How do you go about deciding which marketing channel you should focus on, what metrics to use and how to track return on investment? And can everything be tied back to your ROI?

That’s what we’re going to cover today, with a man who’s a Fractional CMO, a contributor to Forbes and the Founder of Kurve - a marketing consultancy that specializes in scaling tech businesses into hyper growth.

A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show - Oren Greenberg.

Topics discussed on this episode include:

• How do you go about selecting which channel to use for a particular enterprise marketing campaign?
• When you’re working at scaling a tech business, how do you decide on the ROI that you’re looking to achieve?
• Which metrics do you tend to track along the way, to ensure that your campaign is a success, every step of the way?
• How does a focus on ROI fit into an overarching enterprise marketing strategy - is it possible to tie everything back to an ROI?
• Today you’re sharing Kite as an example of a successful campaign that you managed - what do Kite do and what did you manage to achieve?

How to select an enterprise marketing channel - with Oren Greenberg.

The Strategic Marketing Show is brought to you by Insights For Professionals: providing access to the latest industry insights from trusted brands on a customized, tailored experience. Find out more over at insightsforprofessionals.com.

Hey, it’s David. How do you know which marketing channel to focus on and what metrics to use and how to track return on investment? That's what we're gonna be covering today with a man who's a Fractional CMO, a contributor to Forbes, and the founder of Kurve - a marketing consultancy that specializes in scaling tech businesses into hyper-growth. A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show, Oren Greenberg.

Hey, David. Thanks for having me.

Hello Oren. Well, you can find Oren over at Kurve.co.uk. So Oren, how do you go about selecting which channel to use for a particular enterprise marketing campaign?

I think one of the most common mistakes to begin with, strategically, is actually identifying the target accounts and the target companies. Depending on where those companies live, in terms of where they’re active online, that's really the most relevant channel.

Typically, I'd say the majority of sales-led motions, enterprise SaaS businesses, tend to go for the most obvious channels: the Google ads, custom audiences and Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, and cold outbound. Those tend to be the ones that we see most frequently. I think there are specific verticals, industry niches, and publications, where you can run lead-gen campaigns and more brand-building awareness activities for those accounts.

Very commonly now is this account-based marketing approach, so really orchestrating online - but also offline - using, for example, direct mail, to reach the right persona in those right accounts. Then, using software like Demandbase or 6sense (account-based marketing specialized software) to measure the funnel and the touch points in a way that's quite different from a typical digital marketing funnel; from awareness, consideration, and decision.

We're really focused here on account-level engagement. We're trying to acquire those accounts, build awareness for those accounts, and essentially win those accounts and then expand that revenue. A big part of ABM is revenue expansion, not only revenue in terms of initial customer acquisition.

So you started off by saying that you recommend for brands to focus on channels where they're active online. Do you mean that brands should be initially focusing on optimizing their current activities, more than re-evaluating where there targets target audience resides and looking to target, perhaps even, new channels where they think that their target audience are interacting on?

I guess it depends how mature they are in their current channels and their current activity. If someone's undergoing, say, an SEO audit, and you'll see that actually, a market share is like 3% - 5%. We don't have high top rankings for the most relevant keywords in their niche. To double down and invest in a new channel - when you haven't really capitalized on a foundational, obvious channel that you've already started investing in - that doesn't make sense.

I see a lot of businesses do that. They spread themselves too thin, and they end up doing lots of channels on average, rather than some channels really well. I think the key for which channels they do really depends on their competitive advantage on those channels, and whether or not the audience is actually actively living on, and using, those channels.

But typically, being on top of Google (if it’s paid search, organic search, and these high-intent terms) - I’d say for 98% of businesses I've worked with it's an obvious, low-hanging fruit. Then expanding on social is the second most obvious key channel that's quite common.

I think a lot of businesses do this, they just don't do it very well. They're just churning out blog content, they’re not distributing it effectively: their blog content is not exceptional, their SEO strategy is that they’re doing basic hygiene, and when it comes to social they're not really highly engaged in building relationships. They're much more focused on broadcasting their new features or their thoughts on the industry rather than their relationship-building mindset.

It's the way that people are actively engaging and activating their campaigns rather than bouncing around different channels, hoping for a holy grail. It's very hard in competitive niches to find that shot in the dark.

So it sounds like enterprises know the ROI that they're looking to achieve - they know the end goal - but they're probably a little bit fluffy sometimes around where customers arrive, and what metrics they're tracking along the way to mark the milestones on the way to achieving that end result.

What metrics do you tend to recommend that enterprise marketers track in order to keep an eye on whether or not the customers are going along in the right direction?

They need to really attack and think about how engaged those target accounts actually are. We call these ‘marketing-qualified leads’ and ‘marketing-qualified accounts’. Then the opportunity - the pipeline that's been created from those accounts. What are those opportunities in the CRM? That have a sales rep, have a meaningful amount of qualification, (be that MEDDIC or BANT or whatever it is that people are using)?

Then clearly: Account 1 targets - Yes, we've got those specific businesses we want to win, we've targeted them, and we've actually acquired them. Rather than necessarily shooting in multiple directions and not being clear where those accounts are coming from.

They can also attract awareness. You can track from display ads, to social, to what content has been consumed on the site, to really getting an engagement score that's meaningful around an account. You’ve also got intent signals.

Do you try and put some kind of financial value to an engagement score? So you know they are X% on the way to becoming a customer?

Yes, but not at the initial stage where it's just awareness. It's quite hard to do that. It’s not that you can't do it, you just need meaningful volume to get statistical significance. Otherwise, it's relatively arbitrary.

It's still meaningful to do that on a kind of generic number but, as it goes further down the pipeline - when they've started to download the content, you've already got an email address of a persona, you're starting to see what content they're consuming, and you're set to see how that lead score is increasing over time, and how the account is getting engaged over time - then it becomes more meaningful.

And you can start to get predictive power if you have enough volume. You can start to see the opportunity value, you can start to see the sales-qualified opportunity value, see the 0,1 value, and you can start to get a good estimate. Especially if the licensing costs for, say, SaaS is very seat-based. And you know, for example: on average, an organization of this employee account buys this many seats. Therefore, I can quantify the expected ROI of that account once they close.

So, you can start to get predictive power, but to really make it statistically significant you need quite a lot of it, which is hard to do in enterprise. It's also very hard when you start overlaying all the variables - moving pricing, moving features, moving geographies. When you have lots of different moving components and new content that's being created, and then actually trying to identify the most important variables, it starts to get a bit murky.

So really, it's not about going hyper-focused and trying to really understand an individual piece of content and how it's contributing to sales revenue, I don't think that's meaningful. I think it's important to have a holistic view and understand the general pipeline, and marketing contribution to the pipeline - and also a good coordinated attack between marketing and sales. A lot of organizations are working in silos: there are different performance targets and different activities, and they're not effectively aligned. I think aligning those functions, you'll get a much better return on your investment on marketing as a result.

I was interested that you actually referred to the ROI of an account. So, if you have maybe 100 target accounts in an enterprise marketing situation, does this mean that enterprises are generally better off focusing on ROI from a target account perspective, as opposed to ROI from a particular referring source or marketing channel that they're using?

I don't think you can quite get that granular in terms of the initial funnel. Like, if you set up a Custom Audience on LinkedIn - where you can select Custom Audience. Let’s say you had intent data from G2, and you set that up to automatically create a Matched Audience, you can't really see which account level is clicking it - unless you're using something like Leadfeeder or Albacross and it tells you by IP that companies come to your website.

It's very hard on a paid social channel, or even display, to really get that level of granularity. It's difficult. But once they start engaging, you can quantify it. You can roughly say: ‘I spent this much money. I know the original source. I know now what the opportunity cost is. If I divide the opportunity value by my total budget deployed in that campaign, I get an estimate that's, say, 15% ROI on that overall.’

But I’m not sure it's necessarily the most effective way to think about it either because, even though we are trying to optimize, we’ve got to balance building brands and demand generation - which are very hard to measure with these more quantifiable performance metrics. I think they're, for me, indicative tools - or directional tools - rather than specific tools for optimization.

I mean, we do optimize things, for example, on a creative level. You’ll optimize things that will have a higher click-through rate or a better converting landing page. But, when it really starts to go into a full-funnel journey on an account level, it's very difficult to quantify. Because those originations of the channels - if it wasn't cold email - on search and social they don't give you that level of granularity or transparency, because of the privacy. It’s very hard to do that accurately, but you can get a good enough indication.

Okay, so let's focus on a particular success story. You're sharing KITE as an example of a successful campaign that you managed. What did KITE do and how did you achieve what you managed to achieve?

Sure. So KITE was a startup that was acquired by Canon a few years ago, and they were a Shopify app for print-on-demand. They were an intermediary between print-on-demand factories and printers, and Shopify stores that were selling their goods to their customers.

Essentially, we got some pretty impressive results: 15,000 customers in a year. We generated a lot of content for them, we built an entire content engine to get them top-ranking for ‘print-on-demand’ in the UK, and an overhaul of the whole marketing tech stack and website, to create the conversion machine. I think we delivered over 13 million impressions on Facebook - a huge volume of traffic and clicks. We built the engine - and we actually got a really nice conversion rate from organic traffic as well, using a myriad of strategies.

I see that. One of the things that you did was you increased the qualified-lead conversion rate to 17%, so that's quite significant. What were a couple of steps that you did in order to enhance that?

Funnily enough, a lot of the things - they're not sexy. So, the results are sexy but the execution is actually pretty straightforward. Effectively, we had exceptional creative - a very good creative team producing really high-quality creative, and videography, and great assets - and then we personalized the audience segments and the creative. So it's very targeted, very relevant, for those specific personas. And we had personalized landing pages.

When the creative matches the audience, and matches the landing page, you're maximizing conversion rate. Then, we had a cool Chatbot, a Drift Chatbot, that would have a qualification mechanism, and that would kind of refine that engine.

When you have lots of personas, and lots of industries with lots of personalized creative, lots of personalized landing pages, with a personalized Chatbot - that's effectively how we managed to iteratively, incrementally increase the conversion rate through different tests. We do lots of little copy tests, a lot of creative testing, and just constantly tweaking until we've managed to really improve the quality of traffic to lead conversion, and then that into a sales opportunity.

How do you actually personalize a landing page for organic search?

Yeah, so you don't do that for organic search - that was all paid social and paid search. So for example, on Google Ads someone's typing in ‘graphic T shirt print on demand supplier’ and we can identify through IP using Clearbit what kind of industry the business is from. We personalize the landing page for that industry. That was one example of how we did it.

Some of it was keyword intent, some of it was IP based, but the metric on that wasn't always so great: 24%/25%. For the rest, it was kind of keyword-level. Then, for those, we would try and personalize that on a business and industry level based on their IP. This was before COVID, so you had a much better match rate.

Understood, and do you also try to personalize ads that people see based upon the search queries that they type in?

Yeah, so the ads were all personalized to intent. So, the keywords were all very tightly related, and then what we would do: the main change on the landing page was actually just the header because it's the most important element on the landing page.

Once you’ve just changed that H1 above the fold, to personalize it to the search term, that really boosts conversion rates. I've been doing this for 15 years - it's the same strategy I've been using for 15 years across all clients and it always performs. Marketing is all about personalization, fundamentally - it's all about relevance.

Yeah. I love it. I think that's a wonderful takeaway there. Landing pages, you can personalize the heading based upon the search query and based upon the intent. So, when people land on it, they immediately think - in those first few seconds of deciding whether or not they're going to continue reading or go off somewhere else: ‘Yes, this page is hyper-relevant to me’. Great tip.

Let's move on from what works now to planning for the future. So, in your opinion, what's the biggest marketing trend, or challenge for marketers, over the coming year?

I think these changes with privacy, like how iOS update really messed up Facebook tracking - you can see Apple's revenue from ads increasing and Facebook's revenue decreasing. I think that has created a massive problem for a lot of marketers and a lot of businesses.

I think the second category is the proliferation and fragmentation of the tech stack - and the integration between different pieces of tech stack is really complex, and that is particularly difficult.

I'd say the omnichannel orchestration - so trying to target that person who's on multiple channels and having a consistent message for them across different assets: on mobile app, and the responsive website, and once they log in. Doing that at scale is quite complex and difficult because of privacy, but also because of the rules - setting up all these exclusion rules and trying to cater to all these different journeys - and the kit that does it is quite expensive and complex. So that's another level.

Effectively, mass personalization is really the key challenge for marketers moving forward. And top talent. There is a shortage of talent. It's been an issue and it's probably a growing issue. Finding really great marketers is very hard - and finding the good ones that are economically or financially viable. For businesses, getting ROI on that investment, and that asset, is quite difficult. Those are a few of the top challenges that I'm seeing as I screen and audit and advise different businesses, and then build growth engines for them.

You mentioned a phrase there at the beginning: ‘fragmentation of tech stack’. What trends are you seeing in terms of the tech stack that enterprises are likely to use for their marketing activities?

For instance, I see that larger organizations are more likely to use something like Salesforce, or a minimum number of different tech solutions, to try and do as much as possible from one particular solution. And I find that smaller businesses tend to use task-specific software, and maybe tie everything together with something like Zapier.

Are you seeing any particular trends in terms of enterprises being less likely to use singular pieces of software for multiple activities?

Yeah, absolutely. I think they're all going for a Salesforce solution or an Adobe Cloud solution. Enterprises are definitely looking to orchestrate - and buy a one-stop-shop that has this integration power across all these different areas. Because of the complexity - the volumes of traffic they get, the different assets they have, and the different teams they have - I think it's necessary for them to do this.

I think small businesses are doing this as well. The number of times in the last three weeks that HubSpot has been mentioned in every conversation, it's just - whoever I'm talking to - it's the go-to. I think the reason is because it does all these different centralized activities between sales and marketing, in one place.

If you take the SEO tool, it's nowhere near as good as, say, Ahrefs - which is a dedicated SEO piece of kit. But, the fact that it is good enough, and it integrates so it's easier and flows into your content strategy and everything that you're doing on your blog, and that ties into the website that’s powered by HubSpot, etc. It just makes a marketer’s life easier.

I think that consolidation is happening for small businesses as well: that fragmentation and the Zapier integration. Zapier is fantastic, but it's actually very limited in a lot of different pieces of kit, and how much integration with API power it has. It doesn't go deep enough, in some instances.

Personally, I now try and shy away as much as I can from individualized pieces of kit and integrating them. Because a lot of things break, and the amount of time to - that engineering resource is really short. Sometimes I'm fortunate enough to have engineering resources in the marketing team, and even with that is still not enough brainpower, time, and energy to maintain the fragmentation. It’s just too complex. Even for me, I'd always opt for a centralized solution now, even if it's not as good, because the cost of something breaking is too expensive. The risk is too high.

I've been your host David Bain, you can find Oren Greenberg over at Kurve.co.uk. Oren, thanks so much for being on the Strategic Marketing Show.

Thanks for having me, David.

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