Marketers of the Universe: A digital marketing podcast

Is your B2B marketing strategy ready for 2025?

• Brew Digital • Season 1 • Episode 34

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What happens when you merge the emotional appeal of consumer marketing with the strategic focus of B2B? Magic, according to our panel of marketing experts. This episode, featuring highlights from our recent webinar "Is your B2B Digital Marketing Strategy Ready for 2025?", challenges traditional approaches to business marketing by emphasising the human element at its core.

Our distinguished panel—Sarah McCoy from The Adaptivist Group, Rich Harper from Brew Digital, and Katie Gray from Iterable—deliver game-changing insights about building marketing strategies that address both functional needs and emotional connections. They reveal why treating marketing as merely a sales enablement function undermines its strategic value and limits growth potential.

From understanding your brand's authentic DNA to being present in the communities where buying decisions begin, the panel shares practical advice for marketers looking to stand out amid increasing digital noise. 

Want to watch the whole webinar? It's available on our resource hub!

You can also find our free B2B digital marketing strategy template here.

If you want to listen to this episode on our website, you can find that here.

Marketers of the Universe is brought to you by the clever folks at Brew Digital. We’re not your typical digital marketing agency; using an innovative approach to decision-making and collaboration, we help you create an impactful digital strategy that actually delivers results for your business.

See what we can do for you at brewdigital.com


Tom Inniss:

Hello, hello, Welcome to Marketers of the Universe. My name is Tom Innes and I'm the content marketing manager here at Brew Digital. Today, this podcast is deviating from the norm slightly because it is a highlights cut from our recent webinar Is your B2B Digital Marketing Strategy Ready for 2025? Hosted by our Senior Social Media Manager, Debbie Gakutan Jardim de Oliveira, this podcast is going to talk a lot about branding and a lot about what you can learn from B2C and implement it into your B2B marketing strategy. I hope you enjoy it and I'll be back at the end to read you out.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are joining us from, wherever part of the world, I would not do a very good job introducing them, so I will let them introduce themselves. I'll start off with Sarah, as you are on my screen and Sarah hi, can you introduce yourself quite quickly for everyone?

Sarah McCoy:

Of course. So I'm Sarah McCoy. I am the Senior Brand Manager at the Adaptivist Group, so I ensure that all our associated brands put their best foot forward with clear messaging positive sentiment across all of our stakeholders. I have over a decade building relationships between businesses and their customers, focusing on content and storytelling.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Awesome. Thank you, sarah. Glad to have you here. Now I would like to call on my manager, actually Rich Harper. Rich, would you like to introduce yourself?

Rich Harper:

Thanks, debbie. Yeah, hello everyone. So I'm Rich Harper. I'm the head of digital marketing at Brew Digital. Brew Digital are a full service digital agency. And yeah, my background I've been in the agency industry for the past 16 years Been at Brew now for coming up to three years, but prior to that run my own digital agency. So, yeah, uh, focused on on digital marketing for the best part of 20 years in my career now wow, okay.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

So, katie, I'm so happy to be here. Um welcome to our webinar and please do introduce yourself for everyone thank you, it's good to be here.

Katie Gray:

Um. Yes, so my name is katie gray. Um, I've spent the last sort of 10 years in B2B marketing, starting my career and everything from events and then to field to digital and ABM, and then most recently in my role now, which is like kind of bringing that all together in an integrated marketing role. So I'm currently the Senior Integrated Marketing Manager at Iterable to show iterable um. For those of you that might not be familiar with iterable, it's a sas smart tech platform, so um brands like nando strava calm use it to power out their communications to their customers. Um, so my um sort of specialism and where I try and focus is um, obviously launching campaigns, but making sure there's like a good, perfect blend of the kind of data digital side of things as well as kind of like brand and creative side of things, so finding that perfect balance.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

And so that's amazing, and thank you all, to all our panelists, for being here and taking the time. So, with that said, I would love to start jumping in. Let's start with the foundations of marketing. To start jumping in, let's start with the foundations of marketing. When you're building a B2B marketing strategy, what are the key elements that, truly, that you find make, that makes it effective?

Katie Gray:

So I think it's probably quite a boring answer to start with, but there's like four things that I think to kind of focus on. I think the first thing, and arguably the most important, is like doing a retro, like making sure that you're doing a zoom out back on your strategy. Like every plan should come with a retro so that you know you can look back at last year, like what worked, what didn't, what are the shortfalls, what you need to do to actually plan in the future, to kind of tweak some of the things that maybe did and didn't work. So like where was your traffic coming from? Like did you have like a healthy looking funnel? Was it leaky? Like what were the conversion rates? And that kind of thing. And then I think once you've got that, you can start to have a think about like the numbers, which obviously comes onto goals, which I think is again a super obvious thing when you're like looking at your planning.

Katie Gray:

But typically in companies that I've worked for, they've just given us the goal and then from that I work with my team to essentially reverse engineer it. So I know that if I've got this as like a pipeline, an opportunity goal, what do I actually need to be able to create that based on like a lead to an MQL, to like a demo book or something. So having that kind of reverse engineered and then, once you've kind of got those numbers set up, you can then start thinking about, okay, like what are your big bets? So what are you going to do that's going to help you achieve those numbers. I think, like often in marketing, we can get a little bit like and I'm guilty of this as well I get excited about something new or like a new experiment or something like that, so I can think like it can make me want to go off track, but I think having big bets set up, like at the beginning of the year, can really help you and your team prioritize and make sure that everyone's kind of tooting the same horn. I'm not very good at sayings, but I think that's that's how it goes.

Katie Gray:

And I guess, like, then, my final piece to that is, once you've got your big bets, like making sure they're not planned in a vacuum, so making sure that if you've got big bets for your marketing team, that also needs to align with, like, the rest of your go-to-market team.

Katie Gray:

So you need to be making sure that that aligns with, like your sales team and your cs team. So like what I mean by that is say, for example, if your sales team have the idea that they want to go after enterprise accounts but the marketing team are very focused on like industry specific content, like retail, then there's like a misalignment with those big bets there, which means that the the impact of your campaigns and the impact of your messaging is probably not going to be as good as it can be if you have that kind of team alignment. So yeah, I think it's like important to just be mindful about doing a retro with planning and having checkpoints throughout the year, just being okay with being agile. Obviously, everything changes. I'm sure marketers hate planning like a full year because we know half of it was going to end up changing anyway, but it's good to have like the key pillars, I think.

Sarah McCoy:

Yeah, I'm just going to add on to what Katie was saying. I really think it's about staying abreast of your customers and their pain points. So their pain points are forever changing and it's really important that you understand not just the pain point but their end goal. So what is it they're trying to achieve Because actually their frustration and what they think they need isn't always the right thing and actually being able to be the translator for them between their frustration or their barrier to to reaching a goal and what they think they need and what they actually need. That's where I feel like the the true marketing magic happens.

Sarah McCoy:

And also remembering that b2b marketing is actually, in many ways, b2c marketing. You're always dealing with a person. It's just a different, different budget I always think of. B2b is spending that's not yours, um, so it's understanding about how your brand then can speak to their emotional needs, not just literal needs, because often competitors will have very similar solutions or products to what you have. So what is the magic, what is the additional thing that you can add to that? And how do you build that into your b2b strategy, whoever that is, through content or through events, and just making sure that ultimately, people keep you front and center, because you make them feel like you know what you're doing.

Rich Harper:

You make them feel as though you are the solution to that pain point I'll add to what, um, katie and sarah said and agree with everything that has been mentioned. But I think a good strategy we really need to think about the fundamentals and in marketing, what we do very well, or what I see with the customers I work with, is they jump straight to that kind of end point of promotion. It's like how do we get this in front of people really quickly and they forget everything else and sometimes a lot of what we do is based on assumptions, um, and things like the exact cure, sarah, saying that audience research, knowing who they are, knowing where they are, you know where they are online or offline, where their attention is it's not always the obvious places, um, that everyone always turns to, and I think it's it's really knowing that audience. The amount of times I kind of speak to people and you say who's your audience, and it's like it's everyone, or it's marketing managers or it's, and it's like it's not everyone. It's you know where's the niche in that specific audience set that actually are buying from you. So look at people that are buying and then kind of reverse engineer from there and it's also worth understanding, especially in kind of B2B marketing.

Rich Harper:

Sarah's right in the fact that B2B and B2C are actually more closely aligned than trying to split them off and right, in a sense, that you're spending someone else's budget.

Rich Harper:

The big difference in B2B for me is that I am not the only person making a decision. So within a B2C world, the only person I really need to influence, if I'm trying to market to them, is the individual that's going to buy my product most of the time, whereas in the B2B sense you're talking to generally speaking, you're talking to a committee or a buying group of people and some interesting stats. Recently I went to linkedin b2b event a few months ago and they were stating on there that if 80 of the buying group don't know who you are up front, you're not going to get past that procurement stage or that initial selection stage. So it's fundamental bringing it back into the conversation around branding that we're probably going to go into in a minute Not neglect not the long term benefits of brand building because if you do brand building correctly, it can have short term gains as well but not to just jump straight to that end point and try to push that product to your audience instantly.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Yeah, amazing. Thank you for the insights. Everyone. Our panelists already got it started. It was very obvious towards the end of 2024, and I hope everyone agrees to me that there was this big push for brand building alongside performance marketing. My background is I'm a senior social media manager and social media is one of those marketing channels that it's actually very hard to prove your ROI to the business. So for me, this is a win. But I wanted to ask our panel do you feel like this trend of you know looking at and focusing a lot on brand building will continue this year? And, if so, do we feel like there should be a balance between the? You know marketers should still keep a balance between the two, meaning between brand building and performance marketing.

Rich Harper:

So certainly the conversation between branding and performance marketing seems to have been elevated. There's a lot of chat on uh communities and LinkedIn and and and places like that. For me, I don't think it's ever not been there. I think the issue that we face, especially as a marketing department, is that pressure from sales and from different parts of the business to generate leads, marketing qualified leads, and what we've actually ended up becoming is essentially a sales enablement department, and that's why I was kind of talking about that fundamentals, of getting back to the basics of what makes marketing. Marketing it's a strategic department of the business. It shouldn't be just tactical. It shouldn't be just trying to fill a quota or a number of leads for sales to then call, and what we've engineered for ourselves is it is essentially a cold pop, so the sales are not getting qualified leads because we're desperate to hit a number, that sales are put in place in order for them to hit revenue and pipeline, and that whole misalignment between marketing through to sales, through to revenue is causing this friction and actually what we're desperately trying to do, like I said, is hit a lead volume rather than trying to build a business and and work together. And if you think about this isn't new. But over the last 30 years, the companies that have succeeded and always stand out above everyone else are the companies that invest in brand and they invest in performance, and they do that, uh, simultaneously, and they do that really really well. Companies that skip in brand and they invest in performance and they do that simultaneously, and they do that really really well.

Rich Harper:

Companies that skip those steps and try to hit that sales quota, try to hit that, that number, you know. Try to hit mqls. And let's bring it back. Mqls are not we're on a webinar. They're not people that have agreed to come to a webinar and listen in to for some information. That that's not an mql. You don't want to just pass that straight off to the sales team. It needs to be nurtured, it needs to be qualified.

Rich Harper:

More People that sign up to your newsletter. They're signing up because you've got something interesting to say and you're giving them value. They don't then need someone to pick up the phone and instantly try to sell to them. And I think, again, this is not new. Again, this is not new. Your marketplace, at any one point in time, only five percent, I think, is generally the consensus only five percent of your marketplace is in market to buy from you. So there's a huge pool 95 of people that currently have no need or requirement to buy from you. But if you're providing that value and that that need now and you are generating that demand when you want to capture it further down the line, they are already there. If you only focus on that 5%, you are consistently neglecting a wider audience that could become future customers.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

I want to pass this on to Katie, but before I do that, rich, because because you are here and I know for a fact that Rich does talk to a lot of C-level people how do you get buy-in from sales or C-level to let marketing be more strategic than executive?

Rich Harper:

I think it's about influence. I think there's an influence problem and I think that's why we've seen a rise in positions like the cro um becoming more important in the boardroom. I've had this before in businesses when I was in house, and it's it's. You know, the marketing department get referred to as the coloring in team and, and you know, I think it's about educating, uh, the rest of the boardroom on the importance that marketing bring. And it's about aligning marketing metrics, because that's the other thing a lot of our metrics tend to be, let's face it fairly vanity. You know, vanity.

Rich Harper:

I'm sorry, debbie, I know you're on social media, but things like follow, account and stuff I thought you were looking at me ridge, I was like how to get me and don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing anything in terms of, you know, from a channel perspective, but followers alone are not linked to revenue, as you say in a standard attribution way. You can't say, hey, that follower is going to relate to this, so it's hard to prove the roi. What marketing needs to do is align with the marketing metrics that matter Things like pipeline velocity, things like profit, revenue. How can you align yourself with them? It's not about that last click attribution model of saying, hey, paid, drove that lead, that lead then converted. Therefore, we can attribute ROI back to that market and spend.

Rich Harper:

It's about looking holistically at what you're spending from a marketing perspective and aligning that to the business needs. Things like brand building and stuff like that. You can't measure it in the same way as you can performance marketing, so you have to measure it based on things like pipeline velocity, things like revenue, uh, things like customer acquisition costs and how you are. You know repeat business within within the customer base that you've already got. So you have to align yourself with those important business metrics rather than coming to the boardroom and saying, hey, this month I got 2 million impressions. It's like, okay, cool, great. What does that mean? Like align it. Align it to what actually matters to the boardroom, and that's how you'll get buy-in and influence with with other C-Level members.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Okay, awesome. And yes, katie, I did call you out a while ago because I know this is your forte. It's like all about integrated marketing. So how? What are your thoughts on this?

Katie Gray:

Yeah, I think just to piggyback off Rich what Rich was just saying there and this is probably the kind of the lead gen in me thinking this but we're actually launching um, a new brand campaign to tackle our top of funnel um, like issues, essentially um, and we actually have developed something which I don't know if it'll be useful, if it's me thinking too much about lead gen but we're calling out like a brand health index where we're trying to like amalgamate some of these vanity metrics in order to actually track, because we think some of these things are not going to actually influence pipeline until like very much later on in the year, that kind of thing. So we're actually trying to look again to get buy-in from the board just to prove that the investment that they've given us for this brand campaign is hopefully worth it with this like uh, month over month. But I haven't launched that yet, so I actually don't know how that's going to go. And and it's interesting again because it's like as marketers we can become so obsessed with wanting to track things and coming from more of like a demand gen and a field perspective. I kind of fall into that bucket and I'm like, oh gosh, I need to just realize that some things have different, different measurements, but, um, yeah, that could be interesting, so more more to follow on that one. But, um, going back to your like initial question, debbie, I think like yes, 100, we will see brand become more important in 2025.

Katie Gray:

I think a lot of people were talking about the reshift and focus back to brand, like last year and in previous years, but I think what's really interesting and has stood out for me is like there is so much digital noise out there right now and that's obviously just been exacerbated by AI and there's like so many. Obviously you had to talk about AI because it's marketing, but there's so many different tools out there. There's like gen AI tools. There's email automation is like I'm sure every marketer on this call has probably got 20 to 100 sales invites in their inbox every day, and so I think that has kind of, whilst that is good, I think that we'll kind of see ai shifting more to help with things like the digital side of things, the targeting, better segmentation, marketing operations, that kind of thing, which actually leaves more of more opportunity to have that kind of intersection of ai and brand.

Katie Gray:

And then and like both sarah and rich were talking about earlier, thinking about being more um like, having more human to human marketing, having more a human eccentric approach versus like business to business. So I think there'll be a lot more focus on brand. Like I'll be thinking about is like how do I build like emotional connections with my customers? How do I make sure that it's like human to human marketing? And, um, how are my campaigns relatable beyond all of the stuff that is like very automated, ai, data driven and that kind of thing awesome.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

I want to ask this question to Sarah. I know Sarah here, um, she works with a big um umbrella company called adaptivist group. Sarah, I would love to ask you, you know, like, when we say that businesses are ready to engage with a company, or businesses are ready to buy, how can, how do you, how can b2b brands ensure that they are the first choice? Katie mentioned a lot about digital noise, and this is so true. There's just a lot of things happening right now. Everyone is jumping on every trend there is. How can you still stand out and what concrete strategies can you share with everyone, with?

Sarah McCoy:

regards to it. I think it's really important that it's not about jumping on every trend. It's about you have to. You have to understand your dna as a company. You have to understand your brand. You need to understand what is authentic to you, not just publicly but all the way through, because when a customer, when someone is ready to engage with you, and that lead is ready to talk to your sales team, if the interaction with your sales team does not meet their expectation because it doesn't match your public persona, there is a disconnect very quickly.

Sarah McCoy:

So this is where your strategy, your full end-to-end from, like your brand building that might take five plus years. It's a long-term strategy right through to your sales funnel and you're ultimately you know you're in a room with somebody about to sign, sign a contract. All of those points need to align and this is where messaging and your you know everything from. I say brand DNA, I really mean it's, it's the, it's the color of your hair, right through to how you sign your signature. It's the whole of the public and internal facing needs to align. And so that's where it gets really tricky, because you're bringing in so many different stakeholders from around the business to buy into the brand marketing and to buy into the brand messaging almost before you go public. So, yeah, I just think the way you stand out is to be truly who you are, but you need to understand who you are.

Sarah McCoy:

I joke all the time. It's really easy to become really well known as a brand for all the wrong reasons. If your ultimate goal is to be known, I would have a real big mess up that it's the quickest way to be known. Make a really big, very public error. But if what you want is to be known for all the right reasons, then it's a patience game and it is a joined up strategy across all of your marketing teams, your sales teams, your product or your services teams. A whole lot needs to align.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

I would love to do a follow up question on that, sarah, because I recently ran a social media workshop. We're in one of the questions I just wanted to ask a very simple like how would you like to be seen on a social media workshop? Wherein one of the questions I just wanted to ask is very simple, like how would you like to be seen on your social media? Your social media is kind of like your shop window. Who are you on social and some of my clients do not really know who they are. They are modern but they appeal to a very old demographic. I'm this but I'm that, and it's like polar opposites. What is the first step you need to do in order to really answer who you are?

Sarah McCoy:

as a brand. I think it's okay to be contradictory, because brands need to be a living, breathing, evolving thing. They're a creature in their own right and no one creature fits in a box perfectly. There's always an exception to the rule, and so it's understanding to what extent. So you can be a modern looking company set in heritage now. So what extent does your heritage dictate how contemporary or what trends you will be involved in if you are future looking, how far into the future are you looking? Are you, are we talking? We're living on the moon or are we talking? You know the next five years? So I think it's.

Sarah McCoy:

It's really understanding your own contradiction. So the adaptivist group we're a big family of brands and we do everything from reselling alassian licenses to building products and apps, but the whole way through that, I mean brew is part of the family. So we've got this digital marketing arm, but the, for us, the unique thread amongst all the contradictions is the fundamental desire to make going to work feel better, and I keep coming back to the word the DNA of the company. That will help you align those uncomfortable contradictions.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Over to you, rich. We have, like you know, dance over this and we have like kind of like, touch a little bit on it. When you start, you know know, thinking about your strategy, it is also very important to identify the right target businesses, the right target for your company. It's very crucial. How do you approach this, like? What are the best ways to to reach the right target market for you?

Rich Harper:

that identifying who they are is something that you should be doing from the offset. When you establish a business, when you establish a product, you should have been creating that business to answer a need with that marketplace. So hopefully, anyone that's launching a business has got an idea or concept that is going to solve a problem that exists in the marketplace that they're going after. However, like we talked about earlier, you have that sphere of influence. So you have the person that you are trying to market to and then you have that sphere of influence around them that they may have to bring into the conversation in terms of sign-off, approvals, that sort of thing. So it's a bit of a two-pronged attack, because you want to target the messaging to the people that are going to buy and there's going to be specific targeting for that. You then want to target the the rest of the buying group with softer messages. You don't need to necessarily sell to the uh, the rest of the buying group directly, but you do need to be influencing them. So think about, first of all, segmenting that audience out. The best example I can give of this we work with a client and they're running a specific campaign and that campaign is targeting three very distinct audiences. One of those audiences are already aware of the company and that's because they either had a previous conversation with a salesperson or may well have active deals in the pipeline. They are going to be receptive to a very different message because they're already in in in the pipeline or they already know about you. You want to nurture that lead, you want to progress it, so you're going to talk to them very differently to, for example, a cold audience. They don't know who you are. So audience that don't know who you are, so if they don't know who you are, you're going to have to approach it from a full funnel perspective. Katie was talking about that earlier, about how you kind of fill that top of the funnel in order to nurture that audience down. And there's a variety of ways you can do that and you should be thinking about how you can get that audience where their attention is.

Rich Harper:

So it's not one channel, it's multiple channels. It's about messaging that's relevant to the channel, that it's on. One message, say on LinkedIn, doesn't need to be copied and pasted into a Google search campaign, doesn't need to be copied and pasted into a landing page or an organic social media post. Think about the channel. Think about the source that you're on, think about the audience and how they're going to be receptive to that specific message at that point in time.

Rich Harper:

If they're on LinkedIn, for example and that is a channel for you they may well be in business mode but, as we kind of discussed B2C, b2b audiences, just because we work somewhere doesn't mean that when we finish at half past five, that we're not still considering things for our job. Hopefully, unlike me, most of you guys will switch off and have a social life. I do tend to spend my life looking at stuff because that's who I am, but if I'm on TikTok, the messaging that I will be receptive to will be very different to them when I'm at work looking on LinkedIn. So consider the platform, consider the audience and where their attention is, and don't just copy and paste and repeat across multiple platforms and expect the same result.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Katie or Sarah. Is there anything that you would like to add to what Rich said?

Sarah McCoy:

I think it's just what Rich was saying as well. It's about staying top of mind, and so, while we don't want to stalk people around the internet, it is just making sure that you are present wherever your customers are, whether that is hanging things like webinars, being a speaker, being in attendance, or whether it's a content strategy where it's more blogs and social that's infiltrating those. It's how you keep your brand alive in moments when people aren't thinking of their purchasing. Katie I think Rich gave that gave the stat earlier that, like the 95%, of your potential buyers aren't thinking of their purchasing.

Katie Gray:

Katie, I think Rich gave the stat earlier that, like the 95% of your potential buyers aren't ready to buy. I think another really interesting stat and I think it's 70, it might be 75% 70% of B2B buyers actually make a kind of do their own research without even engaging with your brand, without even speaking to a sales rep. So I think that's really interesting because it goes back to Sarah's point like being where your audience is, because if you're not in those communities, if you're not in those forums and you're relying on people to come to your own assets, sometimes that is like a big challenge and you're missing out a lot because, like, people have probably made up part of their decision before they've even got to you. So by the time you know, in the past everything for, like SaaS businesses was demo request, demo request, and that was a little bit lighter, whereas now I think demo request is like you've ultimately like maybe made up your vendors of choice by that, by the stage that you've got there. And so I think again it comes back down to the importance of community and brand and being top of mind, so that you actually are top of mind when they're ready to actually engage with your brand.

Katie Gray:

Like, if I think about how I buy technology as a consumer of like marketing technology is, I'll ask my peers.

Katie Gray:

First, I'll go into a Slack community that I'm part of and that's where I'll start my research.

Katie Gray:

Of course, if you're not in those communities, then you're not seeing that, and I guess there's a level of like Sarah saying you don't want to be too uh, too creepy and like get your sales team to jump on something after they've seen someone looking for a vendor in slack, because that's obviously crossing the line. But something that um, I have at iterable is a tool which allows us to, um, see, uh, which stage our target accounts are in the buying stage, and so we've got that intent to kind of say, okay, now is the time to reach out, and that will be um things like intent from third party sites. So I might set up like a, a keyword phrase for like mobile marketing, and then we can work out from that how what people are actually interested in. So we can kind of use those tools as intent to work out when is the time to like strike to, so we're not constantly bombarding people in like the target awareness phase when, ultimately, they're in that like 70% phase where they're just trying to do their own research.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Is there a brand out there that is B2B? That's the challenge a B2B brand out there that you feel is doing very well in brand building and, as you've mentioned, katie, like knowing when it's right to strike. Katie, you just spoke, so I'm not gonna go to you because that would be unfair.

Sarah McCoy:

Sarah oh, tough one. Um, maybe maybe someone like adobe. I always feel they they have their balance just right, being a kind of cool kid where all the designers want to be using it. They're at a premium price point, so there's that gives an illusion, maybe, of of expertise and quality that then buy into the. You know your decision makers and your c-suite level and I feel like just to name adobe, kind of you know exactly emotionally what that means. So you know, like I said, cool kids it's, design it's, but there's so many more things. Obviously they also now have their ai and I feel like everything they've done, from their content and their brand, leaves you to have a positive sentiment around them, even if you don't fully understand what they do or what they I think that's ultimately what you want from a brand is for people to feel great about something they have no idea about, I mean yeah, I think that's what our job as a marketer is like.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

In one sentence, what do we do um rich? Do you have any brand in mind that you feel is, you know, doing an effective marketing method or an effective strategy at the moment?

Rich Harper:

uh, there's a couple for those of you um, I'm going to plug it. We have a uh a podcast within brew digital called marketers of the universe, and we were recently speaking about brand on there. And I use the example of mondaycom as a very good business that have driven their brand to the to the forefront in the fact that they now own a day Um, but they are very um aggressive with their marketing. They um have absolutely no issues with the investment in. I think there was a stat and you'll have to sense check this, but it was something like 80 of their budget or 80 of investment in in some vc round that they got was spent on performance marketing and brand marketing, marketing in general. So they are a company that understand the value that marketing brings to a business and I think you know if you see them on on search or anything like that. They are particularly aggressive with competitors. You could say if you look for Asana, there will be a Monday ad and it will say Monday is better, better like. They are very aggressive in driving their own brand and competing on on competitors terms.

Rich Harper:

Another good business that I really admire they've got a very strong cmo is a company called cognizant. Cognizant is a like a sales intelligence tool platform. It's's a SaaS platform, but they have a CMO there, alistair Corsi. If anyone doesn't know who she is, go and follow her on LinkedIn. She's very inspirational. You'll see her on the circuits at events and webinars a lot. She's a fantastic CMO and she has been driving that business really, really well and I think it's because they have that inspirational leader and, again, they value what marketing can bring to the boardroom. That's when these companies have success and the companies that we've just kind of Adobe again massive investment in marketing and the tool sales itself, because the tool is so powerful. The user-generated content is massive. For Adobe, they've got a bunch of creative people at their disposal that tell the world how great the tool is through the artwork and the creative that they are creating. So it's a really great model. But those businesses that we're highlighting are winning because they are aligned and they value what marketing brings.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Katie. Any brand recommendations, brand drop.

Katie Gray:

Yeah, I mean, you guys have listed a few good ones. I'm going to take a slightly different approach and think about if you are a big brand, it is probably easier to show up as these things and yes, of course, there is a long trajectory to get there. So I guess I'll focus on a brand that um springs to mind for me, which is a, I think, a very small b2b martech platform called influ2 i-n-f-l-u. The number two. So if you go on their website, I'd recommend it because what they do is they will essentially retarget you with super personalized messages. So I got um essentially they were trying to prospect into me um and I got like very targeted messages with like pictures of the sales rep. So it's essentially like abm, but contact-based abm, so that that message and that ad was specifically for me and not specifically from everyone within the company.

Katie Gray:

And I just like as a marketer, I saw that and I was like I don't think stuff like that is creepy. But I realize some people think that there's like there's a border, like is this creepy? Is this not? Am I being stalked? I just thought it was really interesting and I think because they have a, a smaller brand, and when companies do have a smaller brand, they can't rely on that kind of brand reputation, and so you need to be really careful and personalized and make sure that your communications are really hitting on pain points and stuff like that, because you almost don't have that like, you don't have the comfort blanket yet of your brand. So you need to make sure that everything you're doing is like, is cringy and I hate saying this, but like right message, right person, right time, and when you can nail that it's a lot better because you don't have to then rely on this big reputation or this big logo that everyone's going to recognize in like a millisecond.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Just wrap us up really nicely here. I would love to hear from everyone If you could give one piece of advice to B2B marketers everyone, if you could give one piece of advice to b2b marketers whether it's something to do to avoid to start doing, to do less of what would it be?

Sarah McCoy:

I would start with sarah first don't jump on trends just because they're trending. Um, understand that why you're going to jump on it. And if you can't go quickly, if you can't be first, be second or third or don't bother, understand why you want to do the trend and act quickly, even if it's not super fast, awesome rich.

Rich Harper:

Think about your campaign setup. Think about how you are trying to reach your audience. Have that focus on the 95 with demand generation tactics. Think about the product. Think about how you are trying to reach your audience. Have that focus on the 95% with demand generation tactics. Think about the product. Think about the service solution. What problem do your audience have and what solution are you providing for them? Educate them at that stage.

Rich Harper:

Thought leadership what brand leaders do you have in your business that can help elevate your message and communicate out to their own networks with their own point of views and trends and insights? And use lead magnets like these webinars, but don't be afraid to ungate them. You don't need to put everything behind a form. You don't need to collect an email address or a number every time you do some sort of marketing activity and pass it straight to the sales team. Build demand, build a uh.

Rich Harper:

Basically, at this point in time, you want to get that wider distribution of your message. You want to get it in front of as many people as possible. So don't use metrics such as lead volume at that stage of the funnel to measure your success and then have that five percent um funnel going. Have your conversion activity, have it well optimized, have your kind of consideration phase as well and, yeah, think about it from a full funnel perspective. How can you flood that top of the funnel so that you are filtering it down into the bottom of the funnel, converting that 5% that are in market as best as you can.

Katie Gray:

Katie into the bottom of the funnel, converting that five percent that are in market as best as you can. Katie, a loaded question and I don't know what the golden ticket is, but if anyone finds it, then let me know, um. But no, I think it's like um aligning on whatever your big bets are for the year, but ensuring that you've, like you're still making time for testing, experimenting, like, as sarah said, you don't want to just jump on a hype because it's a hype, but you want to have almost like a portion to test and experiment things beyond those big bets. So I think that's important, um. Once you've worked out what is working, double down on it.

Katie Gray:

I think the difficult thing with marketing is, like one year something might be working really well and something might change the following year, like we've seen that in very much like google and like social um advertising. Well, I have anyway um, and then I think again like going back to that kind of retro conversation, like making sure that you've got checkpoints throughout the year so you can identify what you need to start, what you need to stop and then what you have to continue doing um, just to keep, just so you don't get to the end of the year and then you do like a full retro at the end of the year and you're like, ah crap, I should have really optimized that, you know, midway through the year. So those would be my um tidbits of advice awesome, awesome.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Thank you so much for joining us, and Sarah, katie and Rich, um, thank you so much for again taking the time to join us. And to everyone in the call, thank you, um, and if you'd like to connect with us on LinkedIn, please do so. Um, we'd. And to everyone in the call, thank you, and if you'd like to connect with us on linkedin, please do so. We'd love to stay in chat hey, me again.

Tom Inniss:

thank you so much for listening, and, just to let you know, we have created a digital marketing strategy template, which is available at brooddigitalcom forward slash resources. Now, that's completely free. You can just download it straight away. You don't need to do any sort of sign up. We won't collect your email address. It is yours to implement in your company or organization however you see fit. On our resource hub, you can also find articles and additional templates, as well as think pieces and blogs, and they're all created to help you get more out of your digital marketing efforts. And if you're looking for even more from brew digital, we do offer a digital marketing audit, the details of which are available on our website, which, once again, is brewdigitalcom. For now, though, thank you so much for listening, and if you've enjoyed this episode, please leave a review, share it with friends, families and colleagues and hit subscribe. If you haven't, I've been tom innes, and this has been marketers of the Universe. Thank you.

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