Most of the changes have been positive. Audience targeting has advanced by leaps and bounds. Mobile optimization allows marketers to reach people on the go, and interactive ad formats allow them to captivate people in today’s fast-moving world. 

But this evolution hasn’t come without its challenges. The Cambridge Analytica data scandal rocked social media’s foundation, and more recently, Apple’s iOS 14 threw a wrench in targeting across Apple devices—a wrench that cost Meta $10b.

Marketers are also navigating the recent rise of ungated content and account-based marketing (ABM)—two shifts making them rethink much of what they know about lead generation and paid advertising. 

If you’re nodding your head, keep reading. This article explores the growth of these tactics and, more importantly, how you can adapt quickly. 

Why are ABM and ungated content in the spotlight right now? 

Most of my peers say the rise of ABM and the death of gated content is happening independently. And for the most part, I agree. But I’d also argue there are common threads between them: One is math, and the other is audiences.

I’ll explain what I mean, but to do that, we need to walk down memory lane with the graphic below.

The top row of this graphic represents the old-school B2B marketing strategy: Generate as many leads as possible. For better or worse, this was standard practice for B2B marketers for decades, and for most of that time, people accepted forms as the price they had to pay for something valuable, like an ebook, demo, or another offer type. 

Here’s where the math comes into play and the big reason why B2B marketers are ditching gated content—I’ll use this HubSpot ad to paint the picture.

Let’s say HubSpot’s Marketing team runs this ad on LinkedIn. It gets 100,000 impressions but only generates a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.5%. That means from 100,000, only 500 people clicked the ad.

Now, let’s assume there’s a gate on the landing page, and 10% of those 500 people fill out the form. That means just 50 people actually got their hands on HubSpot’s Instagram cheat sheet—50 out of the 100,000 who saw the ad.

See the problem? Gates limit reach, keeping people from consuming your content and, in many cases, learning about your product.

Marketers are waking up to the new reality of a post-gated word.

1. Gate your content, and reduce the people who digest your message
2. Ungate your content, and reach more people with your message

Winning B2B marketing teams choose option #2, and stop at nothing to get their message out there. They only capture leads when it’s worthwhile. Others will be left behind.

Where does ABM fit into all of this?

Here’s where the audience angle comes into play. Some B2B marketers say tearing down gates will strip their ability to get constant feedback on the quality of their audience. Limiting their control of optimizing who’s receiving their ads.

And to that, I say this: Build an audience with 100% relevance from the start and stop worrying. 

Enter account-based marketing (ABM). You target your ads at specific accounts and personas. Unlike old-school marketing, which is like fishing with a giant net in the middle of the ocean, ABM is like spearfishing from the dock.

Getting your ABM strategy off the ground isn’t a huge lift, either. You just need two lists: 

1. Your target accounts (pre-qualified companies) 
2. Your target personas (pre-qualified job titles)

Combine these lists, throw them into the native ad channels (or a tool like Metadata), and you have an audience that’s 100% relevant. What you won’t have is endless worry about wasting your demand generation budget on people with no business buying your product or service. This allows you to focus on telling a great story. 

How to get started with ABM and ungated content

Ungated content and ABM strategies are at the heart of the next generation of demand generation. But, like anything new, they may come with a learning curve. 

Luckily, it’s not too steep, and you can scale it heroically: 

1. Make your audience aware they have a problem (Inform) 
2. Show them the consequences of that problem (Educate)
3. Create a reason why they should solve their problem with your solution (Hook)  

How to use the Hero’s Journey to create awesome ads

It doesn’t matter what you sell; your success with ungated content and ABM hinges on your belief that someone out there has a problem you can solve.

I made up a company, SafeSync, to show you what this could look like:

• Problem: Do you ever forget to update your software and worry you’re putting your business at risk? 
• Solution: SafeSync keeps your apps, devices, and systems current with the latest security updates with just a click. 
• Benefit: You can rest assured that your software is up to date, remove some stress from your life, and reinvest your time in higher-value work.

Once you understand your Hero’s Journey, you can launch campaigns destined to resonate with people who have their wallets open. 

The last tidbit to consider is your hook, i.e., the carrot at the end of the stick. 

Why should your audience choose to solve their problems with you?

Spoiler alert: A free ebook won’t do jack sh%t. 

Today’s B2B buyers want so much more; they want genuine value, like a gift card, ad credits, consultation, or a lunch and learn. Steal the ideas below if you’re trying to cut through the noise.

How to know if ABM and ungated content is working

There are few things in life I hate more than gated content: wet socks, getting a terrible song stuck in my head, and people who use reply-all for every email. 

That said, I have no problem admitting that gated content offers solid insights into campaign performance. You capture emails, and you can track emails in your ecosystem. The problem is, the performance tracked from gated content is usually very bad.

This begs the question: How do you measure ABM and ungated content? 

In a few ways:

1. The quality of website visits 

Google Analytics, as intimidating as it can seem, is your BFF. Start by looking at clicks, but take it a step further by diving into bounce rates, time on site, and scroll depth. If someone likes your ad and is genuinely interested in what you’re selling, they’ll hang out on the landing page, scroll around, and maybe even visit other pages. Quality website visits are a great primary success metric for your ungated content campaigns.

2. The volume of demos, meetings, etc.  

An ungated approach doesn’t mean you can’t drive meetings and demos with a form. It just means your primary storytelling method can’t be, “Let’s gate tons of ebooks and blogs.” 

If you tell your story well with ungated content, it makes it easy to follow up with demo ads. When you’re getting meetings with people who’ve been consuming your ungated content, that’s a vital secondary success metric to track. Then, figure out what percentage of leads taking demos match your target account list, and monitor that ABM success.

3. Ad engagement 

The way people engage with your ads is a tell, so look at quantitative metrics like CTR and cost per click (CPC).

You can also look at the comments people leave and the personas (job titles and companies) of people who interact with your ads. The latter especially gives you a solid idea if your campaigns are on the right track.  

Say you need metrics closer to pipeline and revenue. Turn your attention to marketing-sourced pipeline, opportunities and win rates. Ungated content is a supporting effort for your demand capture campaigns, and you can easily track the success of those. Everything comes back to pipeline.

What does the future look like for B2B marketers?

ABM and ungated content are both #trending right now and on the fast track to mainstream status. I’d argue ABM is already there. 

So what’s next? User-generated content (UGC), in-feed optimization, and shiny stuff. 

1. UGC: UGC has been all the rage in B2C for years, especially on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, due to consumers’ inherent trust in their peers. B2B marketers have started to embrace UGC for the same reason. They’ll continue to do so as they answer the call for more honesty, vulnerability, and transparency, especially from younger generations.

2. In-feed optimization: New-age audiences (read: young people) don’t respond to gated content and cold emails, which is why in-feed optimization continues to gain steam. Not only does that mean no gates, but it means no landing pages, either. Just deliver the total package when and where buyers spend their time. 

3. Something shiny: There’s always something shiny out there that marketers have their eyes on. Right now, I’d argue that object is TikTok, with 61% of B2B marketers using the platform for work. I don’t expect TikTok to fade anytime soon, but other innovations will come to the forefront—like a true advertising application of virtual reality. When these new socials show up, be ready to act. Boring ads, campaigns, and brands will be left in the dust. 

Famed scientist Stephen Hawking once said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” 
Today, I say, “The measure of the best B2B marketers is their ability to change.”

The rise of ungated content and ABM are forcing marketers to change, and that’s good.  Combining ungated content with an ABM mindset is the perfect one-two punch.

The post Unpacking the Rise of ABM and Ungated Content for B2B Marketers appeared first on metadata.io.

By what? That many people reading our 2023 B2B paid social benchmark report were surprised by the high cost per opportunity (CPO) of paid social advertising.

If you haven’t read our benchmark report, here’s the average CPO across LinkedIn and Facebook:

CPO on LinkedIn (Left) vs. Facebook (Right) Pre-April 2022

My initial thought was, Why’s this shocking? Why don’t demand generation marketers know how much they pay for opportunities, especially in a down economy? Are they too focused on leads alone and not pipeline?

I concluded the likely reason is they’re too far away from their data. Either they’re always waiting for their Marketing Ops team or agency to turn around reports, or they’re relying on metrics in native ad channels that aren’t tied to pipeline and revenue. 

Either way, there’s a divide between demand gen marketers and the data they need to build, launch, experiment, and optimize their campaigns.

This is a solvable problem: The future of excellent demand generation hinges on data independence. 

What does an independent demand generation marketer look like? 

Let’s take a step back. I have a hunch you’re asking yourself, Isn’t demand generation all about collaboration, processes, and moving pieces across teams? 

You’re spot on, so I’ll preface this section by saying this: 

Demand generation is a team sport. Everyone, including Sales, Marketing Ops, and Customer Success, must work together to keep campaigns flowing. 

My point about data independence is less about marketers isolating themselves, and more about them taking the reins of the tools (read: data). To build quality campaigns, experiment at scale, and maximize their budget, demand gen pros need better access to performance metrics. Data is their lifeblood, and nothing should stand in their way of it.

It’s time for marketers to break through roadblocks (and the ensuing disconnect) to shorten the time between insight and action. 

I’ve come up with four characteristics of a data-independent demand generation marketer. Imagine a future like this:

1. They don’t fully rely on other teams to get data or reports

Demand gen marketers typically access data in one of two ways (or a mix): 

1. Use native ad channels 
2. Ask their Marketing Ops team or third-party agency

Both avenues have their pros and cons. For example, native ad channels are fairly intuitive and reduce the barrier to entry for paid social advertising. But at the same time, they don’t give marketers access to metrics that tie back to pipeline and revenue. 

Meanwhile, tapping a Marketing Ops team or agency on the shoulder is excellent for bandwidth, but you don’t always get answers quickly. They have other priorities—trust me, I used to work in Marketing Ops—and this creates a costly lag between the ask and when marketers actually execute on that data. 

In either scenario, marketers are left with an under-equipped toolbox that makes their job tough. That’s a red flag during normal times, but when leadership teams are cutting marketing budgets, the flag is flying a little higher than usual. 

This is why the best demand gen marketers will soon be the ones who’ve reduced their reliance on other teams from a data standpoint and taken full ownership of their data. It’s 2023, and it’s time for them to steer the ship without waiting for everyone else to board. 

2. They aren’t blindsided by cost per lead (CPL) or any other metrics tied to pipeline

If a B2B marketing playbook existed, “How to drive a low cost per lead (CPL)” would be the title of the first chapter.

I’m fine with that since leads have historically been a B2B marketer’s north star. But demand gen marketers need to read beyond that chapter because chasing leads is fruitless and expensive.   

Although I admit CPL and similar metrics are solid leading indicators of paid social success, they’re not close enough to the dotted line to be the primary proxies. 

What demand generation marketers need today, tomorrow, and every day in the future is an uninterrupted view of performance from the first impression to closed-won business.

Instead of looking only at CPL, marketers should focus on metrics like upsell revenue and cost per opportunity (CPO). These metrics are closer to actual revenue. 

That said, don’t stop tracking leading indicators, like demo requests and meetings booked. They’re still helpful because they ensure you’re on track. Pipeline and revenue are lagging indicators, but board members may not be keen to wait around to see how they play out. 

One last note about flipping the switch to pipeline-level metrics: It won’t happen overnight. It took us about two quarters to fully make the move, and it would have been longer had we not set our sights on the downstream impact early on. Marketers making the move should sync with their Marketing Ops and Rev Ops teams ASAP to determine what they’re tracking now vs. what they need to track moving forward. 

3. They realize experimentation is the way to the promised land

Paid social campaigns have so many moving pieces, and, subsequently, so many things to test. Think offer types, channels, creative, and audiences.

The only way demand gen marketers can do that is with a well-thought-out experimentation strategy built on a foundation of the 3 As (and an O):

• Audience: Who sees the ads, e.g., job titles and target companies 
• Ads: The actual ads, e.g., the look and feel, copy, message, format, emojis, etc. 
• Asset: The ad format, e.g., single image, carousel, video, conversation, text, etc. 

I’ll include “offer” on this list, too, even though it doesn’t start with an A. Think of the offer as the hook, the “what’s in it for me?” incentive that gets people to click and convert. Some people use gift cards, ad credits, discounted pricing, and free consultations.

Jason Widup, Metadata’s former Head of Marketing, outlined his experiment framework in this article—check it out here.

So, how does data independence fit into the experimentation equation?

Marketers need access to data to inform their experiments, but more importantly, to take action based on their results.

• Did Audience A convert at a lower price than Audience B?
• Which message resonated the most?
• Do ads with real people get more clicks?
• Does Facebook or LinkedIn drive a better CPO? (Hint: The answer’s at the top of this article, and the “why” is in our benchmark report.)

Marketers can no longer wait for their Ops team or agency to supply answers. Time is money, and without instant access to data, they can’t make quick and informed decisions in the best interest of their campaigns.

The native ad channels aren’t much better. While marketers can quickly dive into them, the structure of these channels makes the experiments less impactful. This is because budgets sit at the campaign level, meaning marketers can’t isolate variables and allocate spend toward the highest-performing ads. Basically, they can access data, but the experiments are nothing to write home about.

4. They lean on automation to scale 

Demand gen marketers ask themselves a lot of questions: 

• Should my next campaign go live now or next month? 
• Is TikTok worth some experimental dollars? 
• Wait, did ads with stock images actually work? 

But without automation, there’s no time to answer them, build audiences, craft engaging creative, assemble experiments, and then launch everything across channels. Oh, and then marketers still have to optimize everything daily to ensure they’re pacing correctly and heading toward their goals. I’m stressed just writing that.

These manual, repetitive, albeit necessary tasks eat an unimaginable amount of bandwidth, which is why demand gen marketers must embrace automation. (Metadata certainly does.)

Now imagine an automation-enabled marketer with ownership and access to their data. They build audiences quickly, launch complex experiments at scale, and act instantly on optimization opportunities. That’s a fancy way of saying, they get stuff done. 

This is how demand generation should be—and how it will be once marketers embrace automation and take ownership of their data. 

Say hello to data independence with Metadata  

Let’s recap how demand generation marketers currently access the data and insights they need to build, launch, and optimize paid social campaigns: 

1. They manually go into native ad channels and use their out-of-the-box metrics
2. They work with a Marketing Ops team or outside agency 

Again, both options have good and bad aspects, and at the end of the day, marketers should trek down whichever path is available to them.  

But there’s one more option I have to mention—and it’s all about data independence: Metadata.

With Metadata, demand gen marketers eliminate manual tasks related to audience building, campaign launchings, and reporting. This gives them more time, control, and flexibility back in their day. 
Marketers, you could literally build audiences and launch campaigns in one place. You could drill down into post-conversion metrics, like opportunities created, CPO, and revenue created, to truly understand where your efforts are best spent. With Metadata, campaigns are optimized automatically using data from marketing automation platforms, so say goodbye to guesswork.

The post We’re Breaking Free: Why It’s Time for Demand Gen Marketers to Own Their Data appeared first on metadata.io.

It didn’t feel right to keep doing the podcast in the same format with Jason leaving Metadata tomorrow.

So DGU is officially on hold until it gets rebooted it in a different format (no timeline on this yet).

Earlier this month, we recorded a special episode together in person when Jason came to work with me in Chicago. In a legit podcast studio with multiple cameras, and a sound engineer. 

We take a trip down memory lane and talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly behind marketing Metadata over the last 3+ years.

We cover a bunch of hilarious stories, including some we’ve never shared publicly before, throughout this farewell episode. 

Listen to the full episode for great memories, a TON of laughs, and a proper sendoff for Jason.

The post The Last Class of Demand Gen U… for Now appeared first on metadata.io.

How can I get something out of nothing?

That’s the question every demand gen marketer is asking themselves right now. 

If you’re a demand gen marketer, you’re used to hearing, “Hey, times are tough, but I need you to double your results with half the budget. Oh, and we’re cutting your team down 50%.” 

For the foreseeable future, you need to get scrappy. You need to find ways to hit paid home runs without the Louisville Slugger you’re used to. There’s no better place to start than getting more out of your budget.  

How we’re staying nimble with our paid media budget 

As last year ended, we shifted the conversation around our demand gen strategy. Instead of double clicking on the “do more with less” way of thinking, I think it’s time to consider the importance of diversifying your channel mix.

I’ve always been in favor of hedging my bets with a healthy mix of organic posts and paid ads. Even though the economy is in the dumps, we still believe advertising during a recession is a winning move. 

With that said, obviously most teams are pivoting right now.

For the Metadata team, that means testing new channels like our DEMAND community and email marketing.

To keep your demand gen engine turned on for the rest of 2023, you can start thinking about diversifying channels into two buckets—demand creation and demand capture. 

Demand creation vs. demand capture: a tale as old as time

When I think about the pre-pandemic days when you didn’t need to take out a second mortgage to buy eggs and TikTok had less than 100 million users, I relish the thought of demand creation.

I’d say about 70% of our budget went to creating demand via no-ask tactics. We focused on providing value without expecting anything in return. 

The rest of our budget went to tactics aimed at turning demand into opportunities.  

• Creation: Demand creation builds affinity, trust, and interest in your product or category via tactics. When setting your sights on demand creation, you’re often going for a long-term play. Think running a weekly podcast or engaging in relevant communities.
  
• Capture: Demand capture converts in-market buyers who know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution to solve it. This focuses on audiences and channels with intent, such as like high-intent keywords (paid and organic) and remarketing.

If this were 2018, I’d tell you to allocate your budget however your heart desires. But it’s not, and that advice would be reckless. 

Instead, I’ll tell you this (keep reading)… 

How to capture demand like a performance marketing pro

I could tell you that targeting high-intent keywords, getting your review profiles in order, and retargeting people who visit high-intent pages would help you capture demand in 2023—and they would. But I want to go deeper and look at more tactical ways you can manage your budget.

I’m talking about budget groups, experimentation, and automation. 

Group audiences by goals 

Everything I do in 2023 aims to give Metadata a better vantage point into which parts of our demand generation engine are working. 

Budget groups in our platform help us do just that.  

What’s a budget group?

In Metadata, you can allocate a certain amount of spend towards specific channels and goals. We call these budget groups. They help you cast a wider net and identify the tactics driving the most efficient results. Without budget groups, you’d be hard-pressed to gain variable-level clarity into how your campaigns are performing. 

Here are some examples from our playbook on building a full-funnel campaign:

That’s what makes budget groups so great. If you want to see if something will resonate with your target audience or save you money, create a budget group, and you’ll have an answer in less time than it takes Elon to deliver a Tesla. 

That’s what we do (the budget groups, not the Tesla), and we’ve walked away with learnings that have dramatically impacted our spending. 

For example, we learned that LinkedIn Conversation Ads weren’t quite as shiny as they were when we raved about them in our 2022 benchmark report. In less than a year, they went from our BFF to that so-so friend you give a subtle nod to when you see them.  

They’re still important, and we’re paying attention, but we’re not obsessed. We’re spending our energy—and budget—elsewhere. 

Pro tip: While creating an endless stream of budget groups is tempting, stick to a few that’ll help you drive short-term gains. For example, instead of creating a budget group for TOFU content typically reserved for demand creation, focus on BOFU content that can convert in-market buyers this quarter. 

Experiment like it’s no one’s business

I can’t manage my budget if I don’t know what’s working, and I can’t know what’s working if I can’t throw my spend around and see what sticks. 

Experiments can be one of the most cost-effective ways to manage your budget. 

What’s an experiment?

Metadata defines an experiment as a unique combination of campaign elements, including audiences, messaging, creative, and content, to discover what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Ok, great. But that opens Pandora’s box.  

If you find yourself struggling to figure out where to launch your experimentation strategy, consider the three As that Silvio Perez, outlined in his DEMAND session, How to Experiment with Your Paid Campaigns (and Drive Revenue): 

• Audience: Who’s seeing your ads? 
• Ads: Which ad types resonate the most? 
• Assets: Which messaging is hitting home?  

Silvio suggests that this should be your order of focus, and I couldn’t agree more. The best way to manage your budget is to make sure you’re getting your ads in front of the right people.

Run as many experiments as you need to wrap your head around how to build an audience that perfectly aligns with your ideal customer profile (ICP). 

From there, run experiments to figure out which ads, audiences, and assets resonate. Then, throw your budget at the budget groups that mix and match the right puzzle piece (or have Metadata do it for you).  

Optimize your paid media budget…automatically

Do you want to make a room of demand gen marketers shutter in fear?

Of course not, but if you did, let them know they burned through their monthly budget in three days. 

Now tell them that despite the spend fest, their pipeline hasn’t increased at all, and there are only a few more leads in their CRM. 

We’ve all been there—and it sucks. 

Unfortunately, that’s the name of the game in demand gen, especially if you’re running campaigns through native ad channels. 

You know the drill. 

You log into Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google first thing in the morning to see how your campaigns are shaping up. You do some calculations in a spreadsheet, check to see if pacing is on track, and pull the levers necessary to make sure your budget goes to the ads driving the best return. 

Unless you’re a wizard, some performance and efficiency gains will forever be glued to the table. You could mess up a calculation or miss something in your spreadsheet due to bandwidth. 

A lot could prevent you from truly understanding how your campaigns are performing and the steps you could take to make them even better. 

You’re human, but why not bring a friend along for the ride?

Let’s call that friend Metadata and think of them as that trusty sidekick who ensures you don’t miss opportunities to do something great. In the context of paid advertising, that means proper pacing and optimizing toward the budget groups and experiments performing best.  

Auto-pause FTW 

Didn’t get the reaction from the B2B crowd you were looking for when you told them their pacing went on the fritz? No problem. Tell them they just invested thousands on an experiment that bombed.
Metadata’s auto-pause setting makes sure this doesn’t happen by automatically shutting down the lagging campaigns and moving that budget elsewhere.

“The best B2B marketers think and act like investors. That means putting stop-loss measures in place to make sure they aren’t investing in campaigns that aren’t delivering a return.”

Silvio Perez

Founder, AdConversion

Manage your paid media budget without pulling your hair out 

I’m sure you’re under more pressure than ever to manage your budget in the smartest way possible. Budget groups, experimentation, and automation will help you do that. 

Unfortunately, doing that in native ad channels is tricky, primarily because your budget sits at the campaign level. 

Because of this pitfall, budget groups aren’t a thing, making it next to impossible to run experiments that give you granular-level insight into what’s working across your audiences, ads, and assets.

The outcome? Inefficient—and manual—budget allocation. 

If you ask me, that’s no way to manage your budget, especially in 2023.

The post Managing Your Paid Media Budget Like a Performance Marketing Pro appeared first on metadata.io.

If your buyers didn’t question the value of whatever your company sells, they would’ve already signed the DocuSign and been a customer by now.

Objection handling gets scary (real fast) if you don’t have a solid plan in place or you leave it up to your Sales team to take care of on their own.

On DGU this week, we share how we identify (and overcome) sales objections and turn new objections into marketing content.

Three top takeaways: 

Takeaway 1: Objection handling isn’t just a Sales thing; it’s a Revenue team thing

Most B2B companies let their Sales team handle objections on their own. 

At Metadata, we ask our entire Revenue team to share new objections that come up on calls. 

Sometimes they share what they said and ask for feedback on how they responded. Other times, they ask for our advice on how to respond to an objection they aren’t as familiar with. 

Objection handling is a team sport. This type of open and ongoing conversation across the entire Revenue team leads to better conversations with buyers.

Whether it’s Marketing, Sales, or Customer Success – everyone needs to respond to and overcome objections in the same way. Consistency is everything.

Takeaway 2: Run towards sales objections, not away from them

Sales objections show you where friction exists in the buyer journey. 

You can learn a lot by looking at objections, where they pop up, and what’s causing this. When you know where the objection is coming from, you can take these insights and apply them to your marketing. 

Maybe your positioning needs work. Maybe your value proposition falls short. Maybe your pricing model is too difficult to understand.

We used to look at sales objections as a bad thing. We thought they’d shine the light on something we hadn’t figured out yet. Until we realized they give you an inside look at how your buyers think.

Running towards sales objections helps you remove unnecessary friction. It’s a win-win for you and your buyers.

Takeaway 3: Turn common sales objections into high-intent content

Instead of relying on your Sales team to overcome the objection (and run the risk of it being too late), use this as an opportunity to create high-intent content. 

This shows buyers you already know what they’re thinking and are one step ahead of them.

Last year, we kept running into the same objection:

“I already have 6sense. Can’t I just use 6sense to do this?”

So we created a comparison page to confront this objection head on with contextual social proof from mutual customers. People searching for “Metadata vs. 6sense” are in buy-mode.

We gave 6sense credit for having great intent data, explained how 6sense is built for sales teams, and reframed the narrative to show how Metadata fits into this equation.

The post Turning Sales Objections Into Marketing Content appeared first on metadata.io.

What do Bigfoot, aliens, and stress-free B2B marketers have in common? 

They don’t exist. If anyone tells you they’ve seen a B2B marketer who isn’t in a constant state of panic, they’re lying.

The life of a B2B marketer isn’t easy, especially in a down economy when every dollar needs to go the extra mile—or ten. 

I spend a good chunk of my day asking myself questions like: 

• When should I launch our next campaign, and on which channels? 
• How many experiments do I need to run?
• Did my audiences work last time, or should I build new ones? 

But it’s necessary mayhem; diversifying our channels is key to making sure our demand generation engine has what it takes to power us through 2023 so we can hit our revenue targets.

Why native ad channels fall short for us

I’ve run a lot of campaigns with native ad channels. I know you have, too. Meta wouldn’t be the ad-dollar magnet it is today if that wasn’t the case.

While these channels thrived during the early days of paid advertising, they lack the flexibility and transparency B2B marketers need to stretch their budgets further.

I feel confident saying native ad channels will only get you halfway to your pipeline and revenue goals.

A black box of doom 

Native ad channels are broken, but not because they don’t work. They do.

They’re broken because they make B2B marketers structure their campaigns in a way that goes against every page of the modern B2B marketing playbook. 

In the example below, that’s $100 a day, which means the channels will try to spend that amount, and when they do, the campaign goes dark until the next day.

Your campaigns then branch into audiences (the people who’ll see your ads) and creative (the ads). I won’t dig too deep into the inner workings, but I’ll say this: This structure is the reason why native ad channels are really budget graveyards. 

Beneath this faulty campaign structure are some less-than-ideal intricacies that strip even more value.  

We’re going to talk about one of them: The launch process.

Build, build…and build again

I’ll be the first to admit launching campaigns natively isn’t rocket science. Sure, there’s a learning curve, but once you wrap your head around how it works, setup becomes second nature. 

So, if complexity isn’t at the core of B2B marketers’ gripe with native ad channels, what is? The manual, time-consuming, and painstakingly repetitive tasks required to launch campaigns.   

Think about everything that goes into a campaign:

• Goals 
• Audiences 
• Creative
• Experiments 
• Measurement
• Optimization   

Some of these things take shape outside native ad channels. For example, your goals and experimentation strategy will come together in meetings and Zoom calls.

You assemble the rest of these things, however, inside native ad channels—and boy, do they require a lot of button pushing.

In native, you’ll be spending your time:

• Building individual audiences with siloed targeting criteria
• Creating campaign groups with multiple ad variations 
• Manually uploading creative variations 
• Configuring experiments with only your spreadsheet as a guide 

The list goes on. And these are only some of the steps that come before you launch a campaign. There’s an even longer list of pitfalls that crushes performance after the fact.

These manual, repetitive, albeit necessary tasks swallow your limited bandwidth and rob time you could spend on tasks like planning your experiments or working with your design team to come up with head-turning creativity. 

Here’s where the true pitfall comes into play.  

Once you get your ducks in a row inside one channel, you have to do the same in every other channel you want to launch the campaign on. This wastes even more time and opens the door to human error. 

Keep in mind, you haven’t even launched yet. Once a campaign is live, your team has to manage these campaigns in siloes, manually optimize everything, and report on what some would call “vanity” metrics. Like Cost-per-Click, Leads, and Cost-per-Lead.

I think back to my days before Metadata and I cringe at the performance and efficiency gains I left on the table simply because I had to do everything manually. That can’t happen in 2023. 

How’s launching campaigns using Metadata any different? 

If native ad channels are a “black box,” Metadata is the sledgehammer that breaks it open. 

With Metadata, you build your audiences in one place (see below) using 10+ data sources, with first and third-party data. You can even tap into intent data without the manual and repetitive work.

Good luck doing that in native ad channels.

These audiences are then prepped and ready to go live across channels, allowing you to move beyond their individual and limited targeting criteria.

Why recreate the wheel if you just built one? Metadata makes sure you never have to. 

Instead of building your audiences in siloes, Metadata enables you to build everything in one place, and that’s efficiency at its finest. Because you’re tapping into the same data sources —not the individual ones offered in each channel—you’re also making sure the same people see your ads across channels, and that’s a superpower.

At Metadata, we believe in a 1-1-1 approach when running paid ads: audiences, ads, and offers.

This testing methodology lets you have more control over every variable so you can see what’s working and make the right moves in the best interest of your budget (and the watchful eyes of the leadership team).

How we automate paid social media campaigns using Metadata

We eat our own dog food and drink our own champagne (after hours, of course). Just about every dollar in our demand gen budget runs through Metadata. 

Why? Because it makes launching campaigns painless and gives us time back so we can focus on the big things like strategy, creativity and driving revenue.

Here’s how we automate paid social media campaigns in four steps:

1. We do the heavy lifting up-front with rock solid briefs 

Every campaign starts with a brief. No exceptions. 

Campaign briefs summarize the foundational elements of your campaigns. They help you, the B2B marketer, organize your thoughts but also give other internal teams the TL;DR of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Here’s what we typically include:

• Goals
• Budget
• Audiences
• Channels
• Creatives
• Offers

2. We build accurate audiences—once 

Once we have a solid brief, it’s time to create audiences. 

If we were launching campaigns in native ad channels, we’d do this inside each “room”—and then we’d have to replicate it for each channel. 

It’s a manual process, and worse, it’s fragmented. Each channel has its own targeting criteria and it’s impossible to know if you’re actually reaching the same people across them.

The model is broken, but that’s ok because we build our audiences using MetaMatch, our patented personal-to-corporate identity graph that matches personal emails business profiles. 

From a launch standpoint, the value of MetaMatch comes by removing the need to create (and recreate) audiences across channels. With MetaMatch, we do it once and walk away knowing we’re getting our ads in front of the same people, regardless of whether they see them on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Google.

3. We choreograph the paid social media dance in one fell swoop 

With our brief and audiences, we’re ready to outline what we want the campaign to look like. That means setting our budget, picking channels, building experiments, and creating the ads—and then putting it all into Metadata. 

Budget

Setting our budgets for upcoming campaigns starts by looking at the past. What does our current pipeline look like, and which channels created the most qualified opportunities?

With a high-level understanding of benchmarks and performance, I can start thinking about where this budget should go.  

From there, I look at historical conversion rates between every funnel stage to figure out how many leads, opportunities, meetings, and everything else we need to hit our goal. 

I then project our cost per lead (CPL) across channels and put it into our spreadsheet to come up with the budget for each group. 

These numbers then go into Metadata.

Experiments

Experiments are neglected by many B2B marketers for so many different excuses reasons. The biggest one being lack of time. At Metadata, we embrace them with open arms.

We use experiments to test audiences, messaging, creative, and offers across our paid social media channels. Although they can take many forms, we build all our experiments on a foundation held by three pillars: a hypothesis, a baseline, and a goal. 

Here are some examples: 

• Which messaging resonates with our audiences?
• Can Facebook be an effective channel?  
• Do ads with people perform better than those that don’t? 
• Do longer or shorter headlines convert more people? 
• Do webinar ads perform better on LinkedIn or Facebook?
• Does capitalizing certain words make a difference? 

I would bet the farm you can’t even start to ask these questions (or find answers) if you’re knee-deep in native channels all day.

We look at performance in the context of our goal and double down on what’s generating the best outcomes. It’s data-driven marketing at its finest.

Launch, automate, and monitor (then smile)

After some QA to make sure everything’s in tip-top shape, we launch. That’s it.

From there, Metadata optimizes the campaign and automatically allocates the remaining budget based on what’s driving pipeline and revenue—and it does it all without the mind numbing tasks paid social media advertising at scale creates. 

It’s that easy, and the results speak for themselves.

Work smarter, not harder

Sometimes in life the hard way is a time-tested tradition. Sometimes it’s just hard for no reason.

In the context of paid advertising:

• The hard way: Native ad channels
• The better way: Metadata 

When it comes to your paid advertising strategy, Metadata always wins. 

It’s 2023 and the pesky “do-more-with-less” narrative is still lingering in our Slack and inbox. While your boss is asking for the world, you should be asking yourself what you can do to generate the same output with fewer resources. 

The obvious answer is time. A few hours here and there would work wonders. Unfortunately, daylight saving time just made matters worse. 

The alternative is to find inefficient pockets of your day and streamline them. If you’re launching your campaigns in the native ad channels, you’re dealing with the epitome of inefficiency and time suck.  

The post How We Automate Paid Social Media Campaigns Using Metadata appeared first on metadata.io.

New MQLs, new opportunities, and new customers.

That worked just fine during the growth at all costs era. But that era is over. Keeping your existing customers is more important than ever before.

On DGU this week, get an inside look at how we’re prioritizing customer retention as a marketing team.

Three top takeaways: 

Takeaway 1: Marketing doesn’t stop when you’ve acquired a customer

If new customers don’t know how to get value out of your product, don’t be surprised when they churn.

This has been a huge lesson for our Marketing team (aka we messed up and learned it the hard way).

We’ve focused more on the core use cases our product solves for and doing everything we can to educate our customers.

We started by publishing tactical playbooks to share how customers are using and getting value out of Metadata. Each playbook turns into a webinar in our community where the playbook author gets to show off their work and results.

Whether it’s in our community, content, or events, our customers do a much better job of marketing Metadata than we’ll ever be able to do. It makes it that much more believable, too.

Takeaway 2: Do things that don’t scale to support your renewals

We have a standing offer with our Customer Success team: we’ll do whatever it takes to sign renewals.

Customer Success Managers will look at customer health index, ICP fit, and deal size (in dollars) for each upcoming renewal. 

This turns into a list of handpicked accounts where they think they can use our help. 

Help can come in many different forms too. 1:1 coaching sessions, working sessions on a specific topic, or attending quarterly account reviews. 

Sometimes, we even help teams with something that doesn’t even touch our own product. Things like standing up a podcast, explaining our content creation process, or sharing how we’ve turned our employees into an extension of our Marketing team on LinkedIn.

The key here is playing the long game and making your customers more successful.

Takeaway 3: Create content that helps Customer Success overcome objections

So much of our content strategy has focused on helping Sales overcome common objections. 

But over the last few quarters come renewal time, we heard new (and different) objections from our Customer Success Managers.

We shut down new requests at first because they started with the medium, not the objection. After talking with Customer Success to get to the root of the objection, we then made recommendations on the best medium. 

Sometimes a landing page might make the most sense. Sometimes it’s a blog post. Or maybe it’s‌ a webinar at the end of the day.

Saying yes to new requests without thinking of the best medium can turn into a big time suck, especially for small marketing teams trying to do more with less.

The post Prioritizing Customer Retention as a Marketing Team appeared first on metadata.io.

Now, we’re flipping the script (again) with a no-BS buyer’s guide from actual Metadata customers. 

The goal this time around?

To help demand gen marketers feel more confident about buying Metadata before the DocuSign email comes through.

They know Metadata can help them, but we’ve noticed a common few blockers holding up the buying decision lately.

These days, you’re nervous about betting on the wrong solution, your CFO isn’t a believer, or your tech stack is shrinking (instead of growing).

We interviewed two Metadata customers to look at things like their evaluation process, how they got leadership buy-in, and, most importantly, the good, bad, and ugly of using Metadata. 

How to sell Metadata internally (and look smart in front of your boss)

Getting approval for new tech is always tough, especially in this economy.

The best way to make a case for Metadata is the first thing on your boss’s mind—tangible ROI and cost savings. 

The good news is Metadata pays for itself. The bad news is you still need to spend at least $20k every month on paid ads to make the math work. It’s hard to get much value out of Metadata if you’re not spending money on paid ads.

Add in the economic downturn every company is dealing with, and getting internal buy-in becomes even more challenging.

That’s why Evan Dunn, Director of Growth Marketing at Syncari, focused on the potential for pipeline gains while evaluating Metadata. The same thing happened for Andrew Harder, Senior Paid Media Manager at Webex Events by Cisco. 

When it came down to evaluating other vendors, they both put their money on Metadata.

Arm your execs with cold hard facts 

Every good persuasive argument has some quantitative and qualitative components. Here are a few reasons demand gen marketers choose Metadata:

Budget maximization

Telling your leadership team that Metadata will drive more revenue is great, but take it a step further and explain how. 

I’m talking about budget maximization based on MQLs and opportunities. You just can’t do that natively in ad channels.

Metadata is such a lethal demand generation tool because it’s designed to help you be more efficient with your ad spend.

I wonder what your boss might say when you tell them that Metadata boasts a 95% accuracy rate when targeting job titles. And how about that 75% Lead-to-MQL conversion rate after one year.

Workflow efficiency 

“We’d easily lose at least 10 hours a week…there would be so much manual work without Metadata.”

Andrew Harder

Senior Paid Media Manager, Webex Events

It’s pretty hard to argue building and launching campaigns in 94% less time, thanks to automation. Time savings like this help marketing teams of every size get more done.

Metadata games native ad channels at every turn: building audiences, creating experiments, and optimizing spend are no longer painfully manual marketing tasks.

Plus, who knows what you’ll be capable of with 94% more time on your hands. Maybe you’ll get to do the things listed on your resume, like building marketing strategies and creating categories.

Long-term savings and undiscovered opportunities  

When you’re looking for a new marketing technology, you want it to be affordable and low-friction. Sticker shock is a real thing, but that’s why we want you to remember the long-haul ROI. 

When Evan started using Metadata, his cost per lead (CPL) dropped by 30%. Expanding to Facebook dropped it by 50%.

But that’s just the beginning. Once you onboard Metadata into your tech stack, you’ll be able to pull more value from the data you already have. Right now I’m thinking about our friends over at ThoughtSpot.

Using Metadata, ThoughtSpot could finally activate their 6Sense and G2 intent data, saving $214,880 of manual work and generating $5M worth of pipeline in the process.

How Metadata eases common implementation woes 

Tech stacks? More like tech mountains. The growing technology landscape and increasing complexity makes it really hard on demand gen marketers. 

We could do some research about how many tools the average demand gen marketer uses everyday, but is anyone really doubting that? 

It’s pretty clear: demand gen marketers are swimming in a sea of complexity, so asking them to implement a new tool may not seem wise right now. 

I’ve led my fair share of implementations, and things can get messy if you don’t have much experience. Real quick.

For those concerned about implementing Metadata, consider these words from Evan:

“You can be live in a couple of weeks. It’s not impossible or crazy. It’s really a low lift to get going.”

Evan Dunn

Director of Growth Marketing, Syncari

The average time-to-value for our customers is seven months, but it can be shorter too. We’ve had customers generate qualified opportunities in their first week.

Here are the steps:

1. Install the Metadata Site Script: If you’re using a content management system like WordPress, all you need to do is add some custom HTML site script. Typically, you’ll embed our script directly into your website host. Here’s an example of what that might look like for WordPress. 

2. Enable admin permissions for your company’s Facebook page: Next, you’ll need to make sure the right people have Admin access to Facebook. Here’s an example of how to give Business Manager Admin Access. You’ll also need to verify landing page domains. 
   
3. Connect Metadata with your marketing automation platform: When Metadata connects to tools like HubSpot and Salesforce, you can start generating enriched leads that get routed to your sales team. When it comes to normalizing values for each lead, use our pick list found here. Next you’ll configure default UTM parameters to make sure you’re tracking campaigns and leads correctly.
   
4. Setup custom email field creation: This step will ensure that you’re capturing a business email through your lead gen forms. Users will have to manually input their email address. Here’s a quick Loom to show you how to get started.
   
5. Validate marketing automation leads: You’ll want to create a safeguard to make sure Metadata is talking to your marketing automation tool correctly. Do this by submitting a test lead.
   
6. Loop in your Legal team: It’s wise to fold in your legal team to make sure everything looks right. In particular, they’ll probably want to know about site scripts and lead capture workflow.
   
7. Create thank you pages (if you’re using lead gen forms): The last step is to send people to a Thank You page after downloading a piece of content or filling out a form. Not only is it a polite gesture, you can also track this event for retargeting opportunities.

That’s the nuts and bolts of it. 

The only potential hurdle—and I use hurdle lightly—will pop up during the third step when you’ll need someone on your marketing ops team to handle field mapping between Metadata and your CRM.

After that, you’ll work with your customer success manager (CSM) to build campaigns, set up experiments, and optimize your audiences. 

It’s that simple. And the best part? You never have to log into native ad channels again. 

Uncovering the good, the bad, and the ugly about Metadata

We’re proud of what we do well and how we’ve built a platform that helps demand gen marketers get the most out of their budget. But we’re also realists and know there are things we can do better.

Evan’s favorite thing about Metadata

The reporting. Specifically, how it’s tied to pipeline and revenue. In other words, he can get a definitive POV of how his marketing dollars impact the company’s bottom line.

He went as far as to say that Metadata’s reporting is a “leap-frogging capability for attribution.” 

While you don’t necessarily get attribution for every channel, you can see how different groups, campaigns, and experiments progress through your funnel. 

Most B2B marketers are marching forward without these insights; they’re marching to revenue blind.  

Andrew highlighted the operational angle and the time—or lack thereof—it takes to build and optimize campaigns. You don’t need multiple tabs open and login information for the native ad channels. You certainly don’t need to build the same campaigns more than once. 

You can do it all at once in Metadata. 

And once the campaigns are live, you can manage pacing and optimizations from your dashboard. No Excel sheets, 17 Chrome tabs, or headaches are required. 

Our user interface and the road to perfection 

Most of “the bad” was focused on our UI, but Evan said something that accurately captures Metadata’s current state: “There’s no way to scientifically execute a perfect UI for such a richly featured platform.”

We’ve packed so many features and capabilities into our platform that it can be overwhelming. Analysis paralysis is real. We know usability is the difference between adoption and getting churn notices.

While we work on UI updates (we have a TON of updates coming real soon), you might find yourself asking questions like:

• How does MetaMatch work, and what should I look for in the dashboard?

• I can dive into revenue optimization, but I don’t know where to look. How do I pull metrics in a way that my boss will understand? 

• There are so many buttons. How do I know I’m actually using everything I should be? 

All the information is available, but if you don’t know where to look, it’s all for nothing—and we know that. Stay tuned. 

TBD on video engagement metrics 

Metrics and measurement have always been important to demand gen marketers, but they’re under more scrutiny than ever. 

Demand gen marketers will keep getting asked to do more with less until they can actually show they’re driving growth more efficiently. 

Metrics that live in native ad channels only tell part of the ROI story, though. Most of these campaign metrics are visible in Metadata, but not all are.

Here’s the snag: Video engagement metrics aren’t quite there yet, so demand gen marketers can’t effectively and efficiently run video ads in Metadata.

Plain and simple, Andrew still goes to native channels to get video engagement insights that don’t appear in Metadata. “We are investing so much on…paid social that can’t be attributed because we’re not asking them to fill out a form, but we want to know what’s working.”

Given the ubiquity of video and increasing video ad spend—video ad spending is expected to reach $78.5 billion this year—that may be a hang-up for some. 

We know that and we’re working on it. (If you’re not running video ads, this isn’t anything to worry about.)

Top-down success measurement with Metadata

While we admit there are some reporting gaps in our platform (don’t worry, we’re fixing them), we know Metadata helps demand gen marketers drive more efficient growth.

Measuring success with Metadata can come in one of two ways: opportunity and revenue. 

Metadata eliminates most of the tasks that make manual marketing such a drag. You get time back to spend on higher-value functions—think strategy, creativity, and experimentation—that drive revenue.

That’s a big time win.

But the optimization and pacing built into Metadata speak for themselves—and Andrew summed it up nicely. “We used to see $200 CPLs on LinkedIn for unqualified audiences. Now we’re seeing $50 CPLs for in-market audiences that meet our ICP [with Metadata],” he said. 

In a recent survey, nearly all business leaders (99%) said they’re preparing to cut costs in 2023. I get that. Times are tough, and budgets are shrinking—but expectations are higher than ever. 

Remember: companies that kept their marketing engines on during the 1980s recession came out ahead. 

Keep your demand gen engine—and the tools that power it—running, and you’ll come out ahead, too.

The post The No-BS Buyer’s Guide From Actual Metadata Customers appeared first on metadata.io.

Everyone’s on board and you let people start running with it. But it’s only a matter of time before your plan gets turned upside down (sup 2023).

On DGU this week, learn how we’re adjusting our marketing strategy so we can prioritize and refocus what we’re working on as a marketing team.

Listen to the full episode to hear how Mark and Jason are working through this process, or keep reading for the show notes.

PS check out episode 45 of Demand Gen U and see how we put out 2023 marketing plan together

Three top takeaways: 

Takeaway 1: Get sign-off on your initial marketing plan from the Leadership team

We learned this lesson the hard way at Metadata. 

We presented our 2022 marketing plan to Gil (our CEO) last year, made some changes based on his feedback, and hit the ground running right away. 

We made a huge mistake by jumping straight into execution mode. We didn’t share the plan with the rest of the Leadership team. They knew we were busy but didn’t know what the marketing team was working on (and why).

By skipping this step, we didn’t have legs to stand on when other teams came to us with new requests.

You’ll always get new requests after the initial plan gets locked in. But other teams will think twice when asking for stuff, if they know your goals, what you’re working on and why.

Takeaway 2: The best marketing leaders know how to prioritize and make tradeoffs

Saying no to other teams feels uncomfortable at first. You want to help as much as you can but you can’t keep saying yes to everything.

If every activity is considered “high priority”, then you don’t have actual priorities either. Something’s gotta give.

So rather than say no and call it a day (like we messed up at first), revisit your marketing plan and see if there are tradeoffs you can make. 

You can probably get to that new request after all. It just will come at the expense of something else.

The key here is having these tough conversations with your CEO and Leadership team, so you can be sure everyone knows what tradeoffs are being made.

Takeaway 3: Turn your marketing plan into a calendar and see where it breaks

The best marketing plans always look great in a Google Doc. Clearly defined priorities, quantifiable goals, and the right activities to get you to where you need to be.

But when you’re looking at a Google Doc, you can’t always see resourcing, timing, and where the plan breaks down.

Whenever we think we have a plan in place, our team gets all of their projects and activities into Asana, then assigns a priority, deadline, and rough level of effort. T-shirt sizing works (S, M, L) so keep it simple.

Completing this step makes it so much easier to see when and where your plan breaks. 

You can’t have a bunch of high priority projects ending on the same date unless you want chaos and a burned out marketing team.

The post Adjusting and Refocusing Your Marketing Strategy appeared first on metadata.io.