Digitalize Your Offer in a Time of Crisis: How to Engage and Personalize Your Audience

welcome to another wonderful semrush webinar we are live apparently and we're live with catherine and john this is going to be absolutely awesome welcome to everybody in the audience apparently we've got some people from shetland island from new york i'm in paris right next door to john uh interestingly enough i can pretty much look out of my window and wait for john it's a slight exaggeration but we're close by very close by in the 12th hour on december in paris so welcome john h who's saying hello to us it's wonderful to be here we're going to be talking today about digitalizing your offer in the time of crisis how to engage and personalize your audience and as you can see i just read that off the screen next to me rather than bothering to remember it uh somebody from denver colorado it must be early in the morning for you in turkey it must be slightly later so you must be starting your evening and probably having your aperitif as we say in france so welcome catherine welcome john before starting just to remind everybody this will be available to watch again on youtube that's absolutely fine if you don't manage to catch everything as you watch it the first time you can always re-watch it we have questions at the end so please do pop your questions into the youtube chat uh we love answering questions from other people i'm speaking actually in the royal we because i actually mean catherine and john because i don't know much about this topic john tell me a little bit about yourself uh my name is john hughes yes i am a neighbor of uh jason uh i work for a company which is called plessy plessy is a marketing automation software um so we work with a lot of different b2b companies whether it's sas whether it's fintech whether it's artificial intelligence whether it's manufacturing whether it's engineering uh what they've all got in common is most of them are doing some sort of inbound marketing strategy most of them doing some sort of content marketing strategy uh and our tool helps people uh basically generate traffic generate lead nurture those leads and helps them to become customers which is wonderful and i think what's gonna be really nice today is we're gonna be talking about the audience i'm gonna be talking about content we're gonna be talking about marketing and we're not going to be talking about tech which is really groovy i think this is going to be a nice relief for a lot of people catherine how about you i know you do lots of copywriting and you're in somewhere that isn't paris that's true yeah we're based up in scotland so hi jason thank you for having me it's lovely to be here so i'm katherine strachan i'm managing director of coffee house coffee house is a content marketing agency specializing in technology in fintech so we work with some brands doing some really exciting things everything from biometric technology at airports to ar for carpenters and home repairs um yeah yeah brilliant sorry i actually had a doubt as i was saying it i i recognize your accent which isn't from scotland but you are in scotland and as i was saying i suddenly had a doubt but you're american or canadian no i'm originally from america um but i'm based up in scotland i've been in the uk for seven years now so i got my bit of citizenship in september which is really exciting so i'm both now half and half which is which is great brilliant that's wonderful now you said it's sunny where you are i'd like everyone in the audience to tell us if it's sunny where you are because in paris it's sunny too and it's the start of summer we're all happy everybody's got a big smile on their face and i think we're probably ready to get started with john i think i suddenly realized i sound like i'm speaking to a children's tv show and i do apologize let's get back on track with something more serious audiences content marketing digitalizing your offer in a time of crisis how to engage and personalize your audience with john who's going to be speaking for 20 minutes for a bite questions from the audience and the panel discussion so please share your screen john and we're off i'll leave it with you thank you very much jason so yeah as jason said uh i'm gonna sort of talk through the theme that we're talking about today and then certainly uh i'm really interested to hear catherine's uh input particularly when it comes to content and different types of content you can use to personalize so uh don't hesitate everybody who's in with us uh to leave any comments or any questions i'm sure we're going to get to them all we want this to be a conversation rather than pres just a presentation but i'm here really to kick off the idea of of of personalization uh particularly in b2b marketing and and it's something that i think people have talked about for a long long time but it also feels to me like it's a it's really been a strong voice that came in at the beginning of the year and i think i i hate to say it but partly due to the dreaded lockdown and the pressure that that's caused for everybody but also this idea of working from home and the difficulty of separating our working cells from our actual selves that seemed to usher in a lot of voices who are asking for b2b marketing to become more human to speak with maybe a less formal voice with a more direct voice but also to create real engagement with prospective customers by personalizing our marketing now these are easy things to say but if you do already have some sort of lead generation going on on your website to be able to understand who your lead is uh why they're there what they're looking for and to be able to speak directly to that person is extremely complicated what's more a lot can depend on what kind of business you're in what kind of sector you're in how many different segmentations you have how many different personas you have how many different offers you have on your website so it can it can become more complex depending on the type of offer you have what i'm going to try and do in this webinar is to get into the nitty-gritty of this and to try to find a way that you can make personalization work for you and some practical ways to go about it so uh as i said uh i work for plesi um i also do a lot of the marketing for plessy as uh as well as uh having my hand speaking to customers and and and and and and helping them out as well um as i said plesi is it is a marketing automation software which basically helps with all of these things that we're talking about whether it's content marketing whether it's inbound marketing uh whether it's getting more presence to your site whether it's creating leads uh whether it's generating leads whether it whether it's lead nurturing um and we work with a wide range of different customers that are that are looking for this kind of kind of voice let's start with this idea of personalization because uh a lot of people talk about it as a b2b marketer in reference to b2c uh and a lot of b2b marketers find personalization harder than b2c does first of all the b2c journey is not the same as be in b2b it's much more emotional it can be based on impulse there are less decision makers involved and secondly uh in a survey conducted by uh marketing charts 52 percent of people said that in b2b it was harder to reach out to decision makers uh or their target market right um now let's talk about inbound marketing um sorry i'm a little lost i'm on my way ass yes because i i want to go back to this idea a little bit um there's a lot of there's a lot of sense that with b to b next to b to c uh the buying funnel isn't same there aren't so many decision makers it often depends on the product and so on and so forth uh his here's his the thing that i would argue when it comes to this sort of b to b and b to c uh case uh it's over 20 years ago that you know everyone got really surprised about uh well you know you know if you ordered something off amazon then they really know our taste and we said oh it's really clever back in the days when you used to buy those things called books and cds um but is b2c really that great at sort of doing like a seamless personalization i'd actually argue that b2c a lot of the time uh can be pretty blunt and and not half as clever as it likes to think it is now we all know that social media is really good at knowing what we want and they've got a huge load of data in there but retargeting is a is a great case in point where uh personalization is it's not really there it's actually something nagging you about getting something you don't really need retargeting has its place it can be really effective but is it personalization or is it just kind of a blunt way of kind of pushing you and pushing you i'm talking about personalization for both for b2b and b2c in terms of personal messages which i don't think you necessarily always get from retail uh it's not very often where you get something where you think they know who i am what we're looking for when we're talking about personalization is is we're looking for something that is not about kind of buzzwords or algorithms or artificial intelligence it's it's it's really this basic idea that if i ordered some shoes from an online clothes retailer the the messages that they sent to me are after that shouldn't be trying to sell me dresses right uh take you wider than take it wider than that idea um think about something like netflix which everybody says is is so is so amazing in terms of in terms of knowing who you are but if you really look at netflix they only push big shows at you that everyone watches and and they do a certain amount of personalization in there but it's not particularly sophisticated and i think to a certain extent they do that on purpose but it's not really personalized for you something like youtube has got personalization down and we can spend hours going down a rabbit hole as they keep suggesting things that we're going to like it's a pet peeve of mine but but it is important when we talk about seamless b2b channels now that is a digression to some extent or just me moaning about it but it shows that if we can do something in b2b where we can understand who our audience are uh and we can send them relevant messages then we can really engage with prospective customers and build our brands um so that takes us to these to these ideas again this this this jealousy uh from b2b marketers to to to those in b2c uh where uh i think everyone starts to think to a certain extent that b2b is b2c is so much more exciting and they're free to do whatever they want um that people feel in b2b uh that their target market is harder to reach their decision makers are harder to reach they often feel and this is true and this is true of many people that i speak to that unfortunately they they're sitting on uh a whole bunch of bad data now and when i say that a lot of the time and i get this with with marketers who've just come into a company and they've got a crm system there that has a lot of leads but they've no idea where they came from who they are what those people were interested in or what they are and the other huge one is budgets a lot of marketers feel that in in b2b uh they just don't have the budget that the b2c has so first of all when we talk about inbound marketing and how you can use your site to engage with your visitors online uh what we want to think about really is the journey that a lead takes in order in order for us to start thinking about personalization now b2b marketingnet said that 94 of b2b journeys start online uh and i just want to push that point home i'm sure a lot of people who are here are very familiar with that idea but i think sometimes we forget that your website is where people come to understand your offer but your offer and as a marketer it's the most fundamental tool that you have for your company and for your brand your website can be used as a way to start engaging those visitors and start creating a relationship really and this is at the knob of personalization if you're creating blog pieces webinars white papers podcasts whatever it may be which is creating traffic for your site then you're probably already writing content that is relevant to your target market inbound marketing done well is when that lead magnet becomes a conversation and you're able to take that lead on a journey and what we see in this graph here is exactly what that journey is right we go from discovery to evaluation to purchase and and then to retain um and the the discovery section is very much uh when someone's first coming to your site if they're coming to your site they probably look something up on google a lot of the time when they've looked something up they've they've they've not googled your company name actually what they've googled is the problem that they've had all the general words of the things that they're looking for and that's where your content should focus on actually that leads issue not necessarily your product now your website is going to be full of things about your product but if you've got interesting content that is talking about the issues your target market is interested in that's how you're going to start to get people coming onto your site and start discovering what you're looking at if you go one step up into the evaluation part you're going to be you're going to be actually using content that's going to help them evaluate their buying criteria and it's you're going to start to talk about your product a little bit more uh when we get to the purchase part you're going to help them finalize their decision so you're going to be doing case studies you're going to be talk talking much more product based you're going to be giving results okay and the journey doesn't stop there even once they've become a customer you still need to be sending uh your clients information about your product getting their feedback helping them improve their competence on your product telling them what your company is doing it carries on and all of that uh content needs to be relevant to them and you need to understand how you can make it relevant to them so let me go down a little bit more and i'm pretty sure catherine's going to have some some interesting things to say about each one of these in terms of in terms of what kind of content you can do because this is what she does every day but again in our discovery section social media is going to bring people to your site your blog articles are going to bring people to your site your blog articles if they're if they have the right kind of wording are going to get you higher up google and you're going to get people coming through if they've got the problem that your product solves once we get onto the evaluation we're getting on to more kind of high level quality content i would call anything that it is a little bit meatier something like a white paper a webinar a podcast something that people have to really spend some time and engage with it it means that they're that that they're already past that discovery stage and they're starting to really look at what it is that you do once we get further once we start to take them on that journey we're going to need to kind of push them and trigger them and it's going to be through some sort of marketing automation it's going to be through some sort of workflow where we're starting to convince them as to why it is that they should purchase the product from you and then we want to delight them and then we then we want to as i said uh while we're retaining we want to be sending them information about what's going on we want to be sending them information about the product information about our company and and and try and improve all the time about what we're doing inbound marketing done well means that your target audience will find you this is what i'm trying to show with with with this sort of simplified journey here because there are more complex versions of it um but whether it's from quality content or whether it's from ceo the journey you take your leads on has to be personalized let's go back idea go back to that idea that we that we had the it's hard to reach decision makers that's exactly where your content comes in because if you can create content that speaks to those decision makers to sp speaks to those personas then you are getting through to your target audience [Applause] um what is personalization what is personalization not personalization is not just getting someone's name or company name in an email in fact let's not confuse personalization uh with this idea which is really outbound techniques it's outbound marketing techniques it could be really useful to certain companies uh where the more personalized you can get the more effective the outreach and there's lots of sophisticated tools and and quotes and and channels you can use to do that but outbound marketing is time consuming it's research heavy it's cold and it's an interruption to someone's day having some sort of marketing software where you're basically saying hi john is not personalization personalization is when you're actually sending information to someone that they're interested in okay uh the question is why and what part of it okay what part of what you do are they interested in as i mentioned before real personalization involves understanding who somebody is how they first came to your site and what it is that they're interested in so for me personalization really comes down to segmentation and we sort of head back to our bad data here um but this is really the heart uh of personalization in in b2b now it is you know i speak to lots of people who have on one hand they're going to have a paying method and the other hand they've got a subscription method and that i understand there could be lots of different business models within it which i can't speak to every single one i have some authority from the from the different clients we have at please but i can certainly talk about what we do at plexi in terms of understanding who are who our customers are the key to personalization with inbound is real segmentation so this means the following paying attention to where a lead has come from so uh have they come in from an event have they come in when those things used to happen from webinars from gated content from blog articles from newsletter signups from contact forms for each individual one there's a different journey and you need to be able to segment those leads so that the journey they go on is relevant to them so we want to look at where our leaders come from so what channel what sources have they come from we want to look at what content a lead is looking at and again this can be broken down into various different pieces so is it early stage articles are they downloading high quality content where are they in that journey right uh where are they in the buying funnel so that you can understand what to send to them next based on their maturity as a lead not all leads will take the same journey but the funnel is still a a fairly good framework uh some go faster faster than others those that the the go by the wayside are probably not your target market some people go through it very slowly but what they are looking at what subject matter how you can segment segment them uh and what offer they're going to go into is essential it's vital to what you send next and so really if if you can segment your audience to understand what content to send next to them you're basically on to some sort of personalization there and then the next question is um when to contact them okay so where they are in the journey what their interest is you need at that point some sort of lead scoring uh which is going to tell you when they've hit the end of that when it hit the purchase part that funnel so that so that somebody from your sales team can start talking to them at plessy for example we divide leads by subject matter so someone who's come in through content that is about lead nurturing will be treated differently to a lead that's come in which is talking about seo or marketing strategies we aren't we can understand the the different segmentation there and if you can segment your audience by subject matter and even by source you you're on your way to be able to define what kind of information to send them to lead them through the funnel so they're ready to go by uh we go back to our trainers and dresses example but this is massive uh for those companies they can often have relatively two different audiences coming onto their site and two different offers and and they and they need to send them off if your content speaks not only to the interest of someone but also to their needs you've got personalization because they start to trust in you as a brand they're starting to engage with you and they look closer at your product if you send them messages which are relevant to them now some of you may be thinking fine i need to segment uh i need to know where they came from um i need to treat each one differently i need to do a workflow on some sort of marketing automation platform but workflows can be really really uh complex things um in fact what a workflow is supposed to do for for a marketer is to automate steps to nurture a lead while the marketer can do something else which is a lot more fun like creating content and coming up with marketing strategies but what it often turns out to be is a very inexp that's tremendously time consuming and finally once those messages are sent out it could often end up alienating the very lead you want to impress for example if you create a workflow six months ago uh and it's still being sent to new leads now you've got to ask the question to yourself is it still relevant uh does it reflect your brand now has your content changed since you created that workflow have your offers changed since you you created that workflow if someone comes in through through a webinar uh last week for example and six months ago you created a workflow where you said well if they go on this then they're gonna go on that and then if they click here they're gonna go on there it's extremely complicated and it's it's a it's a it's a very very difficult thing to do and to get right workflows have their place i would say that they're they're they're really useful for very simple kind of introductions and messages that you want to send but the more complex ones i think it's still quite hard for for a lot of marketers to define uh the exact messages that that is is going to make somebody really engage in your site i want to go back to some some plesi examples right because this is this is what we do with our with our different leads that come in come into our website and how we understand what what they're looking at first of all we know when someone first came into our site and we know what attracted them there we know we know exactly the reason why they came in we know um the details of what they've been looking at on our website and for how long but we also have a have a have basically a lead scoring there where we're able to establish how much they're engaging with the different more high quality content uh that's on our site when i say engage that they're downloading it they're leaving their details in exchange of getting a certain amount of content we have different tags which basically help us segment so our content is tagged uh our leads are tracked and once we understand that we can start to nurture them with the relevant um messages and we don't do that through a workflow we do it through something called a smart campaign now a smart campaign is basically with the system of the tagging and the system of the scoring and as you can see here we've got awareness evaluation and purchase so we've even simplified our funnel even more but what it means is we can start within certain parameters to send messages and different triggers which are going to be relevant which are we don't have to program or anything like that we just create certain parameters and we can see the stats on how people are answering it uh we can see uh how how many people are going through those different phases and we know that each one of those messages that are sent uh is completely relevant in terms of segmentation in terms of personalization to that lead what this really means for a marketer particularly for those working in a startup or maybe with a small team perhaps they've already outsourced a large part of their marketing because they they have very little time in terms of creating content and so on is that purpose-driven content that's actually of interest can be sent to your leads automatically without you doing really very much set up at all segmentation is key it's the key to personalization it's about having data but it's also about having content to talk to those leads to take those leads on a journey as we've been discussing and content that is relevant to them personalization is when a lead basically goes ah that's interesting uh i was looking at that personalization is something that maybe two weeks three weeks four weeks later they're going to receive something and go oh yeah i was looking at that before and and they're going to click on it and they're going to come back into your site if you can if you can start to do that then you can really start to talk to the leads that you want to speak to that's pretty much it from me you guys brilliant stuff wonderful now don't forget to subscribe that was delightful i i was i've actually already seen it so i kind of cheated i knew most of that um that was absolutely awesome uh what did you think catherine you enjoyed that i think yeah definitely it resonated with a lot of you know how we approach content and i think it's really interesting in a b to b context because quite often when you see content for b2b it's very corporate it's very flat it's very dull it's very rigid in fact b2b copywriting gets a bad rep because they forget to personalize so they don't take the time at the beginning of their journey to build customer avatars so one of the things that i always say to our clients is do you have your customer avatars and that is where we start that is where we start to create great content you take the time to understand who these people are what is it that's keeping them awake at night what are they worried about and how can you then position your service or your product to solve that problem so that resonates with a lot of you know what what you're saying john definitely brilliant one thing that strikes me sorry dude i'll come back to you in a moment john but what what you started there was with um i think what one thing you're saying is it doesn't have to be bells and whistles and fun and trumpets and balloons in your content it needs to be appropriate for the person who's reading it or consuming it so in fact being relevant will immediately make it interesting and enjoyable and helpful to the person is that more or less yeah i think i i think you've summed up my 20-minute uh presentation very very well but no i mean relevance is and it's sort of it sounds like a wide world but uh i mean as i said we work with companies that will have you know as i said like we'll have a like a buying model for for something but they'll also have like a subscription model where they're where they're where they're doing learning and and so on um and you know a lot of those times those companies will do a mass email to all of the all of their all of their all of their contact base and it's uh it's it's it's not relevant and it it's uh it's it's it it is under you know there's two sides there's and i i think we should go back to it with catherine's point because there is the avatar or what we sometimes people sometimes call the buyer persona which again many marketers go all right well we're selling to the head of human resources so that's fine we'll just write things about human resources without actually taking the time to talk to those people and understand who they are which which is which is massive uh there is the fact that sometimes also content can be extremely boring and that b2b sometimes b2b bosses rather than marketers think it should be boring uh but there's no there's no need for it to be but the real key and that and that's what i was trying to push home yeah is that if someone receives a message that that is interesting to them then then they are going to start that dialogue with you with your company which brings me to another question that i have for you katherine which is my own personal curiosity is if you've got like five avatars or five personas creating the content that applies to them obviously you can segment it but it's an awful lot of effort and i think people kind of don't necessarily want to do it yeah 100 i mean it's really important that when you're creating your avatars and when you're creating your strategy you are realistic about what you can achieve so it's fine to have five avatars if you can market to them you know in an intelligent way if you have the scale and the resource to be able to market to all of them or perhaps they have similarities so that you can align your content that it maybe speaks to two avatars rather than just one but it is important to not go over the top when you're creating these avatars and perhaps pick the two or the three that are the most important for you especially if you're a small to medium team i mean what john was saying about the mass email i want to go back to that point because i think it's really important so i use this example all the time and i really love this example but marketing that is trying to apply to the masses is like standing in a crowded room of say a thousand people and going hey everybody look at me look at me if you've ever done it if you've ever been one of those street canvassers you know for a fact that it does not work what does work is saying hey guy in the red shirt because all the men wearing red shirts in that room will turn around and look at you the most effective thing you can do in today's world especially in today's world where it's crowded with content everybody's turning up content is to create content that cuts through that noise and resonates with the customer sitting on the other side of the screen the person reading it it makes them sit up and go oh hey this brand really understands me they know what i'm going through they can help solve my problem and then you know their search for the solution to their problem is over because they have found somebody who can you know provide that who can answer that answer that pain point and there's nothing more effective than that that's a brilliant example not the red shirt the shouting championing crowd something that makes people turn around grabbing people's attention that with something that they relate to that that's important to them um coming back to you john the idea of i mean the content i i love i'd like to talk about the fun aspect because i i really want to insist on the fact that boring content for me is interesting for you john for example right okay yeah i i wouldn't let let's let's let's change let's change that a little bit because i work with a lot of marketers but i also work with quite a few different different content writers as well in the sense that um certain pieces of content can be written uh in a kind of language which is stiff and dull and maybe an internal language where they're where they're where they're talking about their products and using the using internal words that aren't necessarily going to be relevant to your initial uh entry entry-level lead uh and and i think you know some people are very very resistant to that um you know i i'm not saying if you if you've got a site that is that is that is talking about semiconductors that you you want to go absolutely crazy but there are people that need to buy semiconductors and and and and they're going to look up certain things and there'll be certain themes but there's no reason for example that the language of it can't be a little bit more open a little bit more relaxed and i would have thought catherine you deal with this a lot yeah 100 as a content marketing agency that specializes in technology we write on quite a lot of subjects that most people would consider boring but it's all about making that content relevant so if you're talking to a cto that already understands this tech then you can be a bit more jargon heavy you can be a bit more technical but if you're speaking to an audience that does not understand the tech then you need to be you know you need to use plain english terms you need to be a bit more of that nature so it's really important to understand who you're talking to and then tailor the content accordingly so john if you were talking to somebody who was very corporate you know and they went on to the semiconductor website you know they would probably want to see very corporate language but if you were talking to a small business owner or you know somebody in the startup scene somebody who's trying to be quite disruptive then the language that you use on that website should definitely be fun and playful but it's about never forgetting who you're talking to and it's about keeping that front and center and that that should be pivotal to all content that you create and how you communicate in the language that you use and shape your tone of voice so when we run tone of voice workshops we spend quite a lot of time talking about that audience because that audience is going to shape and influence the tone of voice that you use and the words that you use and all of that it's so important it always comes back to thinking about that person on the other side of the computer screen and never forgetting that you are talking to one person in b2b you get a lot of challenge for well you know we're not talking to one person we're talking to a corporation because b2b is business to business but there's always a decision maker in that business you are always talking to one person within that business who is your first point of contact and then that person might need to go up the chain and get you know involve other people but it's still human it's still human to human rather than you know trying to talk to the corporation at large wonderful brilliant we actually have a few questions from the audience which i'd like to come on to now chris lopez is saying is it worth being slightly off-brand in order to personalize messages john uh difficult what you consider to be off of i mean i'd love him to tell us what he considers to be because that's a little bit open uh do you know what as i said i i think i mean you've definitely i mean lots of the things here we've been talking about such as you need to know who your target audience are you need to know uh what kind of language to have that that is going to speak to them um and let's let's also go into this idea of and i'm being very b2b here again uh apologies for their rb2c people looking at this is that with b2b it's it's not necessarily about traffic right it's not necessarily about uh how much traffic have i got coming into my site or it's not even necessary about how many leads have i got coming into my site if those leads are not the people that you want to be speaking to right so this brings me to the off-brand idea everything that you do should be thought about in terms of the language that you're using in terms of the in terms of the messaging that you're using in terms of the the the title of whatever piece you're doing needs to speak to your target audience because that's the thing they're going to see first and that's what they're going to click on before they go in and have a have a look at more of the details so you could do something really crazy and wacky and uh throw it up on social media and you're going to get quite a lot of people but you may have to just then throw all of them away or you may have to sift them through or again lead nurturing is going to help you sift them through so i it's half and half because you can do sort of massive things uh or you could say hey man in the red shirt again i mean i think i i think that actually you know long term effective b2b marketing is targeted uh and and and you and and beyond you know the knit the details of the of the content and how well that's written and so on and so forth i mean those magnets those things that lead people to you have to be perfectly written and again just a a a please we spend hours redoing the titles of our of our of our different of our different lead magnets or our paid or our paid adverts because one word off and we suddenly see that all the leads that we're getting are not quite where we should be right i mean what i thought immediately when i read that was you need to use the gambler and talk to your audience in a manner that the audience expects but like in a relationship don't lose yourself when you're doing it because you're desperately trying to please everybody else and i'm sorry i'm not sure why my camera keeps turning it off yeah yeah okay please that carry on uh help me definitely i mean so i would question what you mean by off brand because all brands should start at the beginning should start by thinking about who those customers are so we do brand messaging workshops which is a very beginning process of building a website of building a brand but from a messaging content perspective and that always starts with your audience and who you're talking to and yeah jason i would echo as well that you know it's about building those relationships so good content marketing to me is about creating conversations and building relationships and nurturing those relationships so that somebody can go from not knowing who you are to buying from you and then being an advocate of your brand and you can't do that if you're trying to appeal to the masses or not thinking about who you're talking to it'd be like if you went on a date and only talked about yourself like it's not gonna work i don't know if anybody's ever tried it but trust me it doesn't work what is far more effective is starting at the beginning with thinking about who you're talking to and who you want to court so you are courting prospects rather than trying to convince them to just buy from you it's more about that relationship and that conversation and supporting them in the right way and building a really nice you know collaboration and john you're 100 right too about you know you don't need thousands of leads in b2b if you think about a lead as a as a sale which it is mostly to be companies operate with you know very the cost of their item is is quite high so it's not like when you're selling shoes you have to sell thousands of them to make a profit in b2b you know you need fewer quality sales then you need thousands of sales so it's more about refining you know your seo strategy so that you're choosing keywords that have the right search intent and then when you get that lead on your website nurturing them through the funnel and through the process yeah and i think it's a mistake a lot of people make when they come into seo especially clients who don't really kind of think it all through is i want volume i want lots of people and you're saying no what you actually want is the right people and in b2b i mean it's frustrating is that people think oh there aren't many people coming to my website and johnny that that idea that in fact you're going to get high ticket people as a rule in b2b uh means that that frustration is actually misplaced because you don't need that many people yeah absolutely and and you know i mean these are all your vanity metrics that that certain that that that hit certain uh marketers when they when they when they're trying to justify themselves and and the other ones can be you know i'm doing this for the for the brand message this is why i want to this is why i want to put this on linkedin or this is why i want to do this article it's all about building our brand and so on and so forth but if again if it's not actually creating any business that you can measure or see it it really is again it's it's it's vanity and it's it's just to say to you to the boss somewhere but look we did this article in it it's really good for our brand you know you it needs to have a follow-through and it needs to have a reason as to why it's there and it needs to be measured actually all right in france a raise on debt as we said we have a question from dominick rowe which i like because it takes the offline as well as a recruitment agent agency we send postcards to clients and candidates as a form of personalization could you recommend any other ways we could heighten this personalization catherine yeah well i mean taking things offline and sending people things to people's homes are is a very effective way because you're communicating with them on a different channel but i would want to know what was in that postcard so i would want to know what you were saying to them because you know a blanket mail drop across thousands is the same as sending a mass email so i would want to know you know what does that postcard say is it a handwritten postcard that really talks about how happy you are to work with them or is it like a computer typed out a postcard that says the same exact thing to thousands of people so i think it's less about the postcard and more about the messaging within that postcard what i would recommend is thinking about your content across all channels whether it's social or offline or online and making sure that that content aligns with customer personas and customer avatars and customer pain points and that you understand who you're talking to regardless of you know how you're actually sending those messages out sure i mean i think kind of what i hear as well is don't forget the offline but don't think the offline is any more simple than the online and those shortcuts john and catherine i think what what i heard there was lots of possible shortcuts that people take and it's very tempting but probably a mistake yeah absolutely i mean i do think there's power in doing some offline things or some quirky things like that um i would again i rather than sort of doing that to lots of people i would i would maybe sort of really personalize it and make sure that it's just single things that you were doing offline which was really written to that one person i think that that would that would that would that would really personalize it but yeah it it it comes back it comes back to what we said those things are nice and and it's important to treat people whether where they feel special about your brand and so on um but there needs to be a line through it needs to it's not it can't just be one thing that is well we do this one cute thing there needs to be a line through throughout you know and that there's catherine said that's that's going to follow through that should be on your social that should be on your linkedin it should be it should be everywhere actually yeah it makes me think of something that happened this morning in fact is i receive lots of uh people who say oh i want to be on the on your podcast and you can see they've just copy pasted a template pitch and my daughter actually said to me you should just reply we're not interested in your square bracket template which i kind of thought was fun i'm not going to do it but that what i think we fail to realize as marketers is we hate to be templated yeah and yet we sometimes template catherine yeah 100 i mean marketers are in a tough position because they try to do so much with so little so most of the tech companies we work with run with really lean teams so that means that they might only have one or two people in their marketing department so when when you're trying to market at scale it's very hard to keep it focused on the customer keep personalizing it if you don't have you know lots of time so i think it's about being smart and you know having the right technology to support you so that some of those more tedious tasks like the workflow you know you don't necessarily have to do it can be automated it can be manually done and then you can focus on building those customer relationships and really applying the human skills where the human skills excel and allowing you know technology to take over in areas where perhaps you're not needed well i love that i mean using technology to actually get rid of the the the the the difficulty the very repetitive work focusing on the human being i love that i'm talking about human beings personas we're back to personas i mean somebody knife a sofiana or annie excuse me i'm terribly bad with names uh is asking is it confusing to have two personas that have similarities i mean i think they're saying you know if you have multiple personas that are too similar do you get confused and mess it all up no no that's definitely not i mean it's good to have some overlap because then you can create pieces of content that might speak to two but you know it's worth wondering you know how different are they you know is it just the job title that's different or are there other things that are different about them and perhaps if it's just something like a job title you can combine it so you can have one avatar that speaks to and captures the essence of both so i guess i would wonder you know how similar are they and what it comes down to for me is actually the essence of somebody so the pain points the psychological triggers the emotional state that they're in all of that kind of thing is far more important than like you know male female demographics age you know that kind of top level thing it's more about getting beneath the surface digging deep really thinking about what it is that's keeping them up at night what are they worried about and what's going to happen to them if that situation comes true and then how can you position yourself to solve that problem and you know positioning yourself to solve that problem makes you a headache reliever rather than a vitamin and if you're a headache reliever people have to take advantage of what you're offering today they can't wait they can't wait till tomorrow they can't wait till next budget review they have to do it today so it's so effective to think about those psychological triggers to dig deep and dig beneath the surface and make sure that that is what's captured rather than top level things like you know location or age or job title so the persona is all about kind of what's going to trigger them emotionally and psychologically rather with with your with regards to your product yeah because then you can figure out what to say to them so if you know the state that somebody's in emotionally psychologically then you can figure out what you need to say to them to convince them to trust you right okay because i mean i think a lot of people approach sorry personas and then personalization by as you say job title and location john that that presumably is a big mistake from what catherine's saying you definitely i mean there's there's no end to the questions you can ask in terms of creating a persona but and i i agree with everything catherine said there i would add from the from the tech perspective the thing that you also really want to find out which is sort of massively important for you as a marketer is what they're on what channels they're on what uh you know there's no point crafting your messages if your personas don't go to the places where your messages are um so that's massively important but again that that can kind of get wider than just the stuff you're talking about you know uh what social media are you on uh what what things do you like to read what things do you like to listen to what podcasts you listen to but also it yeah it you know it can become wider if you start to think about it culturally so that you can really again try to understand who that person is there's still a bit of job title age and all that sort of stuff that's that that does come into it too so i was over doing it and taking that all too too literally we have an interesting concept now with rockette who's asking what better way what's the best way and basically the question is can you give us some handy hints about how to a b test because once you start writing those messages pushing them out to personas obviously you need to figure out if it's working on catherine handy hints on a b testing figure out which message is working yeah well i think it's i mean marketing is all about testing reviewing results and then refining so i see marketing as this constant iteration of putting something out there reviewing the results gathering insights and then refining what you're doing so you know you have to start somewhere and even if you know where you start is not where you end up you start at this point and what then you have to track and monitor and when you're doing that that reveals further opportunities so you can kind of finesse this and you know get that messaging to a point that it does really resonate and that results do shine through so i think a lot of people think of marketing as like a silver bullet and it's not it's about learning and developing and being curious and not being afraid to explore new angles and to go a step further and constantly pushing and by constantly pushing you get to an end result that is really amazing right and what i heard that as well is kind of i immediately said a b testing and i kind of think maybe i was just immediately thinking that ambitious thing of having two sets and seeing which one works and you're saying actually it's an iterative process where i don't need all this technology to set up a b split testing in emails i can actually send an email see how it works then send another email to the same group of people and see how that works that's certainly how i see it but yeah i mean of course there's lots of different approaches to it no no sorry i was saying i was overdoing it it goes beyond that in a way jason in the sense that uh you know again uh if you've got uh content on your site if you've got landing pages on your site again you're gonna constantly be looking at how well is that converting how well is that doing what kind of leads am i getting from that so it does become more than a b testing in the sense that a marketer is always always improving and and and fine-tuning and and so on um let's let's not forget though you know goes back to some of those other things when you're sending out an email the title of your email is is huge you know and and and and there's again there's ways you can refine and get that right and and and make that better um and the other and this kind of hits on on catherine's point about creativity i do you know i i i really enjoy my myself i really enjoy louis grenier who talks a lot about sort of radical differentiation in in in b2b marketing uh that there is something to be said for trying a kind of or a an idea that you haven't tried before at all i mean that's that that's part of the fun if you can start to get creative and see what kind of results it gets but it has to be measured i've said that many times this this webinar yeah no and obviously don't put all your eggs in one basket and do one entire strategy around one test right it's a test as part of an overall strategy um i i think one question that i can i can almost feel coming from the audience they haven't actually asked but i'm going to ask anyway is for smaller companies i mean a lot of people work for smaller companies making a budget small budget go a long way in terms of content creation and pushing that out in a personalized manner catherine have you got some ideas for smaller companies yeah i mean i think content marketing is an incredibly effective way to do it so it's proven that seo is more cost effective than only doing paid advertising and ppc content also allows you to kind of scale that relationship so rather than having lots of sales people on the ground who can go out and speak to these people creating content that answers prospects questions and having that on your website helps streamline it so i see content as a very effective way of doing more with less and building that momentum and obviously as we know with organic traffic once you build that momentum and get that snowball going i always explain it that like organic is a bit like building a snowball at the top of the hill you build that snowball and you push it down and as it starts going it builds momentum and builds momentum until it can almost roll by itself and it becomes this really beautiful churning machine that sends you lots of really high quality leads um so i think you know investing in content and seo but then again of course i would say that but i would also i would also add to it that i think within that because i speak to a lot of people uh that are kind of that want to begin doing content marketing and so on and they say i don't have the resources or i don't have the time or uh it's just going it's just going to be too much yeah but and it but it's you know i think also i don't want to do you out of a job catherine but i think also that they uh that a lot of the times they don't realize that they already have content online uh they don't realize that actually uh some of their brochures some of some of the things that is on their site can be reformatted and made into a piece of content actually um or that if they went for one big piece of content that they can redo that as a as an infographic that they can redo that as a webinar that they can redo that as smaller articles that they can chop it up and do some social media with that as well it it's endless and and i totally agree with you it is the most cost effective in terms of uh creating leads in terms of creating traffic it's a it's a long term uh strategy but it's it's way more effective uh than than paid for ads in in in in google or or paid for answer within social media yeah have you got any advice for people who've got an impatient boss or client who's saying i want results tomorrow it's a hard that is a hard one right in the sense you would need to do you would you will well yeah okay i do have advice right i would say it's i mean it's and it's what everybody did this year uh you know which uh which we've seen yeah i mean i see there is there's every single uh website has done it and we're doing it right now it's do a webinar uh absolutely um it's it's exactly like doing an event uh if if if the subject matter is interesting you're gonna you're gonna start to see uh people engaging with your site and with what you're doing uh it's a it's a really effective way of cr quickly creating leads and then again if you can then keep their interest and keep them on your site uh you're starting to do something really interesting so you know webinars podcasts are interesting all those kind of things are normally going to going to bring some people uh into your site um and that's the beginning really of you starting your strategy right okay catherine for for smaller budgets yeah i mean or yeah for the quick win so i i would add that you know it's about planning a strategy that has a long-term gains as well as a quick win so you know when i'm saying that seo is far more effective cost effective than ppc i'm not saying don't do ppc you know you might want to do ppc in the short term while seo works in the long run and it's about having two mindsets constantly going how can i get results today and how can i get results over the long term and then making sure that you adjust that dial as needed so yes content may be you know a long-term game but there are things like content dissemination that you can do today so sharing on social going to the places where your customers already are and engaging with them there sharing the content by email lots of different formats to a repurpose it to please that small budget but then also to start to see results today now and get that quick wins as well as a long-term strategy so i think a good marketer needs to think in both of those terms and not just focus on just a long or just a short um both could be disastrous brilliant let me just add to this because it's something that that again is often forgotten in terms of content and so on but let's take the webinar example it's not something that just sits there and then you've got a whole bunch of leads and then it's it's actually something that works for you in the long term i mean we talk we talk a lot about like a virtuous circle of what content does it can be a webinar but it could be a white paper it can be anything in the sense that if you've you've got a piece of content you're going to promote it and you're going to ask people to go and have a look at it uh and then they're gonna come on it and they're gonna transform into leads but the promotion doesn't end there it carries on it keeps on working for you it works for you in terms of building up traffic you can use it on your page uh it's it it's it still works for you even after it's created so it it it's it's it's a long-term strategy but it can also you know you can do quick wins with it but you can it will carry on working for you after that as well brilliant okay i want to just just to end with elliot zibags talking about the fact that you know they've had to adapt the current situation is actually going to be the ongoing situation to a greater or lesser extent um how do you think things are going to evolve moving forward catherine obviously we've all been locked up for a year now um that's going to be less but it's still going to be something we need to deal with yeah 100 i mean one of the there's a lot that's come out of this last year and i think when we're talking about personalization what's come out of this last year is the empathy behind marketing so you know making sure that you message to your customers in a way that they want to hear bringing your messaging online so i mean all of us are kind of stuck in our houses we're spending more time online and brands that weren't already digital first are realizing the importance of it so i think what's happened over the last year is kind of fueling a natural evolution so all of these trends were kind of there before and now they're coming to the forefront even more so i mean you need to think about where your customers are and most of your customers are now going to be online you need to be more personal you need to be hyper personalized if you like you need to be more empathetic and you need to be helping to guide your customers through this so if we think of customers as a relationship then it's your job to make to help your customers transition to the new normal as much as i hate that term to help them pave the road for recovery and help them get to a brighter day get their businesses back up and running you know recover rebound as brands we almost have a responsibility to share the education the insights that we that we have to help people do that wonderful john yeah i mean i i think definitely catherine's right on the empathy and the and the human side i think i think it is it was you know as i said at the beginning of the presentation a lot of people spoke about it at the turn of the year and and use this phrase personalization but i think what they're really saying is is you know um speak to me like a human being show empathy um show interest in in what i'm interested in and and i think that should really be the key uh to to what everybody's doing um be careful be very careful with your messages i mean that's that that that's that's really what we're saying because if you if you can i would say keep up keep a certain amount of yourself right keep a certain amount of your humanity when you when you're sending those messages um but also you know make sure that the what you're sending is important and and and relevant to those people brilliant wonderful right do you want to quickly take this last question uh catherine from louis bruguera what percentage of your budget will you put on long-term efforts and short-term efforts yeah well i think it depends on where you already are so how i think of long-term for short-term is if you're getting started from ground zero you don't have any seo traction you don't have any organic acquisition going on then you'll want to put more on ppc you want to put more on the short term you know on those leads but as you get going you can kind of adjust that so you're not always spending lots of money on ppc you can adjust and refine so i think it's a very hard question to give an answer without understanding the context of where a brand might be and you know what what's going on what they've done in terms of marketing and what they want to achieve who they're attracting i think it it very much depends on the individual brand and the circumstance that they find themselves in right i think kind of in relation sorry i'll let you finish off that john but in relationship to to what we're living through at the moment short-term survival long-term growth and development and a lot of companies are simply trying to survive so i think you've got to look at where where where can you put your budget which will help you to survive to to actually have the the longer term opportunities john excuse me i'm sorry i i i would sort of only flip it in the sense that uh again you you you can simply do content or you can simply do inbound marketing you with sort of two to three pieces of content uh and you can use that within your page to get instant results uh and you can start to do that thing where you are actually having what we're talking about let's go back to to to that to to being human right or to this situation or new normal or whatever inbound marketing or content marketing is actually just engaging in a relationship just all even in these phrases like marketing or content or things like that or automation or but actually you know what it is is actually engaging in a relationship uh and and and and you know taking that relationship on a journey you need to think of it in those terms i would say that you're you know you can be surprised what could be considered short-term what can be considered long-term some of the stuff you're putting on linkedin is actually long-term because it doesn't go away it's there for your brand all the time uh if you're putting interesting content which is on your site on linkedin as well uh that's gonna build your brand for a long time if you're doing paid linkedin or paid facebook with content that is interesting to your to your target market that content will pay off for you straight away so that you can you can start engaging in the in a longer term thinking and get some quick wins from them brilliant that's a beautiful way to describe short and long term and wrap up this delightful webinar thank you very much john and catherine thank you to the audience who are watching that was amazing don't forget for the audience you can watch this back again it's going to say on youtube the slide that will be available i'm sure afterwards and i'm sure you all want to join me in thanking catherine and john thank you thank you very much jason thank you thank you thank you everyone who joined us yeah thanks for having me catherine that was awesome i thought it was brilliantly interesting and wonderfully informative and i'm terribly happy to have spent an hour and five minutes with you too thank you very much see you soon everybody

Channel: Semrush Live

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Id: _wFco2HGbB0

Length: 65min 31sec (3931 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021