0:00
Sapir Segal
Hello everyone and welcome to our partner webinar series. This webinar is titled the Fatal Flaw of the Engagement How Incomplete and Inaccurate Data is hurting B2B marketers. I'm Sapiyr Segar, the Content Marketing Manager here at Oktopost and I'm super excited to be co hosting this webinar with Jamie from Syntheo. But before we get started, I just have a couple of housekeeping items that we'll go over. So firstly, this webinar is being recorded and we'll send you the link once we conclude. Also, if you have any questions throughout the webinar, feel free to use the chat box to the right hand side of your screen. And if you are posting to social, then we'd love for you to use our hashtag octowebinar. Now, in case this is your first time joining us and I'll tell you a little bit about myself. So when I'm not hosting webinars like these, I do enjoy, I love to bullet journal. So that's kind of like a new trend. It's all over YouTube and it really, you know, I love being creative and it really, really keeps me busy. But yes, so as you can hear, Jamie is also here with me. Would you like to tell a little bit about yourself, Jamie?
1:03
Jamie Walker
Yes. Thanks so much, Sapir. Hello everyone. My name is Jamie Walker and I am the director of Marketing at syntheo. So when I'm not here at Synthio, I would say I love to enjoy high intensity spin classes. And in my past life I was actually a certified spin instructor and I taught four classes a week.
1:20
Sapir Segal
Well, thank you for joining me, Jamie. It's great to have you with us. Jamie and I are really going to focus on four main topics today. We're going to start by giving a broad introduction to the engagement economy. Then we're going to dive into who your audience is and the role of contact data in reaching your audience. Then we'll discuss what your audience is interested in and how you can use social media data for deeper segmentation. And then finally we're just going to wrap everything up and connect everything back to the engagement economy. So Jamie, would you like to start us off with an introduction to the engagement economy?
1:55
Jamie Walker
Yes, I would. Thanks, Sapir. Some of you might have heard this concept before, especially if you're a Marketo user. So essentially this term was coined by Marketo to describe the idea that we're living in a digital age that's defined by interconnection, where everyone and everything is connected. The engagement economy focuses on a fundamental shift between relationships with their buyers and sellers. So in other words, if you want to deliver an engaging experience, we have to engage with all stakeholders in a company, not just the customers or a prospect the whole cycle. I think Steve Lucas said it best when he said, now more than ever, the only way to win the heart and mind of your customer is to consistently deliver authentic and personalized experience. You know that to me, that totally makes sense. Last week, I was lucky enough to attend a marketing leadership retreat. I was able to mingle with some extremely intelligent and, as you can imagine, really busy CMOs. We were talking about the importance of personalization. So everyone felt like it's virtually impossible to connect with these types of individuals via email because it's hard to get through to them in a generic fashion. So if there isn't something in your message that shows you you know them and what they're interested in, you'll never get a chance to speak to them. But the problem is not every company can do that. So according to Marketo, only the digital native companies survive the engagement economy. And they're the ones who really spend their time and energy building two way personalized and authentic relationships with prospects and customers. So in order to digitally transform your company, you have to have these engaging conversations with your audience. And to do that, you need as much data about your audience as possible, because the more data we have in our audience, the better we can understand who they are and what they're interested in. And Marketo's recent state of the economy report, findings that showed that 33.5% of all engagement happens on social media. So even older industries, I'm thinking more like real estate, those older industries that never relied on digital are being forced to shift their efforts into social, because if you don't, you're missing out on a huge potential to engage your customers in a relevant way. Pierre, before we move forward, I wanted to know if there's anything else that you wanted, any other points you wanted to add about the engagement economy?
4:14
Sapir Segal
Yes. So thanks, Jamie. I just want to say that if you look at the engagement economy, it's all about having those personalized and authentic conversations. But to actually have these conversations in the first place, you need to have complete and accurate data. Because as you can see from this visual demonstration, data is really the driving force are behind the engagement economy. And with the right data, you can really start segmenting your audiences into key Personas like fictional characters. And these Personas should be made up of two major things. So we have who your Persona is. And the second part is what they're interested in. And so Jamie's going to walk us through the first piece of the puzzle, which is knowing your audiences and who they are and how you can easily get this information.
4:58
Jamie Walker
Yeah. So, you know, this seems like a silly question. Who is your audience? Because most people feel like we know who our audience is, but today we're going to look at that in terms of what is the role of contact data and how do we use contact data to reach our audience? So in order to know your customer, you need to know as much as you can about them, and you need to be able to have really personalized conversation. So earlier I was mentioning that I had the opportunity to go to that retreat with the CMOs. So one gentleman said, I give people the rule of three. And so I said, what does that mean? He says, you have three chances to set send me an email or a correspondence to pay attention to me. If you don't write something about who I am or my company or something that I'm interested in, he's like, I'll put you into an eternal black box. I'll never talk to you again. And although that might seem a little extreme, it just shows, like, how important it is in knowing your audience. How can you break through kind of the busy. The noise of, you know, just thinking about the scenario. With an E. MOX email inbox, you have all these emails. How can you connect? How can you be a little bit different than your next person? So the question we need to ask is, why do marketers struggle to keep contact data fresh? Well, it's because most B2B marketers are pursuing an audience that's a moving target. People are constantly moving. We have an extremely transient workforce where most people are not staying at their jobs for 10 to 20 years like they used to. But it's normal now for people to move companies every two to four years. So according to the study I was looking at by a leadership consulting firm called Spencer Stewart, the average CMO moves jobs every 42 months. When you think about that fact, you can imagine how hard it would be to keep clean data if people are constantly moving. You know, the basic information that you have in your prospects or your current customers or partners changes when they leave a position. Things like titles, email addresses, industry, or even cities where they're located may change, which will alter which segment you want to put them in or where you have them bucketed in a workflow. Now, job promotions, everyone wants to get promoted. Duh. But a simple promotion can drastically change how one approaches their next job. The segment tracker Persona type like Sapir was talking about, that you have them bucketed in, may not be in line with the messaging that you've created, making it really challenging to engage with them. So in order to stay in front of your audience, you need to have the most accurate and complete contact data. If you don't, your brand will just look silly and it looks like you're not paying attention. You know, I have kind of a personal example here. I was recently promoted at Cynthia. I can't tell you how many emails I get every day for the old director of marketing. Obviously we're all busy and we're human, so it takes time to recognize changes and I understand that. But I have to say the brands and companies that are prospecting me now, and they know that I have a recent job promotion, they're already one leg up on someone else because they are showing that they know me in my new role here. So as we're talking about data and how to engage our prospects, there are two types of data that we want to focus on today. So I'm going to walk you through the profile, that contact data and then later Sapir is going to talk to us about the behavioral and the social data points that we want to capture as we're trying to engage our audience and build out workflows. Now we're going to take a little bit of deeper dive into the role of profile data and how we use that to engage our audience. So first I want to say profile data falls into three categories. So the first one would be demographics, so things like education and occupation. Second, we have firmographic. So this data includes like number of employees at a company, revenue, what industry you're in, and any other things that can be used to target specific groups. And then lastly, if you have it, we're going to look at technographic data and those, those are things like the different technologies that companies using. So you know, for marketers, like we, you know, for us, we use for our marketing automation system, we use Marketo. You know, I used to use Pardot and any email I get about Pardot, I would be more likely to look at it because it made sense to me and it was part of my everyday life. Now people send me part information. I'm more apt to read Marketo information. So from all the conversations I've had recently with marketers and my own experience, marketers feel that there's a lot of noise out there, but the question is why do they feel that way? To progress to the next slide, we're going to look at, this is why, because this is the marketing technology landscape in 2017. And obviously this changed drastically from years before and it will change more years to come. There's just more technology in the space, which is awesome for a marketer. I mean, we all, I like to say marketers like shiny things. So when new technology comes out, you want to see how you can use it, how can you bring it inside your organization. So the more you can personalize your communication, the higher the chances you are going to be able to connect with someone. You know, looking at this penguin here, how can you, how can you connect the dots and make your message stick out to that one person? How can you, instead of spending math, spending messages that are about the same thing, trying to, trying to get a conversion, you really need to be able to personalize those experiences. How do you do that? By enriching firmographic data and adding technographic data, you can have these sophisticated conversations with the people you want to talk to. Like I said earlier, knowing that technology that they're using, there's tech stack allows you to tailor content and messaging that makes your offer look more relevant. But in order to do that, you have to have some squeaky clean data going in. You know, we're going to talk a little bit about the data points kind of coming out, but thinking about that contact point data you have going into your marketing automations platform, the better it is going in, the better the results your campaign is going to be. So now we're going to talk about how do we master clean profile data. So like I was saying, for marketers, your audience is your most important asset, hands down and is arguably more important than your product. So in order to best market to your audiences and contact databases, you have to know as much about them as possible. So we're going to look a little bit here about the importance of data cleansing and then how we can take the information data that we have, append it and enrich it and what that would look like. So first let's talk about data cleansing. Before we were talking about how we had a transient workforce, so the average person changes jobs 10 to 15 times over the course of their career. Data cleansing helps you follow contacts as they move positions, companies, industries or even cities. So not only are you removing kind of the dirty data out, you're enriching it with that new email address and that new prospect record. And now you're able to get in front of that person. So now we're going to talk about data appending, starting with your data, we have algorithms that match contacts and companies when they're a database. So thinking about back to that trade show example we were saying, you know, you go to a show, you have your scanner. And I know in my information people have that basic Jamie Walker Ntheo Director of Marketing and maybe my phone number, that's the information they're bringing back to their company to try to get in front of me. But wouldn't it be great if you knew that how many, you know, depending on if you have an ABM approach or what you're doing, you know, the size of company I work for, the tech install I'm using like all those other rich data points that you can get from a simple data append, you know, for example, Jamie Walker at Sentheo, like I was saying, gives you my work email. So by appending that, you can now find out the location that I'm in Atlanta, you know, information about Senseio and other insights into my job history. What other data fields that would help you complete a picture about me? You know, every time I get an email from someone that references basketball, it's like, well, they must have some data pointing me to know that I was a previous basketball player in my past life. So, you know, just things like that that help, you know, connect people. But yes, Sapir, can you talk to us a little bit about the behavioral data and some of those social data points that would be really important to connect with someone on a personalized level?
12:42
Sapir Segal
Yeah, so I mean you talked a lot about contact data and how it's an essential element to really understanding who your audience is. And it's really interesting to see how simply just keeping your contact data fresh can really help marketers kind of be ahead of their audience and really get their attention. But I think if you really want to engage your audience in the long run, then you also need that behavioral data, as you said, and that comes from social media. So if we kind of go back to the engagement economy and as we know, there is no such thing as one size fits all, as you can see from the picture on the right, it's all about personalizing the experience to an individual's interest. So what resonates with someone at an executive role? For example, a CMO won't necessarily resonate with someone at an entry level position like a social media manager. This is where segmentation comes in and, and why it's so important, especially when we're speaking about the engagement economy. So most marketing automation platforms for Example Marketo Akto and Eloqua Sales Fusion will enable you to segment or divide your lead database into different buckets, and then you can actually use those buckets to deliver more dynamic and relevant content. Now, there are countless ways that you can segment your lead database, but some basic variables that you can look at, geography and language preference. So for example, geography would mean dividing leads based on the country or region that they live in. So someone living in Europe is going to receive a very different email to someone living in the US Just as an example, in terms of language preference, you really just divide leads based on the language they speak. So for example, anytime you create an email or landing page, you can personalize it to a person's language. So one email can be in English, another one can be in French. So again, these are just very basic examples of how you can segment your leads. Also, if we want to take it a step further, every segmentation has a sub segment. So if we take company size as an example, underneath company size, you have three different sub segments. So you have startup, mid market and enterprise. Now you can go even deeper than that by using social media data to segment your audience. And when I say social media data, I'm mostly referring to behavioral insights and information and that we collect from prospects and customers. Social media activity. So in other words, you can build a profile around what your audience is clicking, sharing, liking and converting from social media. And then using this profile, you can better tailor content and messaging to their interests. So let's go into some of the audience segments that you can build using social media data. So yes, the most common way to segment your audiences with social media data is of course, with content topics. Let's say that Katie. Right, we have Katie, and she's frequently clicking your posts about the topic, email automation, because that's a topic that you frequently write about. And then that's a really clear indication to you that she's interested in that subject in email automation. And so the obvious choice would be to strategically place her under an email automation bucket or a segment where she can receive more content relevant to her topic of interest. Segmenting audience by content topics also informs us of what stage of the B2B funnel a buyer is at. So whether it's top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, or bottom of the funnel. For example, if someone is engaging with brand awareness content, and that would be at the top of the funnel, then they're probably a colder lead. However, if they're engaging with advanced kind of educational materials that addresses their, their needs, their Challenges more product oriented, then it's safe to assume that they're a hotter lead and they're at the bottom of the funnel. So again, based on your content topics, you can easily pick up and place leads into a relevant segment. So beyond content topics, you can also segment audiences based on content types. So this could fall under three main categories. So we have original, curated and advocacy. Original content, very straightforward. It's anything that's created by your company and promoted on social media. So for example, your ebooks, your webinars, blog posts, etc. Then you have curated content that's anything that your company has aggregated from external sources and third party website. And then finally we have advocacy. And for those who don't know, employee advocacy is simply your employees sharing your content and promoting it on their personal social networks. You can also segment audiences based on the social networks that they're most engaged on. Historically, B2B marketers have been accrediting LinkedIn as the most effective tool for lead generation. And they're certainly not wrong because in a recent study that we conducted, Oktopost has found that 80% of B2B leads actually came through LinkedIn, while only 13% came through Twitter and 7% came through Facebook. So these findings really say a lot about where audiences are hanging out and when they are in their research mode. And the fourth way that we can use social data for lead segmentation is by looking at other contextual social actions like engagement type and frequency. And what do I mean exactly? So engagement type refers to us, the specific social activity. So what exactly your audience is doing? Are they clicking, are they sharing, are they converting from your posts? And since likes and shares are kind of actions that can be taken by leads at any stage of the funnel, specifically at the top, you can really place them in the bucket where they will need further nurturing. Though if we look at social actions like clicks and conversions, well, these would usually inform us of leads that are more mature and who are more interested in the company and the product or service that you're offering. So another sub segment is engagement frequency. It's really up to you to define what this frequency is and how to prioritize leads to based on their level of engagement. For example, a lead could be clicking and converting from the bottom of the funnel content on LinkedIn, but they're only doing this over the course of three months and then you have another lead that's doing the same thing, but five times within a week. So clearly we can tell that the second lead that's clicking that's engaging more frequently with your brand or with your company on social media, they're a lot more sales ready. And based on their level of engagement, we can segment the audience into a relevant bucket. Now, once you've segmented your audiences using social media data, you can then begin to engage them with relevant content. And so now I'm just going to go through some basic examples. The first and most obvious way is engaging them via email. So crafting emails with content that is tailored to each audience segment and this way you can actually achieve a far more effective conversation. The second example is engaging leads via ads. So for example, the Marketo ad bridge allows marketers to serve ads to a specific audience segment. And then using social data from Oktopost, you can tailor your ad content based on their topic of interest and buyer readiness. The third way is engaging via social outreach. This is all about giving your sales as much access to your social media data, so then later on they can use this information to have a more personal or one on one conversation with with their prospects. Okay, so this brings us to the final part of our webinar and I'm just going to wrap up everything that we've discussed and try to connect it back to the engagement economy. So as we said, the engagement economy is all about having those meaningful conversations with the right audiences. And to do that, we need complete and accurate contact data as well as behavioral data from social media. Now, contact data helps to answer the question of who your audience is. So for example, their age, their company, they work at, the technologies they're using. While social media data informs us of the what, so what exactly are they interested in? And this is all based on their daily social media activity so we can know their topic of interest, their buying stage, and even their engagement frequency as marketers using both of these data points. Right. The contact data and social media data makes it a whole lot easier to manage and segment leads in marketing automation. By segmenting them properly, you can better tailor a content experience that's personalized to their needs, their interest, and their stage of their buyer journey. And unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. But if you do have any more questions or you want to hear more about the Oktopost or the Syntheo platform, then feel free to get in touch with us. I am just going to leave those details up on the slide. And again, thank you for joining us and a very special thank you to our wonderful guest Jamie, and we hope you'll join us again.
