What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Revolutionizing B2B Customer Engagement: Audyence's Innovative Programmatic Approach
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Discover the future of B2B customer engagement as we sit down with Matthew Knight, the visionary Chief Revenue Officer at Audyence. Matthew brings a wealth of experience from his roles at Blackbaud, Spiceworks, and Madison Logic, and is here to share how Audyence is reshaping demand generation campaigns with their innovative programmatic technology for CPL-based inventories. If you're eager to enhance transparency and efficiency in your marketing strategies, this episode is packed with insights on how Audyence's lead tracking and verification solutions are set to revolutionize multi-touch campaigns, reduce fraud, and improve brand interactions with agencies and publisher networks.
We also journey into the art of enhancing customer engagement through smart metrics and personalization strategies. Learn how platforms like Marketo and HubSpot can be leveraged to track critical performance indicators like conversion rates and ROAS, helping you optimize your campaign success. The episode sheds light on the power of content syndication as a branding tool and how AI-driven insights can elevate personalization on websites and landing pages.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, really excited to dive into a chat around the future of customer engagement in the B2B world with audience. Matthew, how are you Very good, how are you? Evan, b2b sales and marketing pro of gosh, 30 years plus. Fascinating topic around customer engagement and outreach these days acquisition, et cetera, et cetera. Before that, maybe introductions are in order to yourself and what's the big idea behind Audience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. My name is Matthew Knight. I'm the chief revenue Officer here at Audience.
Speaker 2:I started my career in B2B digital marketing and digital was pretty disruptive back when I started in the days of setting up Unica and Eloqua email marketing campaigns.
Speaker 2:That was about 15 years ago or so on the agency side, where I got to learn a lot of strategy and planning. I moved in-house to a company called Blackbaud, helped build up their digital marketing department and I went into my first sales role at Spiceworks if you're familiar with Spiceworks, yeah, led their strategic accounts through the acquisition with Ziff Davis on the sales side, went through that integration and then moved over to Madison Logic as a part of their senior leadership team managing their top global accounts and the teams that manage those accounts for a couple of years. So that was my preamble before the audience decision, which I've been with audience now for about three months still fairly fresh, although it feels like three years or three decades at times and I mean that in a good way. And the reason I joined audience first and foremost is this is an industry that's desperate for technological evolution and this company has built something really special, something very disruptive in all the right ways, and you know I was looking for an opportunity to be provocative. So here I am.
Speaker 1:That's always a good goal, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to say a quick go ahead.
Speaker 1:No. So what attracted you to audience and what was the vision that was so appealing?
Speaker 2:audience and what was the vision that was so appealing? Yeah, so audience is the first and only programmatic technology in the B2B space for CPL-based inventories. So a lot of acronyms there, but basically what it means is if you're buying and executing demand generation campaign, you're doing it based off of a KPI, which is a CPL cost per lead. So generating lead and then the cost associated with that, and the way that that's done in the current ecosystem, candidly, is quite archaic. There's a lot of hidden costs, there's a lot of middlemen, there's a lot of inefficiencies, and what audience is built is something that really brings the brands, the publishers and the agencies all together. It kind of removes any veil and creates full transparency between those groups to make better, more informed, more efficient decisions from a buying perspective. So again, we've seen how programmatic media has really impacted B2C and B2B. On the display side. There is no CPL technology for that until us, and so that's really the big kicker here is brand new, disruptive kind of white space that we've moved into.
Speaker 1:That's exciting and talk about the big picture these days around customer engagement, customer acquisition. What are some of the megatrends in this area and how are things changing? Evolving Lots of new opportunities, challenges on the horizon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say the biggest change I've seen in the last few years is the level of sophistication in B2B, digital in particular.
Speaker 2:If you think about if you're a digital marketer in B2B, these big tech brands, the life cycles are tremendous.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it can take three to five years to close a deal, but the deal can be seven figures right and worth that weight, and so what you've seen is a lot of investment in how do you coax that customer experience from the first to the last engagement through multiple channels, which is part of why I love this space. I mean, B2C is a very different motion than B2B. In that respect, you have to have a lot of patience for B2B. But the cool thing is, then, that in B2B, you've seen the tech investment from vendors across all channels really lean in to trying to figure out how do we stitch the story together and quote, unquote, nurture and influence this customer base appropriately. So you've seen a lot of orchestration platforms really take off, like Sixth Sense and Demandbase and others, and you're seeing a lot more models centered around bring your own data plugging in with your client base and other second and third party data sets and technologies to create a more uniform picture of how to execute, so it's exciting to be a part of that ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally I get it. And you talk a lot about putting AI into action in a practical way, with AI-driven insights Maybe. Talk about how that works and how it makes an impact on customer acquisition campaigns.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. One of the most exciting thing that we have that we've been building around is, you know, we talk a lot about transparency and specifically connecting brands and agencies with the actual publisher network that they're going to be executing campaigns through which oftentimes they have no visibility into and absolutely no control. Well, as a part of that ethos that we proudly kind of wear and live and breathe, we're launching this lead tracking and verification solution, and what it's going to do is add nuanced insights into actual digital behavior for these leads that are generated via CPL campaign, and so we're going to be focused more on engagement and showing and validating that actual engagement. So if there was any potential for fraud, that will be out the window. We'll know exactly what type of activity an individual pursued or engaged with from an asset perspective, how much time on page, what tactics were being used to convert them, which ones performed the best. And as we start to really peel back the onion layers around that lead tracking capabilities, it's going to allow us to do some really phenomenal things, one of which is execute true multi-touch campaigns across the entire publisher network. Right, so not simply buying a quote, unquote, you know, two touch CPL campaign where a publisher may have put two assets in an email, sent it to a single contact and called that two touches.
Speaker 2:We will actually be able to execute programs across all publisher sites in which three, four, five assets could be consumed and verified by us to ensure that that nurture outside of your walls is actually taking place. You'll start to see more insights grow from that. Another example will be the ability for us to index this marketplace that we have. We have about 30 approved publishers. They're all owned and operated, meaning they do not resell. We don't allow resellers inside of our marketplace and that list will grow. We have almost 200 in Q who have applied to get into the marketplace. But it's a very stringent QA process and as we mature you'll see us start to really condense down which publishers tend to. You know, have a deeper database by certain regions or verticals or company size, things like that, and really, you know, bring that publisher marketplace to life.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Now what's your perspective on Omnichannel these days, you know, so fragmented. There are so many channels. I love it. I'm on all these niche channels and boards and subreddits, but not easy for brands to engage. How can you help?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it too, because it's just natural, just human behavior, right, that's all it is. And right, to go back to the multi channel, which I think is going to be a big way. Audience will support this that we talked, the multi touch that we talked about. Instead of trying to force a single publishers network of websites into the one arena in which you can get a prospect of yours to engage with your content, why not allow them to freely roam all these tech forums and websites and more organically introduce the content? Um, so you know, sequentially in the right way, um, and you know, a lot of what we do is we're just agnostic, we just like to be agnostic. We don't make a referral to recommendations. We don't have guarantees with any publishers. We've built a free market to where competition will drive performance, and we will continue to innovate our technological capabilities to build that up and support it, and in doing that, the publishers will have better visibility into what actually works for them.
Speaker 2:So it goes both ways. It's not just the brands benefiting from having, for example, that multi-touch capability across all sites. It's the publishers then understanding where do they stack up If they didn't generate the engagement that helped to further qualify the lead, but someone else did. What did they not do? What do they need to beef up? Is it their database? Is it their tactics? Is it the site content itself, Things like that. So we're really kind of giving back to both parties as well the supply side, or the publishers, as much as the brand.
Speaker 1:Very cool, and you talk a lot about using predictive analytics to help clients stay ahead of trends. That's really powerful. How do you think about predicting trends and how do you leverage that data and insight?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're still gathering a lot of data. The more we gather, the smarter, more predictive we can be. We're going to be launching soon our enhanced audience builder Builder 2.0. And one of the things that that'll show is um, you know how many campaigns have been run with what publisher? Uh, what a predicted cpl is based off of historical data. So not just running the bid system and getting your cpls back within 24 hours, which is really at the heart of what audience has done from the beginning, but giving you some information up front from a planning perspective to say, if I'm trying to hit these regions, here's my TAL or here's my targeting parameters, what kind of CPL could I expect and what kind of volumes. Our database and DNP connection with the publisher network will start to project that up front and then you can run the RFP process and get the actual bids back in 24 hours.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic. So when it comes to measuring success, it's all about metrics. This is one of my day-to-day struggles is getting those metrics and figuring out which ones to track. How do you support customers in that, and what are some of the metrics you think companies should be thinking about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we look at a lot of different things when we onboard new customers. We have the nine experiences that we have them rank. That include things like conversion rate, cpl if they have a target, roas, stuff like that. We also incorporate average deal size and ACV to try to project successive campaigns upfront. But in its simplest form, it's our integrations that will have closely purporting functionality to understand which publishers, which campaigns, which creative and content are actually resonating and creating real pipeline and pipeline velocity.
Speaker 2:So, for example, we can plug directly into Marketo or any CRMs and maps and pump our data, our leads delivered, right through that and then bring back the performance map from that CRM or map right back into our system to help inform decision making.
Speaker 2:And so, if you think about, we have a very large client who began their pilot with us a few months ago and what they're doing is they're connecting the dots and systems and testing almost all publishers to establish benchmark performance by region. So if you have 30 publishers that you can execute with, if you allocate budget and map that back into your Marketo, for example, or Eloqua or whatever it is you use, or HubSpot, then you can start to establish that benchmark and baseline data and then reallocate your funds, even in real time, to the top performers. You're not beholden to a single publisher when you submit an RFP and your purchase order through our platform. Again, like I said before, we've built a free market of competition, so if a publisher is not performing, you can shift your dollars to any other publisher you'd like in the middle of the campaign.
Speaker 1:Wow, very cool. Maybe talk about ad fatigue. I mean, I happen to like super well-targeted, well-designed ads. I'm a bit of a geek, but how do you think about keeping customers engaged and avoiding ad fatigue? Such a crowded marketplace can be a little overwhelming. You have a philosophy around that.
Speaker 2:Probably many philosophies around that.
Speaker 2:I will say one that's most relevant to what we do is because we only handle CPL or cost per lead based inventory. We're oftentimes we're talking about content syndication. So that's taking your long form assets or webinars, distributing them across many tech relevant or industry relevant sites and trying to get a form filled and then you generate a lead, nurture the lead, etc. Etc. One of the things that's interesting about that, and really oftentimes gets uh lost in the in the in the mix of everything, is contest indication exposure. From even a branding perspective, it's extremely strong.
Speaker 2:Uh, we're talking about long-form assets. If someone has any interest in actually engaging with these assets, that is a huge indicator of obviously being a fit, but also real interest and real intent. It takes a lot more to read a 30-page ebook or a 12-page white paper a lot more effort than it does to click on a display or banner ad right. So our philosophy is that content syndication is viewed as more of an engagement KPI also carries a lot of value outside of database building and pipeline development, but really just from the branding or thought leadership and awareness perspective, education perspective, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very well said. Maybe talk a bit about personalization. That's the ultimate goal of a lot of this AI technology at scale. How are we doing with personalization and what's the opportunity do you think with your technology?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the biggest I guess evolution in the personalization and RTP kind of space has been what people are doing with their website and then from a retargeting perspective, that's been really unique and really cool. For us, the biggest component of personalization is going to be landing page building and recommendations right, and you'll see this start to continue to be enhanced more from an AI lens based on what we're seeing in the market trends, prior performance, messaging, tone, creative that's worked or had a higher conversion rate, and really baking that into our landing page builder solutions.
Speaker 1:Very cool, very cool. So you're in a fun part of the world in Austin. What's, uh, what's next? What's on your mind the rest of the year? Lots of cool stuff going on, any meetings or events or otherwise you're excited about.
Speaker 2:Let's see. I think I just told you AC I'll just wrap a couple of days ago, so we got our city back um until the next one.
Speaker 2:So that's good, um, it is. It is fall, austin starting to feel like fall. I think we're going to dip into the chilly 80s this week. So that's going to be nice. No, not a ton of events. So we have a company event next month actually an offsite getting the group together and doing some really fun stuff. Going through 25 planning, uh, I hope to take, uh, one of my bigger clients to an austin fc game, even though we just fired our head coach. Um, but yeah, just kind of the standard stuff. A lot of music in there as well always fun.
Speaker 1:Well, hopefully, uh south by next year I'll have a chance to run into you, but in any case, until then, thanks so much for joining and sharing a bit of the vision. Fascinating stuff for those even who aren't an insider in the industry. It's going to be very interesting to watch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we appreciate that. I will definitely get signed with you at South by and thank you for having us on or me on, and audience, and please check us out. It's audience A-U-D-Y-E-N-C-E dot com. Feel free to reach out to me directly as well. Really excited to bring this to market and it's been a wild first year. We're going to keep growing.
Speaker 1:Very, very intriguing. Thanks so much, Matthew. Take care. Take care and thanks everyone. Thanks for watching and listening.