by scott.gillum | Oct 13, 2020 | 2020, Business Trends
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
This post ran original on The Drum on September 30th it can be viewed by clicking here
Thank you Covid, we just broke the record for poor performance. According to Hubspot, the response rate to emails fell to a record low of 2.1% in April. Said differently, 98% of our efforts to reach new prospects failed.
With conversion down what did we do? You guessed it, we increased the number of emails sent during the same period by 50%, according to Hubspot’s survey of 70,000 customers. We are playing a zero sum game, and it’s literally a race to the bottom.
Why is this acceptable? Yes, the pandemic has had a dramatic impact, but even in good times, a 4% click through rate is the benchmark. Why haven’t we been able to improve?
Because the only real lever we really had was to increase volume as conversion rates declined. Now with the advent of new tools, we’re uncovering issues and learning new insights into how to improve performance. Here are 3 things we have discovered so far.
Issue #1 – The Wrong Objectives
Marketing has, because of the pressure from the rest of the organization (from mostly sales and the product organization) lost sight of its objectives. Marketing’s goal is to increase the awareness and interest in a company’s brand, product and/or services and get that prospect to take action. It’s to start the cycle, get a conversation going and drive interest.
A good marketing prospect is an information seeker. Employees who are on the constant lookout for information that benefits them personally, in their role, or for the greater good of the company. A great marketing prospect is someone who will bring our information into the organization, get the buying process started and advocate for your brand.
The point, what we are defining is a personality type, not a title. In the past that has been very difficult to identify. As a result, we have had to rely on mining the existing customer database or using a persona that was defined by the product or sale organization which has left us with senior level buyers.
The problem with that is many of these targets, who are decision makers or budget holders, are not present at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. And as we now know, they are also not interested in what we’re offering.
Issue #2 – The Wrong Targets
With the advent of personality profiling tools like Crystal Knows, IBM Watson, or xiQ, it is now possible to determine which personality types are most likely to meet the needs of marketing.
AI enabled profiling tools identify 4 personality types as defined by DISC (Dominant, Influencing, Steady and Conscientious). Of the four personalities, only 2 types of audiences are good for marketing purposes because of their behaviors and motivations.
Based on our recent client work across the healthcare, tech and professional services industries, we also know that at least 30% of a company’s customers will profile into one of the two categories that are either not active information seekers or are not active in the buying group.
They will not convert, but given our current practices, they still end up on the target list driving down response and conversion rates.
Issue #3 – The Wrong Type of Content or Marketing Assets or Both
The two key audience segments that are present at the beginning of the buying process and actively seek information have different motivations for why, and how they intend to use information.
When targeting titles, companies create one type of content based on that buyer’s role. With personality profiling we know that audiences have different preferences for content and how it’s packaged.
The first personality type prefers “big picture” highly visual content told in story form. These “motivators” are drawn to infographics, animated and testimonial videos, which allow them to grasp concepts very quickly.
Their personality type is “altruistic” and they use information to share with others for the good of the organization. Their motivations are deeply personal in that they like to be seen or perceived as a “thought leader” that others seek out for insight.
Contrast that with the other active information seeker. The “demonstrator” profile seeks information relevant to them in their role. They want “proven” information, use cases, case studies, and business case material (ROI’s). Content that is rich in information on how to implement and business impact.
Combined, these two groups will make up 70% of your responders to marketing activities depending on what it is, and you need to know how that mixes to build and align content. And here’s a hint, you only need two types of personas for marketing…the two I just described.
We are dealing with a future that is more uncertain than anything we have experienced in the past. Add to that an election, polarization and social justice movements we have one of the most emotionally charged atmospheres in modern history. ABM and personas do not delve deep enough into defining buyers interest, motivations and preferences.
To improve marketing performance you have to ramp up personality based marketing and that will require work. Not everyone will be willing to put in the effort, but the ones that are will break the chain of putting more in and getting less out.
by scott.gillum | Aug 18, 2020 | 2020, Marketing
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 2 Minutes
Antonio Ramírez, CEO at Pixel506 and Scott Gillum, CEO & Founder of Carbon Design discuss what you need to know about Digital Marketing newest trends. Topics discussed will be managing work and family life balance and how to keep employees engaged, productive and appreciated.
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by scott.gillum | Feb 2, 2017 | 2017, Sales
The organization has a short-term ‘sales culture’ so almost everything marketing does is oriented to creating a lead. You know that there are larger system/infrastructure issues that are impacting performance but you can’t anyone to invest/focus on them. You’re on a trend mill running as fast as you can, but going nowhere.
It’s a nightmare thousand of marketers are living everyday, so let’s get to fixing this issue, permanently. The problem, at its core, is money. Yes, resources and time are also issue but the bigger challenge is that you have is a budget loaded with program dollars intended to be spent on media, events and other lead generating activities. Unfortunately, little are earmarked to fix the web infrastructure, navigation and content issues that are keeping leads from converting. You have a system problem, without system dollars to fix it.
Step one in the process is to get a capex budget. Just like the one used to build the corporate website. And get a big one, depending on size of the website you’ll need at least $500K, and perhaps over $1M, to build a “system” that will improve conversion rates. Here’s how you’re going to spend it.
- Assessing Search – does the organization know what it wants to be known for (what topics, products, solutions) and how audiences search for those items? If not, pull together a top 10 list and get to work finding out. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz Open Site Explorer and Moz Keyword Explorer to gauge popularity and set priorities from your existing website.
- Increasing SEM spend – after assessing your top 10 priorities you’ll most likely find you need to increase your spend to improve your position. Determine how much, and for how long.
- Inventorying & Assessing Content – while your marketing dollars are working to help audience find you, the next step is to help visitors find the information they are looking for quickly. Assess the content on the following criteria: relevance (is it current, audience aligned, and insightful), accessibility (clicks and public view), and scanablity (ease of assessing key points)
- Evaluating Readability – time to take a hard look at the content you’re producing. Is it written in the audience language or your engineers? Is it compelling, will it engage audiences. Use tools like Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease and the Gunning Fog Index to help score content.
- Modifying Content – this could be painful. Try to leverage existing material. If you have videos, carve them up into 2 minute or less “snackable” insights. Long form content like white papers, etc., do the same. Chunk content into smaller more digestible bits. Next, create templates and guidelines for producers to follow so they know the type of content that will work best for marketing needs.
- Investing in UX – find out how visitors really navigate your site. You may be shocked by their lack of sophistication, and patience. Use tools like Validately to help assess users experience with your web properties.
- Optimization Everything – create pilot pages based on the UX findings and watch how visitors navigate and consume content. Use tools like Hot Jar to help track visitor clicks. Set performance metrics for bounce rates, time on page and conversion rates. Performance optimization is an ongoing effort so become comfortable with constant experimentation.
- Training Everyone – to produce the right content, invest the time and resources to train on how to use the new templates — product marketers on how to produce audience focused content, marketing folks on how to write ad copy that’s compelling, etc. Use insights gathered in steps 5 and 7 to convince folks to get onboard.
- Hiring an advisor – if this sounds like a lot of work, it is. If you don’t have the staff, the time, or the desire to take it on get someone to help you. You have a day job producing leads so put someone else on a parallel path of improving the process and performance. Chunk up the work plan mentioned above into quarters, align it to the marketing and the organizations priorities and set reasonable expectation on making progress.
Inbound marketing, content marketing, digital marketing, whatever you want to call it is not a marketing “tactic,” it is an ecosystem built from the outside in and requires a system thinking approach. The steps above will help you pinpoint issues within the system. “Digitalizing” an organization starts with audience facing sites so try to align this effort with any organizational effort related to digital transformation.
Getting the funding, use data points to prove the value of building a robust inbound lead generation capability. According to CEB, 71% of buyers start their purchase journey on the web. Build a market visibility index using your pipeline/waterfall metrics and market share. Reverse the numbers and find out what percent of the total opportunities available are in your pipeline. If you need more benchmarks, download Hubspot latest report on inbound marketing.
Need a case study? The process I just describe was implemented at a client this year. The results of the investment and effort have produced a 95% increased in MQL’s and an improvement in conversion rates by 65%. Inbound is now the top lead source in volume and performance. This organization has a hardcore outbound sales culture…which now, believes in the power of inbound marketing.
