helpful. No, and seeing the evolution, like you said, from snail mail to fax machines, which were only recently outdated here in Israel, all the way down to what we're using today, things like social media. So Jen, what I want to hear, I'd love to hear a little bit from you because we're looking at essentially two different strategies coming together. A demand generation strategy and a social media strategy. So how can having that strong social media strategy, a really solid presence then better the demand generation strategy?
10:30
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah. So I think that we, you know, with touching on ethical marketing and you know, the buzzword storytelling, I think what's really interesting here is when you look and break down the meaning of demand generation, right, it's right up social's alley, right. It's a multi step process that really brings in the elements of education and making sure you're putting out quality content as we've shared and also brand storytelling. And what we're seeing is that, you know, and as we've shared, these two elements can really appear not on the linear funnel, but anywhere across a sales cycle, across a funnel. And so with the social strategy being strong, it really just, you know, comes down to being able to tell a good story on social, be likable on social media. So as you have here on the slide, right, A successful demand strategy must include social media. But when you break down onto social media, what does that really mean? What are you doing on social to really contribute? So when you take a look at your post across social media, right, it's going to require more education. You want to be able to build awareness. And when done right, social media really can propel this forward. But I think with each company this is going to really differ and it may take some trial and error to find the tone of voice, the right story, the right narrative that's going to work for your brand. And as Shani, you always say on each installment, social media is quite forgiving in some aspects because it's something where each day, let's say you create a bunch of posts and you see you have zero engagements on them, you can go in the next day and switch it up. And when you start to see that you're building a pattern or you're getting engagements on a certain type of post, you can replicate that formula to try to go ahead and increase those engagements. Now when I speak about social strategy, right, I think, and as I shared Right. So some of the posts that I see working well in this are posts that have hack tips or strategy tips or tricks on how to go about maybe for Oktopost, we are a social media management platform, so sometimes when we post about maybe little hacks inside of our platform, people who are following us, they are understanding, and we're creating, again, not only brand awareness, but an educational channel for whoever would like to know more about the industry or whoever would like to know more about our product can follow and feel and know that they're getting quality content and information. I also think when you have a successful social strategy, it's going to be able to have the ability to foster relationships and create those authentic awareness about your brand. Again, that storytelling goes a long way. I was in sales before I was in marketing, and I was oftentimes coached to sell with stories rather than facts. And again, you can put some facts in your story, but when you can just be human, you're much more likely to gain that following. And I think that speaks to the last point here on this slide, right? When we dive into employee advocacy. So we know that today, and I think it was Digital Intelligence today, an article there that had shared that 92% of buyers are more likely to trust information or recommendations coming from people that they know, friends and family or their network, and only about 29% were likely to trust the advertisement. So when we were speaking about the paid side of social. So when you look at just the breakdown of trust, right, this I think paints a really strong picture for you to understand that social media gives you the ability to get real, if you will. And when you have employees starting to share your company story, your brand story in their own words, which is essentially what employee advocacy is, and becoming thought leaders there, it's going to humanize the experience. Now, what's interesting with employee advocacy is that when employees are going to help tell that story, they are building their own networks, right? So it's not just a win for the brand, it's also a win for the employees. And together, I like to consider it a win win, right, because you have the brand story being propelled. You have the employees who are proud to work at that company. And when I'm looking through my feeds and I'm seeing friends post out where they work and I see, wow, they're having, you know, back in the day before coronavirus, they're having, you know, the parties and they're having to get togethers. It looks like a really great place to work. So even two years from now, Five years from now, you know, wherever we all may be in our careers, you're getting a lasting message, brand loyalty from social media, from your friends who are posting things in your feed every day. So I think all these things in terms of social media, you know, you want to showcase your company culture, you want to tell an interesting brand story. And I think all of these things, really getting your boots on the ground and being active. And I kind of learned that the hard way. You know, full transparency here. I thought, yeah, okay. You know, social media, we're gonna go, we're gonna create this great brand story on the corporate channels and we're gonna, you know, get it all out there. And the hard lesson I learned is that when you're putting together a social strategy, especially to impact the man generation, you do not want to be a megaphone. It's gonna come back and bite you. And I have experienced that, and I had to really put my boots on and go into the trenches of the groups and the posts and figure out who are our infl. And where can I comment to spark conversations. But I think that's what social is really all about, right? It's about being social. And when you can be social and be likable and build this brand story and start to be recognized across social, you can impact demand gen in a very positive way.
16:16
Shanie Zimerman
100% just accounting. Demand generation is accounting for every step of that buyer's journey, every touchpoint, every data set. Social media shouldn't be left behind. Which then brings me into you, like that segue. What's social media's role in the buyer's journey? Why can't it be missed? Sure.
16:36
Jennifer Gutman
So what's interesting here, and this is kind of when we're talking about that funnel, that's not linear. And I think where a lot of social media managers, CMOs, VPs, where social gets very gray, is how do you measure it? What's the impact? Where do you start to measure? How do you use the information? So really, I'm not sure. There we go. So kind of I'm very visual. So what I want to share, right, is that when it comes to social media, it's about the journey, right? You need to understand the journey. You need to understand across your social channels what people are engaging with so that you can really understand how they're getting to your brand, how you can understand the buyer journey so that later on you can map it out and recreate these experiences for your prospects and customers. So, for example, right now, if you are, let's say, Using marketing automation. Perhaps somebody heard about your brand and the golden question is always, where does a lead come from? And it's hard to attribute to social. And I think before Oktopost, there were many gray areas on where did this lead actually come from? So let's say you are, you know, you're searching on Google, right? Someone gets to your blog post after their search, sorry, they land on the blog, your SEO team, they're celebrating, they're going crazy. They're super excited because they're proving value. They're proving that their work, their hard SEO strategy is hitting home and they've gotten a lead. Someone came in, they did a Google search and landed on their site, filled out that form and woohoo, like we've got them. But in reality, what's actually happening is that maybe on day one, your brand posted an article that you were mentioned in, in the Wall Street Journal, casually, right? And one of your followers on LinkedIn happened to see that article. Interesting. They click on it, they read through it. Interesting. They go about their business, maybe a week later they're back on social, but this time they're on Facebook. They're looking at their, maybe their, their children and their kids who are doing cool things and watching some videos and they come across, oh, interesting, your company posted again and it's interesting. I'm gonna like that post. And then maybe two weeks later they're back on LinkedIn and they see another post about a topic they're very interested in, and they click on that LinkedIn post and all of that experience together, right? All of that new knowledge that you perhaps presented to that prospect or customer or all of that story that you have just told over your social channels has impacted them enough to do a Google search. Oh, I heard of that company. They do a Google Sear and they land on the blog, right? And they fill out a form and et cetera, the rest is history. So this journey, right, this social journey, it's not exactly linear because it's happening at any touch point, right? But these data pieces are very important. And why are they important? Because when you're going and thinking about how to nurture these leads, right? Let's take a look on day one, if we know that the Wall Street Journal. So I'll take Oktopost, for example. Let's say somebody had clicked on a story about employee advocacy, right? We would then know how to nurture that person. We would understand that that person is clicking about content on social media, about this topic, about employee advocacy. So perhaps the newsletter that we get, let's take marketing automation to the next level. Let's not just blast our database with random pieces of information all about Oktopost. We can get really smart with our marketing. And I think this is where the power comes in, where it helps demand gen significantly.
20:13
Shanie Zimerman
Love it. Weeb, I think you have also a little bit to add here. We spoke about earlier.
20:17
Weeb Cnossen
Yeah. When you talk about this, you make me think of this commencement speech of Steve Jobs that's around on the Internet and he explains that he drops out of school and because he drops out of school, drops out of university and he joins all sorts of classes and he follows a calligraphy class and he at. And then he says that only at one point in your life can you look back and connect the dots. And this is basically, you know, I'm looking at your presentation and this is the first time I see this slide. And I think that is literally what the whole funnel tries to do, marketing in particular. But we always try at one point to look back and connect the dots. And that's exactly what he says in that commencement speech. You can look it up and listen to. It's pretty. Yeah, it's a good one. Anyway, this is also the major thing that I see that opened my eyes when I started to come in touch with Oktopost. It is all about the ingredients of the pieces. Right. If you look at your funnel, you want to know, you want to try and capture what are the roles of all of these people that you have in your salesforce. Look at your salesforce, look at your database. You've got one account and it has 12 contacts. Are these people all decision makers? No. You'll see that decision maker at the end of the whole journey. You'll see him come into play. But before this, you had advocates, you had influencers, you had other people in other roles. And you're always trying to look at what is the missing piece of the puzzle. Do you need one more person that joined the webinar or two more people that all downloaded a white paper? What is it that does this? And the beauty of Oktopost as I saw it, not to sell you your merchandise, but is that you're pulling this whole situation forward in essence, and you are adding a whole piece of data that I as a marketeer would love to play with. So it's not only an expansion of your funnel, it's also an extension or a deepening of your knowledge of the funnel. And that's stuff that you normally don't know. And now you can mine that data and by the time that they finally fill out a form to download a certain piece of content, then all that data can be attached to that particular person in your marketing automation and it becomes knowledge and you can use that to better target and to find out what your quickest journeys are. You know, the perfect apple pie.
23:20
Shanie Zimerman
Absolutely, absolutely.
23:24
Jennifer Gutman
Something interesting when you were speaking about, you know, the journey and with, you know, especially in sales, right. You don't always talk to the decision makers first. And I think this is again where social media comes in into a really powerful area is. And we spoke about this on a recent social media workshop about marginal gains, right? And so you're not going to change your entire system overnight. You're not going to change the map, the journey mapping, let's say, and make it, you know, it doesn't take, I think we said earlier, Rome isn't built in a day, but with these small pieces of data and these small touch points, right? And even if, if it's the social media manager looking at the content and you can, maybe you're doing account based marketing and you can kind of understand and start to see where everybody's looking from, what they're clicking on, it all can have an impact. So it's like, what can you do as a marketer on social media to improve? Maybe it's just 1% of your social strategy or your social storytelling and you don't know necessarily where you're going to have an impact. We had an interesting story where we actually had impacted an implementation manager, right. Which along the way, when you implement new technology, they don't always have a giant say in the decision making. But in this specific case, they had seen some posts about our integrations and they found it really interesting and suddenly they became a very active champion in that sale. And it was. And we were able to see that, we were able to see what they were clicking on, which led to that, which was a really pretty amazing thing as a marketer to be able to prove that value of social media. So just to kind of chime in there with the marginal gains that also something to take into consideration that these data points, right, they may seem like small little wins around an account, but at the end of the day they're going to add up to something really big.
25:12
Shanie Zimerman
Definitely. And very timely because we just got a question about this. How can B2B marketers leverage social media engagement data for lead generation and lead nurturing? Literally. A question just came in, I told her, hold on, this is our next topic, we're getting to it. So I hope that this answers it and if not, we can drive it deeper into. And we can drive the answer deeper in just after.
25:39
Jennifer Gutman
Wow, that's like. That just gave me chills. I know where to start. So, okay, so, right, so social engagement to improve lead nurturing. So I will say, no matter what marketing automation platform you're using, the sky is the limit with what you can do with the data. And I think even at Oktopost we haven't even touched. I mean, I think we're only touching the surface, right? With all of the awesome programs. And a lot of how we understand the data is what we're seeing, even our customers do with it and share with us the programs that they're running. But again, at its core, lead nurturing, you cannot do it if you don't have data, right? It is rooted in data. And, and the more you have, the more knowledge you have, the more data you have. Data is power. Knowledge is power. So when you have more data on the leads, what they're clicking on in social media, the better you're going to be able to craft that content and messaging, right? So it's not enough to base your conversations on audiences, websites and email activity, right? It's just not enough. So what we are seeing is that when you understand your social data and what type of content is generating the most engagements from your audience, you're going to be able to use that to set up the different nurturing programs within your marketing automation. You're going to be able to figure out, right, what to gate and what not to gate. So an example from Oktopost, right, We took this idea and we went all the way, we were like, you know what, let's not gate our social media workshops because let's see what happens. And the turnout to them, incredible. They're not gated, but it's knowledge and it's across social media. So regardless, right, from ebooks, to webinars, blogs, white papers, etc. We also understand that when you engage in real time conversations, you're going to be able to better understand your prospects to increase their overall experience. And I'll touch on that in a minute. But I think kind of to get back to like the programs and the lead nurturing, even if your audiences are not exactly active on your website, but they are active on your social channels and you don't want to miss out on those components, if that makes sense. Shani, did I hit everything? I know because Shani, you work directly with the programs in terms of nurturing with the right content. I know that you can go ahead and send interest based emails around
28:04
Shanie Zimerman
the
28:04
Jennifer Gutman
social data that you're getting. You can set up lead scoring. So maybe you know that if a lead came from LinkedIn, you want to give them a higher value because perhaps. Right. LinkedIn is a B2B social media network, let's say. Am I missing anything, Shanique?
28:19
Shanie Zimerman
No, I just wanted to maybe just emphasize the nurturing based on the interest or intent. We're talking high value content and that's whatever the organization defines as high value content for us. It's our content that speaks to ROI and that speaks to the value. So we're then nurturing these individuals again just based on what they're engaging with on social because maybe they're not engaging on our web, maybe they put us in spam and they're no longer clicking and opening our emails. But we do know that they're active on social. They're engaging, they're clicking, they're liking, they're sharing, they're commenting. And based on all of that is then how we're going to nurture, we're going to follow up. It's going to be a much more meaningful and personalized conversation which goes a much longer way than just those generic newsletters, those generic emails that every single person gets and just speaks to plethora of things. We want to hone in on what's interesting for our prospects at that time. And social media is a really great place to get that information because it moves quickly and everything happens in real time on social. You have to respond in real time on social if you want to, you know, increase that customer experience, that prospect experience. You need to act quickly because everything refreshes on social. Today they're liking this and commenting and clicking on that tomorrow could be a whole other thing. And we need to move quickly. That's what I wanted to drive home. I know that you also have a little bit to share on this subject.
29:49
Weeb Cnossen
What about lookalike campaigns and cross platform use of data?
29:56
Shanie Zimerman
Exactly.
29:57
Weeb Cnossen
You've got LinkedIn which is more expensive, but you can target pretty well. You've got other ways of doing things on Facebook with lookalike campaigns, etc. Maybe you can use the data of your organic social traffic to build your lookalike campaigns for paid social. That's all stuff that's possible. So we're very much about data. I'm saying we. That means anecdotes started in anadot in last December. We're all about data and analytics throughout the company. I love those People, but they're real data nerds. Absolutely. So anadot is an artificial intelligence and machine learning company where data driven throughout everything and that you can feel that literally everything. So what does anadot do very quickly, if I may. Anadot monitors business. We thrive on all online big data, fast data, very diverse data. And what we do is we connect all our clients platforms, those online platforms to our Anodot platform and then we, we learn all there is to know about your data, the seasonality and everything of it, so that we can alert you on picks and drops in real time if there's anything that really impacts business revenue and business continuity. So it's really impressive technology that replaces any sort of business monitoring with static thresholds where you have to ahead of time, think of all the thousands of things that can go wrong. So in marketing, in Anodot, we use our own medicine obviously. So we pull in all the cost and performance data of all our online digital campaigns, all the platforms throughout, all the outsourced. We outsource a lot of this work to service providers. So we get all of that data and we get it in real time. And I can see, you know, drops and peaks in cost and conversion. And as a marketeer, it's pretty much what I've always wanted but never had in any other company. The small downside to it is that everybody has access to this. So it also puts any mishaps under the they don't stay under the radar. My CEO will send me an instant email if he gets an alert about a peak in cost because I forgot to define something properly. So that's. But all in good, all in good harmony. So back to the topic. Yeah, we use it a lot for all tracking, monitoring, a B testing. And that is very important to use data also to base your next steps on the data that you get from AB testing and quick iteration. Whether there is colors or fonts or messaging or banners or all of that stuff, you can measure the impact as long as you don't change 20 goal posts in one go. And all of this is working well with the whole social media approach. We're also now almost we're about to release a platform that we've built, a video engagement platform which is basically Netflix meets Red Bull TV meets the data space. And that video platform is what we really want to focus on to gain more engagement with all of our prospects. It can even be our current clients also prospects in the pipeline and for new lead generation. We'll try and use that to the best of our abilities over Social. So we need the data from that platform, we need the data from our social, we need the data from our marketing automation, all to sync together and give us the right information on where to take this. Similarly to what Shani said, you can use it to later build extra campaigns. You can slice and dice that data to understand where you should improve. And that's how life is in, in our marketing department.
35:00
Shanie Zimerman
I think it's safe to say data is never stronger than when it's, you know, when your Martech stack is communicating and when they're speaking the same language. And you can have, like you said, those cross channel campaigns, those same email campaigns that you're running, run those campaigns through social, see what the engagements are, see what performs better, what performs worse, and invest in the better. Perfect. Yeah. So we're nearing the end of our discussion and this is always my favorite part because I think it just sums everything up really nicely. What are some of the tips and takeaways that you too can give our audience to really set themselves up with success in a social demand generation strategy? Whoever wants to start, Jen, go ahead and start.
35:54
Jennifer Gutman
Ladies first. I would definitely say I kind of have two takeaways. The first is digitally adopt. Because especially where we are right now in the world, technology is changing. And if you are not dabbling in what we're talking about, and this is not even because I work at Oktopost, this is just as marketers and I think in the very beginning of this webinar we've used. You said it so nicely, right? The evolution of marketing has changed over time, but yet so fast, right? So just when you think you've nailed a strategy using a certain approach, technology changes once again. And I think one of the best things about being a marketer, one of the best things about being in our industry is that we are really good at adapting to new technology pretty quickly because we know that we need to do that to survive, Right. We just know it. So that is one of my favorite parts about being in marketing. But with that, I think that when it comes to social media, know that you can measure it and know that measuring it is important. You know, I had a CEO here at Oktopost who's still the CEO, Daniel Kushner. And on my first day, he had given me some pretty helpful advice, right? He had said to me, jen, and we were going over KPIs and he said, you can't improve what you cannot measure. And that has stuck with me my entire career at Oktopost, my marriage, pretty much anything I do in life. That advice has stuck with me, but it's true, right? You're not going to be able to improve what you cannot measure. And I think that even goes to if you think about employee advocacy as well, you want to be able to measure pretty much every aspect of whatever story you're telling across the social channels. And then taking that even a step further, I would like to say a tip would be maybe now is the time. Even though I know across many organizations resources may be limited, now is a great time to re educate your own teams about why they're doing what they're doing, how to do it well, and answer those difficult questions. You know, not only what is this technology and how do you use it on a day to day, but why are we using this technology? Where is it going to get us? And I think again drilling that down to employee advocacy. If you go to an employee and just tell them, hey, share this piece of content because or you're promoting the company, there's no meaning behind that. Right. You really want to make sure your teams know the why behind what they're doing and from there the measuring comes and you're able to measure and understand. But I think when everybody's on the same page of why they're doing what they're doing, it makes a much more meaningful experience. And you know, here on this slide, just to kind of run through some of the points here, right? Understanding and I think these are pretty generic as a social media marketer, all of us are on the same page here, right? But you want to understand your social audience on each platform. I know that my audience on LinkedIn is very different for Oktopost on LinkedIn than it is on Twitter and for all of our employees. Trial and error, what works and what doesn't. So we kind of talked about AB testing, right? So one of the AB test I do often is if I post something as Jen and I take that same message and I post it, let's say as Oktopost, and then I take that same message and post it on behalf of the CEO, you'll be surprised. But depending on the message and the social profile that's posting it, you can really impact engagements that way as well. And it's something just as simple as, hey, if Daniel says something about a product update and Jen says something about a webinar and Oktopost says something about a email marketing hack and you try to switch it up and you see it doesn't work. Right. That's AB testing. Social to its finest. So I highly Recommend giving that a try. Promoting the right content at the right time, I can't tell you and I don't think I'm alone in this. But right now, with so much going on in the world, this is a tricky one. And I think as all of us are working from home and I know people are homeschooling their kids and walking their dogs, the workday has completely changed. So I think this is definitely something again you want to be focusing on right now. Take a look at your content calendar, try to understand the new rhythms that are coming from this time and then familiarize yourself with the user experience. That's also a big one, right? How can you possibly tell your brand story if you don't understand the user experience? And last but not least, you want to make sure you're going to follow every step of that buyer journey from anonymous to known and make sure that when they're known that you can really give them. Right at the end of the day, you're able to map that out and you can recreate those maps. So that was kind of actually a lot of key takeaways, but sorry if
40:48
Shanie Zimerman
I stole any of those, but they were good.
40:54
Weeb Cnossen
I'd like to add something to your.
40:57
Shanie Zimerman
Please.
40:58
Weeb Cnossen
The whole story about. Let me cut it into two. Knowing your audience and to find out where they live is also, I feel, sort of a moving target. It's like a constantly evolving organism because people grow up and times change and it goes so fast. So who has lived on Facebook until yesterday, tomorrow maybe on TikTok or Snapchat. And same thing for Twitter people that are now on Twitter, I see them moving to parler the new Twitter without going into politics. There is growing resistance sometimes to certain platforms and it opens up the growth of other platforms. So this is all a constantly changing thing and you have to follow your audience. You have to understand if maybe your declining numbers on one platform have to do not with your strategy or with your messaging, but because of the facts that they have just moved without leaving any particular note behind of where they went. So
42:19
Jennifer Gutman
I want to actually just chime in because you actually, when you shared that I had an interesting discussion Yesterday with a B2B marketer and we were discussing kind of this idea also in social. So not only understanding your social audience on each platform, but when you're starting to work with your go to market teams, understanding the social platforms of where you want to go to market. And I think that's an interesting one as well because I know, you know, in Germany and other places in the world. They have their own Linkedins and their own WeChat.
42:55
Shanie Zimerman
Right?
42:55
Jennifer Gutman
So you could, you could put together this whole awesome LinkedIn strategy in a go to market strategy and then completely miss the boat because culturally you're not in tune with where your, your audience or where your market's living. So I think that's a really valid point.
43:09
Weeb Cnossen
Yeah, same as Google versus Yandex. Some parts of the world. Let's not even talk about China where they don't have WhatsApp. I don't know what it's called in China, but you know, we seem to be focused only on what happens in the US first and then next in Europe. So. Yeah, I completely agree with you. That is also very important to keep that in mind. My last thing would be my top seven tips. I thought about it quickly. We don't have a slide for it, but I did write them down.
43:49
Shanie Zimerman
So I would say listen closely everyone.
43:53
Weeb Cnossen
Yeah. One, be on top of your game, which to me means that you produce quality. Quality in imaging, quality in spelling, all of that. You know, you don't have to produce the 80s era banners anymore. You can up your game and produce something that is worthwhile. Two, be original. Come up with something new. Come up with something else. Don't always go with the strategy of not having to reinvent the wheel. You know this company, my competitor comes up with a four question quiz. So I'm gonna do a quiz as well. Same questions. Your two strikes, you're out. I would say so. Be original, be informative. And that means that you share your knowledge. Sharing your knowledge is a noble thing in any case, but it also really works in marketing. Something for nothing. I mean it's for free. Share it. Be outspoken. Polarity leads to discussion. That is sort of what is stuck in my mind. The longest threads on any social media platform come from people disagreeing with each other.
45:14
Jennifer Gutman
And
45:17
Weeb Cnossen
that leads to discussion. That leads to something. It can also lead to chaos. You have to be aware of this. But polarity at least leads to that discussion. So don't always settle and post something that is middle of the road. Throw it out there. What you stand for, as long as it doesn't go over certain borders, obviously. Be fun, have fun. Don't be the gray mouse. People are on these platforms not to read all the depressing stories about someone else. Okay? It's not for nothing that everybody. Social can be the biggest lie. The most beautiful pictures on Instagram, everybody paints himself a millionaire sitting on the Porsche of the neighborhood. I said Porsche, not porch. So number six, be ethical. I really sincerely believe that ethical marketing is the thing I don't. I hate clickbait stuff. I hate being sucked into a webinar that just gives me more and more and I have to go click through 17 pages and then in the end I won't even find what I really came there for. So click page stuff is horrendous. Avoid it. Be ethical in your approach and you'll bear. It'll bear fruit way quicker. And seven goes for marketing and it goes for life. Be good. You know, use your platform to also unite people instead of divide people, that is. This is number seven. Not for nothing. Number seven is number of the number of wholeness, the religious number. We've got enough of division going on in the world. Anything from looking at our color of skin to political preference. It's an art form to try and unite with your marketing instead of playing on the division and it makes it interesting. Those are seven points. We'll stick them in the email that goes out after the webinar, add them
47:36
Jennifer Gutman
into the deck and everybody I believe on the webinar will get a copy of this deck. So we'll add those seven points in for sure.
47:44
Shanie Zimerman
So we are just coming to the top of the hour and we do have a handful of questions that came in. We have a lot. I might not get to every single one of them, but whatever I don't get to. Please feel free to reach out to us. You can contact we've directly over at Anandote. Contact myself or Jen. We'll all be more than happy to answer. So again, if I didn't get to your question, very, very sorry but please reach out to us and we'll be sure to get that answer. So to get started, I think that this is actually for the two of you, so I'm going to put it out there and just jump on it. In your opinion, what's the best way to present the business value attributed ROI to these types of efforts? As they can't be directly tied to a sale. They can be. Here we go again.
48:40
Weeb Cnossen
Sorry,
48:42
Jennifer Gutman
go ahead, be my guest. You're glowing.
48:48
Weeb Cnossen
I think that goes all back to data and monitoring, etc. You know these platforms, you can capture that data. You just have to do some work in order to analyze it and derive strategy and derive answers from it. And then there is a way to attribute your efforts that you put in social to growing a brand to even to specific leads that come in and whether, whether or not they make it all the way through the funnel you know, that's always part of the game. But I think it's possible. I refer back to Jen, but I think it's all about data and what you do with it.
49:38
Jennifer Gutman
So. Yeah, so the one thing I want to add to that, so I think that's 100% correct, it's all about the data and what you do with it. And I say that I'm echoing that because I think that's an important point. And something inside of Oktopost that we use on a daily basis is our people database. And this is actually, I'll give some examples that have recently happened that I think again, you are able to search for that data and find it. But with the people database, essentially what it is, it's a database within Oktopost that allows you to essentially, if your engagements on social are engaging with posts, so they like, they share, they comment, they click on the link, they take any action on your post, we're able to actually attribute those engagements to your lead to again, see if it's impacting in any way that sales cycle and attribute it back to social. And what's actually happened recently was that I had gotten so inside of Oktopost, we have social listening component. We have an area where you can respond directly to any comments that come in. I think it's pretty, pretty awesome. And I was going through my comments and, you know, some were less interesting than others. And I had this one comment that this person asked a really interesting question and we started kind of going back and forth in the direct messages on Twitter and then I passed them on over to our sales team and they're right now in like, you know, the last stages of procurement.
51:03
Shanie Zimerman
Right.
51:04
Jennifer Gutman
So again, did I have. I'd like to think I'd have a huge impact on attributing that sale. And I'd like to say, hey, at the end of the day, that's because of me. But it takes a team, right? It takes a tribe, and it takes the data to really understand and track that. And what I had found in direct messaging is that when my personality can be a certain way and I can go ahead and understand maybe a little bit about the qualifying process uniting sales and marketing, it's very helpful. And when that leads hit over into sales, they had already had a positive Oktopost experience. And so I don't know, I think it was. It was pretty powerful. And then again, because it was with the people database, again, we use our own technology, we were able to see all of those interactions. The salesperson was able to see the conversation that originally took place, they could refer back to it. So again, data is power and I think it definitely can be done and we're happy to demo to walk you through it and talk a little bit more in depth on that topic.
52:02
Shanie Zimerman
All right. I'm cautiously unmuting myself. You might have seen me jump at the bark of my dogs. I'm sorry if it goes off again, don't have much control over it. A great question came in. Are there any best practice ratios for posting promotional lead generation content versus thought leadership content on social? Would you say that there's like a golden ratio? An 80, 20, a 70, 30?
52:34
Weeb Cnossen
Probably around that, yeah. Pareto, was it? Yeah.
52:42
Jennifer Gutman
I mean, yes. In terms of curated content. Right. The third party content you're posting. I know there's kind of an industry standard that you should be speaking between, you know, 40% about yourself and you know, the 60% about industry related topics. But I think in terms of, I don't know, I think it really depends on the story that you're telling and then the profiles and
53:10
Weeb Cnossen
the.
53:14
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, I mean I think it is really going to vary from company to company and industry to industry and who your followers are and just knowing them, it goes back to knowing your audience.
53:23
Weeb Cnossen
What just popped in my mind is that I've worked for certain companies where, let's say management would push for the shortcut. I don't know if that's an Israeli thing, but. And then your skillfully crafted audience, etc. You just bombard them all of a sudden with let's say, ask for a demo request today. I mean, what, what is that kind of post? So it is sort of a, sort of a form of toxicity all of a sudden on something that you've worked so hard on to create. So I would say even if you don't want to look at a ratio between promotional content as in promoting your next webinar or, or thought leadership and other funny things. Because you can just post funny things. If that would be 64 or 70, 30. Wonderful. What really, really matters is don't start cold sales on your social platforms. That is a killer. Yeah.
54:37
Jennifer Gutman
Pretty tone deaf.
54:38
Weeb Cnossen
Yeah. Steer away from that. That would be my advice. We had a really nice one also on our, one of our social media where someone answered, what is this anomaly detection? Is that like my wife taking out the trash and me noticing it? That was that funny. I mean not every relates to the data space, but that was for us all. So funny to read that. We used that again to post it on our social media to get, get the conversation started. So it doesn't, it doesn't all have to be serious. I don't know where that fits, if that fits in the 40 or in the 60% but if there is a goal.
55:22
Shanie Zimerman
So no, there is no magic ratio. It's know your audience and know what resonates best. All right, I want to just squeeze in one last question and I really like this one for wrapping up. What are some ways or tools the two of you utilize to continue to grow and learn professionally? Jen, I know I got. But yeah, I love that. I want to hear. Yeah, I want to hear a little bit from the two of you. What do you guys take on to better yourselves and in your organization?
55:59
Weeb Cnossen
Omg, I would say there is so much that I watch. I don't even watch television anymore. I watch TedX, I watch London Real and I follow a whole bunch of people that I think do interesting stuff from Kerwin Ray, this Australian present a coach to Gary V to you know, all sorts of all sorts of thought leaders that will either make you a better person or will either make you a better marketeer in my case. And I think those two are pretty intertwined anyway so stop watching dumb television. Start searching for stuff that you can actually do your benefit with. You know, start growing.
57:07
Jennifer Gutman
I would agree. I definitely am onto the TED, TEDx and TED talks and all that especially in like the marketing and what inspire space. There are two influencers at least for me. I don't know we actually had the opportunity on a workshop yesterday to speak with one of my influencers. It was the best day of my life. Howard Sewell from Spear marketing group. His LinkedIn is just out of this world and I literally everything that comes off of it I follow religiously. It gives the best advice and girls
57:39
Shanie Zimerman
really hard yesterday
57:42
Jennifer Gutman
anyone's not following him, definitely recommend another. There's an author I follow, Kyle Haggerty. He is actually he speaks about cross cultural communication in the workplace and he tells stories through failures of companies learning that lesson in a very comedic way. And so he has a book out called the Digital Nomad and it really helps me again because I think as we're all kind of in this space of working from home and you know we're all on this webinar right. It's interesting because he talks about how global communication don't let simple things about you know, I'll give an example right. So I'm American, you can hear from my accent and perhaps I have colleague who's from the UK and we may be communicating. And because we both speak English, we're on the same page, it's assumed. But there are a lot of nuances between the two languages that are not the same. And so he talks a lot about these tiny little cultural differences that if you're not aware of, you know, you're probably gonna do whatever you're trying to do.
58:46
Shanie Zimerman
So.
58:46
Jennifer Gutman
And I love that. So Kyle Haggerty is one to follow. And then from a marketing perspective, the marketing. What is it? The marketing Profs. Short for professor with Ann Hadley. I think she's also great. They have a lot of good content going out about just everything right now in the B2B space. So those are my top three amazing guys.
59:06
Shanie Zimerman
We managed to take up a full hour. I am very proud of the two of you. Thank you again to Weeb, to Jen, for joining me today and thanks for everyone else. I was able to take time out of your day to join us if you've been following along up until now. It is our sixth episode. We are going to be continuing our from the Expert series over the next few months just to be able to provide you with information, resources to get you through this weird time and to give you success beyond. If you have any questions at all, whether it's for myself, for Jen, or for Weeb, our emails are right here. We'd love to hear from you. And in the meantime and until our next episode, I hope you all stay healthy, stay happy and stay positive, and we'll speak soon.
59:51
Jennifer Gutman
Bye, everyone.
59:51
Shanie Zimerman
Take care. Bye. Thank you, guys.
59:53
Weeb Cnossen
Bye, everyone.
59:54
Jennifer Gutman
Bye.
