Tim Matthews's Blog

AI in Marketing Part 2: Buyer Persona Research

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

There’s been no shortage of bold claims about how AI will revolutionize (or ruin) marketing. I’ve spent the last six months experimenting with AI tools to understand how they could actually help my team. In this article series, I’ll walk you through the use cases that I’ve found most promising.

Companies don’t buy products, people do. 

I’ve done B2B sales and marketing for my whole career, and I’ve seen how often my colleagues forget this very basic principle. All the talk these days seems to be about the ideal customer profile (ICP), defined by Gartner as “the firmographic, environmental and behavioral attributes of accounts that are expected to become a company’s most valuable customers.” CEOs and CROs want to hire CMOs who understand account-based marketing (ABM). 

All of which misses the fact that once you get a meeting with an ICP account, you need to convince a group of people that your product is what they need. Sure, you need a list of target accounts, but you also need a list of target buyers – personas. Who are they and what do they care about? This is a crucial step in good B2B marketing, and AI can make it a whole lot easier.

What is a Buyer Persona?

First, a little nomenclature to clear up: buyer titles, buyer profiles, and buyer personas. Titles are the most straightforward. Most marketers build target lists for their campaigns based on the titles they want to reach. Buyer profiles describe the role and responsibilities of a given job title. We can all understand what a CFO or VP of Sales does. Buyer profiles are useful in orienting a sales or SDR team to the group of people that will be involved in a buying decision.

Buyer personas take things a step further. The goal is to create a description that captures motivations. For example, the job of a VP of Sales is to oversee a team of salespeople and hit the company’s revenue targets. That’s the profile. The persona would talk about things like the quarterly pressure to hit revenue targets, the desire to forecast accurately to preserve credibility with the CEO and board, the fear of losing top sales talent, etc. A sales tool like Clari, which automates revenue forecasting, taps into the desire of the VP of Sales persona to provide accurate forecasts.

Buyer personas reveal the personal motivations of prospective buyers to help the marketing team create targeted value propositions that cut through the noise. Creating buyer personas can be a lot of work, but it’s worth it. I’ve found that AI can save marketers time and tedium in researching buyers. It can also surface information that can lead to important insights.

How to Use ChatGPT for Persona Research: Step by Step

ChatGPT can be very helpful in fleshing out buyer titles and buyer profiles. It can also help in the early phases of buyer persona development. Let’s step through an example to illustrate how it could be used for each.

Let’s say that my early-stage company has made a few sales where a cloud architect was the key buyer. I want to build out my database to target this buyer title, but not all of my ICP accounts have someone with that title. Are there other titles with similar responsibilities that my team could target?

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ChatGPT gives me a list of similar titles. The job focus helps me check to see if they all make sense to target. I may decide, for example, that including DevOps Engineer doesn’t make sense because my product doesn’t add anything to the development process. ChatGPT can save a team lots of manual effort and guesswork.

I strongly recommend checking the answers you get from ChatGPT. Hallucination is still a big problem. I asked ChatGPT where it got the information, and I liked the answer it gave me: job boards, skills frameworks, certifications, and the cloud service providers themselves. 

Now, let’s assume that we have successfully sold into accounts that also use Wiz, a widely-used cloud security product. I ask ChatGPT to tell me the titles of people who use Wiz. Pulling from similar sources, including job boards, I see one that wasn’t provided in response to my previous prompt: Cloud Security Engineer. I add that one to my list. If I wanted to, I could spend a little more time rounding out my title list by including prompts that ask about other software companies or tools, professional organizations, industry conferences – there are lots of possibilities.

My next task is to think of what type of content my team could produce that might be useful or attractive to these people. I haven’t gotten to persona research interviews yet (those take time), but let’s suppose I’m feeling some urgency to start engaging my targets. I like to produce educational content when engaging a new audience. So I’m thinking of professional certifications that my target buyers need to get a job or a promotion. I ask ChatGPT.

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Maybe my product marketing team could produce a prep guide to getting one or more of these certifications, compiled from existing sources on the web. ChatGPT can create a study guide, complete with links to resources. I could interview with my CTO and solicit advice on which certifications matter most. There are lots of possibilities. What I like about ChatGPT is that it can give me very specific information very quickly. The links to sources make it easy to investigate further.

Now, we have titles and some content ideas, but we really don’t have motivations, which are critical in buyer personas. What can ChatGPT do for us? I ask it to tell me the main concerns of cloud architects, and what I get back is a long list that will help me in my buyer profile, but not with my buyer persona.

It offers me a list of interview questions to help better understand cloud architects. They are not bad, if somewhat generic. 

I finally ask it how I can develop a buyer persona for a cloud architect.

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That’s pretty solid advice. I also produced a basic template and some sample questions. Again, a time saver. But this last bit of advice proved the best – you need to talk to humans.

Overall, I think ChatGPT is great for helping marketing teams target the right buyers. It provides fresh ideas and saves a lot of time. You can leverage competitors, commonly used tools, organizations and all kinds of other things as proxies to build out your list of buyer titles and profiles, and it prepares you to do proper buyer persona research. I do expect that some of these capabilities will get built into database and marketing automation tools in the future, but ChatGPT is easy enough to use for the product marketers likely doing the research.

Have you used ChatGPT in buyer persona development? Have an other Ideas to share?

Read AI in Marketing Part 1: Optimizing for the New World of Search

Image Credit: ChatGPT

The post AI in Marketing Part 2: Buyer Persona Research  appeared first on Matthews on Marketing.

AI in Marketing Part 1: Optimizing for the New World of Search

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

There’s been no shortage of bold claims about how AI will revolutionize (or ruin) marketing. I’ve spent the last six months experimenting with AI tools to understand how they could help my team. In this article series, I’ll walk you through the use cases that I’ve found most promising.

Connecting with buyers through web search is by now a decades-old practice for marketers. Most marketing teams do some level of search engine optimization (SEO). But AI has brought some big changes to search. Learning how to navigate these changes can open up new opportunities.

Search Has Changed Forever

The biggest change in search is Google’s AI Overview. You probably see at least one every day. AI Overview appears at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) and provides an answer to the searcher’s query. In doing so, it takes traffic away from all of the pages listed below it. The result is a drop in organic traffic to sites that have been getting thousands or tens of thousands of visits per month from these searches.

AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, are also increasingly being used for web searches. The numbers are smaller – less than three percent of all searches – but this number will likely rise. Even at three percent, AI chatbots collectively perform billions of searches. When prompted, they perform web searches in the background and then add information from their LLMs. In many cases, citations of sources are added. Below is the beginning of ChatGPT’s answer to my ‘What are the five most valuable soccer teams?’ prompt.

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Figure 1: The start of ChatGPT’s answer to ‘What are the five most valuable soccer teams?’ prompt. Note the citations below the summary.

While an AI Overview on a Google SERP and a ChatGPT answer work pretty much the same way, the web indexes they use are different. Google uses the Google web index, of course. ChatGPT and Perplexity use Bing. Claude uses Brave Search. Optimizing your content to ensure your site shows up in AI search is now more complicated. You have to optimize for Google, Bing, and potentially other web indexes.

Which brings us back to SEO. Many have proclaimed that SEO is dead in the wake of GenAI. Far from it. Now you have a whole new crop of AI tools using content from and citing top-ranked web pages. If you want your content and brand to feature prominently, you need to keep investing in SEO, but change up your tactics. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

SEO’s New Cousins: SGO and GEO

SEO has two new offshoots: SGO and GEO. Both build on conventional SEO practices, but are aimed specifically at AI search results. 

Search Generative Optimization (SGO) is a new approach to SEO that focuses on how content is used by AI-powered search engines, Google and Bing. The term SGO was derived from Search Generative Experience (SGE), which is Google’s name for the tech behind AI Overview.

SGO aims to make content easy for Bing and Google to understand, summarize, and cite in Bing AI Summary and Google AI Overview. As a marketer, you want your ideas, products, and viewpoints to be included in these AI-generated overviews, and your page link and logo (on Google) to be included as a citation. 

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a strategy for having your content appear in searches done using AI chatbots. The aim is the same as SGO, but you will need to monitor how your content appears in the AI chatbot results you care about. Some people include SGO under the GEO umbrella.

How to Optimize for SGO and GEO

A solid SEO program is the best way to do well in AI search. You can’t simply skip over SEO and expect to appear AI-generated searches. 

There are some additional things you can do to give your content a good chance of appearing in AI search. First, experts believe that AI engines prefer clearly-written, semantically-rich content. Content that has a lot of semantic connections to other topics and concepts is more likely to be favored in search rankings. Make sure your product pages, blog posts, or glossary entries are written in an easy-to-understand, conversational tone. Include statistics and examples to make the content richer. Also, make it easy to parse by including lists, tables, and FAQs. If you are unsure where to start in optimizing your content, take a look at the citations listed and compare them to the answer given by the AI engine. This should give you some insights on how to optimize your content.

Second, there are some technical tricks that will help. Many of these will sound familiar to anyone who has done technical SEO optimization. Make sure your site is fast. Include AI crawling bots – GPTbot, ClaudeBot, et al. – in your robots.txt file. If you have been ignoring Bing for years (as many of us have), submit your site for indexing so that Bingbot can give an up-to-date view to ChatGPT.* Google has also said publicly that using schema markup helps its AI crawler bots. The bottom line is to make your site easy and efficient to crawl.

For product-related searches, AI will often look to review sites and best-of articles. You need to make sure your product is well represented. You may notice that many of these sites are either vendor-written – the AI is not smart enough to know that, only that it ranks well in SEO {more here}

What Should Your Strategy Be? 

Don’t stop investing in your SEO program. If you don’t have a strong one, consider adding resources. Worst case, you may gain some organic traffic to your site via conventional web search. Done well, a comprehensive SEO strategy that takes into account SGO and GEO will result in citations in AI Overviews.

Going all in on optimizing for AI search via chatbots is not the right nove at the moment. Despite the amazing growth of AI chatbot use, Google is still dominant in search. I recommend looking at a tool like Profound to monitor AI search. If you notice a significant amount of queries from a particular chatbot, consider optimizing for it.

If you want to learn more about AI and search, I recommend the videos from Exposure Ninja and Surfer Academy. You should also get with your SEO team or agency and strategize. There are also some cool new tools for tracking how you appear in AI searches. 

I encourage all marketers to dig in and understand how AI is changing search and how customers find your product or service. It’s an exciting time with lots of opportunities and competitive advantages to be gained. 

*You might be confused, as I was, about all of these bots, what they do, and how they are related. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot. GPTbot is an AI crawler bot that collects data for AI training. Bingbot is a web-crawling bot used to index the web. ChatGPT uses information from both GPTbot and Bingbot.

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Take Control of Your Pipeline With Demand Forecast Calls

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

CMOs can get themselves into a pickle when pipeline generation falls short. By the time they realize they are below the target, it may be too late to recover. I’ve borrowed a practice from my sales brethren to help me avoid this problem.

Most B2B marketers are familiar with sales forecast calls. These meetings are typically held weekly by sales leaders. Sales reps review their deals and expected outcomes. Sales leadership inspects the deals by asking questions about timing, competition, access to approvers, legal review status, and other details.

I recommend that CMOs and their leaders hold weekly demand forecast calls. While you may already have a weekly demand team meeting, I’m talking about a change in mindset from reporting on activities to forecasting results. Here are the key ideas:

Forward-looking, not Backward-looking – Most weekly demand team meetings review the previous week’s results. That’s backward-looking. The main idea of demand forecasting is to have your team predict results for the upcoming week. That’s forward-looking. Will they always be right? No. Will it change their mindset and motivation once they’ve committed to a number? Yes.

Quantity and Quality – Sales leaders are looking to understand realistic deal amounts and probabilities. Said another way, how solid are the deals? In a similar vein, marketing leadership should look for realistic marketing qualified lead totals and the probability of converting to sales qualified leads. So, quality is as important as quantity. Marketing leaders should be inspecting both every week.

It’s Simple – All it takes is a spreadsheet. In the weekly meeting, whoever is responsible for the marketing channel or campaign will give their forecast, which will be recorded. The next week, the team reviews the previous week’s attainment vs. forecast. These are usually great discussions. Then they give the forecast for the next week. Repeat.

Your Team Will Hate It at First – You are doubting me? How should I know how many qualified leads the webinar will generate? These are typical examples of the resistance I’ve faced. To which I respond: Sales reps have their opportunities inspected, why can’t you have your leads inspected? And, I do think you should know how many qualified leads will come from a webinar; that’s what we pay you for.

You Will Get Better Over Time – People will be wildly wrong at first. Then they will get more accurate. They will then learn to sandbag. Or – just like reps and opportunities – they will be overly optimistic about conversion. That’s okay. What you want is a number you can rely on. It just may take some time to get there. 

It’s Fun – I found my teams getting competitive. People felt great when they beat their forecast. They developed the type of camaraderie you see in sales teams, pulling for each other and celebrating the success of others.

Demand forecasting is really just a mindset shift, but an important one. It will increase your team’s ownership of results. Ultimately it will help you as a leader to give a better forecast to sales and management. Plus, it will help eliminate surprises that will be costly to your reputation.

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Six Keys to Winning at Analyst Relations

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

A favorable showing in an industry analyst report can result in millions in new sales. Being a laggard can mean you won’t even get invited to pitch your product. So, how can you make sure your company’s product moves to the top?

The two most influential analyst reports for B2B tech buyers are the Gartner Magic Quadrant, aka “the MQ,” and the Forrester Wave. I’ve been briefing analysts from these two analyst firms for many years now. By way of credentials, my teams and I have moved three products from Visionary to Leader in the Gartner MQ, and two products from Strong Performer to Leader in the Forrester Wave. Three more products moved up and right in the Leaders’ quadrants. Two products (shown below) rose to the very top in the Leaders’ quadrants, one in the MQ and one in the Wave. Full disclosure, I did have one product drop from Leader to Visionary; that experience taught me a valuable lesson I’ll also cover below.

Figures 1 and 2: Two great wins from my teams at Imperva (Forrester Wave for DDoS, 2017) and Exabeam (Gartner MQ for SIEM, 2021)

Showing well in an analyst report takes good analyst relations (AR) and is a lot of work. It doesn’t start and stop when you have submitted your answers to the questionnaire for the annual report. Teams that do AR right do it year-round. Here are six of the most important things you should do to win the AR game.

Business First, Tech Second – The biggest mistake I see teams make is spending too much time on tech and not enough on business. Analysts want to know how your business is doing even more than they care about your latest features or roadmap. Start your briefing with a review of your revenue, new logos, customer retention, and customer expansion. Show them that you are a winner.Review Why You Win – Include a section in your briefing deck on key wins. Show the customer logos, deal sizes, and reasons why you beat the competition. Focus on deals that underscore your competitive advantage. You may also want to demonstrate traction in a new geography or with a new G2M partner. I’ve even included losses in a few presentations when I wanted to illustrate price pressure from a competitor. The more you can be a source on market dynamics to the analyst, the better.Dealbooks – I learned this trick from a colleague during my time at Symantec. Since you may not always have a timely briefing with an analyst, send them a quarterly summary of your business and key wins. This is known as a dealbook. The advantage of the dealbook is that the analyst can spend more time with it and refer back to it (maybe even during a briefing from one of your competitors). When you get to a large number of new customers per quarter, it’s okay to focus on a handful and simply list the rest.Facetime, In Person – It’s not the money you spend with an analyst, it’s the time that’s important. As I said above, your key analysts should hear from you throughout the year, not just when you give your product demo for their annual report. Also, try to get time with the analyst in person. People like people, and in-person is much different than over the phone or Zoom. If possible, try to book a whole-day session (often called a strategy day), and bring several members of the team to deepen the connection. I’ve even flown teams to meet analysts who were too busy to fly out and meet us. Last little tip: Go out to lunch. Get them out of the building for an intimate lunch with your CEO or head of sales. Talk about their kids.Influence Before the Questionnaire – If you do what I’ve outlined above, you will already be influencing the analyst before the questionnaire. If not, well, good luck. If a new capability is listed on the questionnaire and you don’t have it, you will be penalized. Ideally, schedule your in-person strategy day six months before the questionnaire comes out so you can get a read on where the analyst is heading and have enough time to make adjustments to your product or go-to-market.Don’t Forget About Reviews – Online reviews are becoming more and more important for B2B tech sales. Sites like Capterra, G2, and IT Central Station are used by prospective buyers who don’t talk to analysts, e.g., small businesses or developers. In 2015, Gartner got into the game with Gartner Peer Insights. I really admire this move from Gartner in that they recognized that their analyst model was limited. That said, Gartner analysts do look at reviews on Peer Insights to get more color. Gartner has even started integrating data from Peer Insights into Magic Quadrants. So, make sure your customers are leaving reviews. 

If you do the six things above, you will be ahead of the game and likely on your way to winning. Here are two things that can hurt you.

Fulfill Your Promises – Remember above where I mentioned my product moved downward? That was because we’d assured the analyst that we were going to integrate two products into one, addressing a concern he had about ease of management. Well, the engineering schedule slipped and we didn’t do it. He’d written about our commitment and it didn’t happen. He looked bad. Never make an analyst look bad.Be Careful Arguing – Analysts don’t know everything. They rely on smart people, like those at your company, to make them smarter. Nor are they are not always right. But – and this is a big but – you need to be careful when you have a difference of opinion. Winning an argument with an analyst on a call may be a pyrrhic victory. Maybe he or she took your point, but at what cost to the relationship? It’s much more effective to inform, listen, and fulfill on product vision and business execution. Said another way, influence the analyst, don’t argue with them. If you have a strong-willed CEO or founder, I would advise you to limit their time with analysts, bringing them in where appropriate, like the lunch at the strategy day. 

I’d be remiss if I gave all the credit for our showings in the MQ and Wave to my product marketing teams. A good showing is not all due to good AR execution. You need to have a solid product and a good sales team that’s winning in the market. I’ve been lucky to have worked with some of the best product managers, engineers, and salespeople out there. They certainly made my job easier.

There are many more details that go into having a great AR program. How you answer questions on surveys is key. Great demos go a long way. Customers willing to talk to analysts are gold. But, in my experience, being ahead of the game and shaping the market far outweigh these.

Have another tip to win at AR? I’d love to hear it.

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Network Tech Branding: The Cool Stories Behind the Ethernet, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi Names

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

“Hey, what’s the 802.11 password?” I’m guessing you’ve never heard anyone ask that. But someone asking you for the Wi-Fi password? Every family vacation you have taken in the last five or so years?

I was on a ski trip recently and was wondering how we ended up with phones that connect to my Audi via something called Bluetooth, an iPad that streams Netflix in the condo using Wi-Fi, and somewhere a router connected to the granddaddy of packet pushers, a thing called Ethernet. Three memorable but completely unrelated names. Where did they come from? As a marketer who loves branding and origin stories, I had to know.

Ethernet – Where It All Began

For those of you young enough to never have had to crawl around under dusty desks to route networking cables, a brief primer. It used to be a thing. Years before wireless data networks were available in workplaces and homes, we used to run cables from routers and plug them into PCs and printers. We used coaxial or twisted pair cables with logical, but clunky, distinctions like 10-Base-2 and 10-Base-T. These are all types of Ethernet cables. But what’s an Ethernet? It was simply the name invented by the godfather of modern networking, Robert Metcalf. 

In 1972, while working at Xerox PARC – the lab that also brought us the mouse, the laser printer, and the GUI – Metcalf was looking for a name for the network they were using to connect Xerox Alto workstations. It was originally called the Alto Aloha Network, combining the name of the Xerox workstation with ALOHAnet, a pioneering internetworking system invented at the University of Hawaii (Yes, Hawaii. Funny how no one talks about our 50th state playing a role in the development of the modern internet. But I digress.). Wanting to make it clear that the local networking technology could be used by any workstation on any network – which is what we now call an open protocol – he changed the name to Ethernet. Ether is the medium that carries light through space. Metcalf thought it a fitting metaphor. 

Figure 1: Metcalf’s first sketch of Ethernet

Wi-Fi – The Engineers Who Hired Interbrand

Fast forwarding a decade or so, a key moment in the development of Wi-Fi came in 1985 with an FCC ruling that allowed part of the radio spectrum to be used for free, by anyone, for communications. Technology firms began to experiment with data transfer over this newly-open spectrum, but there was no common networking protocol. Another decade or so later, in 1997, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), approved a new wireless networking standard called 802.11. 

Two years later, in 1999, a number of vendors formed the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) to promote interoperability using the new standard. Realizing that the term IEEE 802.11b wasn’t going to stick with the average user, the group did something I would never expect a group of engineers to do. They hired the global branding heavyweight Interbrand to come up with something catchier. 

Interbrand came up with a number of suggestions, including Wi-Fi, a nod to the 1950s-era “high fidelity,” or “hi-fi,” term used by marketers to sell stereo systems. Though the term was inspired by hi-fi, it does not stand for “wireless fidelity,” as some people think.

As reported by Boing Boing, the alliance engineers then did something I would expect engineers to do. Many in the group couldn’t stomach a name not at all grounded in the technical reality. Engineers are literal, and Wi-Fi was not. So, the group added the tagline, “The Standard for Wireless Fidelity,” even though a wireless “fidelity” standard was not what they designed.

Bluetooth – The Codename that Stuck

King Harald Gormsson is well known for two things: uniting Norway and Denmark, and for his dead tooth. It was that dead tooth that earned him the nickname “Bluetooth.” In 1996, engineers from Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia came together to standardize a short-range radio technology to support interconnectivity among various devices. No doubt taking some inspiration from his Nordic counterparts, Jim Kardach from Intel suggested Bluetooth, after the king who unified Scandinavia, as a fun codename for the project. They were, after all, about to embark on a mission to unify the world of devices, from Scandinavia and beyond.

When it came time to roll out the technology, the two proposed official names presented problems. Personal Area Networking (PAN) wasn’t unique enough and brought up thousands of unrelated search results. The other, RadioWire, was interesting, but the trademark search couldn’t be completed in time for launch. So, the team went with the codename, Bluetooth, and it stuck. 

And the Bluetooth icon we see at the top of our screens? A nice engineering touch, it is a made-up rune that merges the the runes for Harald (ᚼ) and Bluetooth (ᛒ). 

Figure 2: Combining the runes for Harald (ᚼ) and Bluetooth (ᛒ) to make the Bluetooth logo.

I’m thankful to these networking engineers who, however they got there, gave us memorable names for complicated technologies. Alas, so much of our tech is not as digestible. I wish the engineers behind the USB connector had been a bit more inspired. They would have saved me from several conversations like this:

Family Member: Do you have a charger on you?

Me: What size? USB A, Mini, or C?

Family Member: What? 

Got thoughts on other tech standards that did a good job branding? Let me know in the comments. 

Header Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Building a Reason to Care

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

You told me the what, but not the so-what. 

You have probably heard this before. It’s often delivered as an admonishment to a salesperson or marketer by a customer or prospect. Maybe someone has said it to you. If we’ve all heard it, why are we not delivering a reason to care more often?

Because it’s hard. As marketers, we all know better than just stating the what, but getting to the so-what takes a lot of work. Sometimes it just takes time for a market to emerge or for customers to fall in love with a product. Only then can you go back and ask customers why they love a product so much or what it does to make their life or job easier.

For obvious reasons, this problem is most acute in nascent markets. No one has sold such a product before. You may have very few customers to ask questions of, and probably – if you know the technology adoption curve – they are all innovators (tech enthusiasts) and early adopters (visionaries). Innovators buy things because they are curious. Visionaries have a concept for how a product can improve their lives or jobs; they are just not the best at succinctly expressing the so-what.

All hope is not lost. It just takes courage, some hard work, and being okay with revising your work. Here’s my process.

1) Form a hypothesis – You must have some idea of the so-what but probably lack the proof you need. I think my new widget will save people an hour a day because it’s so much faster than doing things the (soon-to-be old) way.

2) Make some assumptions – These are allowed if you are upfront about them and clear on what they are. My widget is voice controlled and doesn’t require typing. It also saves old requests and suggests them to you as solutions to future tasks. With ten daily tasks, saving around five minutes per task is about an hour. We’re getting there, but this is not yet the so-what.

3) Do some research – Get on Google and find out how much time people spend filling out forms or setting up tasks. Maybe you are targeting a specific document- or process-heavy industry, like healthcare. Surely you can find some stats on average typing speed, number of documents per doctor’s visit, and that kind of thing. You may find yourself mixing stats from many different sources. That’s okay.

4) State your case – My widget will make your team more productive. It will save them more than half a day a week of manual tasks. That will both make them happier and more likely to stay, and save you money by needing fewer people. Compared to the cost of recruiting replacement employees and paying more salaries, my widget is a no-brainer. Now you have your so-what. Notice we’re not talking about the widget, what it looks like, or what kind of microchip it has inside. Instead, we’re talking about the impact it will have.

5) Iterate – If you have customers, run your so-what by them. See if they buy it. Don’t be crushed if they give you another angle to pursue instead. Sometimes customers need to have something to react to, and their feedback can often put you on the right track. Try it with prospects, too. Here you are looking to see if they bite on your so-what.

There you have it. Not rocket science, just the willingness to stick your neck out and take critical feedback. Once you have a reason to care that works and are selling to many customers, you can go back to them and start building your own proprietary research to support your so-what story.

If you want to go deeper on this idea, I strongly recommend reading The Challenger Sale and understanding the commercial insight concept. Put simply, a commercial insight not only presents a new idea but undermines an existing one. Using this technique, marketers can make their so-what powerful enough to change how prospects see a product entirely.

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B2B Marketer Fails, Part 3 – Website Conversion Optimization

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

[image error]You have spoken to your buyer in terms that they find compelling. You have written helpful and authoritative content that has won their trust. Now you look to set the hook with an offer. Your email or Google ad sends them to a landing page. But has it been optimized? This oversight is a common fail. 

What’s a pity is that optimizing landing pages and websites is so easy. What’s a crime in ignoring optimization is that it’s so effective. Small changes in color, copy or imagery can have significant impacts. I’m talking, in some cases, double or even triple the conversion rate. Let’s jump in. 

Conversion Rate Optimization 

Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is not new. I think pretty much all B2B marketers intuitively understand that they want to maximize their conversion rates. Whatever stage of the funnel, higher conversion means a greater yield. Everyone wants more leads and opportunities. 

In my experience, while this is widely understood, it is not widely practiced. Most marketers spend at least some time optimizing their emails, especially the subject lines. That’s because email subject line testing is built into marketing automation platforms like Marketo, HubSpot and the rest. Similarly, Google AdWords will tell you exactly how each ad or ad campaign is performing, so it’s easy to optimize (though I feel B2B marketers don’t do enough and overspend on Google by a lot, but that’s the subject for another post). But landing pages? Home pages? It takes extra effort and maybe another piece of software to really measure performance. 

There are well known packages that do this – primarily Optimizely, Google Optimize – but also more limited products like Unbounce for landing page testing. The way it works is simple but amazing. You run two versions of your page in parallel. The software automatically splits your traffic so that half the people see one page, and half see the other. When there are enough results to draw a reliable conclusion, the software tells you the winner. 

Growth marketers and consumer marketers are all over CRO. B2B? Not so much. And that’s the crime. It’s so easy and relatively inexpensive. A B2B widget usually costs more than a B2C widget, but the CRO software license costs about the same. So, you’d think more B2B marketers would do it. We’ll get to my opinion as to why after a little more on CRO. 

Hypothesize. Experiment. Repeat. 

A common question from people new to CRO is, So, how do I know what to test? Excellent question. You know your business, so the answer is that you probably have some initial ideas. Busy prospects? Shorter forms. New to a market and need to build confidence? Logos of all your impressive customers. Lots of people doing research on their phones? Responsive pages with less copy to read. You get the idea. 

The beauty is that it doesn’t really matter if you are wrong. Come up with a hypothesis and then run the experiment and see how it goes. If it looks like it is seriously tanking conversions, stop the experiment. If it’s working better, keep it running and see. Not all your tests will be huge winners, but every little but counts. Not to get all sciency in a marketing post, but CRO is based on the scientific method, where results are observed from experiments and then conclusions are drawn. 

I’ve been doing CRO for three businesses for about six years now and I’ll say I’ve had mostly winning hypotheses. Not that I’m prescient, it’s just that it’s typically pretty obvious what needs to be fixed or what’s frustrating your customers on your site. Occasionally you will get a mega winner. For example, I ran marketing for a website security and optimization service a few years back. We had a typical pricing page with an option to get a customized price quote that fit your business (number of websites, amount of traffic, feature options). The original page had a button that read “Contact Sales.” Well, no offense to all my sales brethren, but most people don’t usually want to talk to a someone trying to sell them something when they are just doing research. Our experiment was to change the button to “Get Quote.” That’s what they really wanted, after all. The results: a 280 percent increase in conversions by just changing two words. 

Another interesting thing about CRO is that the customer is always right. No matter how nice a CMO or web designer thinks a page looks, the results speak for themselves. Sometimes ugly wins over beautiful, which I admit I’m conflicted about. But there’s no room for opinion – just facts. You can always try to improve the appearance in a subsequent experiment. 

The range of hypotheses is almost infinite. And they can come from anywhere in your organization. You can change button colors and sizes. Change the image in the hero. Vie a product screen shot against a photo of a happy customer. Of course, you can change the offer itself, too. I personally find CRO a lot of fun and look forward to the check-in meetings where we review the results. 

B2B and CRO 

I don’t know why more B2B marketers don’t do CRO, but I have a few theories. First off, I don’t think they ever learned it. Unless you worked on a high-volume team, it may never have come up. I got to know it from growth marketers in large SaaS businesses. 

Another related possibility is that high average selling prices mask the need for more efficiency. This is the flip side of high volume. If you sell stuff for $100,000 you may not need as many deals to hit your number and may be less concerned about optimization. 

I asked Chris Neuman, CEO of Cro Metrics and a vendor of mine, his thoughts: 

“You can’t get code live on the sites of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, or any other high-performance tech company without a successful experiment.  These companies don’t do wholesale redesigns; their designers run incremental experiments, and the sites evolve over time.  In B2B this practice is less prevalent, so there is still the opportunity to build a structural competitive advantage. 

So, while many of us envy the resources of FAANG, we ignore a simple best practice that’s not expensive. I think the real culprit is ignorance. Which is a shame because it is so inexpensive relative to other marketing spends. Depending on the scope of what you do, CRO is typically between $10,000 and $20,000 per month with software and a specialist agency. This is around what an SEO program will cost, and on the lower end of what a B2B marketer would spend monthly on PR. 

What really puts it into contrast, however, is comparing it to Google ad spend. This can range widely but say $50,000 to $100,000+ for a decent size startup. Much higher for a bigger public company. Why would you spend $100,000 to bring people to a landing page but $0 to optimize that page? It just doesn’t make sense. 

Chris makes another good point about funnel optimization, “Not only can it be used to drive more leads, but you can also design your experiments to drive lead quality up, which is important for B2B since there is real cost in following up on leads. 

Thinking back on this series of posts, this CRO fail is just a continuation of the same theme. Prospects want convenience. They want their questions answered quickly. They want what they want, and they want it on their phone in line while waiting to pick up their lunch. B2B marketers get mad when they can’t place an order for a new t-shirt from their phone at Starbucks, but ignore that experience when they build their own pages. 

There really is no excuse for it. Ignoring CRO just adds friction to the buyer journey. Something we all know is a no-no but too often ignored. 

The post B2B Marketer Fails, Part 3 – Website Conversion Optimization  appeared first on Matthews on Marketing.

B2B Marketer Fails, Part 2 – All Sales Start with Google (or YouTube)

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

[image error]In the first part of this B2B marketer fails series, I talked about how B2B marketers fail to realize they are selling to people, not businesses. They sell to the professionals who work at a business. And though these professionals have their work hats on, they need to be convinced based on their own personal needs, ambitions, and motivations.

The crux of the fail is marketers ignoring how they act themselves. Whether as a consumer or a professional, the people in the marketing department somehow ignore their own experience. For example, B2B marketers buy martech products for any number of human reasons – convenience, status, bragging rights, FOMO. But then they somehow forget all that when marketing their products to professionals, reverting to dusty jargon like ROI, time to value, or best-in-class this or that.

Another example of this unexplained B2B marketer hypocrisy has to do with how business professionals find and buy products – what we dress up as routes to market in B2B-speak. Most, if not all, consumer purchases today start with a search engine, primarily Google, but maybe also Amazon or YouTube. I believe most business buyers also begin their purchase research on Google. But the amount of time and energy B2B marketers spend on optimizing for their products to be discovered this way is proportionally out of whack. That’s what we’ll cover in this post.

Search is King

I don’t think I even need to convince anyone that search has taken over how we buy as consumers. Everyone reading this has typed their own version of “khaki shorts size 34” or “Kaanapali hotel deals November” into the Chrome, Safari, or Firefox search box. Amazon Prime members might type “khaki shorts size 34 amazon” to get the free shipping and convenience of not having to register or enter their payment details.

Consumer brands spend a lot of money to make sure their products show up on top so they can maximize conversion. Some of this is done via advertising. But a lot has to do with the practice of search engine optimization (SEO). Whether images, page links, or map links, businesses fight to be ranked as high as possible because the top links convert at a much higher rate.

Probably 100 percent of B2B marketers pay Google for their ads to show up for certain keywords important to their business. But my guess – based on conversations with hundreds of B2B marketers over the years – is that less than 25 percent dedicate the time, energy, and money needed to do SEO right. This is a huge miss. According to a survey from Smart Insights, 60 percent of people find organic search results more relevant, and 46 percent found them more trustworthy. B2B marketers are not where their prospective customers are looking for relevant, trustworthy results. Oh, and by the way, while SEO is not free, it is a lot cheaper than search engine marketing (SEM).

Build Your Brand by Helping People

Many times, people are looking for answers, not products. So, if you only optimize for search around a product purchase, you are missing an opportunity to both educate your prospect and catch them earlier in their purchase process, aka up the funnel.

What you want to do is map your product to a problem it solves – something you probably already know – and then write educational content to fit. The more authoritative and helpful, the more powerful for your brand. You will, of course, have the opportunity to remarket to those who visit your blog or website and offer them even more valuable content in exchange for their details.

Imagine an accounting manager on a finance team wondering about the new financial regulation ASC 606. As it will probably affect their job, they may want to know when it will take effect and what changes will it cause to how they calculate results. On a more personal level, they may just want to be conversant so they don’t sound stupid in a meeting. So, they type “what is ASC 606” into the search box. If you are a consulting firm or software vendor that works with accounting teams, you can offer an explainer that helps answer their basic questions. Then you follow up with more detailed posts and perhaps recommendations about how they should change their accounting process. This is your opening to market your product or service.

Creating an SEO strategy, with a supporting content plan, is too involved to explain in detail here. But the short version is that you should think about the top 3-5 problems your product or service solves, then look for the terms within those problems that have the highest search volume and lowest competition for ranking, and start there. It’s a long game, but well worth it.

One mistake I have seen made over and over again is to think SEO is a one-time project. SEO is a competitive game. It takes constant care and feeding to work.

The YouTube School of Learning

[image error]I mentioned above that YouTube is the second largest search engine. But until recently, I was guilty of ignoring its potential. I think many B2B marketers have fallen into the same trap.

As I recently wrote, I thought YouTube was good for entertainment. Cat videos. Sports highlights. Cooking or makeup tips. What I hadn’t realized is how many people (millions) turn to YouTube to learn a skill. Which means you can use a similar SEO strategy for video content.

Searches that start with “what is” or “how to” are very popular on YouTube. Typing “What is ASC 606” into YouTube gives me a list of tutorial videos with well over 100,000 views as of the writing of this post. The key is not to ignore the potential of YouTube video for B2B marketing. Some people simply prefer to watch a video than to read a blog post. For others, it’s just become a habit.

Also, optimizing for YouTube can have a beneficial effect on your overall SEO program. I should first say that the Google and YouTube SEO algorithms are different but symbiotic. You need to do the work on both platforms, but there is some crossover benefit. For example, Google now shows thumbnails of videos – known as the “carousel” – for many search terms, especially on mobile. Ranking for a search term YouTube can be significantly easier than on Google, and therefore you may get to the first Google SERP faster via a YouTube video in the carousel. Also, Google likes blog posts with videos embedded. So, your YouTube videos can give a boost to your existing Google SEO-oriented content.

We’ve covered your prospects, how to talk to them, and where to find them in their buying process. In the next post, we’ll cover the overlooked area of website conversion. Once you get them to come to you, you need to make the most of it. Many B2B marketers don’t.

The post B2B Marketer Fails, Part 2 – All Sales Start with Google (or YouTube) appeared first on Matthews on Marketing.

B2B Marketer Fails, Part 1 – You Sell to People, Not Companies

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Note: I don’t know why, but the pandemic and WFH seemed to sap my creativity and shut out the muse. Only after realizing it had been over six months since my last post did I give myself a kick in the rear to get back at it.

[image error]Every month, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by B2B marketers trying to entice buyers from various businesses to inquire about their products. It pales in comparison to the half-trillion a year spent on ads to convince consumers like all of us to buy soda, cars, insurance, vacations, pizza, and all-the-other-stuff-we-need. But B2B marketers still spend a lot of money. So, it never ceases to bother me how little my B2B peers try to learn from their B2C counterparts. Maybe, just maybe, those big brands know a thing or two about persuasion.

I don’t know if it’s arrogance or ignorance, but there is so much we B2B marketers can learn (and steal). And I’m not talking about TV ads. We B2B folks don’t have the mega ad budgets, or really much right to advertise on television. Aside from IBM and the Big Four, B2B television ads are like pebbles in the ocean. Sometimes, very expensive pebbles:

Did you see our Super Bowl ad?

No, I missed it. Is it going to keep running?

Well, uh, we kind of blew the budget on it.

Sigh.

But persuading people is not just about big television ad budgets. It’s about understanding people’s wants and needs, meeting them where they are, and giving them the best experience possible. All of this builds great consumer brands that are powerful and durable. In this multi-part rant post, I’ll cover three things I think B2B marketers can learn from B2C marketers and apply in their marketing programs. To start, let’s talk about people.

We Don’t Sell to Businesses; We Sell to People

I was chatting to a veteran B2B marketer recently, and he mentioned something I hadn’t heard in a long time: No one sells to companies; we all sell to people in companies. Too true.

When it’s said, it’s obvious. But if you are a B2B marketer, think about the nouns you use in your marketing copy. I’ll bet you say things like, “Our company saves organizations 78% on their purchases,” or “Our company makes teams 45% more efficient.” Where are the people? While these statements may be true, and appealing to an extent, they don’t get to the heart of the matter.

What you want to do is convince the people within the office buildings. Maybe instead of business-to-business (B2B) we should call it business-to-professional (B2P).  A consumer is just you when you are not working. You are still a person with needs and emotions. B2B marketers need to convey help their product or service helps people in their profession. Or, maybe, how to get more life in their work-life balance.

Here are three steps you should take to make your B2B marketing more about the people.

Map Out the Buying Center

Wait, you just left us thinking about people, and now you are spouting this technobabble, you say? Yes, but indulge me for a minute. We’ll get there.

In B2B sales, unlike in B2C, there is rarely just one person involved in the buying process.  The buying center just a term for the group of people involved.  Importantly, these people will not just have different roles in the company, but they will have different roles in the buying process.

For example, the buyer titles at a pharmaceutical company may be CEO, head of research, senior scientist, and lab technician. You need to figure out who is the decision-maker, who is the influencer, who is the budget holder, and who may be what’s called a gatekeeper. Depending on the size of the purchase, the decision-maker and the budget owner might be different people, even at the same company.

So, your first step is to map out the people in the buying center. Then, based on your product, you need to figure out their role in the purchase process. Now you are ready for the next step. (For more on the roles in the buying center, read this.)

Map Out Personas

Buyer personas are profiles of the people in the buying center. In our example above, you would want to describe each of the four jobs, the kinds of things they care about, what success looks like, and more.

Consumer brands spend a lot of time studying their target buyers. You have no doubt heard about demographics. Ad people spend a lot of time here. Even before they think about extolling their features or touting secret ingredients, they want to know what makes their ideal customer tick.

In one great example, Best Buy mapped out its four most common customer types. Meet Buzz, Barry, Ray, and Jill, Best Buy’s four personas:

Buzz (the young tech-enthusiast)
Barry (the wealthy professional man)
Ray (the family man)
Jill (a soccer-mom type who is the primary shopper for the family but usually avoids electronics stores)

Best Buy trained its sales reps to treat each of the four differently, catering to their needs. According to the company, its efforts increased sales from Jills over 30 percent. Taking the time to be patient and clear meant real money.

So, how do you build a persona? Get to know what they are thinking. As Adelle Revella from the Buyer Persona Institute puts it:

Built from the real words of real buyers, a buyer persona tells you what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem that your company resolves.

Get your marketing team to do interviews. You need to speak to people directly. Here’s a post I wrote a while ago you can use to get started.

Talk to People

Okay, now you know who the people are and what they care about. Time to talk to speak their language and directly to them.

This means you are going to need to change the way you write your marketing copy. Let’s take the example from the intro above: “Our company saves organizations 78% on their purchases.” If you want to communicate to the CEO persona, then how about, “We can shave 78% off of your basic supply costs so you can make your margins look better.” Or, even better, “We can give you a margin advantage over your competition. The CEO of Acme Corp told us it was part of the reason his stock price doubled last year.” Notice the use of the pronouns you and we. It’s about the person and what they care about, and the people in your company communicating with them. In the case of CEOs, who tend to be competitive and measure success in terms of their share price, we are speaking to something they care about personally.

Now, let’s take the same example and tailor it for the head of research. How about, “We can reduce the money you spend on chemical ingredients so you can put more money into your people.” What head of research does not want that? Maybe they are competitive, wanting to out-research their grad school rivals. “The head of research at Acme Corp told us he was able to hire more scientists and even a few interns with the savings we brought. No need to go to the CFO and ask for more money.” (Great. More people. No tedious and uncomfortable money-grubbing.) “He even told us that his expanded staff got them to clinical trials six months faster than he planned.” (Even better. Prestige and profits on the way.)

You may ask how you can write different copy for all these different people. That’s a lot of work! Yes, it’s more work. But it will pay off. There are ways of segmenting your audiences, either by the marketing channel you use or how you train your salespeople or sales partners.

Now that we know that we are really trying to persuade people, not businesses, time to understand what people are looking for or asking about, and where. That will be the next post.

The post B2B Marketer Fails, Part 1 – You Sell to People, Not Companies appeared first on Matthews on Marketing.

Three Psychology Tricks Marketers Use to Make You Buy

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

We marketers have something in common with magicians. Prestidigitators and product promoters are both students of human behavior. While magicians take advantage of distraction, marketers tap into three other psychological traits.

Unlike magicians, we marketers have no code that prevents us from revealing our secrets. Tips and tricks blogs on growth hacks must number in the tens of thousands by now. So, I don’t fear being ostracized from the CMO club. Here are three of the ways marketers use their knowledge of human behavior to reach or convince you.

Flowers and Reciprocity

Humans are wired to reciprocate. When given a gift, even if we didn’t ask for it, we feel grateful and inclined to do something in return.

An iconic example of this principle in action dates to the 1970s when it became common in city centers and airports to have a robed member of the Hare Krishna religious sect hand a flower to a passerby. After taking this small and thoughtful gift from a smiling believer, the receiver would then be asked for a small donation, sometimes in return for a religious pamphlet. It helped Hare Krishna raise money and spread the word.

Marketers today take advantage of reciprocity in many ways. Maybe you have received in the mail custom return address labels from a charitable organization, asking for a donation. Right out of the Hare Krishna playbook. You feel guilty if you don’t donate because you are wired for reciprocity.

In B2B, marketers are increasingly sending small gifts in the mail to prospective buyers. I’ve received enough cookies, chocolate, and wine over the years to throw a large dessert party. These gifts are always followed by an email or phone call from a sales development representative. They ask if I’ve received the gift and would be open to a phone call or meeting to discuss buying their product. Reciprocity.

Price and Fear

Have you ever walked into a boutique only to find there are no prices on anything? If you are like most people, you get a little trepidacious: What if I get talked into buying a $500 t-shirt?

Software marketers, like me, understand this fear of being taken. When we sell software-as-a-service (SaaS) online, we do one of two things. If we are selling low- to mid-priced packages, we will typically show the various options side by side so that the buyer can decide what they want and – hopefully – upsell themselves to a higher-priced plan based on additional features. This transparency removes fear from the buyer and allows them to upsell themselves.

In the case of more expensive, premium packages – often named ‘Enterprise’ or something similar – marketers fear prospective customers will go away if they get sticker shock on the first interaction. What to do?

Marketers will show the price of the lower-priced packages, but ask the buyer to call or fill in a form to get a quote for the higher-priced one. This is an application of a technique called price anchoring, which builds on the tendency of the buyer to rely on the first piece of information provided in a transaction. Seeing the lower-priced plans puts the buyer at ease. The buyer will, in their mind, assume a slightly higher price for the premium package, thereby removing the fear of the unknown. (Note, price anchoring can also be used to sell a mid-priced product, which seems like a better deal next to a premium product.)

Affiliates and Trust

I recently wrote about my YouTube infatuation. To help educate myself, I spent a lot of time watching tutorials on video production – how to light, how to record audio, how to get the best video recording and the like. I learned a lot.

And it is common in these videos for the YouTuber to put a bunch of hyperlinks to sites offering the cameras or mics or lights that they were demonstrating. How helpful. And how profitable.

You see, marketers know that you will trust the recommendations of those who you trust. After someone has spent ten or twenty minutes teaching you something, you tend to trust them. Those links the YouTuber put in the description are customized to them and known as ‘affiliate links.’ If you click on them and happen to buy the piece of equipment, that YouTuber affiliate earns a commission. Some YouTubers reveal that they are an affiliate, typically in the video description, but some do not. Sometimes you can tell by looking at the URL once on the product vendor’s page. As a buyer, you just need to understand the motivations of the YouTuber and factor it in before you buy.

Now that you know what marketers are up to, you will no doubt see applications of these three tricks techniques all over the place. We marketers are not miracle workers or magicians, just students of human behavior.

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