by Christina | Mar 22, 2022 | 2022, Insights
As previously published on 3/14/22 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Let’s give credit where credit is due, most B2B organizations have made the transition from leading with products to being customer or market focused. Content is now shaped first with the needs of the target audience (industry, company and buyers).
Many companies make it a regular practice to research “hot topics” in the industry, the needs of those buyers and their channel preferences . Personas are shaped around the insights, and content and messaging are created to align with needs, then carefully aligned to the buyers’ journey.
So is that personalization?
What about the customer experience on the website? This is how Forbes describes website personalization.
Website personalization is the practice of creating a custom experience for site visitors based on who they are and what they want. Rather than providing a single experience for all site visitors, website personalization allows B2B businesses to create unique experiences for visitors based on factors like location, industry and even website behavior.
Ok, got it. Let’s add location, website behavior and personalized digital experiences, and we should be good. Does anyone see the problem here? Bueller, Bueller, anyone?
There is no “person” in any of this so-called “personalization.” There are personas, but they’re most likely role based. Web behaviors, yes important, but without understanding the motivations behind those actions, you only left to guess their intentions.
How do you begin to understand behaviors, motivations and preferences? Start with understanding audience personalities.
In almost every industry, there are only 1-2 dominant personalities. If you’re in the life sciences segment, there is a good chance you’ll over-index with “skeptics” and “status quo” seekers. Selling to a marketing audience? You’re going to find an overabundance of “influencers” and “champions.”
To truly create a world class customer experience, you have to be able to align to the preferences of your audience. Those preferences are not driven by a title or a role.
And it’s not just their preference for channel and content, but more importantly, how the content is packaged, how it’s messaged, and/or how it’s created.
Understanding your dominant audience provides the insight to set your marketing, digital and engagement strategy. It provides the level of insight necessary to take your existing activities and assets to the next level.
Webinars appeal to a certain audience, but only if the topic is research or data backed, and presented by a credible speaker. Animated videos are preferred by another audience type, as long as they are sharable and short.
Don’t rest on thinking you have the right content, at the right place (in the buying process), in the right channel. It’s not enough. Not all the buyers are the same, they all don’t take the same path, consume the same content, and/or prefer the same channel.
In fact, without really knowing their personal motivation and behaviors, most of this insight is based on previous experiences that happened randomly but is assumed to be true for all, and/or based on research with buyers who will say one thing, and then do another.
Deep down inside we know that to be true, because we know that buyers are people, and people are as unique as their personalities…just as no two buyer experiences are the same.
“Personalization” as it is defined for B2B today, is more about trying to get the tools to work better, than it is about improving customer experience. Technology is an enabler, but it is not personalization. Understanding what makes buyers human is. The process has to be flipped so that it starts with the goal of understanding buyers at a deeper level, do that, and the tools will begin to work better.
by scott.gillum | Feb 1, 2022 | 2022, Insights
As previously published on 1/26/22 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Does the answer to improving B2B marketing success tie back to a problem discovered during World War II? Perhaps.
The B-17 plane was quick and inexpensive to build with a goal of “blackening the sky” over Europe. The problem with that strategy was because they were designed to be quickly built they ended up being easily shot down. In fact, soon after entering the war, the B17 was getting shot out of the sky faster than they could be built.
Recognizing that something had to be done to keep them in the air, the decision was made to assemble a group of engineers to study the returning planes, and assess where to add armour.
The team was about to submit their findings when Abraham Wald, a lead engineer on the project, pointed out that they were thinking about the problem the wrong way. Instead of putting armour on areas that were damaged by bullets, they should be thinking about adding armor to the areas where there were no bullet holes, because those areas were most vulnerable.
This phenomenon, known as “survivorship bias,” can be seen all over B2B marketing. Survival bias is a type of selection bias. It’s a logic error that occurs when focusing on things that survive rather than looking at things that didn’t. By selectively leaving data out of the analysis it can cause one to make the wrong conclusion, like putting armor on the bullet holes of returning planes.
In B2B marketing, there are signs of this bias in almost everything we do. We try to scale and “optimize” a 3% response rate or 10% open rate. Focusing on the “returning planes,” missing the opportunity to assess, and understand, how to improve on the 90%+ of our effort that didn’t return a result.
This myopic view on scaling the “3%” drives us to an endless cycle of investing in new technologies. Providing a momentary boost in performance which quickly dissipates. This stacking more tools on the “stack” has now put us at the top of the yield curve. Essentially, marketing tools are now being shot out of the sky faster than they can be built.
Scale has become the enemy of the good. Remember this for 2022. Volume will not necessarily get you to your goals. For example, according to Hubspot’s 2021 Industry Survey (over 100K companies) email performance dropped by 30% from the previous year, which was historically low. So what did companies do? They sent even more emails, increasing by over 120%. (I believe that is commonly referred to as the definition of insanity.)
For years, I searched for an answer for why marketing performance continued to be poor, despite advancement in new technologies. Stumbling upon survival and selection bias helped to explain some things but what I’ve concluded is that at the core, it’s a motivational issue. Confusing activity for performance is convenient. Searching for, assessing and acquiring new tools offers hope and can feel like you’re making progress.
It’s time to stop looking external for a solution and turn our efforts internally. The answer to improving performance lies in the insight from the missing data.
To win the war on poor performance will require a commitment to thinking differently, like Wald. Not everyone will be willing, or able, to make this journey, but as another WWII hero, Winston Churchill once said; “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Onward soldier!
by scott.gillum | Dec 1, 2020 | 2020, Business Trends
Face to face meetings are dead, at least for the foreseeable future. Companies have invested in sales enablement platforms without seeing a measurable improvement in productivity. Email response rates are at a record low, and webinar performance is declining. Scott interviews Dr. Howard Dover, Director of Professional Sales and Sales Coach, University of Texas at Dallas on these challenges and how they are impacting how we sell now and in the future .
To hear Scott’s entire conversation with Dr. Howard Dover, Director, Center of Professional Sales, and professional sales coach to discuss the Future Of Selling”, listen or download here:
by scott.gillum | Nov 16, 2020 | 2020, ebooks, Marketing
What would your work day look like if you could pick how you spent your time?
When we founded Carbon Design three years ago we did it with the idea that work had changed…but companies hadn’t. People wanted to, and in some cases, had to, work differently. The M-F, 9 am to 5 pm workweek was an antiquated industrial revolution legacy.
With the impact of Covid, the idea of a “work day” has changed even more dramatically. So that’s why we survey our talent to better understand what a real work day really looks like now.
The cool part of this survey – Carbon is probably only one of few organizations that could actually figure out what a real work day looks like because of our business model.
Our talent “own” their time, we don’t. Because they’re not a FTE, they have the autonomy to make their own hours, focus their energy on work or life when and how they choose.
For the survey, we randomly choose a group of people to fill in how they spend their time. The diverse group included an almost even mix of women, men and age groups.
Starting at 5:00 am the group used different colors to fill in 30 minute increments to define their focus at that time, extending to midnight. Three colors were used to create a “heat map.” Red showing time dedicated to work, yellow indicates a blending of life and work activities and green represents personal time.
The results of the survey yielded insights into how to bring employees back into the office, how work days differ for parents based on children’s ages, and how to managing people in this challenging time.
by scott.gillum | Nov 12, 2020 | 2020, Marketing
On Friday, November 13th at 10am EST Scott Gillum, Founder & Chief Executive Office of Carbon Design spoke with a panel of industry experts at The Drum Digital Summit. The panel fused real cases of success with personalization, helping the industry understand what is achievable today, while also taking a look at the risks and rewards of implementing personalization in digital advertising and online purchases.
The panel covered the importance of providing more meaningful engagement with potential customers along with best in class examples of:
· Personalization and relevancy in digital advertising today
· How direct-to-consumer companies personalize their product offerings
· Personalized Customer Experiences that DTC companies provide
The Drum Digital Summit was a five-day festival which kicked off on Monday 9 November and brought together key players from tech, brands and agencies. The APAC publisher and programme curator, Charlotte McEleny, picked out 10 must-watch sessions.
The core theme that ran through every session was ‘speed’, which is reflective of one of the words that is being uttered most regularly in conversations with the editorial team, in every country.
The event can he downloaded here.
by scott.gillum | Oct 30, 2020 | 2020, Marketing
Scott appears on Jason Swenk’s Smart Agency Master Class Podcast, the #1 Digital Marketing Agency Owner podcast for sharing the strategies and stories from real agency owners of what is working today in the agency world, and how they got to where they are now.
In this episode with Jason, Scott will cover:
- What is the “upside-down” approach to recruiting agency talent?
- Can an agency be successful with a team full of contractors?
- How you can keep your employees focused.
