Campaign-Focused vs Always-On

In this episode, we dive into the complexities of the 'always-on' strategy in B2B marketing. Join us as we host a panel of industry experts, who offer their insights into the advantages, challenges, and subtleties of employing this approach. Together, we explore topics ranging from the creation of initial awareness and the strategic blend of organic and paid efforts to potential pitfalls and synergies with other techniques. This conversation provides a broad understanding of how an 'always-on' strategy fits into a marketing landscape where audience comprehension and alignment with their interests are key. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting out in the field, this episode offers invaluable guidance to navigate the intricate pathways of contemporary marketing. Tune in for a dynamic, enlightening discussion.

Guests

Dani Hernandez, Senior Paid Social Manager at Merkle B2B

Duarte Garrido, Global Head of Omnichannel Marketing and Social Media at Standard Chartered Bank

Amr Shafik, Digital Media Director at Paramount-Media

Simon Mitchell, Marketing Director at Korn Ferry

Matthew Soakell, Paid Media Marketing Manager at YouGov

Fernando Gonzales, Performance B2B Marketing Specialist at Preqin

Good. All right. Well, I'll introduce myself and then, um, just explain kind of my role and or Kim's role on the call today. So, so I'm, uh, Adrian Hobs, uh, VP of Customer Success at, uh, at Exact. And, um, obviously a lot of what we do is helping customers execute on, uh, on their marketing strategies, particularly around paid social. So, firstly, thank you very much for attending. I mean, this is a, a, a series of podcasts. That we're doing on, so deciphering, um, marketing strategies and, and this one, uh, is around, you know, campaign focused marketing versus always on, and actually came about as a conversation with one of today's participants where conversation with Waki and was around, look, know, we have to find a balance between campaign focused marketing where we can create a noise versus always being on, um, so that we're constantly in the market. Um, and, and managing that, that process is, is difficult and challenging, particularly when you've got a specific budget that you've gotta work to. So if we look at the two, you know, sort of two ways of going about this. So always on marketing where maybe our focus is more on organic marketing, supporting, you know, our website, ss e o content, social media strategy, um, you know, where we're always in front of our customers, we're always available to our customers, uh, but not necessarily able to drive peaks in engagement or peaks in lead generation. Whereas campaign folks, marketings where maybe we, you know, we go through a, a process where where we go through a process of trying to drive activity by investing maybe more than we would normally do in pay channels, whether that's increasing search, whether that's, you know, p p C. But obviously there are other things such as if we look at, know the social channels such as LinkedIn, moving from a more organic process to actually spending more money on, on, on LinkedIn and, and other social channels. Um, that might also be investing in running webinars or events. Something that creates a focus around a particular activity. Obviously absorbs more budget over a short period of time, but perhaps helps create cut through. So Joaquin's gonna manage the discussions today to kind of, you know, look at how those two things, you know, work together and, and, and what is the best fit for different organizations, particularly, you know, when we're, when we're managing to a specific budget. So, does that make sense, Wakim? Does that kind of set it up as you as you wanted to in terms of the discussion?

Totally. Um, let's do a round of introductions. Um, I can start. Um, I'm ho Dominguez, as you know. Um, I'm head of marketing here at atac. Um, my background is in B two C marketing. I used to be brand manager for cao, the wine brand. After that I did a master's in innovation and technology management, and that's how I transitioned into B two B marketing for a technology startup. So, well, thank you very much to be here today.

Simon, would you mind introducing yourself?

Hi everyone. Um, so Simon Mitchell, I work for Korn Ferry. Korn Ferry are a professional services leadership development executive search organization, a global organization, and I head up regional marketing for that company. So I have sort of one foot in the business and one foot in marketing looking at revenue generation marketing.

Thanks, Simon. Matt.

Hi everyone. Yeah, uh, my name's Matthew. I head up the paid search, at, uh, Ugo. My role as paid media marketing manager involved managing the, b two B activity, across u gov's, ever growing search activity. Thanks, Matt my name is Dri, I'm, uh, the global head of social omnichannel at Extended Chartered Bank, which is, uh, both an investment bank and a retail bank, depending on which market you're in. Uh, and I'm about to transition to a new role, um, at Volt, a FinTech scale up as the, uh, VP growth marketing there, which I will be starting in September.

Great. Thanks very much. Fernando.

Hi everyone. Uh, I'm Fernando. I am in charge of, uh, the paid media campaigns. So Pre Queen, pre Queen is a data finance company. Uh, my previous experience is also in Finfin Financial Services. Thank you very much. Thank you, Amir.

Hi everyone, I'm Amir Shafi. I'm the digital director of Paramount Media, which is an affiliate agency for Densu in, uh, north Africa. So I'm based in London, but I'm, um, taking care of some Middle East and, and African clients. I've been through the journey of executing campaigns myself, Google certified like 15 years ago, and then I moved up to be a digital director on, uh, several global clients. Daniella?

Hi, I'm Danny, well Daniella, but as well, like Matt, you can call me Danny. I'm a paid social, a senior paid social manager at Merkel B two B. So at Merkel B two B, we manage a lot of, we have a variety of industries right now actually, we manage, our clients, b two B advertising, and we are the number one international B two B, agency at the moment. I've worked across quite a few industries mainly tech, oil and gas and the financial industry. So I've got some experience across quite different ones. Thank you, Danny. Um, so Achim, I'll, I'll hand back to you, um, and obviously I'm here, um, to support you as you need.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Adrian. Well, let's start the discussion, um, with importance of Always on. Okay. Your, your products are constantly evaluated. According to LinkedIn, 73% of B two B decision makers, uh, do research on the evenings, um, 51%, uh, on the weekend. Um, so let's discuss examples of the best always on strategy, uh, but one that generates great engagement, a lot of web traffic, thousands of leads. Um, so let's start with people that work for agencies to, to, to hear their experience. Hammer, Daniella. Um, hammer, maybe given your, your experience in, in Google AdWords, um, search engine marketing, could you tell us a little bit how this works, um, for always on strategy and a good example?

Sure, sure. Basically always on is usually important for, the industries that has, either an online product or they are generating leads online or they have an e-commerce business and so on. So you can keep on improving as you go and, you know, collecting, uh, amazing amount of insights. When you, when you choose between always on or, campaign-based model, it's really, the decision is really based on the industry, the client business, what kind of KPIs they want to achieve and so on. But the always on model is, is definitely good in terms of improving the performance as you go and keep on enhancing, you know, week by week, month by month, your KPIs and your, your cost per result. And, and this definitely, gives back to the business as well.

Thank you. Daniel, do you have similar, uh, points of view?

Yeah, I obviously focus on the, on the paid social side. I, I lead a few teams that, that work on that. But as an agency, what the way that we like to look at it, because we do cover, a few other elements of, of altogether media and creative and, and, and insights. We like to take a little bit of a step back and versus going at it with the point of view that everyone should have always on or, you know, going kind of based on, on, on what the client is requesting, taking a little bit of a step back and looking at not only what we're trying to sell, um, but focusing more on the consumer themselves. So I think, you know, when, when we look at consumers nowadays and, and the, the B two B buyers, we know that they're not, you know, they're not your classic, um, older gentleman, right? Anymore, um, they're becoming younger, more millennials are becoming those B two B key decision makers. So what we like to do is look at the journey that they are looking for, um, and also how they engage with overall marketing and, and, and promotion. So to give you an example, one of the things that we found out from, uh, a piece of, um, research that we did is that Ss m b buyers actually rely more on just influencer buy-in and, and, you know, word of mouth. So I think if you're trying to reach that audience to then go and have an always on approach across multiple channels across, out of home and digital, and, you know, spending all your money there, it's probably not gonna be as efficient as if you were going after a, a, a different audience and you apply that same strategy. So we like to start looking at the, by looking at the con, uh, consumer first. Um, but yeah, I think that's always an approach. It's, it's definitely important, but it's just being on the, on, on the areas, uh, the placements, the channels that your consumer is gonna be on. Um, and also just focusing on what we like to say call them is like their key moments. So again, if you are looking for like an all year strategy, uh, or multiple year strategy, which, uh, I don't think many clients do just yet, uh, looking at, again, I think somebody mentioned, you know, budgets are being cut lately. Um, where should we be focusing those, those dollars, which months do we know that that consumer and the influencers, um, making that decision will be searching for these products? And we should be there at that point, um, not after. So that's the way that we approach it.

Interesting. Well, we are running, by the way, on, uh, an episode next week about influencer marketing and all the, the huge influence that, uh, platforms like Quora and Reddit, uh, are having on, on decision B two B decision makers. But yeah, let, let's continue. Um, Matthew, you, as Daniella was mentioning, um, some companies, and in your case, you, you use keywords for campaigns that run all year round, right? Um, to raise brand awareness. Um, so could, could you give us an example of how you use that as an example of always done? Because you also use some keywords to tackle ality in a more campaign oriented yeah, AB absolutely.

And, and, and this is something that was kind of fair, like coming from an an account manager background whereby you manage a, a various pot of clients at an agency for quite a few years prior to, starting at you government first in-house role, the, the majority of the SMEs that I worked with and, and the clients at the agencies that I had worked with, um, even bigger clients that I worked on, um, later down the line, the majority of it was always on. So it it like testing the waters out even with more like seasonal sort of, um, more, just general generally thought out and, uh, processed, um, processes was, was a bit of, a bit of a first to me. And it was something that, um, when I joined you of our, all of our search, marketing was always, and we looked at some of the data, and Danny, you mentioned there about budgets and kind of having to be more clever with budgets and kind of box clever. And we looked at it and there were, we, we realized that there was certain really, like we like to call high importance, keywords that are, that are essential to always be getting, uh, impressions in clicks for, and to have a good impression share for, and those therefore will be always on throughout the year. But we looked at, we also run, sector based advertising. So we split our advertisement kind of between, like I said, it's always almost is around sort of our products and some of those things that we really do need to rank, rank for and show for. But then the sector-based stuff is more, sometimes a little bit more seasonal, as, as, as you mentioned. And also we looked at it in the budgets that, that had been given, were, were a little bit too small to always compete in an always on, capacity. So I looked at info, well, why don't we use the sector campaigns to compliment when we publish things like white papers and big reports, and, and compliment them doing the, the big push that we have alongside our marketing, whether that's social or email or whatever it might be when we're, when we're trying to drum up more, you know, more interest in these. So, um, so what we did is we, we took about that, uh, sector approach and decided which ones were our key sectors and how we wanted to, to, uh, what we wanted to spend on them. And in our main markets, we, we didn't run sector advertising for the majority of year. We just ran it alongside key white paper releases and report releases, uh, and access all really, really good results. This, this financial year compared to the previous year where really we didn't, didn't really give it enough budget to compete because it was on an always on basis, and it was on such a, uh, such a small sort of minimal budget. Whereas now we've gone, right, let's focus on two to three or four weeks, be more aggressive with the budget and be more aggressive to, support a wider marketing, so that's kind of how we've sort of split the always on versus this more, niche, and more sort of, timed set of advertisement that we do.

Thank you. Well, we, we had an interesting conversation of how LinkedIn and Meta were mostly always on platforms primarily LinkedIn. In their case, for example, they, they just launched these sub leaders ads, in my opinion, to support an always on strategy, because they realized that the platform was saturated with, ads. So they created this new way of doing ads, sponsoring, people. So in this platform, you indicate a budget, and your audience is always familiar with your brand. And on the other hand, it's a very good way to do, organic strategy with employee advocacy in Standard Charter. We had a couple of weeks ago, Charlotte, who runs the, the employee advocacy program at, uh, under Charter. Um, and she told us how efficient is, is that as well? So how these strategies, organic and paid coexist, in, always on.

I think first of all, we need to classify always on properly, right? Which is, I think it's, it's different to have a presence always on in social channels, for example, which I think is necessary for most big brands at least, than having it always on paid media strategy, which involves you spreading your budget usually thin throughout the year. Uh, instead of focusing on key activations like Matti said, uh, three or four during the year, and it, it comes as no surprise that platforms like LinkedIn, like meta want us to go, um, more towards an always on paid media strategy, because that is not only more predictable from a revenue perspective, but it also ensures continuous spend, uh, and actually incentivizes more spend from the, from, from our side. So it's a bit like, like we fell into Google's fallacy of sort of last click attribution with, um, with direct attribution software. Now we're, I, I fear that we're falling into the social media fallacy that, uh, the most effective, uh, paid media strategy isn't always on strategy. I haven't found that to be the case at all, especially at a time when companies are tightening their budgets. Um, I feel like it's, it's much simpler if we, if we are trying to show the value, for example, of top of funnel activities like brand or category awareness, we need to ensure that whatever we're doing at the top of the funnel comes out at the bottom end, right? So that we know that we're targeting people throughout the funnel and then retargeting them. So with that in mind, it's always a lot more clear through to show the return on investment of a singular campaign from a specific period in time than it is to justify your yearly budget through an always on paid media strategy. Because quite frankly, you cannot track it effective, right? So it, it, it's just not possible for you to say the target audience that we targeted with, uh, with our brand campaigns, uh, were the same ones that we targeted with our, uh, middle and bottom of the funnel campaigns throughout the year. You can only do that in very, redetermined and find restricted campaigns and media pushes. And that's been my experience so far, is that the more you constrict it, the more, the easier it is for you to prove the value Ing time, time restriction.

It is something that, that resonate with. With the rest, yeah, I agree. Actually, it's, it's important, um, the factor of budget as well as Dore was saying, if you spread thin across the year, that impact will still be, you know, weak. You need to have a big burst. You need to, uh, have good frequency to make an impact and get your brand to be seen. And then you can start retargeting or you start, you know, sustain your presence throughout the year. But it's very important to have those big bursts. So, so you can actually make an impact. Make sure that a good size of audience have senior brand, uh, they digested your message, they have seen the ad four or five times a month, and then you can start, you know, do always on tactics, whether it's just, uh, answering demand or retargeting or, you know, targeting, uh, retargeting the users that has have seen your ad several times or interacted with your ad. But if you just divide your budget across the year, you, you'll still be small, you'll still be thin, and you won't have that high frequency, high reach impact in one or two months, fernando and, and Daniel, yes.

Yeah. And only to follow the idea of arda, and I'm, I'm totally agree with them. For me, um, it's hard to convince my stakeholders because as, I mean, not only in terms of revenue also for tracking, it's very hard to, to see the results in always on campaigns, or at least maybe takes more time because it's a long term strategy. So I always say to, to, to maintain as stakeholders, not all the products or not other companies are prepared or, or have that in the budget to run always on campaigns. Uh, um, so yeah, I think it's like very something, very costume, depending on how much money you have, what's your plan, and how much you are willing to wait, right? You want to see results in three months. You can wait one year. You want to have a consistent presence on the media.

So yeah, I think that's something that have, and Why do, and why do you think B two B marketers are so anxious about results? About immediate results? For example, I come from B two C marketing where investments are always long-term. You, you can't invest in brand awareness to have results during same year. You will have, you will have good results after two or three years, and that's common, right? Um, and of course, a, a a a similar could be investment in above the line and, and B two L and trade marketing as, as campaign focus, but always, investing, on a brand as CocaCola does with out of harm advertising, et cetera. Uh, it's a long term, uh, investment. Why do you think in, in B two B marketing is, is different?

I think it comes from a lack of trust, frankly, because I, I, if you look at B two C companies, most of them have realized over the years that there is, um, real merit in running a, a fine tuned marketing department, right? They understand the value for sales, they understand the value of brand, uh, in the consumer brain. B two B was very slow to adopt that. Uh, and it's very early days still, in which B two B companies have, came to terms with the fact that marketing is essential. And more than that, that brand is essential. And they're just now testing with the sort of one-to-one or one to few approach that B two C has been doing for years. So it comes from the, the, the, the need for immediate return and the need for immediate results and short-term results comes from the fact that most B two B companies, the leadership team, doesn't really, uh, trust the value of marketing yet. That's why they need those quick results to confirm, uh, that they're spending their money. Right.

Just to add, because I, I totally agree. Dot, I think one, one, another factor as well is from, from what I've seen from my marketing stakeholders, is that they're so siloed from their sales teams and all of the pressure is just on them. But whilst there's all that pressure on them, they get very limited say in terms of what's actually happening to the product improvements that should be made, how the user journey is happening. So there's, there's all this pressure for them to, to generate results whilst also pretty much having their hands tied behind their backs. So for, for them, it's like, okay, I don't have time, like Fernando said, don't have time to be waiting a whole year to see the effect of a, of a long-term strategy. I need results now. So I think it, it, it also comes from that. But I, I just kind of wanted to go back to that point about, 'cause I have seen very high successes from having an always on approach. Not always. I will say that. So I think based on that, I think it's gotta be done right, which, going back to arda, your point B two B, unfortunately right now, I don't think we're doing it right just yet. Mm-hmm. a lot of the times the user journey that we provide, it's not good enough for, again, for, for this new day and age consumer. It's like you, you load a page up and it takes two minutes for it to load. Nobody's gonna wait for that. Nobody's gonna land on a page that has 10 click to actions, and you're gonna figure out by yourself what to do. We need it to be easy. We need it to come to us. Um, we needed to, to, you know, you need to reach the right person absolutely at the right time, but with the right information. So I think that's another one of the biggest challenges that we have in, in B two B. Um, and again, creative comes hand in hand with this, the creatives. I mean, I don't know if I'm seeing a lot of hands, a a lot of heads, uh, agree, but the B two B creatives suck right? They're very boring, they're very corporate. Um, and yeah, I think we, we could really do it just like a bit of revamp, uh, altogether.

I think Simon, you have a particular view on, on this, right? That a lot of time the user journey is not good enough. Um, that bit of marketers should provide insight, but it's not what, what many times we are doing, right?

Yeah. Thanks. Uh, I, I mean, look, I, I work for a, a company which has sort of big ticket, sales, and the, the sales cycle is very long. So for us, it's really important that when we win, uh, a client, you know, that lifetime value is maximized. So we, to me at least, i, I, I mean, I, I, I struggle to see the, the, the delineation between always on and campaigns. I, I think, you know, I, I'm everyone's talking about that and I'm thinking, well, for me, always on is more about sort of self-serve. You know, they come to us and they can choose the insight, or they can see some insight that we might deliver, but it's really difficult for us to put ourselves in the situation of the person that's looking for that and being able to give them insight at that time, right? So for us, the brand is, is so tied in with the themes that we're trying to deliver to the market, that it's almost, it's almost difficult to, to separate the two and our creative, I think there are some fantastic examples of creative in, in B two B, and I think I would agree that we are becoming more provocative in how we position ourselves. I think that's really important, um, because we're trying to communicate with so many people. But for me, I think it's, really difficult to think about personas and therefore to create an always an always on campaign or create campaigns that are targeted at a certain persona when we don't really understand the situation of that persona, right? So for, for me, I think much more about jobs to be done, which is how I, I sort of think about how we should be presenting things to people. Um, and we go so far, um, in terms of trying to enable the, the, the channel that I think really works to get in front of really high value people, which is our people, right? So we spend a lot of time enabling our people to work with LinkedIn, to work with our insight to customer, our insight to bring it much further down the funnel. It it, you know, 'cause 'cause when we're presenting something to somebody, we are allow, we're asking them to translate, well, why is this important for me? And I think we as marketeers need to go much further into help the per, and to help the person see why this is important for them in their context. And that can only be done on a one to few or one-to-one basis, I think. Um, so our channels, you know, are, are, we work with a lot with our people. Just some random thoughts.

I I, I totally agree. I think you have like to have them probably the, the, the most intelligent salespeople that, that you, you could, you could have, right? Consultants are, are really clever. Um, but, but then how, how did you just justify your, your, your marketing efforts and, and because it could be very tempting to attribute all the, the success to the consultants and not to the marketing efforts.

Well, you, I mean, you know, I think you and I to discuss this before I, I, I spend so little time on measurement. Um, it was a really good example. One of our biggest clients at the moment, i, I met her for, for coffee a couple of weeks ago in London. And I said, well, you know, how did you hear about, about Korn Ferry? And she said, well, I attended, um, uh, a series of webinars that you did a few years ago on Black Lives Matter. Um, you know, I, I, I learned so much about how, what her words about how I see that whole, um, area, um, and it gave me a new insight into Korn Ferry and what you're all about. And she said, about two years later, I was in the market for something and I contacted one of your consultants. Now, how can you possibly attribute that to anything? Um, and maybe this is going back to what you were saying about consumer, that you know, that, that I think if we drive ourselves to measure, if we drive ourselves to measure the success of a campaign or success of always on, uh, always on, then we are, we're measuring what is easy to measure rather than what's important.

Well, I, I totally agree. And I, I think my experience with Con Ferry, I, I came across the brand studying my master's because the, in the leadership course, uh, like the guide text was for your improvement, a leadership book or publication that you, you publish every year. And, and I'm sure that the next time that I need to refer to leadership, I will contact you and, and you never know, maybe in five years time. So that, that example really resonates with me. D you, you, you had, uh, something to say about this.

I did. I, I mean, I, I totally agree with Simon on, on most of what he said, but I think, I do think that it's a privileged position to be in where we don't need to measure the success of our marketing. And I know that some companies do that, and I'm glad to know that KornFerry does that. It's good, it's a good thing. But the reality is that most companies are not in that place, and especially when it comes to big multinational incumbents, they will, there will be a push from, uh, the finance team or the senior leadership team or the sales team to show the value of marketing. And if we do want to show the value of marketing, then the difference and the distinction between running an always on paid media strategy or targeted campaigns, full funnel targeted campaigns is a massive, massive difference. Um, and I've struggled to show the value of, of, of marketing spend from an always on perspective, particularly in B two B when we're talking about doing maybe a b m or, or even more granular than that, buying group marketing, right? When we're targeting a specific set of people or a specific type of function within a target account, uh, if we do it on an always on basis, it's very hard to understand at which point of the funnel of the customer journey, uh, that buying group is when we target them with diff different ads and different platforms, and it gets really murky. Um, and then of course, when you layer on top of that, the huge unquantifiable effect of things like dark social, like someone was mentioning, you know, I heard you on a podcast, I saw you on a webinar, and then last click attribution, I searched for you on Google, and that's where you think the traffic is coming from. I get that. But it is, it is very important when you're trying to prove the r o I dollar by dollar of the money that you're putting on marketing, I think it's much more effective to do it on a campaign by campaign basis, considering that every campaign that you run should be a full funnel campaign. So it should run for a specific period of time, 2, 3, 4 months, whatever it is, targeting buying groups within your key target accounts with first for first for a few weeks, top of the funnel, then for another few weeks, middle of the funnel, and then finally bottom of the funnel content, right? And then you can actually see who in those retargeting efforts, if you run controlled in test groups, who was most likely to convert after being exposed to your brand campaigns or being exposed to your thought leadership content. So it gives you a kind of a, a proper framework of measurement that then allows you to go back to your senior leadership or to your business counterpart and say, this is the proof of concept. Uh, if we want more of this, we need more budget next year. And this is the sad reality that we, uh, live in. And most companies, in the companies that are, um, lucky enough to understand the value of dark social, to understand that not every marketing dollar is attributable, uh, and that brand has a huge role to play in B two B, uh, and that really every B two B should be treated as a consumer brand first and foremost, then great, you're in a really good position.

Um, yeah, And I would agree, and please, I'm not saying that we don't measure, we certainly measure against KPIs, but what I'm, my point is that we, that where we spend the majority, or where I spend the majority of my team and i's effort, is to actually track back from the, the new revenue, um, almost on a manual basis to see, right, well, how did, how did campaigns, how did that interaction, what thought leadership did we use? Now that's really hard to do, and it takes a lot of time, but that, I think that gives us more, um, usable, it gives more outlying data and more that we can build other, uh, activity around than trying to sort of look at the aggregate data that we would get from any sort of campaign. But if we do set KPIs for all campaigns, of course we do, we need to, we need to know how successful what we are doing is, Um, I was, I think I was gonna to ask you that.

Um, how do you track back from revenue or from the conversion? Um, if you ask your, your, your, your customers, about which campaign was the one that made the decision well, it, it depends what your ultimate goal is, right? If your ultimate goal is actual pipeline revenue, then it gets a bit murer and you have to align with your sales team on what exactly a sales qualified lead is, uh, and how you get the two of them together. And you have to have a really robust c r M system integrated between sales and marketing to kind of, um, walk through that customer journey. But if your target from a marketing standpoint is delivering M qls, but high intent m qls, then it's easy because the only thing that you need to track, you don't need self-reported attribution in a way you could have it, uh, to qualify the measure, the, the success of Doc social, but all you need really is to ensure that when you get your lead, so when you get your email address, or when you get your sort of highend signup, that person or that account or that buying group, uh, or that audience has been subjected to nurture thought leadership content before that, and even before that category awareness, brand awareness, right? So, and, and you do all of these by stage and you run control in test groups in each of those stages to see, just so you can show your senior leadership team, this is what happens when you don't, when you go in called and ask for, for a person to give their, uh, email contact in exchange for a white paper, and they haven't seen your brand and they don't know what your category is in some, uh, in some industries that can happen, um, or they haven't been nurtured by thought leadership content, so they don't, don't trust you. Really, this is what happens. Your cost per acquisition and cost per, or cost per, per per conversion is higher, right? Um, and then you show the control group, the group that has actually been exposed to all those different stage funnels, uh, uh, funnel stages, and you see, you see that your, your CAC has gone lower, so you can show the value of brand, right? Instead of just running brand lift studies, which you can do. But my question then is, what will that mean for senior leadership when you come with a brand lift study and say, um, we've surveyed X amount of people and they've recognized our brand, um, x more percent than last year. Great. So what, right? How does that, what people wanna see within the company is how does that translate into revenue? How does that make us either earn more money or save money? And if you can't prove that with brand lift, then the only way to qualify to quantify the value of brand is by doing full funnel retargeting campaigns.

Brilliant. Well, Fernando, it is good that you have your hand raised, because I was going to ask you something about your, your experience, well, transitioning from a, from a bank in Peru that used to do a lot of always on, and now you are following maybe more, uh, more niche, uh, approach with campaigns and also with your efforts, um, about creating a, a comprehensive customer journey and aligning, uh, very closely with the C R M team. Yeah.

Um, Yeah, no, I was just gonna, yeah, sorry. I was gonna mention, because I have some experience of what Gerardo just mentioned is like, well, sometimes we have some campaigns that we track, okay, they came for, I might pay search campaigns, but then, then when they go to sales, they say, no, I went to a webinar, and then I came back and searched for, uh, of your search, your company. And so at the beginning, we make a lot of efforts to, to try to show the exact attribution of the channels at the, but for the senior leaders, they, they don't care, but they're like, okay, talk between, because in my case, in pre committee work, I'm in charge of media, but each segments have make their efforts on emailing, uh, events, webinars. So at the end, it's like, uh, I think we, we have this conversation before the whole thing. Like, it's like to realize that sometimes it's very messy to have to, to find exactly distribution. Sometimes they come from, um, they see a mail and then they see our app. But at the end of the day, the important is like to align of these marketing, efforts in different channels. Because as, as I said, when I present that to senior levels, it's like they don't want to know exactly which was the first contact with that client, or we was the last touch, or we is like, okay, come talk between each others and bring me, like, how much put money I put in marketing, and that's how much money is gonna come back. So this kind of a, a lesson I learned at the beginning of my, of my work here in, in Pre Queen.

Brilliant. And is, is that something that resonates with, with you, Matthew, for example?

One, one of the things that that caught me earlier as well is, is the entire user journey. So thinking about things like, um, like we talked about branding and, and our sort of the, the creative side of things as well. Like, that's one of the things that I feel like B two B has got better rap, but still has a long way to go. If your branding isn't, isn't fantastic. You can't really expect a huge uplift from, from a brand awareness perspective, you can target as many people as you want, but if it's not relevant, but b, if it doesn't look good then it's not gonna engage with the, with the user. So that was a really fascinating point kind of just to be think about and to hear people, but, i, I think what really stands out to me as well is just from a, a reporting metrics perspective as well, is that, it was really interesting to, to hear what Sam was saying about kind of measurement and how sort of you might or might not measure, uh, certain things. But I'm interested to kind of get everyone else's thoughts of how kind of stakeholders deal with that and kind of how you, so we've seen a bit of a shift away more from M Q L than relate to kind of more like higher important, uh, opportunities and that kind of thing, previously, so we, we kind of shifted previously what would qualify as an M Q L. We kind of changed the goalpost a little bit to focus on kind of more intra, um, more important, uh, opportunities based, um, uh, metrics. So I, I'm interested to see if, if that's kind of being done, anywhere else from a B two B perspective, if anyone's kind of seen that shift I can, I can go from, my experience and from the, from the accounts that I've worked on, there's definitely been a transition from receiving client briefs where it's just, the, the K P I is, I don't know, I wanna generate a hundred, um, m qls to now this is being translated into, you know, we need 25, sQLs and, and they need to be, you know, the highest intent. And what this has really done is, I guess we, we've gotta look at the channels that we're, we're going on, right? Um, because you might find that there are specific publishers that can generate the volume for you, but the quality is just not there. So then why are we on those channels? Um, so that's kind of the way that we've, we've gone about it. This is where I guess a lot of, a lot of people tend to go directly with, I mean, social is a channel that it, it, it is kind of like you're always on, right? Not, I, I don't mean like we should always be on it, but we are always on it. Um, so it, it is a channel that tends to be, we're, we're definitely seeing that, um, that change to, there's a lot more paid social campaigns because of the quality that we can generate, um, because we know that the audiences are more engaged there and we are able to, to, to go after those high intent, uh, uh, people.

And I think that's a really good point on, on always on. I think maybe actually Joaquin, that you, that was your first question to me, and I, I just realized maybe I didn't answer it at all, but, um, the, the always on, but the difference between organic and paid, as far as I'm concerned, especially when it comes to social media, is that it's important for any company, any brand to have an always on organic presence on social. But if that presence becomes paid, uh, you're gonna spend a lot of money and you're not gonna get your a bank for your buck. That's my experience. I think that always on, on social is meant for organic. And then you run paid media campaigns on top of that for more sort of lower funnel activities and programs, you keep the always on lights just for brand for thought leadership. So top and middle of the funnel to ensure that you become, um, a spot for your target audience, whatever that target audience is, uh, that they come to consume content. Uh, it's not, it's not a place for you to keep telling how great your company is, uh, especially not via paid media. Uh, it's just a place for you to continuously give content that's of value to your target audience list. And then on top of that, you run paid media to ask something in return. It's the old Gary V thing, the jab, jab, right hook, right jab, jab, jab should be your always on organic strategy. Um, and then the right hook, then you put some paid behind when you actually want to ask something of your audience for them to do, give, give us your email address, subscribe to our newsletter, whatever it is, then you put paid behind because that's when you really wanna do effectiveness.

Is that something that resonates with you, Simon? I, I kept thinking about what, what you mentioned about tracking back from revenue, yeah, I I would definitely agree that, you know, with your highest value assets, thought leadership, whatever, you, you know, you putting paid behind those would be really important. I, I, and I think I would agree, and I've never heard it described like that. D I say that, you know, that that always on in social isn't, you know, shouldn't always be paid. But I would say that there's a trap that if you make it too easy to be always on, on social, you become, you say things that are pretty irrelevant. Um, you know, I, I see a, a lot of organizations with, you know, employee advocacy programs, um, you know, that make it really easy just to churn out stuff on social, but without any context. And it become, I think it's counterproductive. You know, you just become noise. And then I think that that noise is in, is sort of in, is a, is a danger that that would drown out the stuff that you really want to put in front of people. So, I mean, it's complex. It, it, it really is. We spend a lot of time, as I think I said, you know, we spend a lot of time trying to get people to don't say anything on social unless you can, unless it's gonna be worthwhile hearing, unless it adds some insight, unless it's, um, you know, unless you can put that translation of context in there. I think that's, I hope that's answered the question you were asking, Wakim.

Yeah, definitely. And I think this is probably last question for Danny and Amir. Um, maybe because you, you're in contact with different clients, if you could share with us examples of campaign focus are, are always some that have failed and for what reason have failed, if you can recall any example?

It, it depends on where your brand is and you know, which, which stage your brand. Is it well known? Is it, you know, visible when wa when was the, the last, high reach campaign that they have done? So you cannot just start by always on, on having just minimal presence, that is aiming to generate business. You know, you need to have big bursts at the beginning. So when you do that, when you, when you're very, you know, very low in terms of, reach and frequency and so on, it never works. You know, it's not magic. You need, you have to look at it from a communication point of view, awareness, point of view, branding point of view. You know, you need to get people to know you first understand who you are, what do you stand for, and then you can start asking them to actually make business with you or take a step or, or contact you. So running always on, on a small scale, for brands that are not well known, that, that they are, they are not having an amazing offer, they're not giving really, a great value to the customers for a product that everyone is looking for, definitely it won't work. You know, you need to, you need to be aware that, at the end of the day you are, you are talking to humans that they need to know you before they take an action. So you have to build this by the big burst, and then you can sustain by always on. So a lot of clients, they come and say, oh, we know that brand. They are only running lead generation and they are doing great business, for example. But this brand, they have great offer, great product. They have done for 10 years, you know, they're well known for everyone. Everyone actually wants the, they want to buy their product. And that's why when they do lead generation, they are just, they are answering the demand in the market. While your brand is not the same, it's not in the same, you know, level of awareness, not the same stage life stage for the brand. So we, it's different, you know, even if you run lead generation, the cost of the cost of lead is different. The c P l, the interaction rates are different and so on. For us, uh, it doesn't work if the brand is not known and they just wanna have very small budgets, or it's not about the budget only, it's about how many people you're reaching out of your audience and, uh, what's your frequency, how are you impacting them, what are you offering and so on. So all of these factors really, impact the results you get when you do, you know, term always on campaigns. I would definitely recommend always on when you have different births and, when, when you're collecting very, when you, when actually analyzing the data and collecting insights that you are reusing to enhance your always on campaign.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Uh, Daniella, I don't know if you have, uh, something shared to say.

I agree. Interestingly enough, I do have an, uh, a client that right now we, well, we've been working on quite a big project with them where it's kind of similar to what Amir was saying, but this client is actually very well known. Like they are kind of like tech leaders. Um, but they are going after a very, very niche audience that, you know, the, the demand there whilst it's there, it's like the, the knowledge of the product is just really not. Um, so we're really working on and well, we, we collaborated with the client work on an always on approach, but it's product specific versus brand. Um, and to be honest, we've, we've approached it in a way that it is a long-term strategy this is not gonna be, uh, you know, we're gonna generate results within the first two months because that's not gonna happen because nobody knows about the, this specific product. So the client is happy with that. We're working towards that. We have seen, very good efficiency so far and looking to again, continue to, to continue to develop that. Um, but it has been key to have a strong user journey there and, uh, bespoke messaging. I think that's, that's what's been, you know, the, the, the sweet spot there.

Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I think, um, what Adrian mentioned at the beginning that the reality is that most businesses use a mix of both campaign focused and always on. And I think it's what you have said really confirms that. And you really need to, to choose which strategy to follow, uh, based on and, and your clients, right, based on what they need. And well, thank you so much. It's been really, really nice to have you. Thank you.

Thanks, Jeff. Thanks everyone.

Lovely to meet everyone.

Thank you. Bye bye.

Bye-bye. Thanks.