Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing, and Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata, give their rapid fire takes about marketing Metadata in 2022: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Find out what they think about:

• Their favorite marketing successes in 2022
• Stepping away from incentivized LinkedIn demos
• How they dealt with 30%-35% marketing budget cuts

Three top takeaways: 

Takeaway 1: You’re sitting on a TON of content when you host a virtual event

The real (and usually hidden) value of virtual events is the content. 

Most marketers share a link with the post-event recordings and call it a day. And that’s a huge miss.

Repurposing content from virtual events is a big-time cheat code for small marketing teams expected to do more with less in 2023. 

Every recorded session can be cut into short YouTube videos, social clips for LinkedIn, a long form blog post, graphics for social posts , and more social post copy than you’re probably thinking of right now. I promise you.

We all know events aren’t cheap. Repurposing content stretches your investment further and helps you keep the buzz going – long after your event has ended.

Takeaway 2: The best leaders find their blind spots and turn them into strengths

Leaders can be oblivious to the way their peers and teams view their weaknesses. They’re called blind spots for a reason.

Not knowing where your blind spots are has consequences too. Leaders’ blind spots can limit their opportunities, impede their performance, and ultimately drag down their career.

Jason opens up about missteps he had earlier last year, tough conversations he had with Gil (our CEO), and the big steps he took to work on his blind spots.

Using the help of his coach, counselor and feedback 360-assessment, Jason put some serious work in this year. It’s been quite the journey and he has a ton of positive results to show for it. Inspirational stuff.

Takeaway 3: You have to play the analyst game (at some point)

Ever since I started at Metadata, Jason and I haven’t wanted to play the analyst game. 

It’s an old, outdated way of marketing. It’s not how most people buy software these days. Everyone knows it’s pay to play, the evaluation criteria rarely makes any sense, and you’re giving up control of your own narrative to analysts who don’t know your product as well as you do.

We realized we had to take a different approach with industry analysts as Metadata has moved up-market. 

We have no plans to sell our souls to the Forrester’s and Gartner’s of the world. But we, unfortunately, know how much industry reports and placements matter in the eyes of enterprise buyers. 

The post Year in Review: Looking Back on 2022 appeared first on metadata.io.

Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing and Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata, get vulnerable on this episode of Demand Gen U.

Mark asks Jason about everything that comes with being a marketing leader and invites him to share the challenges he has faced through his career.

Find out:

• How Jason has grown as a marketing leader
• The benefits of building strong relationships in marketing teams
• How to take feedback as a marketing leader

Three top takeaways:

Takeaway 1: Challenge obvious priorities

Much of the time, performance, tactics and other hands-on work take up the bulk of marketing leaders’ time.

But it’s OK to take time to focus on how your team are doing.

Throughout his time at Metadata, Jason has been able to take a step back and change his approach to better serve his colleagues.

He believes marketing leaders need to be OK with challenging traditional priorities and shifting focus to the team.

Especially in a startup, things can move so fast, so simple things like morale, team building and just good, old-fashioned happiness in the workplace can be left behind. But it’s so important!

Takeaway 2: Take care of your team

This leads on from the last point. If you don’t put your team’s needs first, things can go wrong.

Jason says: “If the team isn’t taken care of, I don’t get to work with the team. There’s no world I want to live in where that happens.”

At the end of the day, we all want to be happy at work. We want to feel like our needs are prioritized and our colleagues genuinely care about us and our wellbeing.

Plus, if we are happy during the working day, we are going to do better work! It’s as simple as that.

Takeaway 3: Professional and personal growth are linked

Especially nowadays, with many of us working from home, personal issues can seep into the working day and vice versa.

As long as we can acknowledge this and stay understanding of each other…it’s all good!

There is no real work-life and home-life anymore. They’re one and the same!

The post Learning and Growing as a Marketing Leader appeared first on metadata.io.

How can they target the right audience when people are using different devices and tracking technologies like third-party cookies are going away?

How can they use their budgets in the smartest way (without wasting money), knowing CEOs are pinching pennies?

How on earth can they determine what’s actually generating pipeline and revenue when they have 17 audiences and 122 ads running across campaigns on different ad channels?

Now that I say that, tough isn’t the right word; impossible seems more appropriate. 

But demand gen marketers will keep spending money on digital advertising and that spend keeps going up. By 2023, B2B digital ad spending is expected to approach $15b, up from less than $3b in 2015.

There’s just one problem: native ad channels aren’t good enough for today’s demand gen marketers.

Native channels aren’t intuitive, many are over-complicated and none of them meet the requirements of what demand gen marketers need to do today: generate pipeline and revenue. 

Not to mention, every channel makes more money when you spend more money. The whole model is broken. Let me explain why and how Metadata fixes this.

“I can’t imagine ever running paid campaigns natively ever again. It’d be like going back to dial-up internet.”

Andrew Harder

Senior Paid Media Manager, Webex Events

Here’s the problem with running ads natively

When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook Ads in 2007, he did it with the current state of the digital world in mind. 

The same for LinkedIn, Google, and every demand-side platform (DSP) out there.  

These ad channels were revolutionary (and are still powerful), but they don’t account for how buyers move between channels and what demand gen marketers are on the hook for: generating pipeline and revenue.

Let’s break this down at a high level: 

• Campaign: The box all the way to the left represents your entire budget. By setting a budget of $100/day, you’re telling Facebook, LinkedIn, Google or the Display network to run your ads (creatives) until you reach that threshold. When you get there, your campaigns are paused and restarted the next day.
  
• Audience: These are the people you want to see your ads. You can build your audiences with two different data sources: First-party data and third-party data. The first-party data is yours (like your customer or prospect list), while the third-party data comes from the individual platforms.
  
• Creative: These are the ads that your audiences see. Simple as that. You can create as many as you want, testing different colors, headlines, CTAs, imagery, ad formats, and more. It’s up to you. 

This is generally how campaigns work, although it varies slightly within each channel.

The point of outlining this structure is to highlight where running ads natively goes wrong.

Let me explain:

In this example, you have three audiences and three creatives (ads), which means you have nine total combinations. 

Great. Variety is the spice of life. 

The problem is you can’t see which combinations drive pipeline and which ones burn through your budget.

This is because your budget sits at the campaign level, meaning you can’t isolate variables and allocate your budget towards the highest performing combinations.

So, for example, if your campaign is driving 2x more leads than your goal, you can’t drill down into the campaign and see which combination is driving the most conversions.

You just have three audiences, three creatives and nine combinations. 

Somewhere in there is the answer, but you can’t see it. See the problem?

Without the ability to drill down into each unique variable, you can’t really optimize for performance and efficiency (but you can try). This is where Metadata shines.

So, how does Metadata fill the gaps?

You can use Metadata to move beyond native ad channel capabilities and run better paid campaigns.

From targeting to automation to experimentation to revenue optimization – Metadata is the cheat code demand gen marketers didn’t know existed.

Let’s start nerding out.

Targeting

One of the fundamental gaps in native ad channels is they exist in siloes; you build your audiences for Facebook in Facebook, for LinkedIn in LinkedIn, and so on. Every channel has their own audience criteria, with limited flexibility, so good luck trying to target the same people across channels.

There’s a reason the term “walled garden” follows most of these channels around. It’s their way or the highway.

This is a problem for three reasons:

1. It’s a huge time suck
2. Targeting is limited to the individual channels
3. They all operate in silos
   

Combine these problems and the most important aspect of your campaign (targeting) is on rocky ground. Not only do you spend a ton of time manually building and rebuilding every audience, but it gets that much more difficult to make smart optimizations.

How does Metadata solve this? With MetaMatch, our audience targeting capability.

With MetaMatch, you build all of your audiences in one place, using the same audience criteria with 22 different data sources. You can finally move beyond limited native targeting in each channel.

For example, you can use dynamic account targeting with your first party data from Salesforce, activate intent data from Qualified, G2, 6sense (and more), and use our proprietary database of 1.5 billion B2B profiles using firmographic and demographic criteria.

Once your audience is built, you can preview the first 100 rows and refine your criteria to make sure you’re targeting the right people— before you launch your campaign and blow through your budget.

P.S. MetaMatch is powered by emails, not cookies, which means when the latter goes away in 2023, MetaMatch won’t lose any of its power. 

Automation

The average B2B buyer, let alone a person, has too many devices. Because of this, cross-channel campaigns are no longer a pipedream. It’s an absolute requirement for demand gen marketers.

The only realistic way to move buyers from unaware to most aware, is to launch different types of campaigns across Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Display. Meeting your buyers exactly where they are in their journey.

Remember: The diagram above represents just one campaign on one channel. Each time you want to launch a new one, the complexity and resource drain grows exponentially. Your team wastes serious time building and rebuilding the same campaign experiment on each channel. 

Metadata ensures demand gen marketers can keep “button-pusher” off of their resume by allowing them to launch every campaign—and all of its experiments—across every channel with just a few clicks.

So, say goodbye to siloed campaigns and hello to freeing up your time so you can spend it on important tasks, like strategy, creative execution and experimentation. You can also bid farewell to the inevitable errors—albeit unintentional—that come with manual campaign creation in every native tool.

Experimentation

Unless you’re a mad demand gen scientist (or a clone of Silvio Perez), finding the right mix of targeting, creative, and budget will take some testing. If you’re a mad demand gen scientist, let’s chat. 

But time experimenting is time very well spent. 

Experimentation is your lifeblood and the only way to maximize the value of your campaigns. 

Here are examples of what you can find out with the right experimentation strategy:

• Which messaging resonates with your audience?
• Which audience converts at the highest clip?
• Do ads with unpolished images of customers outperform ones with stock images?
• Does a certain headline on a landing page convert people at a lower cost? 
• Does Google or Facebook have a lower cost-per-opportunity?

Each of these experiments gives you an idea of what’s working and what’s not. From there, you can look at the performance metrics that matter to your business and double down on what’s generating the best business outcomes.

The problem is running all of these experiments in native ad channels requires a ton of manual work and even more spreadsheets. If you’re running experiments across channels, the complexity grows exponentially. 

It gets worse. 

Once your team (or agency) gets everything into the native ad channels and all of the variables are aligned, the curtain is closed, preventing you from truly seeing what’s working and what’s not.

Metadata opens that curtain, wide open.

Simply select the audiences (or keywords, if you’re running campaigns on Google), ads, and offers you want to test, and bam, you’re ready to go. Seriously, it’s that easy and there’s no limit to how much you can test. 

Want to test 10 audiences, five ads, and three offers on Facebook?

Sweet. The only thing standing between you and all of those experiments is a few clicks. 

At Metadata, we believe in using a 1-1-1 (audience, ad, and offer) approach to run paid campaigns. This hypersegmented, and automated approach lets you experiment within each ad channel at a much more granular level. 

Not only does this save your team serious time—and a ton of headaches—but it gives you a single source of truth you can rely on. The kind of insight you and your leadership team dream of.

Because Metadata gives you greater visibility at each level of your campaign using the 1-1-1 approach – you can truly see which unique campaign experiments drive pipeline and revenue.

Don’t forget: with native ad channels, your budget lies at the campaign level, which prevents you from optimizing experiments in a way that takes the performance of each variable into account. 

Revenue Optimization

Vanity metrics like impressions, clicks, and leads are so 2010. 

Unfortunately, vanity metrics are all you can see in native ad channels. Even worse, they’re the only options you can use to optimize your campaigns.

It’s 2022. Demand gen marketers need more or else they’ll be out of a job. 

Metadata gives you just that, by providing you the ability to drill down into post-conversion metrics, like opportunities created, cost per opportunity, and the holy grail: revenue created.

From there, you can get clarity on what works, what doesn’t, and what you need to optimize moving forward to get the most out of your paid campaigns.

With Metadata – your campaigns are optimized using data from your marketing automation platform, your CRM and our AI – without having to do any manual and repetitive work.

Metadata vs. …Nothing

Both Metadata and native ad channels exist to help demand gen marketers do the same thing: get in front of potential buyers for whatever you’re selling.

But they do so in very different ways.

At first, native ad channels worked wonders for demand gen marketers. But they don’t help you get any closer to truly impacting your bottom line (and getting your CFO off your back).

Metadata lifts the veil on the advertising world that’s historically lacked the transparency and control needed to drive pipeline and revenue—while saving you a ton of time every week.

While some might see a choice here—Metadata vs Native Ad Channels—we titled this piece Metadata vs Nothing for a reason. Call us presumptuous, but there’s really only one right option here. Native ad channels don’t make the cut.

Metadata has what you need. If you don’t believe us, book a demo here and put Metadata to the test.

The post Why Running Ads Natively Doesn’t Cut It for Demand Gen Marketers appeared first on metadata.io.

Whether your budget was cut or your CFO is scrutinizing your purchasing decision (maybe both), it’s real tough to get internal approval in a down economy right now.

That’s why we’ve asked a seasoned salesperson to help us get to grips with these changes and what could be around the corner.

Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing, is joined by Kevin Young, Senior Director of Sales at Metadata, to discuss his career before Metadata, selling Martech in 2022 and why 90% of sales is purely luck and timing.

Find out:

• How selling Martech has changed
• Why brands should have strong relationships with their salespeople
• How to create better interactions with prospects

For more Martech insight, advice, and predictions from Kevin, tune in to the full episode.

Three top takeaways:

Takeaway 1: Real conversations work

Kevin says it’s important to have real, friendly interactions with prospects. That way, they won’t be put off or frustrated by your communications.

Even if a prospect asks you to “get back to them in a few weeks”, ask them if you can get in touch with any important updates in the meantime. Kevin says that he rarely encounters people saying ‘no’ to that.

Don’t trick or trap people into taking calls with you. That just leaves a sour taste. Having genuine conversations and providing value is what keeps prospects on your side.

Takeaway 2: Surface-level problems aren’t the full story

If a prospect says to you that they aren’t getting enough leads, that’s rarely the full story.

Kevin suggests asking questions to get to the bottom of why this is. Follow-up questions let you get to the root of issues and make you more likely to solve your prospect’s problems.

Takeaway 3: Transparency from sales teams is key

Marketers can feel like salespeople are backing them into a corner. But honest conversations and transparency are key to preventing this.

One awesome silver lining from the past two years, with COVID and the recession, has been that salespeople have become much more transparent. They’ve had no other choice.

Kevin says the people who are performing best right now are the ones having transparent, open conversations. We suggest taking his advice.

The post Buying Martech in 2022 and Beyond appeared first on metadata.io.

As with most things in marketing, it’s pretty subjective. But in this episode of Demand Gen U, Alex Virden, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Metadata, joins Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata as they discuss whether analyst relations are worth it in 2022.

Jason and Alex break down analyst relations in layman’s terms and detail Metadata’s experiences with the Forrester Wave. They also outline the alternatives they are exploring to maximize their exposure.

Find out:

• Jason’s summary of analyst relations
• All about Metadata’s category challenge
• How Metadata became involved in the Forrester Wave

For more analyst relations advice from Jason and Alex, tune in to the full episode.

Three top takeaways:

Takeaway 1: Waves don’t work for versatile companies

If you’re a company that offers a number of products or services, being pigeonholed by a report such as the Forrester Wave or Gartner’s Magic Quadrant may serve as an inaccurate representation of your brand.

Your brand may be building different products in different areas and it isn’t accurate for you to be judged on just one of them, especially if you’re new in that space.

Takeaway 2: There are alternatives to dedicated analyst relations

Metadata employs a lot of boots-on-the-ground tactics to amplify our voice.

Building a solid customer community, creating more quality content, and growing employee advocacy are all great ways to boost your brand’s reputation without turning to analyst relations.

Takeaway 3: Create a community

Metadata’s strategy is to build engagement with solid B2B marketing practitioners. Jason explains that the brand wants to give B2B marketers countless reasons to continue to engage through helpful content.

He explains that Metadata will approach an alternative to analyst relations by continuing to build a community and produce high-quality content. If you do community right, the commercial benefit follows.

The post Are Analyst Relations Worth It? Our Forrester Wave Experience appeared first on metadata.io.

Metadata is on a mission to build the first operating system for B2B marketers, and Reactful is the perfect technology to help us get there.

I’ve witnessed firsthand the impact of personalizing the buying journey from end to end. 

It’s not enough to get traffic to your website anymore. You need to identify each visitor and give them content that meets them where they are in the buyer journey. 

Imagine identifying a prospect as a customer – would you want to change the website from ‘closing’ to ‘up-selling’ or ‘activating’ a customer?

Imagine welcoming an anonymous visitor not only based on their company name but their job title, seniority, and industry. Automatically promoting case studies from their industry peers. When you do this, you can convert visitors, drive more revenue, and increase product activation.

Now, Metadata customers can give their website visitors an end-to-end personalized experience and optimize every stage of the buyer journey – from clicking on the ad to visiting the website to buying and using the product.

What does this mean for Metadata customers?

With this acquisition, we expand our capabilities as we continue to build the Marketing OS for B2B.

• Metadata campaigns will have better ROI: You won’t have to create new landing pages for every campaign. You can customize and auto-personalize your existing landing pages so they’re meant for each buyer – with no changes to your site and zero coding.
• Run end-to-end full-funnel ABM programs: With our new site insights pixel, you’ll fully understand target account engagement on your website at the buyer level. You can personalize that experience and augment your programs with highly targeted ads.
  
• Give prospects and customers the best website experience: Make sure your visitors always get the right content at the right time. You’ll be able to personalize dynamic ads, chatbots, and forms for every audience segment that visits your website.

Eliminate manual work through AI and automation

The quicker you automate your manual and repetitive tasks, the quicker you can turn your focus toward driving more revenue.  If you embrace and harness the power of AI you’ll become more productive, spend more time doing high-value work and drive better results. And you’ll be the one who gets promoted to grow your company.

This is where AI can eliminate manual work while improving performance:

AI can launch thousands of campaign experiments in minutes. AI can apply new learnings to your marketing immediately. AI can increase your team’s capacity without adding a single additional person to your team. Leverage it not only for insights, but for action.

We started with paid campaigns. We’re adding website personalization. And we’re not stopping there either. 

Metadata will sit at the center of your tech stack, coordinating all of the activities, insights, and integrations needed to drive revenue – with massive scale and efficiencies.

The next step toward the Marketing OS

With this acquisition, we’ll be able to expand our offering beyond paid advertising, and give B2B marketers more ways to drive revenue while eliminating manual, technical, and mundane tasks.

I’m so excited to take this next step in our journey to truly disrupt B2B marketing. 

FAQ

What is Reactful?

Reactful is a website personalization engine that automates the process of delivering personalized website and landing page experiences. For B2B marketers, this means targeting high-value prospects, partners, and customers, with relevant and dynamic experiences at the right time.

Why did Metadata acquire Reactful?

Reactful has solid technology that will help Metadata customers focus on making every visit count by increasing engagement and optimizing conversions of their hard-earned traffic.

With this acquisition, Metadata is adding a new core pillar of our Marketing OS: personalization and website capabilities. This expands our offering beyond paid advertising, giving B2B marketers more ways to drive revenue while reducing manual work and tasks.

How will current Metadata customers buy Reactful?

Existing Metadata customers can contact their account manager for more information on buying Reactful. 

What is the overall product vision? 

Our product team is hard at work building the roadmap to fully integrate Reactful into the Metadata platform — the value we can deliver together is greater than the sum of our parts.

While we won’t give too much away, our goal is to expedite landing page variant creation, use Reactful’s website analytics in Metadata’s proprietary Optimizer, and create playbooks that will automate the entire buyer’s journey B2B marketers can enable with one click.

The post We’re Personalizing the Buyer Journey As We Continue Building the Marketing OS appeared first on metadata.io.

Some people are cut out for big enterprises, and others would rather invest their effort with newer, smaller businesses.

But what makes people favor one over the other?

Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata, has tons of experience in both. He joins Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing at Metadata, to share his experiences and why he left the world of big enterprise to team up with Metadata.

To find out more about marketing at different levels, listen to this full episode or keep reading for the top takeaways.

Three top takeaways:

Takeaway 1: You can get more done in a startup

In an enterprise company, your work often has to go through multiple people. By the end of the process, it sometimes barely feels like your work. That’s if you even get the chance to see the final product.

The effort you put in can often be lost amongst the hundreds and thousands of other things going on.

In the startup world, feedback is more tailored and helpful, therefore allowing you to improve your work and build a stronger bond with your team whilst simultaneously maximizing your potential.

Takeaway 2: There’s more transparency in a startup

Jason thrives alongside the transparency of his work colleagues at Metadata and says it’s just not the same in enterprise companies.

In fact, the lack of ego and people’s ability to self-motivate to a greater degree in smaller businesses are part of the reasons why he swapped enterprise for startups.

Takeaway 3: Marketing is a sales support function in a startup

Having close-knit teams and smaller-scale operations often means there’s a stronger integration between teams. And a strong integration between different departments can go a long way in successful collaboration.

At the end of the day, marketing is a sales support function and should be treated that way.

When working at a startup, a closer relationship between marketing and sales can create a more streamlined working process. Moreover, it can lead to better results overall.

The post Marketing at a Big Enterprise vs. a High Growth Startup appeared first on metadata.io.

In this Demand Gen U episode, Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing, and Justin Simon, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Metadata, look at the most useful lessons they’ve learned since the podcast kicked off. This episode is packed with takeaways for you and your company if you’re keen to set up a podcast.

Watch the full episode:

Three top takeaways:

Takeaway 1: Track what does well and what doesn’t

After you record and distribute a few episodes, it’s always a good idea to look back at how they performed. This will tell you what your audience likes and what doesn’t resonate with them.

You can see what topics they like most and identify the nuances that made them so appealing.

Not only that, tracking your episodes and how they perform will give you the reassurance of your growth and improvement as a podcaster. It’ll allow you to make further changes to hone your product and make it even more successful.

Takeaway 2: Promote your show

This may sound really simple, but it’s so important it isn’t overlooked. Make sure to formulate a proper plan to promote your podcast – not just on the day of release but across the weeks before and after.

Your show can be promoted via email, social media, blog posts, and so on. For example, Metadata uses email as our primary channel to promote the podcast.

Content repurposing is also a great way to extend the life of each episode in a productive and engaging way. We post clips to YouTube and even shorter clips on social media to promote the podcast.

Takeaway 3: Have fun

Be yourself on camera or behind the mic, and you’ll be well on the way to building a strong and long-term relationship with your audience.

It all comes back to know, like, and trust.

You want to come across as a real person rather than a buttoned-up expert talking down to the audience.

The post 20+ Things We’ve Learned Doing 20+ Podcast Episodes (Part 2) appeared first on metadata.io.

A podcast can be a core pillar in your content strategy. But most podcasts don’t even make it past 7 episodes.

And a lot of marketers are stuck wondering how to make one work.

In this Demand Gen U episode, Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing, and Justin Simon, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Metadata, dive into 10 useful lessons they’ve learned since the podcast kicked off.

It’s the first in a two-part series and offers real hands-on insights you can take away if you’re planning to start a podcast at your company.

For tips on how to get your podcast started, tune into the full episode or check out the key takeaways from this episode.

Watch the full episode

Three top takeaways:

Takeaway 1: Pick a topic you’re genuinely interested in

You’ve probably already done a little research and figured out what will resonate best with your audience. But, here’s some food for thought, are you actually interested in any of the subject areas you’ve come up with so far?

No doubt, your audience needs to enjoy what you’re dishing out every week. But if you, or your co-host, aren’t fully onboard with the topic, it’ll show in your delivery. In Justin’s opinion, a podcast serves two areas:

• Helping your audience learn
• Providing something fun for you

If you’re looking for longevity with your podcast, it’s a good idea to pick a topic that won’t fizzle out after a couple of episodes.

Takeaway 2: Batch recording episodes can help you get ahead

Starting a podcast can seem like a full-time job, and that’s understandable. It takes a lot of work and consistency to get things right.

One major hack for this is to batch record a handful of episodes. Batch recording doesn’t just help you stay on schedule. It also helps you get ahead.

Takeaway 3: Authenticity over perfection

If you’re new to podcasting, know that the perfect podcast episode is somewhat of a myth. In some cases, your content may tick all the boxes, but your audience may not be on the same page as you.

But here’s the thing, perfection should be low on the list of things you strive for with your podcast. It’s authenticity that matters the most.

The post 20+ Things We’ve Learned Doing 20+ Podcast Episodes (Pt. 1) appeared first on metadata.io.