The power and problem with marketing signals?

Quotes

• “I was once told that the intention is attention. With that said, let’s talk about the problems with marketing signals first.” -Ross “Attribution is a huge problem with marketing signal. I want to tell the story of Honey, which is a chrome extension. Honey comes to the Chrome store about two years ago, they spend millions of dollars spend advertising on YouTube and millions of people use it to get discounts on buying a pair of pants and this completely destroys companies.” -Ross“The reason it destroys them is, let’s say you are a Walmart and you have an SEO team that is spending a million dollars a year to advertise a pair of pants. Icome in as a consumer, I click on that pair of pants but right before I’m about to buy it, I could use Honey. Now, there’s an affiliate marketing team at Walmart also who is going to incredibly well-known YouTubers and giving them discount code. Honey somehow scrapes that discount code puts it into the chrome extension and so before right I before I buy a pair of pants, I use a discount code from an affiliate marketing which means that everyone at Walmart thinks that I came in through watching a YouTube channel when really, I came in through SEO so they defund SEO, they give more money to affiliates and their whole platform collapses.” -Ross“It is a marketing signal problem because it has to do with attribution. In Ross’ example, the attribution was going through the affiliate but it’s about the SEO making the product discoverable and building that demand.” -Bryan “Understanding the power of your marketing signals creates attribution problems. You might be looking at a data source and marketing towards it but because their attribution marketing is not always clear, it’s hard to evaluate whether your marketing signals are actually successful.” -Ben “In previous episodes, we’ve said that basically you need to build your own signals into your own platform, creating your own affiliate program is part of building into your own platform if your affiliate program is collecting signals that aren’t as accurate as they think they are, then you are going to fail and become dependent on whatever previous method that you are using.” -Bryan “What I’m hearing you say is that the problem with data signals is evaluating the data signal from a beginning to an end. I can go look and say, ‘I want to figure out who the people are that attended a marketing event as theywould be good potential prospects for the MarTech podcast’ but if I am not able to isolate those people, market to them and then understand what their conversion path is all the way through my funnel, it’s really hard for me to tell whether that data works or not.” -Ben “It really comes down to the sales cycle. We supply data to B2B customers, their sales cycle maybe 9 months to a year. How do they know that we are giving them new hire data at the beginning that starts the conversation? The conversationgets started, they go into a nurture funnel and they become an MQL the MQL then converts into a pipeline and proposal and opportunity and then finally converts into a client 9 months later. Is the marketing team accurately monitoring the entire customer journey like you explain? That signal to noise atrophies over time internally as well.” -Ross“The problem is you don’t know. Was it the nurture campaign? Was it the rockstar salesperson at the end? Or was it that they had the first conversation with new hire data. You really can’t tell and attribution is definitely a problem when it comes to marketing signals. It’s a multi-billion dollar problem.” -Ross “This is why most SaaS companies start with the SMB space with small dollar amounts because they canafford to risk the long enterprise cycle and then once they had it figured out at an SMB sales cycle is like, they start to go up-market.” -Ross “The reason why SaaS companies often start with a lower price point is to shorten the time for conversion so they can evaluate which data sources are the effective ones, hone in on targeting them, build the right list and then they can raise their prices because they know those people have the highest conversion rate. That’s really smart.” -Ben “If you look 10 or 15 years ago, only CFOs, COOs purchase big enterprise licenses and now, 5 or 7 years ago, the functional leaders like the VP, the Director level is buying in a stack. We are seeing the evolution of SaaS because there is a SaaS for everything coming all the way down to action that individuals have in their own personalized stack that they can use and plugin with each other to get the job done. You don’t need the CFO level or the functional level. That’s where I see the future is going and I don’t see it going to more and more enterprise contracts anymore.” -Ross “The power of marketing signals is just, you can get to a point where there is so much data about you on the internet where the platforms, the social networks, the enterprise sales companies know more about data about you and know you better than yourself.” -Bryan“The power is in saving money and time. This is all an abstraction of a relationship or understanding a fundamental need and saving time is pretty powerful.” -Bryan“To me, I think the power of marketing signals is moving from being a volume shooter to an assassin. If you are able to get the most accurate data that not only tells you whether somebody is a prospect but they are in ready to buy market prospect, then youhave to market to fewer people and that’s where your costs come down and conversion rates go up.” -Ben “Marketing signals are all about understanding intent and propensity to buy and also gives you the ability to start a conversation as well as it gives you a warm lead.” -Ben“It’s about knowing who to reach out to, when to reach out to them, and what to say. The tower is that it’s so simple to know who to reach out to and when to reach out to that and how to reach out with a timely conversation starter. You can reach out to anyone at any time but they are not going to respond unless you ask them an interesting question or start an interesting conversation.” -Ross