Take Care of Your Data
In B2B data-driven marketing, your data is a bit like a bicycle chain.
In B2B data-driven marketing, your data is a bit like a bicycle chain.
David Fisher, author of Hyper-Connected Selling, knows that technology-enabled sales is great, but it’s never going to satisfy the need for human connection.
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B2B marketing has a vanity problem.
The lure of LinkedIn’s vast amount of business data makes it an attractive advertising asset… if you know what you’re doing. Ill-informed LinkedIn marketing campaigns can cost you big-time.
AJ Wilcox is the founder of B2Linked, a LinkedIn ad agency.
On this episode of the B2B Revealed Podcast, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell interviewed B2Linked Founder AJ Wilcox on how best to leverage LinkedIn to reach B2B audiences. B2Linked is an advertising agency that specializes in LinkedIn ads.
The key benefit of advertising on LinkedIn is its business targeting capabilities. “Here’s the dirty secret of LinkedIn: they absolutely have a monopoly on business data,” Wilcox said. “You can target people by their job title, by what department they sit in, their level of seniority in the organization, individual skills they have listed in their profile, groups they are members of, their education level, what degree they got, what school they went to, their company size, their company name, company industry. It just goes on and on.”
LinkedIn advertising is rather pricey though. For this reason, it’s not always a great fit for companies’ advertising goals. LinkedIn advertising is worth it, Wilcox said, if the target audience is shaped by some professional criteria and the transaction or relationship the ad is designed to prompt is worth thousands.
“You’ve got to make a lot of money off of the deal to make LinkedIn worth it. The reason why is because clicks on LinkedIn usually cost somewhere between about $6-9 on average whereas similar clicks on Facebook might cost $.80-1.50,” said Wilcox. “The line in the sand that I draw is if you’re going to make $15,000 or more from either the lifetime of the deal or that initial deal size, then LinkedIn’s an absolute no-brainer.”
LinkedIn offers a variety of advertising options. Wilcox favors sponsored content, the ads that run in the LinkedIn newsfeed. “These work really well because they are the highest interaction ad that LinkedIn has,” he said. “By “highest interaction” I mean on average, about a third of a percent of every time it’s shown it’s going to get clicked on.”
Text ads, Wilcox explained, show up far less frequently and are only visible from desktop. The latter may be an asset if the landing page your ad directs to doesn’t look great on mobile. But, think carefully before investing in text ads when sponsored content boasts much higher engagement.
“[Text ads] have a much lower, like 12 times lower, engagement rate,” Wilcox warned. “In order to drive enough traffic and leads from that ad unit to even make it worth running, you have to have a really big audience you’re going after.
Whereas sponsored content and text ads charge a cost-per-click, sponsored InMail has a fee-per-send. “There’s no guarantee that someone’s going to open it, let alone click on it, let alone convert. You’re going to pay just for having it in their box,” Wilcox cautioned.
But sponsored InMail does have its benefits. “A really cool factor here to keep in mind is that once you send someone an InMail, that LinkedIn member is ineligible to receive another one for 60 days, a 2-month period,” Wilcox said. “You know that none of your competitors can steal that inventory from you for a whole two months.”
The key to a successful InMail campaign, Wilcox explained, is an enticing offer. Beware, whitepapers and e-books won’t cut it.
Tailor the offer specifically, and keep it interesting. You don’t want to be mistaken for spam.
“The offers that we’ve found work really well are things like employment. “We want to reach out to you and ask you to apply for this position because you look like a good fit,” Wilcox said. “Or, “There’s an in-person event that we want to personally invite you to,” or, “Because of your standing in the industry, we’re really curious about your thoughts around this new platform. We want to give you free access to it.” Those types of offers are really, really attractive, and are probably going to get someone to engage.”
The B2B Revealed Podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights, a market research firm specializing in B2B technology. Need more B2B brilliance? There are many ways to follow us.
Facts and statistics make for a boring presentation. If you want to earn thunderous applause with your next conference talk, make sure your speech actually says something. Spellbind with a story.
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In this episode, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell interviews renowned speaker Troy Hazard on giving a conference talk. Hazard is a seasoned keynote speaker, entrepreneur, author, TV presenter, and business consultant with more than 25 years of experience.
Hazard points out that an emotional arc means more to the audience than a random list of data points. “People relate to stories. That’s why we like the movies. We like to see the hero win and the villain get crushed, and all that sort of stuff. It’s the same on stage,” he said. “They’re going to immerse themselves in the journey, and there’s a far better learning opportunity when you do it that way.” Give your audience a reason to care about your data by putting it in context and explaining why it matters.
Campbell pointed out that some individuals are natural storytellers, others are not. What if a non-storyteller finds themselves giving a presentation? Can they learn to build a compelling narrative?
Short answer: yes. Anyone can turn experience into a story. What happened? What did you learn from it? How did you change afterward? How did that affect outcomes? Hazard encouraged potential speakers to answer the question: “What was the action you took after you experienced the events in this story?” That’s what audiences want to know and learn from.
Another key tip: don’t spend 5 of your 60 minutes walking through your bio. Instead, take the opportunity to grab your audience’s attention as quickly as possible. “I learned a lesson from a fellow speaker years ago that the best way to start that presentation is to walk out and start it. I’ll walk out onto the stage and say, ‘Let me take you back to 1996. I’m getting off a plane from Tokyo, and I get a call from the office, and the first thing is that they tell me is we just lost $375,000.'” In other words, get right to the point and start the story off right away.
To give a speech worth listening to, you gotta tell a good story. Turn your presentation into a hero’s journey of lessons learned from experience.
Want to spruce up your presentation skills? Listen to the full episode for more speaking tips and see our collection of business communication best practices.
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How should marketers balance the need to be visible with the need to be relevant and useful?
The best marketers love data and the creative process in equal measure.
On this episode of B2B Revealed, “Analytical Marketer: How to Transform Your Marketing Organization” author Adele Sweetwood is our guest.
Sweetwood is the senior vice president of global marketing & shared services at SAS.
Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell and Sweetwood explore why an analytical mindset is necessary for a properly targeted marketing success strategy.
“The days of marketing as simply an artistic endeavor are gone. That’s not to say that creative skills are not in demand, it’s just that [creative skill] alone [is] insufficient.”
“We’re killing our customers with messages.”
“Once you start the engine moving, you don’t want the pieces missing.”
“The sales relationship needs constant care and feeding.”- Sweetwood on communication between marketing and sales.
“Investment in technology and … [capturing] data and analytics in your company is better than an ad you might buy or an event you might go to.” – Sweetwood on marketing for small businesses.
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Ageism in tech is common knowledge, but, oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of data on it.
LinkedIn ad targeting is a surprisingly useful tool for studying the gender gap in tech giants. Especially in the absence of diversity reports.
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