Seamless Nurturing & Innovative Growth in B2B Marketing

In this episode we bring together top growth marketing experts to explore the dynamic and challenging world of lead nurturing and marketing funnel optimization in the B2B sector. Our guests include Tejal Tailor from MHR, Ali Fakhar from Geeks, and Cory Johnson from Synthesia. They share their expert insights on how to effectively engage and nurture leads in today's complex marketing landscape.

Key themes discussed in this episode:

Tailoring Nurture Strategies: Understand the importance of customizing nurturing strategies to fit the unique preferences and demographics of different audiences.

Nonlinear Journey Engagement: Discover the benefits of engaging prospects through flexible, nonlinear journeys instead of traditional sequenced campaigns.

Utilizing Diverse Platforms: Learn about leveraging various platforms, both owned and external, for effective prospect nurturing.

Strategic Partnerships: Uncover how strategic partnerships can enhance the credibility and reach of your marketing efforts.

Continuous Experimentation: Delve into the necessity of continuous testing and optimization in your marketing strategies.

Sales & Marketing Synergy: Explore the critical role of aligning sales and marketing efforts through deep customer insights.

Join us as we delve into these topics, offering valuable insights and strategies to enhance your B2B marketing efforts.

Episode Timestamps

[10:14] Continuous Experimentation and Optimization

[10:41] Tailoring Nurture Strategies to Audience Demographics and Preferences

[19:33] Partnering for Increased Credibility and Reach

[29:33] Aligning Sales and Marketing through Customer Insights

[35:01] Leveraging Diverse Platforms and Communities

[44:34] Driving Nurture through “Messy” Nonlinear Journeys

Guests

Tejal Tailor, Growth Marketing Manager at MHR

Cory Johnson, Growth Marketing Manager for Synthesia

Ali Fakhar, Marketing Manager for Geeks

Joaquin - [00:00 - 01:08]

Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for being here to our podcast, The Future of B2B Digital Marketing. In today's episode, we will talk about a challenge that many are facing in B2B marketing, which is nurturing and funnel visibility. So in simple terms, nurturing is about building a relationship with your potential customers. Um, at every stage of the funnel and funnel visibility refers to having a clear understanding of each stage of your customer's journey. We will discuss actually if there are those stages. We have three guests today. Um, each of you are facing challenges in these areas. Um, so our discussion aims to provide you and our listeners with actionable insights to overcome these hurdles. So let's kick off with a, with a quick round of introductions. Um, Tejal Would you like to.

Joaquin - [01:08 - 01:10]

Start?

Tejal - [01:10 - 01:27]

Absolutely. Hi, I'm Tejal. I work as a growth marketing manager for MHR a HR and payroll software company. My biggest challenge, I would say, is finding quality leads. I think in growth marketing, that's always the biggest issue.

Joaquin - [01:27 - 01:30]

Brilliant. Thank you, Ali.

Joaquin - [01:30 - 01:31]

Hi.

Ali - [01:31 - 02:30]

So, I'm Ali. Marketing manager at Geeks. Um, currently, I have over 13 years of experience in almost all fields of marketing, so I usually consider myself as a marketing generalist. And it's not a good thing, to be honest, because you go abroad, but anyway, that it has its own pros. Um, so currently our challenge is also we are in the verge of um, bringing automation to almost all of our processes in marketing and nurturing is one of the main issues or problems that we have that we are trying to basically with using advanced tools, we are trying to automate those and then have a better visibility. But we have just started, so that's something. Um, we have some challenges in the road.

Joaquin - [02:30 - 02:31]

Brilliant, Corey.

Corey - [02:31 - 03:54]

Hi, everyone. I'm Corey. I'm a growth marketing manager at Synthesia, and I also write a newsletter, unsolicited marketing advice. I suppose our main challenge at the moment is synthesia. And, you know, I share some of your, um, your, your sort of concerns about being too broad. In many ways. This is my sort of first niche role, I would say, when it comes to marketing in the sense that I'm concentrating mostly on email marketing as a channel, right? Um, and one of the issues we have with nurture at the moment, well, there's actually two issues, you know, one is we get a lot of general buzzy interest because, you know, we're an AI company. And so there's one issue in the sense like who do we actually reach out to? Who is most likely to convert? You know, we're always thinking, is ICP Quite correct? And I suppose the second big issue we're sort of facing is when to do the soft nurture and when to do the hard nurture. You know, at what point in the journey do we go book a demo? You know, is it five months later? Is it every month? In this case, they may be stumble across us. Is it after we've run a bunch of PPC campaigns, remarketing and so on and so forth, You know, when do we when do we really try and convert that MQL into that sales qualified lead? Yeah, those are two main issues. I'd say.

Joaquin - [03:54 - 03:56]

Brilliant. And Tom.

Tom - [03:56 - 04:32]

My name is Tom Gatton. I'm the chief executive and founder of Ads Act. Um, and I am also designing a nurture program at the moment. Um, and so yeah, I'm really keen to learn how, how it works for all you guys. And yeah, mean challenges for us are unlike you guys. We're super small team. So, um, you know, the challenge for us is, you know, how do we get something up and running, you know, and then optimize it over time? I think we've come up with an interesting solution, which I can I can talk about. Um.

Joaquin - [04:32 - 05:51]

And I'm Joaquin Dominguez. I'm the head of marketing of Adzact. We are hosting the future of B2B Digital Marketing podcast. So well, we already started talking about the challenges of nurturing and funnel visibility. Ali You talk about your main challenge, your pain points that we talk about this in our briefing called that your activities are disjointed. You needed to have a full view of the funnel. Um Tejal You also talked to me about that you are running very different channels currently. You work in for education and public sector, and you mentioned that it was hard to create a customer journey, um, because you use very different things like billboards, Um, so out of home or you use third tool to measure how to interact with content and, and you are constantly testing different things and covering. Corey Sorry, you, you had like a good problem because you have so many leads. Your company has been really effective creating leads and so choosing who to nurture and and when does soft become hard etcetera.

Tom - [05:51 - 05:59]

So possibly load 5 million emails into HubSpot because it would cost you like 100 grand in HubSpot fees a month or something like that.

Joaquin - [05:59 - 06:34]

Yeah, exactly. So the idea of this, the idea of this conversation is to is to that we can dig deep in your problems and we start talking about them. And please mean this is really unstructured. So the idea is that you can unmute yourself as questions why we are facing these problems, understanding them and trying to find solutions together. So please feel free to start. We you already talk a little bit, but you can you can explain to to the rest better what are your challenges?

Corey - [06:34 - 06:59]

We've actually if I jump in, you know, we've actually had a little bit of a win today, actually. It's just it's just sort of come out in the sense, you know, talking about hard and soft nurture. So we have a really interesting and very popular lead generation sort of tool at Synthesia. It's people tend to call it the sidecar. I don't know if that's wide, you know, widely used, but essentially people can.

Tom - [06:59 - 07:02]

Kind of a sub product that everyone can use.

Corey - [07:02 - 08:27]

Yeah, exactly. So we, you know, and I can't take any credit for this. This was this was a baby of people before me. And it's just really, really well, it's an AI video generator. Just a short clip. You know, you can get a template. You can choose your avatar out of a limited selection and you can do a little script. You can say, you know, Hey, Dave, this is me using Synthesia, you know, that sort of thing, or, you know, really excited to welcome you to the conference or something like that. And we have this, this tool and as a result we get a lot of organic interest is very easy to use and you know, we have a form there where you'll get, you know, email first name, last name, potential use case and so on and so forth. And this is very popular like among everyone, right? You know, someone who's in marketing can use it just as much as someone's grandmother who wants to send their their grandchildren a sort of Santa message. And so we have this sort of lead nurture thing, and it's really, really good. And from that, we identify, you know, great leads. You know, those people are like perfect to our ICP. We're like, Oh my God. They're just like, you know, perfect customers. And obviously the stars reach out to them straight away. Um, but we also have these people who maybe aren't like a perfect fit, but, you know, they want to talk to us and we want to talk to them. And so we've been working on a nurture flow for the past three months, really, on those sort of people, right? You know, steering them towards a webinar, potentially then getting them to book a demo. Corey - [08:27 - 08:27]

It's.

Tom - [08:27 - 08:29]

And this is on email.

Corey - [08:29 - 10:02]

Yeah, this is all via email. This is all via email. Right. So, you know, because these people aren't in the platform, we can't do in-app nudges. We don't gather their phone numbers, so we're not going to be like messaging them on WhatsApp, you know? And so it's very much email, right? There's additional thing we can do and that's proven some success is remarketing with Google Display ads and YouTube. Also LinkedIn, which is working really, really well at the moment. Um, but you know, the big win we've had recently in fact is messaging. So, you know, we have a bunch of case studies, um. You know if different clients in their results they've had. And literally I was just sort of hypothesizing and I know it's awfully stereotypical, but my idea was I was using the same touch for North Americans and Europeans. And, you know, my hypothesis was that maybe Americans care more about time because they tend to work long hours. And maybe Europeans can tend to care about money because maybe there's not much money or maybe not as much money as an American company. And I'm like, let's give it a go. Let's give it a go. And I changed literally the example. So for the for the European touch, it was €9,000 saved per um, per video made for DuPont and for the Americans. It was, I think it was ten hours saved per video for DuPont. This was based on a case study and it's been massively successful, right? It's a hard sell. Attend a webinar. I think it's quite hard to sell. You're in a group, but you know, it's not like, Hey, look, here's some cool video we made, right? Or here's David Beckham speaking ten languages, right? Corey - [10:02 - 10:14]

It's not a totally hard sell, but it's quite a hard sell. And yeah, that's just worked really well. Um, and so, you know, I suppose I'll just jump in and share that just, just, just straight ahead of time. Um, that, you know, Yeah.

Tom - [10:14 - 10:17]

Understanding your audience, understanding a segment. Really.

Joaquin - [10:17 - 10:19]

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom - [10:19 - 10:20]

Yeah.

Corey - [10:20 - 10:41]

And experiment, right? Because, you know. There's so much information we have. Why do customers like us? Well, we know X, Y, Z. Right? And you want to experiment with those? You don't want to just put everything down. Maybe you just want to highlight one really important thing and work out what's really important to that person in terms of messaging. But yeah, that's, that's just sort of jumping on that. But yeah.

Tejal - [10:41 - 11:46]

Just on your point about experimentation, I do completely agree with that. I'm currently working on building an email nurture program at the moment, not just for my sector. As you mentioned, I deal in education, so public sector, but actually across the board for the organization. So one of the challenges I'm finding at the moment is how do we make the nurture broad enough that it appeals to everyone but also have the tailored content so that banking and finance feel included because private sector feel very different to public sector. And again, you mentioned the webinars. Webinars are really hard in the public sector. No one has the time for them. No one's got the time or the inclination to sit there and watch them. So at least for me, I find that working in my industry, the best way to get people is face to face, go to events. And it feels really old school to me because I'm very much a digital marketer. Like I've come from a very like digital heavy background. So then to come into a role where actually emails are great because provided you send them outside of school time, but like everything else in terms of like LinkedIn or social media just doesn't really get read.

Tom - [11:46 - 11:48]

Outside of school time.

Tejal - [11:48 - 11:55]

Outside of school time. If you want to send an email to a teacher or to someone working in a school or in a university.

Tom - [11:55 - 11:57]

Of course. Of course. Yeah, of course You want to.

Tejal - [11:57 - 13:04]

Get them, like I'd say 8:15 in the morning or maybe 4:15 in the afternoon, because if you send it between 9 and 3, we have really bad open rate and like response time when we send an email at 8:15, I think we had something like a 70% click through rate, which was mad. I mean, it was a small section, like it wasn't a massive segment. We sent it to about 120 people, but we definitely have found that testing times and knowing that about your audience, like what time are they going to be online? At what time are they going to be active, When do they look at their emails? When are they going to have a browse through it? It's really important because it's really different and I work in a team of five people, so there are five of us, five growth marketers. And for my colleague in banking, he finds that he gets the best response. If you send them after six, like send the emails after six once the back, like in the evening, once everyone's logged off. Um, so I think knowing that kind of data about your audience, although it's not trackable, really helps to kind of test and work out where you best sit. So when it comes down to experimentation, I'm all for it. I'm constantly throwing ideas at the wall and seeing which one sticks.

Tom - [13:04 - 13:42]

We have a we have a contact chap called Edwin Abel, who's, um, writes this really good marketing expert, you know, marketing kind of guru, been around for ages, a bit like you, Corey, your email newsletter he sends us on Saturday morning and I reckon it's quite good because it's, you know, it's very soft. He does mention, you know, I can do consulting, hit me up at the bottom, but it then gives you the whole weekend where if you are checking your emails, which you shouldn't but perhaps you are, you see it and then it's also there first thing on Monday morning. So Saturday morning works quite well for him. Yeah, that's because it's. Yeah.

Joaquin - [13:42 - 13:53]

Exactly. And it's to your to your he sends it mostly to your work email. So usually you don't receive many emails on Saturday.

Tom - [13:53 - 13:58]

So it has quite a lot of time in your eyeballs. Yeah.

Speaker: 4 - [13:58 - 13:59]

Exactly.

Joaquin - [13:59 - 14:11]

So yeah, you definitely click that notification. Yeah, that's great. Well, experimenting is definitely something really interesting. What about you, Ali? Um, are your thoughts on it?

Ali - [14:11 - 16:23]

So I am on board with Tejal about the event. So we had during the last couple of months or even over the last year, we have almost tried, um, all of the channels, all of the different marketing activities that we could do. But in the end, because we are not a SaaS company and we don't have SaaS services that we can easily market and sell that, that's the whole marketing is much more difficult, um, because we need to first create the trust they need to because the, the duration of projects is not just, for example, one month or something, it, it can be years. And they, we also consider ourselves and we position ourselves as total tech alloy. So they, we will be their alloys alloy to our clients. And then with each other we grow over the years. So we have some clients over 5 to 10 years and, and so building that trust is something that really takes time. And then when we have a presentation at an event and then. That when the content resonates with them, it it gets much easier. The next steps, it gets much easier because they know us. And also we don't consider ourselves as a faceless company such as other bigger corporates in tech. And so, yeah, when we do in-person events or in-person activities, even webinars, online webinars, we get a really good attractions. But on on the other hand, when we do digital stuff, so that's where it gets harder. For example, if you have lead magnets, we have something, a really cool quiz that we recently launched it with a new UI and UX, which is a digital appetite quiz. So basically they can in a few minutes, in a few minutes, it just has nine questions. Ali - [16:23 - 16:33]

They can take it and then they we will give them a report that where are they in the digital transformation spectrum and what is their profile? And then there are benchmarks. Is this.

Tom - [16:33 - 16:34]

Good?

Ali - [16:34 - 17:44]

Yeah, yeah, it's a really good tool, actually. But one thing that we it seems it's harder to get people to do it, so maybe something is wrong from our side. Um, but still, we, we, we have just launched it last week. The new version. Um, and there is just one ad running at the currently. Um, so yeah, for us really building the trust so they can come and, you know, sit with us for a long term, uh, service. That's, that takes time. I mean, if we have a really good lead, it can take, for example, even six months until they can, we can, you know, reach to a contract stage. Um, and yeah, that, that's something probably that's why we have the, as I said, we have the nurturing issue because we need to first have a really good flow of nurturing so we can warm up the leads, then we can, you know, start the. So yeah, we are in the earliest stage in that case if that makes sense.

Joaquin - [17:44 - 17:47]

It's really cool title.

Tejal - [17:47 - 18:27]

Sense to me. Um, I was just going to say, on your point about knowing, you know, meeting them in person is that brand awareness element, isn't it? Because I think that's something we push a lot because we've recently launched a mascot. She's called Harry the Hamster. It helps us stand out against other HR and payroll companies because they're very kind of staid and corporate. So I think when you're attending events and stuff like that, building that brand awareness is what's going to help you in the long run. And it's something I feel like B2B doesn't do as much. Lots of it is B2C or like DTC, but not so much in the B2B space. And I think it's what really does help you to kind of like make a bit of an impact and stand out.

Tom - [18:27 - 18:29]

I think you can you can really.

Tejal - [18:29 - 18:31]

Shortcut building that trust.

Tom - [18:31 - 18:48]

Yeah, I think you can really shortcut some trust, familiarity recognition with a character, even if it doesn't have to be a hamster. It could be like your CEO, could be, you know, like loads of companies use their CMO. Yeah. As a, as a real like, yeah. A character, their own podcasts.

Joaquin - [18:48 - 19:33]

Or a partnership. Yeah. Or partnerships as well if you have. But that's tricky right. Because you really need to connect with with, with the company that you want to be a partner with. Uh, otherwise it's just, it's really easy to notice that you are trying to, trying to leverage on their success, but you are not connected. So it needs to be a, a high bond between those, between both brands. Um, I'm curious about the webinars because you mentioned your experience with webinars. Sally, what about you, Tejal and Corey, how is your experience with webinars? We can tell our experience then with Tom.

Corey - [19:33 - 20:04]

I mean I suppose I suppose I sort of say that, you know, I was in a very similar situation to digital, um, literally my first sort of marketing gig, right? We were very, we were quite lucky in the sense that, you know, about a year in Covid happened and I know that's not usually called, but, you know, it was sort of a captive audience for webinars, right? Everyone was at home. Yeah. Like I'm very much the case. Who the heck wants to attend a webinar anymore? And I know anecdotally that that's the case because I've been getting so many LinkedIn emails that are like, We'll give you $100 Amazon voucher if you attend our webinar.

Joaquin - [20:04 - 20:05]

Yeah.

Corey - [20:05 - 20:09]

So, so clearly not many people are right if they're not.

Tom - [20:09 - 20:11]

Prepared to give up the webinar strategy.

Joaquin - [20:11 - 20:12]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Corey - [20:12 - 21:57]

And but you know, yeah, it's true. It's like webinars, you know, how the heck do you get people, especially time, poor people, teachers, you know, public sector workers, How do you get them to attend a webinar? We you know, our main back at was. Librarians beginning in Covid. They needed our solution. We were very fortunate in the sense that, you know, it fell into our lap in that way. One of the things we found really powerful was not necessarily partnerships. And it's interesting you bring up partnerships working, not necessarily partnerships with companies, but partnerships with NGOs in the space. So we partnered with a big sort of framework book provider called Jisc. We partnered with the National. National Library Association. I can't remember the name of it. It's called Nag. Um, but yeah, we associated with these two and we sort of get, you know, built that trust as well, right? We we essentially leveraged their databases. They would send out the invite we would do. And that was like, Oh, we're not just talking to some random company like, who has time to talk to X, Y, Z Company, Right. You know, they were talking to an institution they respect with a company which was a little bit plucky startup, maybe. I don't trust them so much, but hey, you know, they're talking to these people. Yeah. And actually, that sort of institutionalized us as sort of one of the two main sort of B2B e-textbook providers to, to the library and university library space in the UK. That's sort of crucial time. And so, yeah, you're totally right, right? Like partnerships. Trust is really, really important. Um, you know, I was just, I was just really curious to, if you've explored, you know, doing partnerships, have you, have you sort of done joint webinars and have you had much success in that or is it the same?

Tejal - [21:57 - 23:10]

We tend to find we get good success if we invite a like a happy customer customer success, and they basically host it and we support in hosting it. So like, for example, when we've had a couple of like the universities in to come and talk about, you know, their experience with us, their experience with our product, that generally goes down quite well because I think it's that kind of customer advocacy, right? You buy from someone who's like you, who you can relate to, but when we're doing the webinars on our own, not not so great response. And I do think, as you mentioned, like in the pandemic, everyone was glued to their screens, so webinars were the only way forward. Um, but I definitely think now people are moving away from that because it's not just they don't just want to learn something, they want to learn something and have the experience of it. And I think we're kind of looking at doing kind of more experiential kind of events where people we invite people down to like running to the pool, which is like my like family owned pool and kind of get them in, get them talking. I think it's just a more relatable atmosphere. Like you say, I personally I don't want to sit through another webinar. I don't think I'd want to watch one for a long time. Um, but if someone said to me, Do you want to go to this conference or to this MarTech event, Yes, sign me up. I'd love to.

Joaquin - [23:10 - 24:15]

Yeah. Yeah. In our experience with webinars, I think it depends how you measure the success of the webinar. If you measure the success of the webinar of attendees to the actual webinar, probably we are doing really bad because no one shows up to the webinars. However, I think and I talk about this also as a as a user or people who attend the webinars is person who attend to webinars, is that. And when I clicked attending to a webinar, I want to be part of a community or something that gives me access to future knowledge or future content that won't be available unless that you click there and many times. I think that's a good practice. A good thing to do is to is to send that or give that specific content to the people even if they didn't attend. Right. So and and the other thing is that that gives you the perfect excuse to talk to the people who didn't attend. Here is the here is the recording.

Tom - [24:15 - 24:46]

What the webinars. So I've registered for a webinar. I didn't go this morning. It was, you know, but, um. But what it does give you is a is a time pressure. It's pretty much the only thing it gives you. Right. But it does give you some it's happening on Wednesday. So you've got to you've got to register and then, yeah, if they don't turn up, it doesn't matter necessarily. But you know that you can then go back to them and say, here's the summary, you know, here's another one or whatever gives you a perfect excuse to nurture them. You've got to get that.

Corey - [24:46 - 24:49]

Thomas You've got to get that Amazon voucher. You've got to you've got to.

Joaquin - [24:49 - 24:49]

That.

Corey - [24:49 - 24:51]

Because they don't give you delivery.

Joaquin - [24:51 - 24:52]

Unless you.

Tom - [24:52 - 24:56]

Attend. Well, I think they're missing a trick then. £50 if you register and don't attend.

Tejal - [24:56 - 25:32]

No, but I do agree with you. They are a really good tool in that sense because it's not necessarily we don't measure it by who opens it or who like who comes along because like you say, you might have three people come along, but it's a great way, as you mentioned, Thomas, to be like, Hey, you missed it. Here's the content or here's the summary of the content. And this is kind of what we try to do with in-person events is we film them. We've got an in-house studio. So if we do have an event, we film them and then go, Hey, a few weeks later we noticed that you missed it. We're running it on demand for a week. Do you want to have a watch? Because I think in.

Tom - [25:32 - 25:45]

Nurture you always you always need a justification for even just sending someone an email. You need to have a plausible justification. And the and the webinar does in fact they've missed a webinar does give you that for one email.

Joaquin - [25:45 - 25:46]

Yeah.

Tejal - [25:46 - 26:40]

It's like it's the little hook to kind of draw them in something we're doing, which is completely different to this. So it might be a slightly off topic, but in terms of like different channels and stuff like that in the sector. So for universities, we're currently experimenting with sending envoys to all of them to ask them what who our competitors are like, what software they're using, what the it's not. No, it's our Freedom of Information Act. We're literally going tell us everything you've got about us, because they're public bodies. They have to have to tell you when's your tender date? When can we go after you? It helps us then to build the next day to go, okay, Q1 next year. We know that University of Sussex, for example, is coming up to tender. Let's hit them. What can we. And so then we're not just spending a lot of time and effort nurturing everyone all at the same time when we can just nurture who we know is coming up next.

Tom - [26:40 - 26:44]

That's amazing. If only if only you could do that with businesses.

Corey - [26:44 - 26:52]

GDPR requests. That's cool.

Tom - [26:52 - 26:54]

Tell me what you think about me. Yeah.

Joaquin - [26:54 - 27:17]

Yeah, well, let's move on and and continue with the importance of segmentation in in nurturing. Um, well, we, you you already discussed about this. Like you have millions of leads, uh, on your CRM. You can't nurture them all. Um.

Speaker: 8 - [27:17 - 27:20]

If you guys could.

Joaquin - [27:20 - 27:30]

Share your techniques of what kind of segmentation are you using to to select leads and go after them with these different techniques that we are talking about?

Corey - [27:30 - 28:58]

Yeah, absolutely. So our ICP, I'd say leads are segmented quite strongly by use case, right? So what do they want to use or what do they think they want to use the platform for? And it's never 100%, you know, accurate. So for example, we'll get a lead with, you know, saying, Oh, I'm in marketing, I won't use it for marketing. What does that mean? Maybe it doesn't mean what we think marketing means. You know, maybe they're the person who's looking after the website. Maybe they're in a sort of organization which doesn't really know what marketing is, and they're frustrated and they're making internal training materials. You never know, sales enablement, all this sort of stuff, right? But, you know, we get a broad idea through use case. You know what what what does this particular user want think they want to use the platform for and it's not 100% you know I wouldn't even say it's like 70%. Right. But it gives you that sort of idea. Um, you know, and obviously you get additional attribution information, company size, company location, all that sort of stuff based on the IP address and stuff. Um, you know, another thing is whether they use a free email or not, we just tend to find that people who use a free email like Gmail or Yahoo just don't convert as much. Again, not universal. We've had some massive strategic clients. In fact, I had a bizarrely enough, I was just managing YouTube comments one day and this person asked this question, Oh, can you do this in the platform? And I'm like, Yeah, you can. You can do it here. And they said, Oh, cool, I'll reach out. And it's one of our biggest strategic clients now, which is bizarre, right? Corey - [28:58 - 29:29]

Like you don't know where leads will come from and they can come from the weirdest source, like YouTube comments, apparently. Um, and so, you know, it's, it's not perfect. I don't think you can ever get too perfect but we find that use case and use case as messy as possible. Right. Mutually exclusive. Can't remember the key. You know, you don't want to essentially you know as much as possible you want to say marketing. They fall in that bucket but not L and D right. Um in your use case categorizations, if that makes any sense.

Joaquin - [29:29 - 29:29]

And how.

Joaquin - [29:29 - 29:32]

Do you how do you build those use use cases.

Joaquin - [29:32 - 29:33]

With.

Corey - [29:33 - 30:50]

So this is a really good thing about synthesis. They've got a fantastic bunch of product marketers. I work with them all the time. Um, you know, I'm in growth, but, you know, working very closely with product and product marketers. It's about research, right? The best way to determine your ICP and the best way to determine your use case is by literally talking to the customers you already have going, What do you use it for? Oh, I use it for making training videos, right? Oh, I use it for making videos to send to my granddaughter of Santa Claus. Right. And then you're like, okay, how much revenue do they make from us? You know, Sorry, how much how much revenue do we make them from them? You know, what's what's their response to the platform? Are they enjoying the platform is they're good at and so on and so forth. And so like fantastic product marketers, some of the best I've ever known who will literally just go and jump on a call with about 40 existing clients, they'll be like, you know, screw it, This is what I'm doing this week. And a big database which everyone has access to of these recorded calls that essentially, you know, says, Oh, I'm head of D for, you know, big insurance corporation. You know, here's here's here's what I use it for. Here's my frustrations. And you just let them talk and then you summarize that. And so of course, yeah, it's really, really, really cool info and it's publicly available to the whole company. And from that they shape use cases. So it's really nice.

Tejal - [30:50 - 32:10]

That is amazing. I'm not going to lie. I think product marketers are amazing. Our product marketers are fantastic, like yours, like they'll find all the information. You ask them a question, they will dig to the very ends of the earth to find the answer for you. So I totally agree. It's really interesting to hear about your segmentation process, especially on like a use case basis. Um, because we've tried that. We've tried like going, Oh, they're interested in HR or they're interested in finance, and it didn't really work for us in the way that we were hoping. Um, we definitely found that when we divided them up by kind of these are universities, like higher education, this is what we're going to go after, These are the people we need to be talking to like by job title versus because it's different. Like if you look at what the job titles we deal with it in a college are, they're probably like it manager or administrator or looking at the software at university level. They have like specialist people, you know, they've got probably got a HR or a new business kind of person and they'll kind of deal with it. So it's really interesting to hear you say that worked for you because that's something we really wanted. Also, your thing about Gmail, totally agree. Anyone email you literally never get anything from them. If they put their address in, you're golden, they'll put anything else in.

Corey - [32:10 - 33:25]

But that's the crazy thing, right? So Gmail, we've had some strategic clients that come from Gmail, but by and large I've tested it. It's not worth it's not worth, you know, enrolling them as marketing contacts and paying however much you're paying for them. Right? Usually. But it's quite interesting. These things can change and they can change. I was talking to Joaquin yesterday about it, right. And Thomas and it's these things change overnight, bizarrely enough. You know, we have different regions now as well. We're segmenting by and traditionally we would forward them strategic and enterprise companies from um, from India. Right? And they would be like, oh, they never convert. There's no budget, they never convert, you know, stop sending me leads from India. And we're like, Well, let's revisit this. And actually within the past two months we've got like a phenomenal conversion rate for leads from India. And so it's like, you know, these things can change like overnight. And then you need to be like, okay, maybe our use cases aren't even working anymore, you know? And it's a constant struggle. And that's where product marketers are phenomenal because they will anticipate that and be like, actually now. Now our main segment is Fast Food Chefs, you know, like, yeah, let's pivot the whole business, you know, Um, and yeah, so yeah, you're right. Like Gmail just generally doesn't work. But you know, never say never.

Tejal - [33:25 - 34:03]

No mean you make this it's a very good point that leads come from the strangest places. Um, our best lead thus far that we've had this year is we're in the process of signing a big major university. I can't say specifically which one because we're not fully there, but a massive Russell Group university. Um, and this came from a very informal chat on a train with one of the sales guys who just happened to be sat next to him and they were literally just talking and they were like, oh, blah, blah, blah. I'm so and so both of us are related. And the guy was like, I'm really interested in your software. And sales guy was like, Oh, tell you what, I've got all of this and it's now just.

Tom - [34:03 - 34:10]

Yeah, networking is, is Oh yeah, yeah. Good isn't it? And yeah.

Joaquin - [34:10 - 34:13]

And if you can.

Tom - [34:13 - 35:01]

Provide more opportunities for networking, I mean, a webinar is not really a very good example, but communities might be like online communities like little communities on Slack or something. So if you can like create spaces for. You will often get people with Gmail addresses to use a kind of to use that cliche. You know, people that are not going to buy like super enthusiastically contributing to the community and all they do is just like bump up the the visibility of activity. But then, yeah, if you have, you probably need hundreds of people on there before it's a viable conversation at all. But if you can get there, it's just an opportunity for networking. You can ask people, you can ask them questions and theory.

Ali - [35:01 - 35:32]

Podcasts can be also a really good way of networking as well. So we have we we do that as well on a regular basis. We have the Innovation Room podcast, which we invite, for example, the leaders in businesses. Um, and then we discuss about the future of tech in different businesses and those conversations and also the networking that happen within the podcast that leads to other, other networking so they know someone.

Tom - [35:32 - 35:33]

Given the game away.

Ali - [35:33 - 35:41]

Yeah. So, so that works for us as well. So we, we had some really good connections.

Tom - [35:41 - 35:48]

Love the idea of the YouTube comments though as well. If you could. I mean that sounds really enticing. Is that the current companies anaesthesia?

Joaquin - [35:48 - 35:48]

Yeah it.

Corey - [35:48 - 36:06]

Is. It's not a strategy at all It was just completely completely fell into our lap. Um YouTube comments on our videos are almost universally well they ask questions which are really interesting and they say, oh I love this software. And it's like, cool. And then sometimes you get some trolls and then you get people who are like, Man, this avatar is really, really hot. And we just sort of like.

Tejal - [36:06 - 36:08]

Oh my God.

Corey - [36:08 - 36:50]

Okay, all right. We're we make we make videos for corporations, okay, make videos using us or whatever. Um, but yeah, like YouTube is an interesting one. I suppose I just ask as well like going to that community point, you know, obviously there's always talk about is discord the best is the best for group, the best. What have people found that's most useful? Like we do that as part of our nurture. We invite people to our Facebook community and that works for us for a number of reasons. We'll get into them. But you know, what's what's the weirdest or the wackiest sort of thing you've done with community? At a previous company, I tried and failed miserably. Nobody wanted to join setting up a minecraft server. Um, but you know.

Joaquin - [36:50 - 36:51]

It's interesting.

Corey - [36:51 - 36:56]

Maybe a little bit late to the game on that one. But yeah, it was, it was good fun. But yeah.

Tom - [36:56 - 37:06]

We've, we've talked a lot about discord and we, we currently use guild which is supposedly it's it's like WhatsApp for business for businesses corporate version of WhatsApp.

Joaquin - [37:06 - 37:13]

Um we will invite you to be part of our guild community and and you will see yourself. Absolutely you'll see it.

Tom - [37:13 - 37:39]

But yeah, I don't know the right answer, but I like the idea of the YouTube comments because yeah, I think perhaps when think about it, since it probably has a disadvantage there given how broad the appeal is, which is kind of tied to your overall challenge, I suppose. But if you had something that was less, you know, slightly more focused, then you. Absolutely. Because people I mean, YouTubers absolutely have a community in their comments. They tend also to have a discord, I suppose, don't they?

Joaquin - [37:39 - 37:40]

But yeah.

Ali - [37:40 - 38:00]

Just discord, I guess One feedback I have from some older people in general about discord. They can't work with discord. Discord is just yeah, they they're like, Yeah, it's for younger people. It's for gamers. And are you lot? What about Discord? But I guess this is something I have heard.

Speaker: 3 - [38:00 - 38:01]

I mean.

Tom - [38:01 - 38:07]

I kind of think that maybe Slack is probably the most boring answer, but possibly also quite a good solution.

Tejal - [38:07 - 39:50]

It's really interesting to have this conversation about like different channels. I was going to ask about this, just kind of be like, what's the weirdest thing? Because in a previous role we tried Discord. Um, we were doing a generative event, so we tried to build like for the event day, a discord where people could come and chat and like all of that. Um, we use Slack personally, so I'm a member of quite a few Slack groups and like marketing, but also for hobbies and stuff like that. I love it. But I think Ali is right when he says that it's it comes down to your demographic because in my previous role a couple of years ago, I worked for a medical device company who sold to, like, I would say, like patients in their 60s and 70s Facebook pages was really the best We were going to do that. Um, in my current role, we find that it's not really about building our own community. It's more about being a part of existing communities. So we're like joining LinkedIn groups. We try to make ourselves a bit more known. We try to collaborate with other partners and stuff like that, because I think the challenge with building a community is that it sometimes becomes a little bit kind of echo chambery like we found. I found that in previous roles, when you build your own community, you're kind of getting a lot of like minded people and they're all kind of like they might, they're very complimentary, but they might just echo the same thought about the software, the product, the company. Um, whereas I think if you. The your fact finding kind of indifferent communities you can just lurk. So I've done this still do this like LinkedIn communities lurking like Facebook groups just to kind of see what the trends are and then maybe comment, because I think it also helps with that feeling of people trusting you if you're part of their community rather than trying to shepherd everyone into yours.

Tom - [39:50 - 40:33]

Yeah, and realist you need to. Realistically, Ashley from Guild, the founder of Guilds, was talking to us the other day about this and he, you know, he was straight forward about it takes 300 people because, you know, 10% of the people create 90% of the content or something like this. And so you need probably 20 people, actually. 20 people who are actually posting regularly. And so therefore, you need 200, 300 people to get 10% of those to actually form a community. And that is hard because you have a long period of time where you won't have very many people unless you can shift a large number of people from one community to another like YouTube to Discord really quickly. Um, otherwise it's, it's tough.

Ali - [40:33 - 40:48]

But is it worth. I have one question. Is it worth it based on your previous experiences, is it worth it to, you know, focus a lot on creating a community, which we all know that is really hard to maintain the community.

Speaker: 9 - [40:48 - 40:51]

I just creating the community.

Ali - [40:51 - 40:52]

In theory.

Tom - [40:52 - 41:08]

The maintenance should be easy. But in theory, once you've passed that critical mass, that's the promise of it, I think, is that once you actually get your prospects talking to each other about, then it kind of takes on a life of its own and maintenance shouldn't. It's just getting it to that point. It's hard.

Tejal - [41:08 - 42:39]

I think it depends on demographic. I think if you're so, for example, when I went to the medical device company, the patients really loved the Facebook group we had. They loved the page. They wanted to come along to the events. They really wanted that social, I guess, because they were elderly, they were tired, they had a lot of time on their hands. They really enjoyed the social aspect of it. Um, I think it is worth trying if you think you've got a niche pocket of people who are all similar interests or have a similar demographic and think they might be able to talk. I think where I am now, it's easier for us to go ahead to be like to a teachers summit or a conference and just be a part of that conversation than to say, let's get all of the teachers around a table together. Even with segmentation, it's just it's a massive feat. So I think it really depends on what you're looking and also what do you want out of the community? Is it just for brand awareness? Because we do a lot of stuff just for brand awareness. So we have a podcast, but it's not really a serious podcast. It's very much a lighthearted chat between a couple of colleagues about Workplace X, about going on holiday, Like it's not really a let's talk about marketing or let's talk about the product. It's literally just for fun. So I think it's always important to think about what do you want out of it as well as like whether because sometimes I think we do things as a tick box exercise in marketing, like we need to do X, Y, and Z. Like when my previous boss told me we needed a tick tock because we had all of the other social channels, like we need a tick tock and was like, Don't think Tick Tock is going to work there. Tejal - [42:39 - 42:47]

Elderly patients. Instagram didn't really perform very well, but you want to do a tick tock too. But she was adamant. So we did one and it failed dramatically.

Joaquin - [42:47 - 42:51]

Yeah.

Joaquin - [42:51 - 44:16]

A recent experience with with a community that I had was they moved them. It's a software company and they moved all their customer service to their community. So every time you need to ask something about the product, you instead of going and talking with a bot or going or sending an email, you go to the community, you get responses really quickly from the community or from the product team. And that and if you are intense user of that product, you usually have problems or queries or whatever. So you need to go to the community, you go to the tab, to the help tab. You, you write your, your questions, etcetera. You get answers, but keeps you going to to the same place, right? And sometimes you check the other channels and what's going on. Oh yeah, actually I did that yesterday. So I enrolled in a webinar because I saw it in the community. And the other thing is the product team. This is also related with what you were mentioning before. Corey Like it's so important that being in touch with, with your audience, right? And many times the product team from the software, they are talking to me, Hey, could we have a 15 minute talk about this? You posted this about this query we will love to understand better your. And so for a.

Tom - [44:16 - 44:18]

Product for a product marketing team that would be like.

Joaquin - [44:18 - 44:19]

Heaven.

Joaquin - [44:19 - 44:34]

That's heaven. Exactly. It's heaven. Yeah. And for for a user also it's great. Well, you can collaborate with the with the product you it's great to to as a user to see that the product is improving thanks to your work.

Tom - [44:34 - 45:36]

The nice thing about it from a nurture perspective is I think nurture works really well when there's mess. So like when you can, like when people can interact with you in a non-linear way where they're not getting six structured emails in a boring way where there's mess or like unstructured stuff and they can kind of dip in and out, it makes it much longer lasting because at the end of those six nurture emails, what are you going to do? You're going to send them again, or are you going to wait six months and then send them again? Boring. But if a community is only one answer, I think there are others as well. I think you can send messy emails. I think you can send I think you can create like multivariate emails and, you know, and basically create variations of these emails randomly and then send them to lots of people. And that way you can send them more emails for longer. I think because they're not getting the same sequence, you can still it's harder to do the analysis, but you still can do it these days with more style tools.

Corey - [45:36 - 46:08]

I think it's like, yeah, we we have so much content. We, you know, whoever's making it, the creative team, the growth team, the marketing team, the R&D team, we have a bunch of different content. We're a bunch of different purposes and messy. You're right, it works so much better because. You know, my manager is always trying to drill into me, and it's so true. It's like each email that you do as part of a nurture campaign should stand on its own two feet, right? Because nobody's opening every single email from anyone. So you can make an email independently. Interesting. One of them.

Tom - [46:08 - 46:16]

That's why like did you see my previous email is incredibly useless because. No, you're right. Yeah. You pretty much have to repeat everything in every email.

Joaquin - [46:16 - 46:17]

Yeah, yeah.

Corey - [46:17 - 47:06]

Yeah, yeah. And also, you know, you also get a bit of benefit even if you're. Well I suppose if you're looking to get someone on a demo. Right. That's the hardest sell in my opinion. You know the headline you can use to that email is time for a chat or you know, you could do like a personalization synesthesia brackets. Corey You know, like that sort of thing. Yeah, a little bit of that. But there's very limited things. And when you're doing a long nurture, you know, what I find really beneficial is you can do really clickbaity stuff. You know, as I said, one of the most popular is David Beckham speaking ten languages, which is a content they made three years ago, which is relevant. But it's like it draws in attention. It's like, Oh, they made David Beckham speak ten languages. Okay, cool. Um, and so, you know, you don't even need to worry about the CTA almost. It's literally just we exist, We do cool things. We're here when you need us.

Joaquin - [47:06 - 47:07]

Yeah.

Corey - [47:07 - 47:08]

Um, yeah.

Ali - [47:08 - 48:06]

And I guess if you have a really good content hub or knowledge center or something for people who can navigate all of because let's say someone is looking for a service, you know, it doesn't take them six months to decide. They need a they need something and they are in a research phase. Then in a week, in a two weeks, some some a timeline, something like that, they want to find the right service. And then if you are if you're lucky and you're sending out something to them, email, nurture or anything or an ad they are watching that is relevant to them during that period of time and then it leads them towards a basically a page or a multiple pages even that they can access to anything that they want. You can get get those content as well. And then this way they they they can do their research on you. And if there is not a really good example.

Tom - [48:06 - 48:20]

Of kind of mess is yeah. A website which is a bit of a mess because there's lots of links, there's lots of content. Um, but that's great, as you say. So people can choose their own path through and then come back to it and then come back to it and then ignore it for six months and come back to it and yeah, and.

Ali - [48:20 - 48:38]

Then you can track as well. If you have the, the right tool, you can track if they are doing those. So if they are using your content and if they are, then you know, okay, this is this person probably is in the right phase. So we need to take care of it. Take care of it. Yeah.

Tejal - [48:38 - 49:22]

That's a really good point, Ali. That's what we use. We use what we class as an interest score and it's tracked across like websites, tracked across emails, it's tracked across downloaded content and it's like you say, it's not so that they get the same kind of structured or like the same structure. It's so that they get something that's relevant to them. So if they show interest in finance, they'll get something finance related. If a couple of weeks later they click a few more times on the website and actually look at air, they'll get air related. I think it's a lot more fun. Like, right, Like marketing for me is fun because you get to try lots of different things. You get to try a lot of different channels and it's kind of throwing everything and going and we make a customer journey and using.

Joaquin - [49:22 - 49:24]

Them using.

Tom - [49:24 - 50:05]

A large language model or GPT four or something like this. You absolutely can interpret that information. So feed in information about what articles they've read on your website, what emails they've opened or whatever, and then ask it to recommend some other stuff. Really low friction. And you don't, because in a traditional method of marketing automation platform, that would be really quite hard to hard code, all the conditionality and the flows and whatever. But don't think you have to do that anymore. You can just feed the information into GPT four and say this. This person has read all this stuff and this is today's date. You always have to tell it the today's date so it knows how recently it's all this stuff. And then you can here's all the resources that you could send them. What do you recommend?

Joaquin - [50:05 - 50:12]

Yeah. And this is my my tone of voice. Please write it like me and not like a bot.

Joaquin - [50:12 - 50:14]

Yeah, yeah.

Joaquin - [50:14 - 50:34]

Yeah. Well, which are other technology tools, guys? Apart from the classics that don't know. Marketo, HubSpot. Are you using something? I don't know, in the last month that you could recognize? Well, yes. This is something new. Something cool that I'm trying. Uh, do you have any kind of examples?

Tejal - [50:34 - 51:50]

I don't have an example for this for my current job or within the last month, but I can say that in my previous job when I worked in events, we use Reddit. We did promotion on some Reddit. We got into some of the subreddits and started talking about our events specifically for that is the generative one we did because obviously people who are interested in it are probably going to be interested in a wide range of technology. And we did an AMA and it went down really well. Like people were really interested to hear our chief research officer talk about kind of what generative AI is, what it means for events, what it means for companies. So and that was a really cool thing that's almost sort of missed that that element of trying find new technology. Because I think in my current role there's not as much scope to do. So, um, but I definitely, I enjoy all of that kind of what channels and also keeping an eye on upcoming channels. So like obviously TikTok isn't what is upcoming anymore, but you've also got threads. Is threads ever going to take off? I'm sitting here waiting for the kind of interest to go, Is it going to be a thing? Is it not going to be a thing which is part of being a marketer? You just sit and watch and go, What's the latest trend and how can we jump on it?

Ali - [51:50 - 52:33]

I guess Tom had a very good point on using GPT because we are also using it a lot on our projects and we are building a new new tool as a lead magnet using GPT four with prompt engineering to create the content based on the based on the entries that the user provide. So it's really cool. I mean, GPT four and these generative AI is in general, you can do a lot of good things with it. I mean, for content creation, they are, they are really good. And I'm talking about the automation of the creating contents and you don't need to.

Speaker: 9 - [52:33 - 52:35]

You know, give.

Ali - [52:35 - 52:40]

It a prompt. It can generate the prompt also itself. It's really cool.

Joaquin - [52:40 - 52:53]

Yeah. You still need to do a hard thing of meeting someone and taking notes and giving a good input. But of course you can automate a lot of things with large language models.

Joaquin - [52:53 - 52:54]

I came across.

Tom - [52:54 - 53:12]

Tome, I thought that was quite good. T o m e dot. I think it's dot or something. Yeah. Tome dot app. That was good. So it was probably the closest I've come to being able to copy and paste in a document and for it to output a web page or copy and paste in a document, ask it to output a deck.

Joaquin - [53:12 - 53:15]

And it's kind of not terrible.

Tom - [53:15 - 53:17]

Yeah, it's okay. Have you.

Ali - [53:17 - 53:18]

Used Claude?

Tom - [53:18 - 53:21]

Claude? Yeah, have used Claude.

Ali - [53:21 - 53:37]

Claude is also really good because you can attach a foil and then it's you can attach, have the limit. You can attach a word. Yeah. And then you can ask, ask for abstract or something. Yeah. It's really good.

Tom - [53:37 - 53:42]

You can copy and paste in The Great Gatsby famously the entire novel because it has such a long prompt input. Yeah.

Joaquin - [53:42 - 53:45]

Yes. I was also.

Tejal - [53:45 - 54:19]

Watching summarizes things and helps you. That helps you to generate stuff. I've used that in the past where you can put in some information and it'll either like summarize it for you, which is really handy if you've got a massive brochure to read and you don't have the time to read it. And it can also help you write stuff if you want. I don't think it's as good as chapter in terms of writing content. It's a bit more refined, but don't think it's got the quite same skills to pick up on your tone. But I've also used Canva for social media posts, and I think Canva works better for social media posts than Chappati because it really nails kind of your captions and stuff like that.

Speaker: 4 - [54:19 - 54:22]

Yeah. Interesting.

Joaquin - [54:22 - 54:29]

I've never heard of using Canva for social media posts. Do you mean writing the writing the text for you?

Tejal - [54:29 - 54:30]

Yes. They've got.

Joaquin - [54:30 - 54:30]

It based on.

Tejal - [54:30 - 54:35]

A function where they'll like, write the text for you. Um. Very cool.

Speaker: 4 - [54:35 - 54:38]

Yeah, cool. Yeah.

Joaquin - [54:38 - 55:12]

Well, thank you so much. I think we coming to. To an end. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time. I think what we can get from this and I think it was pretty obvious at the beginning of the conversation is that understanding your audience is how you best can nurture them. And and you've given us great techniques and best practices that you've been implementing in your jobs. So thank you so much for your time and we will be in touch soon.