In this episode of the B2B Marketing Methods podcast, host Terri Hoffman, CEO of Marketing Refresh, speaks with Marketing Refresh’s own Tiffany McArthur, the VP of Account Strategy and Aaron Eaves, the VP of Digital Marketing. They explore key B2B marketing strategies amid budgeting season. The discussion focuses on formulating effective marketing budgets, understanding company goals, competitor analysis, and leveraging digital strategies like SEO, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.
The episode emphasizes the importance of integrating marketing and sales efforts through robust data tracking, using CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot, and exploring automation and AI capabilities. Terri, Tiffany, and Aaron also highlight foundational steps like maintaining a functional website and crafting a coherent messaging strategy tailored to the buyer’s journey. The episode aims to provide insights for business leaders looking to optimize their marketing strategies for revenue growth.
Topics Discussed:
Formulating effective marketing budgets and goals
Digital strategies within SEO, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Ads
The importance of a functioning website
B2B solutions via automation and AI capabilities
To learn more about Tiffany McArthur, connect with her on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffanymcarthur/
To learn more about Aaron Eaves, connect with him on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaroneaves/
To learn more about Terri Hoffman, connect with her on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrihartley/
To connect with Marketing Refresh, visit: MarketingRefresh.com or follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketing-refresh/
Full Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Terri Hoffman: Welcome to B2B Marketing Methods. I’m your host, Terri Hoffman, and I’m the CEO of Marketing Refresh. Let’s face it, embracing digital marketing is daunting. This podcast was created to make it more approachable. Join me as we talk to CEOs, sales leaders, and revenue growth experts who will share lessons learned and tips from their own journeys.
[00:00:24]
[00:00:24] Terri Hoffman: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of B2B marketing methods. This week we have a special arrangement on the podcast, instead of inviting an outside guest, I’ve got two people who lead the Marketing Refresh marketing agency, and run our client accounts and strategies, and they’re Tiffany McArthur, our VP of account strategy and Aaron Eaves, our vice president of digital marketing. They’ve both been with the firm for a while. Daily interactions with our clients, very heavily involved with B2B marketing strategies. The reason I wanted to have them on today is because we’re thick into budgeting season right now.
[00:00:58] Terri Hoffman: And there are a lot of firms looking at their budgets, trying to figure out how to allocate money. How should they allocate that money towards the revenue growth that they’re working on in their business. Today, we’re going to talk about methodologies, right? So how do you go about budgeting? What are the things you should be thinking about? What are some of the steps you should take to determine that budget?
[00:01:19] Terri Hoffman: Once you’ve got the budget in place, how could you even further dive in and do some research and analysis on your competitors to see where your money and time may be best spent to grow in your industry. So, we’re going to be talking about those topics mainly and I’m sure it’ll lead into many other important things about SEO and Google ads and LinkedIn ads and Bing ads and all of the tactical things that indicate where you may want to end up budgeting money.
[00:01:47] Terri Hoffman: But we want to talk about how you arrive at those tactics and why you would arrive at those tactics. So Tiffany and Aaron, thank you for joining me today. Hopefully that’s the most talking I’m going to do in the episode. I’d really like the audience to hear more, from the two of you on this topic.
[00:02:02] Aaron Eaves / Tiffany McArthur: Yeah.
[00:02:03] Terri Hoffman: Let’s start with the most difficult topic, but also the most important topic and that’s budgeting. So, when we first start talking to a company a lot of times they just want to jump straight to tactics. Like, hey, we called because we want to run Google ads or we want to start an SEO program.
[00:02:19] Terri Hoffman: Great, but let’s back up a step from there and talk about why you want to do that. And to even answer the why, you need to understand what’s possible, right? So that we can help them set priorities. So Tiffany, walk me through budgeting, what is a normal average range that a B2B business should be spending on their marketing activities?
[00:02:40] Terri Hoffman: How do you know within that range how to guide someone?
[00:02:45] Tiffany McArthur: Yeah. So every year, whether it’s a current client or a brand new client coming on, we always get hit with budgeting questions right around, August, September leading into Q4. The question is always the same from me regardless of if they’re new or they’ve been a client for six years is what are your goals for the next year?
[00:03:02] Tiffany McArthur: Cause usually they’re trying to do an annualized budget. How much are they going to spend? What are they going to be doing over the next 12 months? We have to really know the goals for the company as a whole before we can really tell you what you should do to achieve them. That conversation is always best to be had right up front,
[00:03:18] Tiffany McArthur: They come in and they’re like, oh, I want to do X, Y, and Z and it’s like, that might not be the best vehicle to get to that destination, you know. So knowing what those company goals are is super helpful. If it’s a client who has never done marketing before and they’re completely green into the space, sometimes they’re just like, what should I be doing in general, and we can certainly recommend, the basics of you need to do X, Y, and Z.
[00:03:40] Tiffany McArthur: That’s going to be the baseline level to get you set up and going, but that is it, right? That’s not going to get you all the way to those company goals and those big goals that are going to achieve the results in the return on investment that you’re looking for.
[00:03:52] Tiffany McArthur: So knowing those goals are paramount.
[00:03:53] Terri Hoffman: When you say goals, what are some of the goals you’re expecting in that response?
[00:03:57] Tiffany McArthur: So some companies may be like, we’re doing great.
[00:04:00] Tiffany McArthur: We just want to continue what we’re doing. Other companies may be breaking into a totally new market that they’ve never explored before. So they don’t even know how to tap into it, or launching a new product.
[00:04:10] Tiffany McArthur: It just depends on what those initiatives that they’re going to be pushing throughout the year and we figure out the best way to help them achieve whatever it is that they’re trying to aim for.
[00:04:20] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. So before you even start digging into the goals and doing research around the goals, are there just general rules of thumb that someone could follow to establish a starting point on budgeting?
[00:04:31] Tiffany McArthur: Yeah, that can be a real tricky situation because a lot of people get sticker shock immediately right off the bat because I don’t think that many companies really have a great idea, or have their finger on the pulse of what people are spending in marketing in general. There’s many different articles and places you can go for to get this information.
[00:04:50] Tiffany McArthur: But like, MarTech says 6 to 8%, the SBA says 7 to 8%, there are other articles that say that, for B2B, you can spend like, you know, anywhere from 3 to 8%. So, you’re definitely going to be looking to spend 5 to 8 percent to get the best bang for your buck and actually, you know, make waves and do something with it.
[00:05:10] Tiffany McArthur: So, that’s 6 to 8 percent of your total revenue. So people are like, whoa, you know, nobody really thinks about that. If you’re a small business, just starting up, you don’t realize how much you really are going to have to invest in marketing.
[00:05:20] Aaron Eaves: And that benchmark is so important because, you can spend too little and you get nothing for it.
[00:05:28] Aaron Eaves: So that’s why those benchmarks are there because you do have to hit a certain level to get a return on that and I think that’s what scares people a lot. And they’re like, well, I don’t want to do that much. It’s like, well, maybe we need to reevaluate some strategy here.
[00:05:41] Terri Hoffman: I can remember saying to clients at different points in time, like, you might want to just go on a vacation instead or throw like a really fun company party.
[00:05:49] Aaron Eaves: You’re going to get more return out of that than doing this.
[00:05:52] Terri Hoffman: And we, I mean, I think, most professional agencies or organizations or, CMOs, they want this to work, right?
[00:05:59] Terri Hoffman: And so, you want to produce results. And if a client takes the time to articulate those goals to Tiffany, like, she wants to make sure that she’s putting together a program that is actually going to drive results. And I think that’s true for anybody who’s doing this at a professional level.
[00:06:12] Tiffany McArthur: Yeah, I agree. I think the biggest mistake that companies could ever make in marketing is not having a realistic budget in mind. Because, if you don’t spend enough and you’re not doing enough, then you walk away from that thinking that marketing doesn’t work and that’s not true. You just weren’t doing it at the right level.
[00:06:31] Tiffany McArthur: And that can be a hard pill to swallow you, especially if you’ve never done marketing and you’re just not, accustomed to that spend, but that’s the reality of it. The internet is huge now, and you’re talking about digital marketing. You’re trying to get your product or your service in front of eyeballs that everyone’s competing for.
[00:06:47] Tiffany McArthur: If you don’t have that realistic budget set, you start off with this feeling of, marketing doesn’t work for me and that’s not entirely accurate.
[00:06:54] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. There are those industry averages and the studies that come out that give you a starting point, right?
[00:06:59] Terri Hoffman: But then you can bring that closer to home and look at your competitors. Like, what are they doing?
[00:07:03] Aaron Eaves: Yeah. So, I mean, you’re right, all of those industry standards they set us a great benchmark, but maybe it’s not the right benchmark for your specific niche or your specific geographic area that you want to market in, right?
[00:07:17] Aaron Eaves: So, the best way to figure out, or at least to get a starting point on what should we do is to look at what your competitors are doing in the market. You know, marketing is fun, but we’re not making a new wheel here, right?
[00:07:30] Aaron Eaves: So we can make it run a little smoother and make it run a little better. Looking at what your competitors are doing and reverse engineering things a little bit can help give you confirmation on the strategy that you are already starting to flesh out and put into practice.
[00:07:48] Aaron Eaves: that could be, looking at your competitor’s ad spends, looking at your competitor’s websites. What are they spending time, energy, effort, and money on? If you get enough of these and they’re all doing time, energy, effort, money, there’s probably some sort of trail you should follow there.
[00:08:04] Aaron Eaves: There’s a reason why you’ve got 10 companies spending money on this. Maybe we should look at that.
[00:08:09] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of tools out there that can help aggregate data and information about like, what topics are they frequently talking about? What are they running ads on?
[00:08:20] Aaron Eaves: What platforms are they using? What are they not doing?
[00:08:23] Terri Hoffman: Cause it can reveal where you need to put yourself, but it can also reveal where they’re not and you definitely want to put yourself because there’s a good opportunity.
[00:08:33] Aaron Eaves: Tiffany said it earlier, right? Like the internet’s not getting any smaller.
[00:08:36] Aaron Eaves: It’s just getting. noisier and noisier. So, if you want to do something specific and a certain channel is really, really noisy, you might find one that’s not as competitive and there’s less noise that would be a better, part of your strategy to go after. Especially, you know, when you’re talking about
[00:08:53] Aaron Eaves: companies that need to spend X amount of dollars or percentages of their budget, right? Those numbers are scary. It’s like, okay, let’s play something a little bit safe, get you some return and expand.
[00:09:04] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Tiffany, you talked a little bit earlier about just some standard foundational things that you’ve got to put in place.
[00:09:09] Terri Hoffman: What are some of the table stakes that they need to have in place?
[00:09:12] Tiffany McArthur: Yeah. So, I mean, if you’re going to venture off into digital marketing, the first thing you need is a website, right?
[00:09:17] Tiffany McArthur: And not only does it need to be a website, but it actually needs to function properly. And so it needs to be a fast website. It needs to be very clear what you do and what your intentions are, from the get go when they land on the homepage or even within an internal page, like your messaging needs to be clear.
[00:09:32] Tiffany McArthur: Who are you? What do you do? How can you help the client? And so that to me is like the first step.
[00:09:37] Terri Hoffman: Quick question there. If I already have a website, how often should I be updating it to make sure it’s staying fresh, right?
[00:09:45] Terri Hoffman: To achieve all the things you just talked about?
[00:09:48] Tiffany McArthur: you should be updating it every single month in some sort of way or fashion, adding content to it. A total refresh? probably every few years you could do with a complete revamp, but you should definitely be adding content to it all the time, making sure that it stays updated.
[00:10:03] Tiffany McArthur: And not only is that going to help your customers understand who you are, and put more content out there for them, but it’s also going to help the search engines realize that you’re still alive and you’re still adding to your website.
[00:10:13] Terri Hoffman: We have a whole separate set of videos, by the way, if anybody’s interested, we’re sharing those on our YouTube channel about website performance and all the things that you have to make sure you’re covering on a website.
[00:10:22] Terri Hoffman: I would really encourage people to go listen to those because, again, it’s good. Whether you decide to call Marketing Refresh or not, that is great information for people to be armed with as they go out and kind of assess their website and try to figure out their next steps there. Go find that video on YouTube.
[00:10:38] Terri Hoffman: What are some of the things that people, business leaders, should be thinking about? Like, you talked about making sure you have the right message. You talked about making sure it appeals to your audience, but like, how do you know that? What are you going to do in order to make sure you’ve got that nailed?
[00:10:54] Tiffany McArthur: Yeah, we’re going to have to talk to a marketing expert. They’re going to have to help you run it through some tools and systems and do some audits to make sure that it’s in the right shape to get you going in marketing. Because, if you’re not doing that, it’s going to end up costing you more money in the long run on ads, or, just cost you customers cause they’re leaving your site cause they’re not getting what they need. So, a marketing expert who is a professional in websites can help you look at that and say, okay, yeah, this is great.
[00:11:17] Tiffany McArthur: Or this needs some work, or let’s blow this up and start over. We can definitely tell through our tools and, experience whether or not that website is going to be fit to do the program that you’re trying to set in place.
[00:11:31] Aaron Eaves: But, to add onto that, your website’s great, but what is the messaging?
[00:11:36] Aaron Eaves: Who am I trying to reach? Am I hitting those pain points? Is whatever I’m saying on my website going to help me get the results that I want? So, having a website script and if you don’t have the right content on there, it doesn’t really matter.
[00:11:50] Aaron Eaves: Tiffany, how do we find out what to put on the website?
[00:11:54] Tiffany McArthur: Yeah, so like Aaron said, you could have this wonderful, beautiful website, and it’s so fast, and it does all the things, but when you get to it, it has this vague headline, and nobody knows what you do.
[00:12:03] Tiffany McArthur: That’s definitely not what you want because somebody’s gonna end up thinking they’re in the wrong spot. Messaging is really important and that takes research, time, and expertise to craft that message to make sure that it’s reaching your target audience. One of the ways that’s achievable is through a buyer’s journey or customer journey.
[00:12:19] Tiffany McArthur: Like, where you actually take and you separate your target market out by who they are and their job titles and what they do and then how do they go about their day and make decisions. And that whole process can be built out through that customer journey so that you can make sure that as you’re speaking to them, you’re doing it in a way that actually relates with them in their day to day working life so that your message hits their pain points.
[00:12:44] Tiffany McArthur: Who’s involved? Who’s whispering in their ear and helping them make decisions or steering them in a different direction? And so a buyer’s journey can be really helpful for that
[00:12:52] Tiffany McArthur: and that is a foundation for creating that messaging that’s really tailored to your audience, making sure that you’re providing them with what they need to hear, that will actually impact them. And you’re not just screaming out messages about your product or things that really don’t hit home because it doesn’t relate.
[00:13:08] Terri Hoffman: I mean, the buying process is complicated and it’s only gotten more complicated. Gartner has that really great image that’s called the long, hard slog or something like that. And it kind of shows a B2B decision making process and it looks like somebody just threw a heap of spaghetti on a plate, right?
[00:13:27] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. It’s not linear, but I think the buyer’s journey is really interesting because it helps you articulate and document like what Tiffany just went through. Most of the time a b2b business doesn’t just have one buyer on the other end, there’s a buying team and there might be four or five, six different job roles involved, and you’ve got to understand their unique needs and their unique drivers so that you’re putting together content involved in the site that is going to meet all of those different needs.
[00:13:57] Tiffany McArthur: I find a lot of times clients know who their buyers are, they know their job titles, but what they struggle with is they just don’t know what a day in the life of that person is. They may not completely have a full understanding of how hard it is to make a decision in that role or the hurdles that they’re having to overcome, or the things that they have to achieve to make a decision, or even if they’re the ones who make the decision, they’re just an influencer in the decision. That is what that project can uncover is, what do they actually go through.
[00:14:27] Tiffany McArthur: Like, who are they dealing with and what is their job? We know who they are, but like, how do I reach them where they’re at?
[00:14:34] Aaron Eaves: What are the pain points and how can I address those and help them? Cause if you can help that person that you already know who it is, then your job’s done there, right?
[00:14:44] Aaron Eaves: Marketing’s role is to help fulfill a problem or fulfill an issue and if you know what that issue is, then you can address it.
[00:14:54] Tiffany McArthur: The internet is so huge now. There’s so many messages being screamed at them.
[00:14:58] Tiffany McArthur: If your message doesn’t hit home, it’s just another bit of the noise, you know, it’s completely ignored.
[00:15:04]
[00:15:04] Aaron Eaves: Bypass and go to the next one.
[00:15:06] Tiffany McArthur: It’s super important that messaging is really on target and hit them between the eyes with it. But to Terri’s point with the gardener illustration, with how the buying journey is just chaotic right now, a lot of the foundations of marketing that you need to set up is that you need to be in all those places, you know. So the website is one component, but everybody does social media and
[00:15:28] Tiffany McArthur: if you don’t have a social media platform and you’re not utilizing it for your business, you’re way behind. That would be another foundational aspect of it is making sure that you have all of the platforms, checked off the box. I’ve got a website. I’ve got my social media platforms.
[00:15:42] Tiffany McArthur: I know my messaging. To the competitive research, I know what my competitors are doing. I know where their gaps are, so I know where I can come in and steal a little bit of the show, or I also know where I just absolutely have to be, or I’m going to be missing out on opportunity. So those are some of the foundations.
[00:15:57] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. They’re always coming out with new ad types, new targeting strategies.
[00:16:03] Terri Hoffman: And we’re staying on top of it, but sometimes they’ll come out with a new ad type on a specific platform and we’re like, oh, that’s cool. We’ve got to figure out how to integrate that into this company strategy or that company strategy. Aaron, maybe you can just talk about some of the primary ad platforms that are important in the B2B space in particular.
[00:16:25] Aaron Eaves: Yeah. One thing I wanted to add to what Tiffany said, it takes multiple avenues to get in front of someone, and that leads into these different ad platforms. The more complicated your product is usually the longer the sales cycle is and B2B has long sales cycles, right?
[00:16:40] Aaron Eaves: Um, but on average, it takes, it takes eight touch points in B2B to do something, and that’s why that marketing spend and whatever your budget is and the strategy is so important because it’s not a one and done. And that’s when you, you come into ads and, you know, how can I get in front of my audience?
[00:16:57] Aaron Eaves: How can I get in front of a group of people that I know they need me, but they have no idea who I am? Yeah. So, you know, for B2B, LinkedIn definitely sits at the top and that’s just because of the professional nature of that network. Even though sometimes it feels like it’s, you know, just full of recruiters and people flooding your inbox, right?
[00:17:18] Aaron Eaves: That’s where professionals stand out. But, we can’t talk about ads and not talk about Google. Google ads is the biggest platform out there. It has the most eyeballs. Um, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is the right strategy or avenue for everyone. Usually, it needs to be a part of that mix.
[00:17:37] Aaron Eaves: The often overlooked, little brother of Google ads is Microsoft ads or Bing. Bing is a fantastic place to advertise. Um, you know, they own LinkedIn, all of the LinkedIn data that’s there gets fed in and shared with Bing. Um, but you know, a lot of B2B brands operate internally and Bing, and, and those search engines are their default search engines because it’s dictated by their IT department.
[00:18:05] Aaron Eaves: So it doesn’t matter if they want to install Chrome or Safari or some other platform, they’re on Bing. So that automatically says, okay, great, then this is untapped. And what most people don’t realize is that, uh, the audience on Bing is smaller, but it’s usually more engaged, it’s worth more.
[00:18:23] Aaron Eaves: So ad networks and platforms good for B2B, LinkedIn and Bing, are definitely top two, Google right there as well. I would say those are the biggest ones.
[00:18:31] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Maybe you would consider adding this as your fourth is geo-targeting ads?
[00:18:36] Aaron Eaves: Yes. If you have, the right strategy behind it, geo-fencing ads can be fantastic. Think about if you go to a conference or a trade show. We’re located here in Houston. So we have giant conferences all the time in downtown at the convention center. If I know that there’s 5,000 people there, that’s my market, why would I not want to advertise there? Especially, if I could draw this little imaginary fence around that area and shoot all my ads to those people, geofencing is great. Now, there’s other industries where geofencing may not be that good avenue.
[00:19:09] Aaron Eaves: Most people, don’t realize geofencing would be something that’s considered top of the funnel, right? You’re getting in front of somebody that they definitely aren’t looking for you. They just happen to be the right person in the right place at the right time. But again, eight touch points, so you got to remember that, right?
[00:19:24] Aaron Eaves: So if that’s one of them and then you follow up with all of these other things you’re doing, you can really, really make a marketing strategy work to your benefit.
[00:19:32] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, one thing that I think is critical too, there’s the platforms and there’s the different type of ads that sort of serve different purposes,
[00:19:39] Terri Hoffman: but I think what is really often surprising people is how you’re able to target people in different ways on the, on these platforms. Tiffany, you are working through this and your team with clients all the time. Trying to gather information that helps us know, like, what do you already know about your clients? Do you have a list? Do you have emails? What do you have that we can then leverage in our targeting strategy, right?
[00:20:04] Terri Hoffman: What are some of those common things you’re asking about?
[00:20:07] Tiffany McArthur: Yeah, so in a perfect world, they have an email list of these people, because those emails can be matched on various ad platforms. A lot of times they might have an email list though, and it’s not large enough or it doesn’t, you know, it’s
[00:20:21] Aaron Eaves: not complete.
[00:20:22] Tiffany McArthur: Yeah, not complete. We’re asking, who are these people? Do you know the company? Do you know the job title? What industry are they in? Um, what, what size of company, revenue wise, are you looking for? Um, and those sort of things, and Aaron’s team is then able to take all that data and information and go back and then target specifically to them.
[00:20:42] Tiffany McArthur: What city are you looking for? Are you looking for specific counties, specific states? And really hone in on that, to eliminate all the noise. So I’m trying to gather as much detail as we can on that right up front and then if you need to break it out, you can also break it out into different audiences, if you’re trying for different things.
[00:21:00] Tiffany McArthur: So for us, for example, we go after VPs of marketing and also VPs of sales, and you can break them out that way. But, the first step is going to be gathering all of those details to make sure that we know exactly who they’re trying to target.
[00:21:13] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, and then what their mechanisms are to get that data. Like, you could even have subscriptions to list services or, other types of data sources.
[00:21:22] Terri Hoffman: And I mean, with the way AI is going, there’s, there’s often all kinds of intent data and other data that can be added to a base list that just helps propel our targeting even further when it comes to using that on an ad platform, right? Yeah, like, we see that a lot. Yeah, you know, one thing we didn’t really talk about is CRM.
[00:21:45] Terri Hoffman: It’s like the bane of most people’s existence when they’re in a vice president of sales role. It’s like the CRM can be your best friend or the thing that everybody on your sales team hates the most about their job. But, um, I think that’s a pretty critical foundational piece because, um, like if you’re not able to track what’s working across multiple areas of your marketing and sales metrics, you’re going to make it hard to see, like, this is working, let’s expand this. This is not working, let’s stop this. Or this seems like there’s something there, but we don’t have it working quite right, let’s improve it, right? If you don’t have that data and the CRM is one of those foundational pieces, so what, what are the common CRM tools that we see B2B companies using?
[00:22:34] Aaron Eaves: I think that the two biggest ones are Salesforce and HubSpot .
[00:22:35] Terri Hoffman: I think we’ve got clients that use both.
[00:22:39] Terri Hoffman: That’s like a whole different show we could have on which one is better or has a
[00:22:43] Aaron Eaves: Different podcast.
[00:22:44] Terri Hoffman: We’re gonna stay away from that. There’s a lot of things that go into deciding what CRM platform to use, but once you’ve made that decision and you’re, you’re running on it, you know, making sure that there is a connection between your marketing activities and the customer data that you’re storing and tracking and updating through your sales process is really, it’s vital and important and that kind of ties into reporting in general. How often should people be looking at these metrics? And what metrics should they be, be looking at to see, hey, are we spending our budget right?
[00:23:16] Terri Hoffman: You know, is this, is this going well?
[00:23:19] Tiffany McArthur: Ideally every week, but at a minimum each month. Going back to a little bit, what Terri was saying is like the hardest thing that we have sometimes because we are an external resource providing marketing is getting hooked into those CRMs so that we can understand the true return on investment for what they’re doing.
[00:23:39] Tiffany McArthur: We cannot give you an ROI without that data. If you can’t tell us if that lead went out and became a customer and how much they spent with you guys, like we can’t give you a dollar amount. So, that is like the biggest thing that we need to get in there and do. But once that’s all set up and running fine, you know, we’re looking at that all the time, but we’re reviewing it with our clients monthly so that we can say, okay, here’s what’s working,
[00:24:03] Tiffany McArthur: here’s what’s not or like, you know, maybe we switch the gas here. We pull back here because of the season or things like that. Um, and so diving into those numbers and really understanding what’s coming in lead-wise, what’s going out and actually becoming a customer, um, really helps hone in on that ROI and like, is this worth it or is it not. What, and that tells you what tactics are working or not.
[00:24:26] Tiffany McArthur: You know, we’re getting a lot of leads from lead gen, but none of them are turning into customers. Well, is that because the wrong platform or is it not being utilized right and we need to make some tweaks.
[00:24:34]
[00:24:34] Terri Hoffman: Often the person who is leading and managing the marketing activities is not the person who’s leading and running and managing the sales team.
[00:24:42] Terri Hoffman: Sometimes it’s the same person, but sometimes it’s not right. So getting those functions connected and communicating and kind of setting up some agreement between the two areas on what information is going to be shared and how often they’re going to be talking about it, I think is really, really vital to the success of this. Especially, if one of the goals is we’d like marketing to help us grow revenue, right?
[00:25:06] Terri Hoffman: How are we going to know if marketing is helping to grow revenue if we’re not connecting those two functions together? Because marketing doesn’t make sales. Sales people make sales.
[00:25:15] Tiffany McArthur: Exactly, and salespeople are busy. You know, I was at INBOUND a couple of weeks ago and when they talked about sales and marketing, talking to each other, everybody laughed because it was just, it’s a problem everybody has.
[00:25:27] Tiffany McArthur: Salespeople are busy. Marketing people are focused on marketing, and demanding answers and salespeople are like, I care more about the customers than your questions right now. Um, so I mean, at the minimum, having that CRM though, It provides both teams with the ability to see what’s going on on either side without even having to talk to anybody, you know, like, if you’re able to look at that report, you can see it. Having conversations about it is great, but at the minimum, like, you know, to see that data and exchange that data, that is really the important part so that you can make meaningful decisions based on data and not on feeling, um, and so having that CRM plugged in on both sides.
[00:26:05] Tiffany McArthur: The leads are coming in through marketing. The salespeople are updating their prospects through the, through the CRM, the sales tools. Um, and then you get a really good clear picture, you know, and then hopefully we can review it all together once a month.
[00:26:18] Aaron Eaves: I think a lot of people think marketing and sales are like this, but in the reality, most of them are siloed, right? They’re separate. Um, marketing gets super excited about, oh, we did all of these things, we’ve got all these leads in. And then sales was like, whatever, like you did all that, but only three of them were good.
[00:26:37] Aaron Eaves: And then after they closed the sale, they wash their hands of that and they never think about it again, right? Like, salespeople, they just go after the next sale. So like Tiffany was saying, having that data updated in a CRM, but then also closing that loop. It’s like, hey, marketing in this example, brought in a hundred leads.
[00:26:59] Aaron Eaves: 10 of these turned into customers. That last little piece of like, hey guys, this 10%, like. This was great, we got that. Um, that is so important because then it tells marketing what’s working and what’s not, but it also tells all of the platforms that you were using to get these leads, what’s working and what’s not.
[00:27:23] Aaron Eaves: And that’s what, uh, at least from my side, I, I find that businesses have the hardest time giving that to us and closing that loop. Because they just, again, they move on, but whenever the businesses that do that marketing is able to work more efficiently, the platforms are able to work more efficiently, um, a company’s budget goes even further.
[00:27:44] Aaron Eaves: So, you know, if they had X amount of dollars and they got this result. They can still spend X amount over dollars, except maybe the result goes up. Um, and so it, but it’s a lot of work. That’s why sales and marketing don’t talk to each other.
[00:27:58] Tiffany McArthur: A lot of work and sales people are really busy. I’m married to one.
[00:28:01] Tiffany McArthur: They’re super busy. They’re keeping track of contracts and stages and and all these different things. And then also a lot of times dealing with customer problems themselves, cause they’re also managing the accounts that they sell to. And so they’ve got a lot going on and then
[00:28:15] Tiffany McArthur: it’s easy for us to be like, well, how many leads came in? And they’re like, well, they were all garbage. It was like, okay, but why? Because telling us that they weren’t good doesn’t give us what we need to make any type of adjustment to help you. So having that communication of like, well, it was a good lead, but the business was too small they couldn’t afford us, you know? Um, it was, uh, improper search, they were actually searching for something in a totally different industry that’s called the same thing, you know, like, that says, no, that, okay, well, we need to tweak our targeting and we need to help hone that in so that we can get you the right leads.
[00:28:49] Tiffany McArthur: But without that discussion like, it’s just, that was a bad lead. Well, okay. Thank you. But yeah,
[00:28:56] Aaron Eaves: like flying the plane blind, right? You’re just like, we’re up in the air. We’re going somewhere. I just don’t know if we’re going to where we want to go.
[00:29:03] Terri Hoffman: Right.
[00:29:04] Aaron Eaves: Right.
[00:29:05] Terri Hoffman: The other thing that’s really cool is once you start tracking data, I mean, now you can start to see a trend.
[00:29:10] Terri Hoffman: So Aaron, even going back to the example is a hundred leads that turn into 10 customers. I mean, is that good? Is that bad? I mean, that answer can be different depending on the industry and the money spent and what the story is worth, right? What’s the value of that customer over time? Um, and so if you don’t have any data that you’re tracking, you’re unable to develop a benchmark for your company that you’re then asking marketing and sales to work together to improve, right?
[00:29:39] Terri Hoffman: So if we know 10 clients leads to 10 million in business, cause you’re selling a piece of equipment that costs a million dollars, well, then that helps us backtrack and say, okay, if you sell 10 percent of the leads, and it takes a year to make that sale. Now we’ve got data points that help us determine, hey, remember that budget you said at the beginning, now that we have data, we can help you improve that budget even more.
[00:30:07] Aaron Eaves: That’s right.
[00:30:07] Terri Hoffman: we can help you really dial in and say, well, this is what it does cost you now to get a lead. Let’s try to take that and improve upon it for next year. Any number of things can happen at that point, but at least there’s data that can be referred to as a group. The CFO is going to be interested in that data.
[00:30:23] Terri Hoffman: The COO is going to be interested in that data. Every group is going to want to know how that information can be used to improve the budget for the next year. It all ends up tying together, but if you don’t track that data, you have no start for that.
[00:30:37] Aaron Eaves: If you don’t close the loop, you can’t find out what your return on your investment is. I mean, it’s just, it’s impossible. We talk about this all the time. There’s a great thing about digital. Like you can, track everything back. I spent this much. I can close that loop. It brought me this much. And so, you know, back to budgeting, if you plan something for this year and you can close the loop and get all that attribution next year, it’s like, Hey, we do want to grow.
[00:31:01] Aaron Eaves: We know what it takes. But I think we also find most B2B companies like they don’t really know how much it takes to get a new customer. They think they do, but they really don’t.
[00:31:13] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, you’re not saying that as a criticism. You’re saying that, hey, this, this is a common issue and a common problem.
[00:31:19] Terri Hoffman: And there is actually a way to solve that, right? There, there is actually a solution that might not get you the perfect answer, but you’re going to go from not knowing at all to a much better idea on how to answer that.
[00:31:31] Terri Hoffman: I’m going to shift gears to like a different topic, but before I do that, I want to make sure that we’ve really covered all the fundamentals. We talked about website, we talked about messaging strategy, buyers journey, different kind of targeting strategies, platforms that might be popular, CRM, any other fundamentals that we want to make sure, we’re helping people understand and get their arms around.
[00:31:52] Terri Hoffman: I’m talking about reporting too, which I, I believe is fundamental. Right?
[00:31:55] Aaron Eaves: It is.
[00:31:56] Terri Hoffman: So I think in my mind, to use a basketball analogy, before I would try to teach someone how to dribble behind their back or, or throw, you know, a no look pass. I would make sure they have the fundamentals in place. Can you dribble with your right hand?
[00:32:10] Terri Hoffman: Can you dribble with your left hand? Do you know how to shoot a layup? Do you know how to shoot a free throw? Right? Like basics talked about some that are more advanced are, you know, marketing automation, the ways AI can help improve what you’re doing.
[00:32:25] Terri Hoffman: So if a company comes, and starts kind of like thinking about their, their strategy, and they’re like, we have all the fundamentals in place.
[00:32:32] Terri Hoffman: We’re ready to take this to another level. What are some things that could be done or set up on an automation side that might add a little bit more efficiency and speed to their marketing strategy?
[00:32:45] Aaron Eaves: The first thing that comes to my mind, are there integrations between platforms that you have already?
[00:32:50] Aaron Eaves: There’s a ton of tools out there that can speed up processes that, used to be manual. And that’s great, but again, are all the platforms talking to one another? Sharing data is paramount. Outside of that, if you’re going out and jumping people on the top of that marketing funnel, what are you doing after that, right?
[00:33:08] Aaron Eaves: Are there automations that are nurturing that client and pushing them down? That could be via email, that could be via ads, a ton of different things, right? But those are the few things that, that really come to mind for me immediately and that are often overlooked, because they’re, they are all siloed.
[00:33:24] Aaron Eaves: But, when you share that data, all those platforms win.
[00:33:28] Terri Hoffman: You just talked about like a really key one. Somebody fills out a website form, they call, what happens after that? You know, why not automate some of that? The automation could be like triggering to the salesperson hey, you have a new lead.
[00:33:41] Terri Hoffman: Set up a meeting, try to find out what type of information they’re looking for. Like HubSpot, as an example, has a lot of, um, AI enhancements that they’re constantly adding. They just announced some really huge ones that would even show you intent data way beyond this is how many pages on the website they visited.
[00:33:59] Terri Hoffman: It’s pulling in intent data that shows how likely they are to be interested in the product you sell or the service that you offer. Like, there’s, there’s a lot there.
[00:34:07] Tiffany McArthur: It can be really intimidating to get started in marketing if you’re not used to it. Um, especially when you’re talking about, uh, pushing out content onto your own social media platform. One of the things that we’re pushing our clients always to do is on their individual accounts, they need to have unique content.
[00:34:23] Tiffany McArthur: It needs to sound like it came from them, it wasn’t just a branded message from that company and that can be pretty daunting if you’ve never done it before, but the good thing is that if you’re brand new to it, all pretty much 90 plus percent of your content can be pre-scheduled.
[00:34:39] Tiffany McArthur: So you can work on it in batches and schedule it out and automate it to go out. You can also automate your sales outreach on LinkedIn. So your connections with people, um, your messages that are going into people’s inboxes on LinkedIn and drip campaigns and things like that. So that you’re not having to manually do all of that.
[00:34:55] Tiffany McArthur: That will save you a lot of time and headache and a lot of stress. Especially if you’re brand new into it and you’re just getting started and you’re like, I don’t even know what to do and this sounds like a lot. You’re asking me to do a lot, you know, and I don’t have a lot of time. So those types of automations are also really helpful.
[00:35:08] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Yeah. I agree.
[00:35:11] Aaron Eaves: And I think automation is fantastic. Um, the message has to be on point, but everyone now, if they don’t get exactly what they’re looking for when they want it, they really just move on. And so when these automations set up, like you have a touch point immediately, whether that’s sending this to the salesperson.
[00:35:31] Aaron Eaves: Like, Hey, this just came in, you need to get ahold of it instead of like, oh yeah, I saw something came in last week. In the wrong industry or a specific industry that could be, you know, the end of a lead because they went somewhere else, but messaging is key. But getting back in front of that person, and, another touch point with them immediately is I think paramount to, to anything working with marketing sales.
[00:35:56] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, well, there’s, there’s a lot of orchestration that takes place across everything that we just talked about. And I think you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got somebody who is in a good position to orchestrate. Also, people who are in a good position to do, right? And cause the, the doing across all of these different areas, the skill sets needed have become much more specialized and they used to be several years ago.
[00:36:19] Terri Hoffman: Like when I started my marketing career many years ago, there were a lot of skills involved that were just common across the different channels that were available to us as marketers that has just grown. Um, now that digital has sort of taken over as the primary way to market your firm, the, the need to find that person who can orchestrate and lead and measure and hold people accountable is necessary along with these special skill areas who know each platform and each medium inside out and backwards is, is vital.
[00:36:51] Aaron Eaves: Each one of these platforms are, are so complex and so powerful that, um, no single person can be an expert in every single one of them. Like, and if they ever say they are, then you probably should run the other way. Um, you know, I mean, people can be really good at a lot of things, but you can’t be great at everything, right?
[00:37:12] Aaron Eaves: And so, um, having experts in each one of these platforms, like you can build a strategy, but that’s, what’s going to help take that home.
[00:37:20] Tiffany McArthur: Yeah. I love reading resume or not resumes, but job descriptions and postings on LinkedIn that are like, must be a graphic designer and PPC specialist. Also, we’ll need to be able to be a copywriter of eight blogs per month and need to manage a team and a budget of six.
[00:37:38] Tiffany McArthur: You’re like, no, that’s not reality. Yeah. Um, you might could have gotten away with that 20 years ago before all of this was really a thing, but now like you really need somebody who knows what they’re doing in each area and then somebody who knows a little bit about everything to oversee them.
[00:37:54] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, exactly.
[00:37:56] Terri Hoffman: I, I think we, put together some really helpful information for people who are on a B2B leadership team.
[00:38:04] Terri Hoffman: They’re starting to think about embracing digital marketing or maybe taking what they’re doing in digital marketing and making it more sophisticated and leveraging it as more of a tool to meet their goals instead of just thinking, well, we’ve got to be on LinkedIn because everybody’s on LinkedIn. But
[00:38:20] Aaron Eaves: right.
[00:38:20] Terri Hoffman: If you’re starting to think like, why do we need to do that? Why is this important? How do we want to allocate for that? This episode hopefully helped you. If you do want to get in touch with us, go to our website, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn. We do offer a free audit, right? So we can, we can do kind of a quick audit that helps you see where you stand in the market.
[00:38:41] Terri Hoffman: I promised at the beginning, this would not be a commercial for Marketing Refresh, and it wasn’t intended to be that way, but there have to be people who listened to you thought, okay, I want to start taking this a little bit more seriously. Get in touch with me and we can help. Even if we don’t end up working together, you’ll walk away with information and data that will be helpful to you.
[00:39:00] Terri Hoffman: So thanks, Aaron and Tiffany. Appreciate it. and we will see everybody on the next episode of B2B marketing methods. Thanks for joining us today.
[00:39:08] Terri Hoffman: Thank you for listening to B2B marketing methods. Please be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast channel and leave us a review. We’d love to hear from you and connect. You can find me on LinkedIn or visit our company website at marketingrefresh.com.
