Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
244: Evolving with B2B Marketing with Guest Eric Eden
Kendra talks imperfect marketing with B2B marketing expert and podcast host Eric Eden. With over 20 years of experience leading marketing teams for internet services and SaaS companies, Eric shares his insights on the evolving landscape of B2B marketing.
Topics covered in today's conversation include:
- The most remarkable marketing strategies Eric has implemented
- How marketing channels have shifted in recent years
- The rise of podcasting and YouTube as effective B2B marketing channels
- The impact of AI on marketing processes and content creation
- The changing landscape of in-person events in B2B marketing
- The importance of measuring ROI in marketing activities
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Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I am your host, kendra Korman, and today I am joined by Eric Eden. I'm going to take a look at his bio really quick. So he has over 20 years of experience leading marketing teams for internet services and SaaS companies. His experience includes building great marketing teams, implementing marketing technology solutions effectively, driving demand and driving growth, which is hugely important. His greatest gifts are his strategic vision, his ability to implement dynamic marketing and branding strategies. He says show me any business and I will accelerate it to its highest potential. That sounds so cool. Thanks so much for joining me today, eric.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, kendra, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Oh, and he's also the host of the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, so I love it when I have podcast hosts on too. I know that I've been on your show and now I have you over here on Imperfect Marketing, so that's always good. So let's go ahead and jump in. Your podcast is called the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Can you tell me something about the most remarkable marketing you've done so?
Speaker 2:my daughters would tell you that I'm very old and so I've done a lot of great marketing things over the last 25 years. Of great marketing things over the last 25 years. I've always worked for venture capital and private equity-backed companies, so where the growth is supposed to be 100% a year, and so that is what I love and what I'm passionate about, and I've had eight exits, so ranging in price points of the exits where I've been part of the leadership team and leading marketing for those companies, totaling $8 billion. So, I think, driving growth of those companies and helping them get big exits, in several cases, after raising more than $100 million and after going public and it all happened really because at those companies, we built sales and marketing machines that drove really high growth, and so that's really what I'm most proud of a lot of the things that add up to that.
Speaker 1:That's pretty amazing. I mean, people that have one successful exit are considered extremely successful, and the fact that you've had multiple totaling that amount is amazing. And yes, you're old, so am I. It's all good, it's all good, so let's go ahead and start talking about. Marketing has changed a ton so far this year. How are you seeing it? What changes have you been seeing and where do you see things going?
Speaker 2:It's funny if you went back just five years and took five years off and then you showed up again today, it would be a totally different thing of leading marketing at B2B and growth companies.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of that is because the systems and technologies and tools have changed and evolved quite a bit over the last five years.
Speaker 2:I also think it's because the distribution of which channels make the most sense has changed pretty significantly over the years, and so the amount of money that you spend on like people typically say, like half their marketing budget is on program spend you know money that's going out to third parties, advertising and things like that and so I think that how they spend that money has shifted quite significantly. And I think the final piece of it is you know, there's systems, there's programs and there's people, and I think the people and the skills that you need today, because the channels and the systems are different, are also, in some cases, different. People that you need today, because the channels and the systems are different, are also, in some cases, different people too that you need for your team. So I think, across all three main areas where you invest in marketing, those three things have changed and just the willingness and curiousness to think about that is what makes, I think, a lot of people successful in the new world order, if you will.
Speaker 1:Yes, curiosity, I think, is really, really important and I don't think we're giving it enough credit. I actually think it's going to be my word of the year for 2025 is to be curious because, again, things are changing so rapidly, talking about the channels shifting and where your money is going, what channels are you seeing? Increase versus decrease?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think one of the channels pre-COVID was an in-person event. Pre-covid, I think, was a solid 35% 40% in B2B businesses. One business by going to other people's events, holding their own events. So events was um more than a third of the equation pre-covid. I think it's come back, but it hasn't come back quite to that level um, because the cost of doing those events was always at the higher, the higher um, one of the higher cost channels and and now that people are over the pandemic it's still like well, they're like it's a higher cost channel and there's other channels that might be more cost effective. So I think yes to events, but people aren't quite going as big on sponsorships and they're not spending $100,000 to go to a certain trade show and things like that. They're thinking differently about that. So that's one change.
Speaker 2:Another change is around online advertising. I think Google and Facebook advertising has gotten so expensive. It's prohibitively expensive for a lot of companies unless you have a much higher price point. I just frame it up this way is, in B2B, a lot of companies used to be able to acquire a customer via Google or Facebook advertising. If they spent $3,000 in advertising they could win a customer. And now you have to spend more like $7,000 to $10,000 to acquire a customer, and that dog just doesn't hunt. For a lot of companies it's just too much. They're losing money In SaaS companies.
Speaker 2:They say it takes years for them to pay that marketing cost back if they spend that much, and so I think online advertising was a couple years ago. 20-25% of business came from that, and now I think companies just can't really afford to be winning 25% of their business that way. It's just too expensive. So those are just two examples. I think on the other side of what's more efficient is I think a lot of companies are looking at channels like podcasting and YouTube as channels that have a lot more reach and you can do a lot more than you can with written content, and so I think a lot of companies are investing more in those channels because they can get awareness in these channels and then connect with people. So I think five years ago I don't think people were waiting more than a couple percent there, and now they're waiting more like 10 to 20% there. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:It definitely does.
Speaker 1:So before we switch to our next question, let's spend a little time here, because I love that we're doing that.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, in-person is bouncing back a little bit, but it's expensive and I think companies did get a little bit of a reprieve, you know, on their budgets from that and it's hard to get it to go back there.
Speaker 1:I went to my first, maybe second, large conference since COVID earlier this year and I was like wow, like it really made a difference, Um, and which is interesting, um, you know like, because it the connections were there, the conversations were there, I was energized and so there's a lot of value to those events coming back. But you're right, they're nowhere near where they were and I think a lot of that has to do again with budgets and and coming off of that sort of spoiled us a little bit in the marketing budget world. But I also I also like where you're headed with the YouTube and podcasts, Because there's a lot of people that are generating a ton of AI content right now and, yes, you can generate AI video and all that other stuff, but I feel like more of the podcasts and the videos seem to be more authentic and less fake, for lack of a better term than a lot of the AI generated content. That is just sort of blah, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think the interesting thing is is that from a written perspective and I say this as someone who is a journalism major in college 30 years ago so I love to write and I've written like a gazillion blogs over the years and I like writing on social media but the reality is, is that on podcasts, where you can hear people's voice, you can hear the emotion come through. You can can hear people's voice. You can hear the emotion come through. You can hear when someone's smiling, you can hear when they laugh, you can hear when they're sarcastic, you can hear when they're frustrated.
Speaker 2:I think that's a different mode of communication than just the written word and I think some people said just well, written content and B2B has gotten flooded and there's just everyone has an ebook and everyone has a gazillion blog posts and it's just really hard to cut through that noise. So I think podcasts and YouTube with the audio and the video cut through some of that noise and you add in the factor and what it does is it beigeifies everything, taking everything to sort of the lowest common denominator. And I think if people follow some of the best practices like you tell, you know, chat, gpt, not to include the generic best practices and if you do five revisions of everything it gives you, you can probably get to a more real sort of answer. If you're really good at giving that sort of direction but I think the super majority of people do it give vague direction and you get back the lowest common denominator of beige-ified stuff that really doesn't move the needle with anybody, and so I think that's like, from a content perspective, the issue with AI today. I mean in six months maybe it gets better.
Speaker 2:Some of the cool things I've seen that are next. One of the cool things I've seen this next generation is you sort of put in a persona, you put in the role you're targeting, you put in the tone you want, like inspirational, motivational, and then it gives you something that's a little bit better. Just by having several input prompts like that, it creates a better prompt for you. Uh, but we're not really there yet, in my opinion, with chat, gpt 40, some of the other models like um, gemini and some of the other ones like they're not quite ready for primetime yet, to automate, to just put stuff in and get stuff out.
Speaker 2:We're still not there yet, right?
Speaker 1:And I don't know if we'll ever be 100% there. It'll be interesting to see how it evolves, and I do think that it's important. I'm a huge fan of AI. It saves me a ridiculous amount of time on everything that I do. It saves me three hours an episode per podcast Like that's a lot, because I bulk record. I'm recording five episodes today of interviews and when I go to edit these in a couple of weeks I'm not going to remember what we talked about. So the AI generated transcript doesn't require me to re-listen to the whole episode again, and the magic clips that Riverside makes for me allows me to, and they still need editing, you know, to find some of those important little snippets that I can leverage on social and things like that. But yeah, it all takes some level of input from us and the more we rely on it, the more it's going to. The world is going to be beige-ified and you know, our information becomes a commodity without our stories and our feelings and our experiences, and I think it's a dangerous situation.
Speaker 2:I think there are a number of things in business that it will get there and it won't be a co-pilot, it'll be the pilot. And what I think is going to happen is every single process in business, in marketing, is going to be evaluated to say, is this a business process that can be co-pilot, or there can be an AI agent created that can just do it, and there'll be some, a third bucket where it doesn't apply like you just can't do it. But I think that bucket will be much smaller than people realize. So I think the AI agent use case will be things like book a meeting or book this trip for me, and it knows what your preferences are, that you like in ILC and you want to fly in United and you won't want to fly in the morning and you always have to fly. You know premium economy. You can put in those things. I think it'll get good enough where it can like book the trip for you and maybe you review it or you can change it after. But I think there will be a number of cases where you can just tell it do it, and it'll be good enough in the next couple of versions, maybe not today, but maybe in the next year or two. So I think that'll be really interesting and fun to watch.
Speaker 2:I think there'll be a lot of grinding of the years to get there, but I think we'll get to AI agents and to get there. But I think we'll get to AI agents and I think that's pretty interesting to think about. If you think that's where it's going. It'll sort of inform some of your behavior today and I do think that we'll get beyond, even on the co-pilot stuff. Right now I use seven different tools when I'm doing a podcast. I can do a podcast episode from start to finish in two hours, but if I hadn't had any of those tools that have AI capabilities, it'd probably take me 10 hours. So similar sort of time savings. But I still look it over and I would say it only gets it like 60% of the way there. So if we can get to the point where it gets it 99% of the way there and maybe you change something and got slightly wrong, that'll be interesting if we can get closer to that directionally right yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I definitely think we are headed there, so it should be very interesting to see how it goes and evolves. Again, going back to curiosity, this is where you know it's going to make a difference. I find so many people have opinions on everything and they haven't, like, really spent much time with these tools to be able to weigh in on them. You know, and it'll be interesting to see, I think, as it evolves and as it goes, but the more mundane tasks that I can delegate to AI, the better for me.
Speaker 2:One other sales and marketing. Go ahead. Sorry, no, go ahead. One other sales and marketing example that I saw that I think is really powerful, that speaks to this is I've actually seen AI tools that act as a BDR rep to qualify a prospect and book a meeting, and I actually have seen several of the solutions that do it probably just as good as a real BDR would have done it. They gather the required information, they qualify the person, they even customize it and personalize it and build rapport and they actually book the meeting on the calendar. And if I think back five years when a lot of tech companies were hiring a team of 10, 20, 50 BDRs, it's really shocking to see the testing of some of these tools. I wouldn't claim they're all ready for primetime yet, but you can see it's going to happen.
Speaker 1:Which, to be honest with you, I don't think I would mind dealing with an AI BDR, because I had a bad experience recently with a real live one who booked an appointment and then everybody's trying to track it back down. Gave him all this information. The next guy when he was calling to reschedule cause they scheduled it for a holiday week, and the guy they didn't realize it was going to he was going to be on vacation and then he's like, well, can I ask you these questions? I'm like I already answered all of those questions. Do you not have that information?
Speaker 1:So something got lost in translation and I think AI probably would have been a better BDR in its current iteration than the real person that I spoke to, which is frustrating at times, right? So, in the world of B2B marketing I love B2B marketing because I feel like there's so much low-hanging fruit and so much impact to be had there and to be made. So let's talk a little bit about where things are shifting, because we talked a lot about events. Events are starting to come back more and more. I think I don't think they'll ever come back to the level they were pre-COVID, but I do see them potentially playing a bigger role. What do you think? What about people that are trying to leverage events for their marketing, especially in B2B? How are they going to get better results from them?
Speaker 2:So I think better results come from thinking about investment in those events differently. So it may not simply be you buy a booth for $10,000 at the show. It may be that you sponsor a dinner or reception instead. It may be that you go to the event and you do networking. You send two or three people and buy the conference pass. I just think people are thinking about the way they invest different. I don't know if we'll get back to people buying $50,000 of signage that is what the pieces of it that'll be harder to come back. Or I've literally seen people spend a million dollars on designing a booth those pieces of it. I'm not sure that'll be the same, but I think people going and networking and building up engagement activities. I think people going and speaking at sessions whether they pay to speak or they get paid to speak I think those aspects of it will probably live on in a very meaningful way.
Speaker 2:I think that other aspects outside of events are also changing in a pretty seismic way.
Speaker 2:That makes it disorienting for marketers too.
Speaker 2:If you think about SEO with the impact of AI, it's really shifting in that the new SEO is how do you get your company to be included in the AI summaries, not how do you get in the top page of Google, it's how do you get into the top page of AI summaries. So it's sort of a different motion to do that. And then when you look at other things like we've talked before about email marketing, which I still think is a great channel, but you have to sort of do different things within that channel in order to realize the same success there as years past. And so I think if marketers aren't curious and they're not learning how each channel is really evolving, it's a mistake to just assume this worked last year or a couple years ago. We'll just keep doing more of that, because even things like blog posts because SEO has changed the way you do blog posts shouldn't be the way you did it a couple years ago, right, and so this is all just very disorienting for everybody, I think at some level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that this has been just a revolutionary change Between COVID and AI. We've had our fill of change and the need to adjust and hopefully, be curious and adjust and learn and test and experiment. Speaking of testing and experimenting, this show is called Imperfect Marketing and one of the questions I ask all my guests is marketing is not a perfect science, right? We know that. What's been your biggest marketing lesson learned?
Speaker 2:My biggest lesson learned has been around measuring the return on investment of every single thing you do in marketing. And this is because when you don't look at the unit economics and you don't treat marketing like an investment, it leads you to doing all the wrong things. So if someone comes up and says, why don't we spend $10,000 on this activity let's say, for example, a trade show booth If you're not thinking about, well, what will our return on that be? And I think SaaS companies have been the best ones at having a really good investment mindset and marketing because they developed all these SaaS metrics and they said like customer acquisition costs and lifetime value and payback time. And this is because VCs invested in 10,000 SaaS companies and they demanded, as investors, this level of rigor of looking at it.
Speaker 2:Because a lot of companies make the mistake and I've made the mistake in the past to answer your question of someone says well, if we spend $10,000 on this, as long as we get at least one customer for $10,000, we got our money back right, it was successful.
Speaker 2:And the answer is no. You probably need to make something like five to 10 times what you spend, because marketing should be something like 10 to 20% of your revenue, not 100% of your revenue is the marketing cost, and so not thinking about marketing as an investment leads you to making bad decisions, which frustrates everybody involved, because everything directionally works. You'll get some customers if you do some marketing, but if you don't hit the right investment ratios, it's like would you rather invest and get 1% back or would you rather get 10% back? It's a very different result. Saying I got something, I got some return. It's not really the same thing, and so I think that's the biggest mistake I've made in the past and I've learned that lesson a couple times. So I really just try to help other people say you got to look at marketing's investment, and if you're not, then that's when everybody on the rest of the company the management team, the investors, everybody is unhappy.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I think that's really important. I love how you put it. Marketing is an investment. It is an investment of money and it is an investment of time. It is an investment on a return right. I mean, you don't buy stocks to donate to the companies that you're buying stocks from, right. You're buying because you want your investment to grow, and that's the way marketing should work too. You know, again, there's a lot of different tools and a lot of different ways that we can streamline our time investment coming up here, but it's going to increase the monetary investment, maybe for a little bit before it gets more streamlined as it goes too.
Speaker 1:So I think that looking at it as an investment expecting a return expecting more than a zero return right, and that zero return is really important. So you should be looking at your marketing that way. So I love that and I love how we got to chat about all of the different things that are changing in marketing. So we talked about a little bit about how marketing is changing and where it's going with the advent of AI, and I love that we got out our crystal balls and started talking a little bit about where things are headed. But life is going to be getting, I think, more challenging to differentiate. Everything is starting to become again beige-ified, to steal your term. I like it, I might be using it in the future again. But everything's becoming beige-ified because we are using some tools as a crutch when they should just sort of be a support, as a crotch when they should just sort of be a support. So I'm looking forward to seeing how things change, how things get easier, and how we're able to still change things up and break through.
Speaker 2:So any last words. Eric, I think you summed up really well. I would just say that I think, if you have the right mindset, if you're curious about it, it's an exciting time, more than it is a scary time. And generally, as these things are all changing and evolving, what I like to tell people is like hey, marketing has never been easy, but it should always be fun, and if you take that approach to it and you put that investment lens on top of it, you'll have a lot of success.
Speaker 1:Great. Thank you so much for all of you watching and listening, wherever you're watching and listening. If you learned anything or maybe had some fun in discovering what we're talking about, it would really help us out if you would rate and subscribe Until next time. Have a great rest of your day.
