EP 51 - Don’t Over-Index on Performance Marketing with Haley Pierce @ The B2B Institute

Speaker A: Jonathan, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Um, we're thrilled to pick your brain. So just to start, could you share a little bit more about what you do at Omnilab?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, thanks for having me on again too. I think this would be uh, this would be fun. Uh, yeah, I mean the, the short story to keep it really simple. So OMNILAB is a B2B demand gen agency. We work solely with predominantly early stage SaaS. Startups are in that series A to series C range, usually raised 10 to $100 million which is still pretty broad, but those are kind of the core focus in terms of clients we work with and what we help them do is uh, create, manage and optimize anything related to the paid media that they're running. So their whole entire program. So that could be like YouTube, Meta, LinkedIn, Google, Bing, also all the ad creative as well, uh, that they're running. And so think like any static image, ad, motion graphic, et cetera that goes into a box inside one of channels will help them create that, to create engaging creative. And then there's the conversion, tracking and analytics part too, of course. Right. So Google tag manager GA4 making sure everything's piping correctly because we want to have good conversion data so we know what's working and what's not. But ultimately, philosophically where we've always been is that uh, we've always tried to balance with any of the brands you work with, the balance between performance marketing, direct response and brand marketing. The stuff that's not direct response or we're having a longer term view. And so those direct response campaigns are clearly going to be more geared around KPIs like pipeline opportunities, quality conversions, things like that. Whereas brand marketing are going to be about social mentions, the trend of brand searches month over month and other metrics like that so that we understand how things are performing. And so it's a delicate balance that I know we're going to get into a little bit, but that's a lot of what we do with um, with our clients.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's great, great overview. Thank you for sharing that. I mean you alluded to what is like we're going to talk more about around this big challenge between brand and demand. And at the B2B Institute we work with lots of B2B marketers who have the same challenges. And I think our audience in particular is very curious about how our research applies to small brands. So obviously you get to work with smaller B2B SaaS brands every day. So I'd love to just kind of start with what's been the most surprising thing that you've learned from working with them.

Speaker B: Yeah, something's interesting. I could almost flip that question. It's a little bit unsurprising too, what I'm about to say at the same time, but I think there's still a huge reliance, um, by a lot of these brands still on direct response like we were talking about before. And no matter what expectations are set with them, I think a lot of people struggle with the idea that there are people that are simply not in market for what they do. And so I think a lot of this just comes back to the good old psychological bias, the present bias. And um, short termism is certainly a popular term that's been used a lot on Marketing Week from some famous people. And so it really comes back to that and our need to prioritize shorter term returns over longer term returns. And so it's difficult. And I can totally empathize because you've got a lot of these brands that we work with where at least last quoted by Saster, runways at about 12 to 18 months. And so when you think about that, I mean 12 to 18 months to live before you have to raise again is a lot of pressure on a CEO or a non marketer, cfo, whoever's running the company. And so ultimately they're tasked with needing to fulfill some of the end market demand today. They have to hit some of those numbers because if they don't, they may not be able to get to their next round of funding, whether it be series B, C, D or whatever round they're on. And so it's a difficult thing to balance those two things, but it's still surprising to me that most of them are over indexing on those types of campaigns. And when I say direct response, I mean things like G2 Capterra, uh, Google Ads, Bing channels like that, or heavy legion motions on LinkedIn. And so you really miss out on a lot of opportunity by thinking about which we'll talk, I'm sure about a little bit, the 95, 5 rule, and thinking about the fact that there's a whole lot of people that you're marketing to that are just not going to bite on that offer. And so you need to kind of sometimes take a step back and say, wait a minute, should we be potentially positioning ourselves and our brand a little bit differently in terms of the stuff that we're communicating, or should everything be just a book, a demo type ad? And the answer is clearly that there are the majority of people that are out of market which we can chat about in a second. But I'll stop my uh, real quick there, maybe have a thought or two.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I mean I think you're right and I think every marketer particularly now is facing a significant amount of pressure um, around like proving the value of their work. And I think the easy and most quantifiable way to do so is through Legion outcomes or just bottom of funnel stuff. And so you know, many of the marketers we work with also get stuck in this trap of like, well I can prove kind of X media spend translate to X leads. And so that's a super tangible thing for them to be, to be able to talk to. But I think the reality is, and a lot of times the education that we're doing is, you know, your lead gen outcomes are actually going to get stronger with some top of funnel work. So um, but you know, totally empathize with the idea that like if you're not proving results quickly, you know, particularly for these smaller startups, like your marketing budget's going to be cut and the company, you know, potentially is not going to make money, which is, is what we're all trying to do. So um, yeah, totally, totally empathize. But it's sort of like striking the balance.

Speaker B: It is. I mean if you, if you can't hit some of the short term goals, I mean I always say the best thing to come to a CEO, uh, if you're about to present something that's going to be a longer term type of player program is show them how you've been able to hit some of the initial shorter term goals. I mean show them that there's some proof of work. Like hey, here's what we're doing over here. It's purely focused on capture. We're getting some pretty good results right here. I just want to use around 10 to 20% of the budget on these types of campaigns. Here's how we're going to measure them, here's the timeline of how long we're going to run them and here's what we can expect, right? And just really make sure everyone's on the same page on that. It's a really tough conversation if you're not hitting shorter term goals and then you're trying to bring forward an idea of hey, maybe we should launch this podcast or do this really big brand campaign where we don't expect to see any real results from it, uh, at least within the next, you know, three to Six months. That's going to be a tough pill for anyone to swallow, especially a CEO that's got, you know, 12 to 18 months to live, so.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we sometimes work with CFOs and in the context of like their relationship with their cmo. And a lot of it is around the education piece of like, hey, we care about the long term value of this company, which CFOs tend to really resonate with. And so it's more. So like, how do we reframe some of the marketing work that we're doing, doing to make sure it is in the language that makes sense to your cfo, your CRO, your CEO, and just demonstrating like, here's the approach that we're taking, here's the early indicators of success. You're not going to see all the value immediately, but here's like kind of proof that this approach could be, could be working.

Speaker B: And one thing to add to that before we move on, I mean, I think there's an easy example. I mean, let's say, um, in a terrible situation, you had a termite problem in your house and um, you know, you were trying to think of some people or some brands that came to mind that could come in and resolve that problem. Well, the first thing that you're going to do, and this is kind of a thought process that I go through with some other people, not always this example of course, but others. And so the thought goes, all right, well, if I'm the easiest least path of resistance, is for me to clearly think of who are the top brands that come to mind immediately. Right. Just to think there for a second without talking to anyone, doing any research, going to Google or nothing. Right? Just purely thinking who are the top brands. And if you don't know anyone, um, then you're likely to maybe go to a community, maybe a friend, maybe a co worker, you might do something like that. And then after that, if no one comes up or you don't have maybe any good friends that you think are going to give good recommendations around that, then you might go to Google or Bing or a search engine or something like that, or nowadays chatgpt to ask a question. And so the point is that Google or search or these types of platforms are really there as the last resort for people when they can't think of anything else. And so I think the whole thought process around investing more in brand revolves around the idea of mental availability and making sure that you are that 1, 2, 3 top brand in their mind. So they're saying, okay, I've got a termite problem. I'm thinking Terminix for example. Okay, they may be a good brand. I see their green trucks all over the place. Maybe I should give them a call. And so then instead it's just going to Google or directly in the URL path and writing the brand name. And so that's where again, you look at brand name volume over time to understand how your investment's improving are the things you really want.

Speaker A: So yeah, I mean totally we have like really big on this idea of like you need to be top of mind for your buyer before they enter the category because otherwise it's just too late. Because the reality is like people's consideration sets are so small when they're looking for a product or service to purchase. I think termite is, you know, a great example. Like that is an urgent problem I'm trying to fix. Like I don't have all, you know, all the time in the world to do like a pro con list of the type of people to work with. And so they're likely to your point gonna be like, here's the brand that I already know. Let me reach out to them or go to a neighbor friend. So you actually have such little time to influence once they're in market. Typically. Um, okay, well you alluded to uh, previously our favorite rule, uh, at the B2B Institute, which we call 955 Rule. Um, not taking credit for that rule. It's, you know, John Dawes from the Amber Bass Institute coined the term. We have just loved evangelizing it these past few years. And I think, reason being is that it's just a very powerful tool in illustrating the importance of brand advertising in B2B. Um, so, you know, you talked a little bit about the beginning of this, this kind of challenge between brand and demand, particularly for the small brands who need to prove the demand outcomes quickly. Um, talk to us a little bit about how you views the 95.5rule in those conversations and just sort of like has it helped, um, marketers internalize this need for brand and demand?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I'm uh, actually talking to John Dawes on next year in January, which is going to be really interesting. Never met him before, so be, uh, asking him a whole lot of questions on some ideas around the 95 rule as well. But yeah, I mean I think it's um, and I think the inspiration from it, even reading John Dawes's original blog way back when he coined this, was that it was never meant to be A precise calculation. The goal was never to get an Excel spreadsheet and say, I have a thousand accounts in my target market and uh, I'm going to whittle that down to the 5% that are actually in market in a given quarter and then I'm going to take a certain action using, uh, that data, that information, assuming I could even find out who exactly those 5% of people that are in market are. That that type of thing is interesting is a thought experiment, more to talk through. And so the way that we think about it is really just framing up the fact that not everyone is in market for what you do today and using the 955 rule as a way to think about the idea of dedicating a little bit more budget towards brand marketing or campaigns that are not direct response. Just knowing the fact that just by that simple rule or heuristic, you know that you've got to have some campaigns that are dedicated towards other types of activities that are not just book a call or download ebook or download this template or whatever the direct response offer is. And so I've been asking a lot of marketers about this too recently because I've been very curious to see if any other organizations actually practically using this in a very scientific way. And I still haven't uh, come across anyone that's doing it that way. In fact, there's still a lot of people. As much evangelization as being done by you all and me and plenty of other people all over LinkedIn, there's still a lot of people that don't even know what it is or even heard of it. And so I think we need to clearly talk about it more so that more people understand that, hey, there's clearly a big percentage of the people that are not a market. And in fact, even before John Dawes, I think you and I chatted about this maybe a few weeks ago when I initially, um, had a conversation. But it was Chet Holmes, uh, back, I think it was 2005 or 2007, he wrote a book called the Ultimate Sales Machine. And it was actually in that book that I first heard about even the concept of in market, out of market and putting some type of a number around it. And he'd come up with, uh, heuristic 97.3, which theoretically, again, none of these things are meant to be precise. But the way that he did it is he just stood up in front of a room and he, he said, hey, is uh, anyone in the market for buying a house right now? And he just kind of looked around the room and estimated but it ended up being around you know, almost 97% of the room saying that they didn't raise their hand, they weren't in market. 3% that did raise their hands. And he did that with a couple of other categories of products and he was just trying to make the point that like hey look like if you lead your message with book a call, book a demo, get XYZ thing all the time, you're going to have your message fall flat for a lot of people that are just not there yet. You know, they're not going to bite on that type of thing. So um, so again I think the TLDR is, it's more a more ah, way to frame up the conversation and not necessarily, at least I have not seen this today. I'd be very curious if anyone is, but if not, Cindy uses a really precise calculation to um, divvy up budgets.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I think it's just like a powerful framework to rethink your approach because I'm sure you know when he stood up in a room and asked how many people were ready to buy a house today, the crowd was probably like oh right, that feels a little bit obvious that not everyone is going to purchase today. But it's, it's as a marketer you get caught up in this tendency that like everyone's thinking about your brand as much as you are and it's clearly far from case. Um, so yeah, I love that and you know we don't have a lot of customers who use it and as that like with that precision per se we have some and varies by category of course. We mostly have customers internalize it to like, like rethink their strategy across brand and demand and also use it to educate their teams, educate their cross functional partners on the intention behind kind of this full funnel approach. Um, but yeah, I love that we also commonly use the example um, like the automobile category and if you think about it um, blanking on the exact brand. But um, we usually use the example that like most people don't buy a car like every year they buy a car every 10 years. But you see like car categories, they're advertising constantly so they understand kind of the reality of their, they need to be top of mind for buyers regardless if they're ready to purchase a car, you know, let alone in the next two years, the next 10 years.

Speaker B: Right, that's an interesting point. Yeah, I mean I think that's a good point uh, about the rule as well to Keep in mind is that that rule is based off a five year inter purchase time period. And so he initially had the idea just as a general average and a starting point, because to your point, it's different from business to business and product category to product category. But, uh, the idea was to say, all right, well, if you can estimate or survey or get an understanding of how often a consumer buys a certain product category, like CRM, um, cybersecurity software, automobile, you know, toothpaste, whatever, then you can start to form an understanding of how often they may be in market based on some of those behaviors. And then do some simple math from, you know, some division between, you know, if you want to look at month, quarter year, et cetera, you can estimate, you know, the amount of people that could be in market. And so that is really important because, uh, to your point, it's not the same for everyone. So in your category, things may move a lot quicker than, uh, than every five years.

Speaker A: So. Yeah, exactly. And like B2B, obviously there's longer buying cycles, so that's why this rule really makes sense. But to the, in the toothpaste category, you know, you're not buying toothpaste every 10 years, or at least I hope you're not so big thing of toothpaste. Right. So, yeah, I think it's important to like layer on the category nuance here.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, cool. So I'd love to talk a little bit more, um, about future buyers. This is like we talked about this in the context of the 95, 5 rule. But, you know, I think we know how important future buyers are regardless if your brand is big or small. Um, so I'm curious from your perspective, if you talk about future buyers with your customers and you know, generally, why do you think that they matter so much?

Speaker B: I think it comes back to the termite example a little bit to a degree. I mean, we can use lots of different ones, but just given the fact that we've established that not everyone's in market, uh, there are people that may not be a good fit for you even right now, but could be a fit later. Businesses grow, change, uh, problems arise in the future. And so what you want to establish really early on is that you're one of the top choices in your product category for a very specific situation or a need or a pain point that you can solve better than anyone else or maybe in a better or different way that best matches what you're looking for. And so future buyers are incredibly important because that's your future cash flows that's the future money you stand to make in future quarters. We're always thinking about this month, this week, this quarter. Uh, these are the people though that maybe are not really ready right now. But if you create the right associations in their mind today and in the future and over the months and years of doing consistently good marketing, that's where you can start to get into the minds of them and say, all right, well when you do have a need, like we'll be here, like these are the things that we're really good at. And once those associations are really intact, I mean, for example, for us, one thing that we've always Talked about on LinkedIn is just, uh, we're about quality or quantity. And uh, we relate that to quality leads, quality conversions, which means precise targeting, good targeting, getting the right types of buyers into our funnel, making that we're on the right channels where our buyers are spending time. And so that's a situation that lots of clients have struggles with. They have struggles with getting the right types of leads into their business and they have quality problems and conversion rate problems and things are moving to the funnel fast enough and all sorts of things, as you know all too well. And so if we can start to associate at least our brand with those things that we're a potential solution for helping you, uh, get better quality leads that convert at a higher rate through your funnel, well then that, that's a great association because not everyone has that problem right now. I'm sure everyone would agree, like it'd be better to have one, uh, hundred percent conversion rate or something like that. But the pain may be smaller right now and bigger for others. And so maybe it's not there right now for some of those future buyers, but when it is, we want them thinking about Omnilab potentially as a brand to solve that problem as it relates to paid media. And so that's why it's so important to uh, think about those folks also because of the majority too, the majority of buyers are just not ready. And so if you ignore them, then it's going to be very hard for you to think about, um, a future mine mindset. And the last point I'd add is, you know, there is a cap, as uh, we've kind of said over and over again, to how much you can scale a channel like Google Ads. I mean, Google Ads is actually a great example because you can literally go into Keyword Planner and you can size the amount of searches for specific high intent terms. And by no stretch is it a way to size the Whole entire market demand. Right, because it's just one channel, but at least gives you a directional input to say, okay, great, we know that, that there's a thousand searches for these high intent terms. Well, now we know that there's literally a cap, like we might get to a point where we've just spent as much budget as we possibly can spend and that's it. There are no more people that are searching for this category or for the jobs that we actually accomplish. And so I'll stop myself there. You probably have a thought or two before I, uh, you know, rant too much.

Speaker A: I think this is like a great kind of segue into what I wanted to dive deeper on which I like creative and messaging, because I think you started to make that point very clearly. Um, in that, you know, for future buyers, you need to be thinking about, you know, they don't know about your brand. You need to be thinking about the messaging and creative that is broad enough and like widely accessible enough, yet emotional enough to really drive some type of future memory. So that when, you know, in the automobile category, 10 years later, they still have an association with your brand, they still remember your brand. Um, so I want to talk a little bit more about that, but I did want to share sort of like in the context of this day one list concept, which at B2B I, we've been champion, championing quite a lot recently. And I wanted to share a few stats just to sort of like hone in why it's so critically important and why the messaging and creative piece is so critically important for the future buyers. So feel humor in me for these stats and see what you think. Um, but so generally, on average we see that 86% of B2B buyers start with a day one list of brands in mind. So that, that's, you know, once they enter the category, like the termite example, they already have a few brands in mind. And on average we see that that day one list only includes three brands. I think it's actually like 2.7. So round up to three, but three brands only, so that's super small. And then even more Interestingly is that 92% of those buyers end up choosing one of those three brands. So when you think about how small that is, and if you look at the category and how many players there are in any given category, there's millions of brands to choose from. But most people think of the brand that usually has like, either comes from like a strong referral and personal connection or that is like the largest player in the category. So when it relates to messaging and creative, I feel like that's when brands can really make their mark on helping drive the associations to get their brand on that day one list. So curious, like in your work with, um, particularly the smaller B2B SAS brands who probably don't have the market share, um, what do you advise them to do when it comes to messaging and creative?

Speaker B: I think let's start with messaging first. Messaging is probably even more important, uh, than the creative itself to get. Right. Um, certainly the thing that we argue about the most, I know with a lot of our clients it's always messaging and copy and uh, trying to really get the nuances of what we're trying to communicate out there. Correct. But I think it really comes back to, um, buying triggers, or you guys would certainly call that category entry points, uh, things like that. Buying triggers is what we a lot of times use as a term for it. But really it kind of comes back to making sure that we've mapped out for a given segment, let's say, because you may have multiple segments that you're targeting, multiple geos, all sorts of things, but per segment, have a very clear understanding of the situations, the people, um, the situations that people. Situations that happen to people where they have a problem and they're ultimately looking to, um, find a solution. What are those trigger points before they actually came in and filled out a demo form? What are the things that made them reach out? Are the things that, uh, we want them to be thinking about when they reach out to our brand? It goes back to again, the termite example. I have a termite problem. My wood is rotting. I've got some problems on my wall. I want to be associated with those things so that when people need my services, they think of Terminix, in this case potentially as a brand. So that's really the first thing. Each segment needs to have listed out buying triggers for all the different segments you're going after. So there's very clear, consistent messaging. And consistency is also very important too. Right. I think we always want to go crazy with testing from a creative perspective. And we should test. It's not that we shouldn't, but you have to overcome ad friction. Uh, within the channel. There's bots sometimes on ad platforms. There's people that are distracted, that are not paying attention. There's people that forget. Um, there's a forgetting curve which is very real. And so you got to refresh memories and remind them what's going on. And so all those things are really, really important. To make sure that you continually say just the same thing over and over again. I mean, someone said something to me about, uh, just content in general, and they said you should say something enough times where you literally get sick of saying it. Like, you should be just tired of saying the same thing at that point. Once you get to that point, once you get to the. Yeah, exactly. When do you get that? Then you might start getting through to people. Because, I mean, if you think about it like, I mean, even presidents like Biden, Trump, or whoever the president is at any given point, I mean, they say all sorts of things all the time, and they have one of the biggest stages in the world. Biggest platforms are on all media channels, all over the place, everywhere. Right. And I don't know if I can even tell you what happened yesterday sometimes. And so the point is, you just need to be so brutal about staying consistent on the same types of associations from a messaging perspective over time and again, you can learn things and you may find that there's certain messages that resonate versus others. But I think that's. That's the big thing on the creative front. Uh, the next thing that is, um, really important that we do with a lot of our clients is making sure that we've got a consistent level of, uh, creatives that have really distinctive assets that have come from their brand. And so for Omnilab, we have a pink circle with a black border around it. And so that circle's present kind of all of our website, all of our material, over everything. Uh, we probably should add other distinctive assets, honestly. But brands have distinctive assets like that, and those distinctive assets after used for a very long period of time and all of the different creatives, you'll get to a point when you should literally be able to pull off all the copy and all the messaging and just see those assets. And again, it could be icons, it could be, um, all sorts of different things that are used across the website and brand, where you could just look at those things and understand which brand it is. I mean, Cognizant is a good example. Uh, for me, uh, for whatever reason, some of their brand assets, I'm sure they're not going for this, but it reminds me of the Flintstones. Um, they have, uh, these kind of, you know, Flintstone kind of shapes, in my opinion is the best way to describe it. And I know immediately, as soon as I see that shape, I know exactly which brand it is. I know exactly which brand it is because they're so consistent with it. So I'll stop myself there for a second to give you a second to chime in.

Speaker A: I love everything that you said. I really did. Um, yeah, the few notes that I wrote down that, like, really resonated with me was just. I think the way that you're framing category entry points is buying triggers. Like, I think is a much more digestible way to understand the concept, which is like, what is a common enough scenario that a future buyer finds themselves in before they enter the category? And I think I harp on the commonness point because sometimes brands try to find, like, this very niche thing that they as a brand want to own. But if you go to your customer first and understand, like, the landscape of, like, what are those buying triggers as you described, or those cues that, like, bring people in market for your brand, what's common enough that, you know, the majority of the buyers in the category will experience at some point? And then what is the point? Like, what is the buying scenario that you can uniquely own depending on, you know, your product or where your brand stands for? And, like, that is the sweet spot, which then leads into your second point around just the consistency of the message and importance of, like, I forget we used to have this phrase, like, say it X amount of times X different ways kind of thing. And the idea is, like, the more you harp on the same thing, the more people are going to resonate. So, yeah, I love, love that idea. I mean, and then distinctive brand assets, like, frankly, is probably my favorite thing that we talk about at the B2B Institute, because is that, like, what exactly we described, like, people underestimate the power of some of the visual components of their brand. I think, think B2B. What we see is that, and unfortunately we are also guilty of this, is that, um, most B2B brands are blue, first of all, and most have, like, totally undistinct assets. Whether, like, we have this great exercise where we show, like, in any given category, we'll pick a category and then we'll pull the slogans for, like, the five different five of, like, the biggest brands in the category. And it's actually, like, hilarious because every single slogan is, like, totally generic. And, like, no one has, like, no one can identify, like, what slogan goes to what brand. And I think the B2C category does a really great job of, like, driving distinct brand assets and everything from visual components, like their color or their logo or a character, and even, like, their slogans. Like, if you think about Apple, think different. Um, you know, that's a really distinct slogan that they were able to own. So I just think there's a lot of work that B2B brands can do and even it doesn't even have to be that drastic and they'll earn some type of competitive advantage, which is actually like pretty cool and empowering. And if the small brands and just the idea that like, what can they do that's in their control but is an additional budget that they might not have, there's a lot of these things that like, come at no cost. Like they can design a really great character that, that is just consistently shown throughout their actual ads, or they can design a really compelling, you know, messaging, um, plan that's just consistent across all their ads. And it's actually, you know, beneficial for them to just continue to harp on that in driving the mental association. So I think that's hopefully like a really empowering place for brands big or small, um, and really actionable thing that they can do.

Speaker B: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I'd add one thing, um, one of the. We were playing around with an ad idea, uh, for a potential client Stripe, and we, uh, created something that we thought was pretty interesting and out there. And I think you've probably heard of the whole concept of create ads that don't look like ads, uh, is very prevalent in a lot of early stage SaaS. Brands that I think are looking for all sorts of ways to stand out. Because a lot of the mature, bigger category leaders typically are a little more risk adverse. And so they're usually not taking big risks like that, nor do they have to as much as they might need to, just because they're established category leader. Uh, but the smaller people that are trying to come up are trying to get noticed. And so they have to do very different things. And so Stripe in this case isn't necessarily one of those. Stripe is a very well known brand. Everyone knows it. Um, but I'd still counter that I think it's still really important even for a mature brand to still do everything they can to stand out. And it doesn't mean that you need to move away from the distinctive assets that are part of your brand. I mean, colors, fonts are still distinctive assets at some level. I mean, Coca Cola has a very distinctive font that they use. And so it's another example. Distinctive assets doesn't need to be iconography or other things like that. But we created an ad where it was literally a horse race. And what we did is we use, uh, generative AI to place a dirt bike in front of all the horses and then we changed the color of the Jersey to their brand colors, which is this off blue or whatever, and then added a banner below it. I forget exactly what it said, but it's something like race ahead with lightning fast payments or something like that. Um, but it's a great example of using just a pure image that's emotional, like you're watching a horse race. Something you can relate to do. It's not just a picture of product, uh, abstraction that's in the right hand corner, which you see all the time in B2B ads, which, uh, still may be on brand, right? Maybe a good thing. And multiple people want to know, but it may not create the same emotional connection, be as memorable. Whereas if you see something where it's a horse race and there's a dirt bike on the horse trail in front of horses, like, you're going to notice that it's going to stand out. Now, I'm not saying you're going to sit there and think about it for the next weeks, but if you saw that ad or ads like it and seriously series, you'd started creating some associations in your mind around payment processing being fast in relatable situations like you watching horse race or it could be anything.

Speaker A: So, yeah, oh, totally. Like, I think I'm a former, uh, track athlete. So we love to use this hurdle analogy, which I really understand. But like, yeah, you have to capture attention. That's the first thing before you can build like, like any type of association or recall or attribution or whatever, you know, let alone purchase. So like, capturing attention is like a critical thing or critical KPI, we would say, for any ad. Um, but yeah, like, it's the combination of capturing attention in a way that like an ad might not look like a typical B2B ad. Um, and then it's like honing in on exactly the consistency that we talked about with the messaging and the visual. Visual, visual elements. Um, so, yeah, I love that we have this also, like, great concept. And you mentioned Coca Cola. So it sparked this for me is we have like these two ad mockups, um, and we say, like, if Coca Cola marketed itself like, um, a B2B brand, it would likely say, like, our product quenches your thirst, you know, 97% of the time, which is hilarious because of course they would never say something like that. Like, they use like the red that you shared, the polar bear. They like really hone on those, like, universal human emotions. And like, they've been doing that for years and years and years and years, like the same kind of visual identity. And that's you know, part of the reason why Coca Cola is so memorable. And so it's funny to see the juxtaposition, um, where you and I know well, and even, you know, I was a B2B marketer who unfortunately built a lot of those ads with like a CTA button and a stat and a stock image, which I like.

Speaker B: I think we all have.

Speaker A: I think, yeah, we all have. It's a rite of passage. Um, but it's funny when you like really compare it to some of the most famous brands that are so widely well known.

Speaker B: Oh yeah. I mean, it's the same thing with headlines on ads or websites. When you see, you know, increase revenue, saves you time and you know, insert metric, right? And it's like, okay, yeah, I mean, I mean, at the end of the day, like all products save you time or make you more money or make you more efficient somehow. I mean, like everything kind of boils down to the those two value points at the end of the day, but it's still not the situation or the association you're really looking for. I mean, yeah, sure, our end benefit is maybe that we help you increase revenue, but what is it? What does it do? What is the situation that I'm going to find myself in or the pain point that I'm going to have that's going to lead to me wanting a solution like that and then desire that ultimate outcome? Gong actually did a study, it was some years back now, I think it was, I don't know, 2021 or 2022 or something like that. And they looked at cold email results and they found found that leading with ROI based statements led to much lower conversion rates from an acceptance perspective from cold email. And instead it made a lot more sense to actually lead with the pain point or the situation that a buyer had first because that gave them the context of how they could relate to the actual solution that the person was talking about. And it also made the stat around our water point about Coca Cola a lot more believable. And so I think it's kind of a little bit a of like, you know, which do you kind of lead with? And in this case, clearly, you know, from Gong, who does tons and tons of data on this and many others, leading with that type of messaging is many times not going to work as well. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, the last point I would add is that in B2B people think that you have to market a certain way because you're marketing to businesses. But the reality is the decision maker at the businesses that you're marketing to are people and they still in interpret information in the same, you know, way as they might for a B2C purchase. So like, you have to leverage that like, human element to it. And I think, I think there's a lot of progress being made in B2B now and people are really understanding that, which is great. But I still think we just like have a long way to go. But sometimes even as simply as that is like you're still marketing to people. Like, let's not like recreate the, the guidebook, uh, here.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So, um, as we're like, you know, getting away, um, we could talk about this all day, but I want to, I want to talk about two different things. So, um, second to last question for you is, you know, and we experience this at the B2B Institute, like a lot of the times in having conversations with the customers that we work with, they can understand a lot of what we're talking about. And really. But the problem is in the most common objection we still get is like, I really struggling to demonstrate the value to my leadership or cross functional leadership. Um, so we talked a little bit about those like, indicators of success earlier on in the conversation. Can you share, based on your experience, you know, what are the early indicators of success that you have found to work and resonate with, um, the marketers that you work, work with?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And I think it is difficult, I mean, to your point. I mean it's really a mindset shift from the beginning. And you know this. I mean, if you're used to looking at the typical types of metrics you're going to get from a performance marketing campaign, like Google Ads, for example, because everyone's addicted to paid search still, I think that's honestly going to change a lot in the next few years with Gen AI. But um, certainly for now that's going to be the future. Then you just get these situations where people just can't put one and one together. Like, I don't understand, if we're going to run this campaign, how many clicks are we going to get? And then can you tell me exactly how many conversions we're going to get out of the hundred thousand dollars that we're going to put into that campaign? And it's like, no, that's not really the way that we're going to think about that. And there's some really logical reasons why. And I think marketing lag is a really important thing to understand when you're running a campaign like that. Because your intention isn't necessarily to convert people right now. So when you look at your slightly lagging, more lagging indicator metrics like conversions or pipeline, in the short term, these are the things that are not going to move as much in those quicker early moments. And so you really need to look at other leading indicators and be perfectly aligned with that from the beginning. That, hey, we're really looking for over time additional social mentions on social media platforms. We're looking for uh, share of search, we're looking for the amount of people searching for our brand term. We're also looking at qualitative data. You might have it through your call recording software or through your form on your website. But what are the events and the things that people are mentioning when they mention your brand, uh, when they come in or salespeople are talking to them. And so you're looking for those types of things, interactions to try to understand like, hey, are we seeing more of these or less of these? I mean that would be the just like really rudimentary like way not to make this overly complicated. There's obviously, mmm tools and there are uh, MTA tools that are now doing incrementality tests and all sorts of things. So clearly you can get a little bit more advanced there. You can do brand lift studies on the LinkedIn side and other uh, tools if you want to get a little bit more advanced about, about it. Uh, but I think that in the beginning for a lot of the companies we work with, I mean you got to keep this stuff simple. Most people don't have huge budgets to invest, you know, and long time frames to run these types of tests that really need to be done with a lot of data. And so sometimes it just comes back to the simple stuff. Are people talking about us more? Are we seeing more searches for our brand? Are we seeing more social mentions on social sites? If we start to see those things, that's a good thing for the CEO to hear. Now. Now you might then be in a position of where's the revenue then? And how much revenue has that led to? That's when you just really ultimately have to take the steps, if that's the conversation that you're going to have and do some type of incrementality test where you launch a campaign in a certain geo, like split the US in half and then you look for the ultimate lift within that given area and run campaigns like that to really better understand it. But again, it's not going to be a, a world where you're looking at this ad did this thing. It's not a world that you're ever going to look at that campaign, um, like that. That's a performance marketing thing. This is a world where you're looking at the broad strokes, broader correlations. So, uh, that's what I'd say about that. That's what we say for some of our clients. I mean, ultimately we don't track all of those things directly for our clients. We use tools to do that and some other tools will push them towards. But I think it starts with that conversation about just making sure there's a clear separation in the mind of the buyer first before, before you even get started on it, and then being uh, very clear on the metrics you're going to measure, like the ones I mentioned.

Speaker A: So yeah, I love that. I love what you just said. And then I also love what, you know, this idea of just keeping it simple. Like I think people like marketing measurement is not a simple, straightforward thing oftentimes. And companies just have a lot of different systems in place or lack of systems that, that, you know, it's, it's not universal across the board, I guess I should say. So I love the idea of keeping it simple. And I think the only other thing that we found that really works is um, like I think you talked a little bit about this at the beginning about like the warm versus cold audiences. If you can see whether it's anecdotally or even just, yeah, like qualitative feedback. If you can see an uplift in sales conversations or like an easier time for sales reps to book meetings like due to, you know, you targeting the same audience with some top of funnel stuff. Like that's really compelling and that demonstrates like a true value of the marketing on the pipeline, even if it's not, you know, a specific lead, let's say.

Speaker B: I'll give you another really great example with an actual company we work with called Luminous. Um, you should look at their ads. They're great. I would love to take credit for designing these. These are like full production, like actors, actors on a set, which we don't do as much of, but they're absolutely great. And um, one of the ways that they measure the success of that campaign is not just by some of the conversions that they are getting from a direct response perspective, but it's like a true brand play the way they're doing it. I mean they've got a consistent actor and mascot, you could say, uh, throughout all the ads. And uh, so now it's created an association across uh, this Brand, certainly, uh, for me, and I'm sure others that are seeing it because I'm not the ICP for it. But what they hear is that people literally come on the calls and tell the sales reps. The first thing is like, oh my God, I love that ad, uh, that you guys did with that one guy, or whatever. And it kind of gives some directional feedback to the CEO where, like, we're literally looking at our CRM. We see nothing but people saying, oh my God, like, it's just so funny. It's so great. It's so on point, you know, whatever, whatever. And so many times, like, with some of those people from a UTM perspective, there are no UTM parameters saying it was meta and it was that ad. There are some conversions where people take that path. There's many, though, that are just consuming the information. Maybe they weren't in market at that time and they came in later, but they remembered that ad and they always mention it in the first call. So I mean, to me, like, that's again, just another great example of just mining some of the qualitative data without making m this stuff so rigidly complex, uh, and difficult. So, um, I wish more people would do exactly what they're doing. It's great.

Speaker A: I love that. I love, love, love that. Um, it, you know, kind of ties a bow on our point around the future buyer piece too, is like, if you can be memorable, that's, that's the objective of an ad, particularly awareness ad. So I love that. Um, okay, one final question for you. We're going to shift gears a little bit. Um, so curious, just sort of like, as we look ahead 20, 25, um, what trends do you think they're going to shape the future of B2B SaaS market marketing?

Speaker B: M. Uh, there's a few that come to mind. Uh, one is that's been honestly huge for the last couple of years, but I think very few people are really doing it. It's the small microcosm of people that are on LinkedIn that are leading with the founder and creating a founder brand. And what I mean by that is the founder really leading is like the core SME, the content creator, the voice, the person's bringing, the narrative, creating relationships, having direct conversations with people on a channel like LinkedIn and others, wherever your ICP is hanging out. And so we're seeing more brands take this approach where they've got a really vocal founder or SME. It doesn't always have to be the founder. Sometimes the founder isn't the SME uh, but in many cases it's usually the founder leading those types of conversations and they're creating more of a direct tie with the buyer where I think a company would just always struggle to have that relationship because at the end of the day we're buying from each other. Humans are buying from humans, not just companies. And so it's creating an association, especially for early stage brands, more so than anything, but even big brands too. But early stage brands having a direct association with a really personable brand where they can communicate with that person directly in a social channel, in public. And so I think that's gonna still be huge. There's still so few people. I mean you've got R2B 2B or RB2B or whatever crazy uh, guy there, I'm forgetting his name. You've got uh, Dave Gearhart who for a while has been a big proponent of founder brand, who's the uh, founder of Exit 5. A whole big community for B2B Market. And so there's many others that are taking this approach and creating all sorts of great content, educational and just pushing out their narratives. So I think that's a big one. Uh, that'd be one.

Speaker A: I love that. Yeah, don't want to cut you off. Keep going.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, sure. So yeah, that's a big one. And uh, I think that all brands need to be thinking about that more. And I guess to say one thing, not getting too specific on tactics and channels, but I mean, taking that content and then figuring out ways to promote that content directly to your ICP as well on channels like links. LinkedIn has also been huge. Right. So now you can really get increased reach on who you're trying to reach in a channel like LinkedIn. So again, that founder led growth would be one influencer marketing, which uh, for anyone who's a B2C marketer would say, yeah, we've been doing that forever. What are you talking about? I think B2B has done it to some degree, but I'd say that certainly most of the companies that we talk to have barely tapped into this at all. And there's far more of the companies that are in that series A to series C range versus like the salesforces and the hubspots of the world. And so for those types of brands like micro influencers that share the same audience as that brand, getting to work with them and doing content collaborations, that could be a, ah, guide, an ebook, it could be a podcast, it could be a webinar, um, but riding off the audience and sharing that audience creates a lot of credibility. It's kind of like me. For example, we've done a, uh, before Clearbit was bought by HubSpot, we did a Clearbit webinar. And uh, it was great for us from an Omnilab perspective because, um, Omnilab still a smaller brand, Clearbit's a more established brand. So it really allowed us to kind of ride off the coattails of some of the brand that Clearbits built because we share the same audience. And so we were kind of able to steal a little bit of trust from the market that, oh well, if Clearbit's talking with Omnilab, they must at least know a little bit about what they're doing. And so we try to do this with brands over the years, uh, that we feel like are just a good match and uh, there's some good content that could come out of it. But influencer marketing is another, another big one. Clay is honestly the biggest example of this. Clay's done an incredible job, uh, from everything, uh, they did from a thought leadership perspective and enabling all these freelancers and consultants. I mean literally, they've basically been built off the back of some of these people that are creating amazing workflows and really cool stuff on the Clay side. So that's one and then third one, and I'll stop uh, ranting here is, uh, you can, you can't not mention generative AI or anything related to ChatGPT or Claude or any of these LLM models. It's impossible to ignore. And anyone that hasn't invested the time into learning this needs to literally wake up and start doing this immediately right now. Uh, because there was some report, I believe by Bain Capital, I think it was just in the past few weeks or so that talked about something like 47% of marketing activities being online, automated or deeply impacted by generative AI. And I think they may even be underestimating that to a degree. It's not to say everyone's going to lose their job immediately, but it's very much going to change the way that we work as marketers. And so everything from, you know, writing blog outlines to writing ad copy to creating, uh, even ad creative, uh, which is still not great today, but certainly getting ideas and I think it's only going to get better. All these things are going to completely reshape the way we do things and everything's just going to get a lot faster. You know, products are going to be built quicker, which is interesting from a brand perspective. To your point about lots of companies in the same category. I think we're unfortunately going to see even more companies coming into the same category, which is going to be interesting. I think it's going to make it a little bit tough for some brands, but the ones that are going to stand out with all this AI content coming out of the market is ultimately the people that have still genuine POVs, real experiments, real proprietary data, um, and real examples of what they're doing are going to start to stand out. Where I think all this AI content is, there's just more and more of it. Ultimately we're just going to see that stuff be ignored because a lot of times it's just me too content and it's just not, uh, breaking through the noise. So that's my. Those, uh, are my three. I don't know if you'd add to that or have any.

Speaker A: Great. I think it's a great overview. I have similar thoughts. I mean, I think. I guess I'll have two reactions. One is like, on your last point about AI, I don't think it's. I don't know if we're, we can do like an interview in 2024 and not mention it. Uh, to your point, like, it's, it's, it's a daily vision at this point, I think, um, as someone who would consider themselves a marketer, like, I think it's easy to be afraid of that change and say, you know, like, no, like, only I can do my job. But I think what has helped me, and I think some of the marketers that we work with is the more empowering piece to. It is like, number one, this can automate a lot of the tedious work that we all have on our plates when it comes to copywriting, for example. Um, but I think, you know, there's a human element always needed for all of these tasks. Like any, like, now I can actually tell, like, is this copy that was written based on AI or from AI or not? So there's always going to be some level of. And of course the models are going to get better and better and better. But I think the empowering part is, yeah, there's, there's like, you know, the output is only as good as the input, and the input comes from a human. So, like, that's empowering. The other part that is empowering to me is on your point around, you know, more and more brands are going to be emerging because products can be built significantly faster. And I think that just to me makes it clearer that, like, the marketing and like, the strength of the marketing needs to be better, to stand out out. And if you have a good understanding of these like, foundational things that we talked about today, I think you're in a really good position to make sure that your brand is, you know, standing out or you're doing the right things to keep your brand top of mind for, for future buyers. Um, so I think actually I'll end on that. I was going to talk a little bit about influencer marketing, but I'm still grappling with my perspective on, on how that's going to change. So we'll end, end on that note. Um, but Jonathan, thank you so much for your time today. This was such a good conversation. I think you and I could keep chatting for hours. Um, so thank you for your thoughts. This is great and it's going to be incredibly valuable, particularly for the small brands that we work with. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course, thanks for having me on.

Speaker A: Of course.

Speaker B: All right, well, thanks for listening to another episode of the Demand podcast podcast again. I'm Jonathan Bland, the co founder of Omnilab. I'll also have with me Jason Steele, who's the other co founder of Omnilab on this podcast as well. Uh, we're a demand gen agency for C2 Series B SaaS startups. Um, if you like this episode, uh, or you're looking for some help with demand gen, please feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn over a DM or you can go just directly to our website. That's omnilive Consulting. Otherwise uh, we look forward to seeing you on the next episode where we'll be talking about all things Demandin. Until then, thanks. Bye Bye. Mhm. Sam.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Daily.