Today in Digital Marketing - 154: Special Episode: B2B Digital Marketing in a Post-Pandemic World

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

It's a stat holiday here in British Columbia, so in lieu of a regular show, here's the full conversation I had this week with Mark Emond. Mark is CEO of DemandSpring.com. Also be sure to read his great piece in MarketingProfs.com called "B2B Marketing After COVID-19: What Changes and What Doesn't?" -- Produced by engageQ.com. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Email [e-mail] or visit engageQ.com/contact Help Spread the Word! • Review this podcast at ratethispodcast.com/today • Click bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish Advertising: Reach ~1,000 Digital Marketers • Classifieds ($20) — engageQ.com/classifieds • Mid-Rolls — engageQ.com/podcastads TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Tod’s web site: TodMaffin.com • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • Instagram: instagram.com/todmaffin • Facebook: facebook.com/tmaffin • TikTok: tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Mixer: mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy • Xbox Gamertag: Radio#9573 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Hello and happy holiday Monday. at zensurance.com called B2B Marketing After COVID-19, What Changes and What Doesn't. And I thought I'd get him in here to chat a little bit more about that. He joins me from his home in Ottawa. Hi, Mark. Hey, Todd. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me on today. Well, thank you. You know, we see a lot of consumer marketing folks changing their messaging in the last few months, sometimes a little abruptly. But I don't see a lot of B2B agencies or firms changing things up. Am I wrong there? No, you know, I think most B2B firms realize that, you know, they have longer sales cycles, that, you know, now is a time to

serve more than to sell. I would say that's the change that we're seeing more in B2B is that most organizations realize that it's tough to drive bigger deals, definitely tough to drive transformational deals. Where they can build affinity and loyalty is by serving over selling. And that, you know, with their existing clients, those that they take that posture with, that they're there to support and to, you know, help stand up as best they can in this time is how they're going to win, you know, to some degree in the short term, but absolutely in the long term. Can you give me some examples of how B2B firms are doing that, making that transition from selling to serving? Yeah, I think a lot of it comes through content, right? It's identifying how they can help educate, how they can help their clients pivot in light of the current environment.

And that comes from thought leadership and expertise, content. And it could be through simple ways, helping to, you know, even identify how they can support the employees within their customer base. You know, we've seen a lot of examples of puzzles, of coloring books being created by B2B firms. By B2B firms, really? Yep. B2B, you know, even B2C, you know, we have examples of clients who we work with who, in various ways, we're even, as an organization, Demand Spring, we run virtual yoga within our organization. We've been doing it for a couple of years. We've got some certified yoga instructors on our staff. We've offered better to our clients. So it's a way to's a way to, you know, in many ways,

looking at helping to look after the health of their clients, employees, the children of their employees, you know, whatever ways that they can, you know, just kind of come together. And I think what we're seeing, which is has been wonderful to see much like in society overall, is that people are putting community and a helping hand in front of commerce. And we are even seeing that in B2B, which is fantastic. Yeah. Let me take you back in time a bit. In your article in Marketing Profs, which is how I found you originally a couple of weeks ago, you noted that about 10 years ago or so, Harvard Business Review did a study of corporate performance after that recession. What did we learn then that might serve as a bellwether for today?

Well, I think it's, yeah, it was a great article. It really traced the article for folks who didn't see my, or the study for folks who didn't see my article that summarized it, went back across four recessions. Now this was as of 20, you know, the 2008 financial services led recession. And it looked back for, through four previous recessions and it found that overall organizations who found the right balance between things to cut and things to keep were ones that fared better. And importantly, one of those areas to keep and to proportionally spend more on was marketing. If you maintain a presence in the market, if you maintain engagement, if you can show strength and stability in a declining market, you tend to outperform your competitors both during the recession and certainly for the longer term after the recession. That ability to really project

presence and strength and engagement and stability and serve with a strong message in market and a strong presence in market helps you both in the short term and the longer term. Yeah. You quote a saying that I'm quite fond of as well in your piece, in good times, you should advertise. In bad times, you must advertise. Yeah. Well, there are a lot of good reasons to do so beyond what I just said as well.

The fact is that there's less noise in the market, so you tend to stand out. And traditionally, paid media, you know, not surprisingly declines in price point in a recession. And we've seen that already in the last two months where the cost of Google AdWords, for example, have declined and the performance has increased, right? So there's less noise, prices are going down, and you have the ability to shine better in a time like this.

You know, what's interesting as I hear you talk is when I'd sort of scheduled this interview with you, I had thought, as in the case of most sort of marketing exercises, that there's a real difference in terms of B2C versus B2B, that the type of marketing, the scale of marketing, the pace of marketing, the decision flow, that they're quite different. And everything so far that you've said in our brief time together, it sounds like B2C. Well, so there are obviously absolute differences, right? Especially from B2B to non-considered purchases in B2C. Obviously, the length of a sales cycle, the number of individuals involved in the buying process is much different in a B2B buying process than a B2C transactional sale.

But one thing that B2B has done, I think, tremendously well, much better certainly in the last five to seven years than the first 15 to 17, 18 years of my career anyways, is we have increasingly recognized an amazing thing that B2B buyers are actually humans. They have emotions and you can tap into these emotions. And so, you know, we have seen B2B organizations step out from behind their well-manicured brands in the last five to seven years and really reveal themselves to be very human, to show empathy, to use humor, to show fear, to really engage with, you know, their B2B

stakeholders in a way that is much more human and that is much more emotion-driven and isn't all rational product features, capabilities, and things that the rational part of our brain would hold appeal to. And do you think that'll stick? Do you think that'll stick through this? Absolutely. I mean, I think it's a trend that, you know, was happening long before COVID-19 came about. And I think if anything, COVID-19 has further made B2B brands more human, right? It's recognized that you need to step out from behind the brand, that, you know, human faces

of the company, you know, acting and speaking in a way that is compassionate and that shows empathy and that reflects the individuality of the people within a brand is really important to connecting and engaging. There's been a lot of studies. Google and the Corporate Executive Board did a study three or four years ago that we cite often with our clients that showed that the role of personal values is actually more important in B2B buying than professional values. If you can appeal to a buying team's aspirations, their fears as individuals, what a buying process can do for their careers, and you can build affinity and loyalty at a human level, that has a bigger impact on critical purchase values, such as to buy or not to buy, to pay a premium price, to retain and renew a B2B client. So I think it's here for the long run.

Why do you think it's been so hard for B2B companies to work in that emotional and human space? You know, I think it's fear. I think for the longest time, B2B brands, you know, there was this, there was just this trend that a B2B brand had to be careful and cautious and considerate that, you know, there was, there was a concern from a legal standpoint that showing and from a corporate a legal standpoint that showing, and from a corporate communication standpoint, that showing too much of the human nature of the brand went against brand values, went against brand guidelines,

and was not something that a B2B company should do. There was this posture, if you will, that we're a serious purveyor of whatever product or service selling to serious businesses that have serious buying teams and procurement people. And it has to be a serious conversation. It can't reflect humor. It shouldn't reflect empathy. It needs to reflect rational buying proof points, not emotional ones. And, you know, I think we've, you know, through trial and error and the evolution of marketing and studies such as the Google one and innovative voices in the market like Anne Handley and Jay Baer, you know, we've learned that that's not the case.

Yeah. Inside the sort of universe of B2B marketing, in addition to the B2B agencies and service providers, in addition to the actual organizations that do that work, the sort of the third constellation in that universe are the MarTech firms, the SAAS software providers, you know, that service those organizations. How do you see them faring post-COVID? So there are 8,000 MarTech vendors out there right now. I think there will be certainly some of them that the capital runway will run out. And I suspect, given the economic impact of what we're going through, that venture capital financing, private equity financing will not flow as freely as before. So I think you're going to see probably a culling of some of the firms that are out there. I think you'll see a strengthening of some of the strong players, folks like Adobe and Salesforce, for example.

HubSpot obviously have the wherewithal to withstand this timeframe, and they've built a great vision and set of technologies. But I think you'll also see a real flourishing of innovation coming from this as well. We tend to see, if you look back on the last two cycles of recessions in 2001, companies like Salesforce and Eloqua that was later bought by Oracle that really was the pioneer in marketing automation, they emerged from the 2001 dot-com bubble and burst. In 2008, firms like Marketo and HubSpot and Hootsuite emerged during those times. So you tend to see when there's market disruption and economic disruption,

entrepreneurialism we know, flourishes during those times. People lose their jobs and they turn to entrepreneurism. Not everyone, certainly, but some people do. And that's where innovation flourishes. So I think we're setting up. I think this timeframe is going to see a culling of the folks who, you know, 8,000, there's definitely some, as I said in my article, some wheat and some chaff in 8,000 vendors. I think you're going to see a culling of the chaff. I think you'll see the continued strengthening of the heavyweights. But I also think you'll see the next class of innovation come from this time.

Of the group that survives the culling, I'm not speaking of the big Adobe and HubSpot that, you know, have the capital to survive this. But of that group of the smaller B2B SAAS tools that survived the culling, what do they have in common? Why does that group that will survive two years from now, when we look back on it, why did that group survive? I mean, I think it comes down to value, right? I think there are some, you know, great, amazing technologies that provide tremendous value, you know, that, you know, folks like Drift, who, you know, you could argue are making their way towards heavy weight status, right? Another smaller vendors, Path Factory is a good one based out of Toronto,

Canada. They've got a great technology that helps their clients nurture clients through a strong B2B buying process in a very targeted, relevant way. To me, there is tremendous value in technologies that I think is going to drive their relevance moving forward and their ability to continue to operate and to gain clients even in an environment that might be tough, because of the value they bring to clients. You started your career in the mid 90s,

when the Great Recession was still affecting things, you noted in your article that B2B marketing has really benefited from the influx of millennial talent in the last 10 years or so. How do you think the next 10 years will fare for B2B agencies or service providers in terms of recruiting? Well, it's clearly been in the last few years an employee market, right? If you look at prior to the last two months, the level of employment and the ability for people graduating to find great careers and really contribute and people at all stages of their careers to be employed

in opportunities where they're really helping to transform marketing to a large degree. I think we're obviously going to flip to more of an employer's market where we've seen the number of people that have been added to the unemployment ranks in the last couple of months has been astounding. And that's touching, I think, every part of the economy. So I think you're going to see employers, be it on the client side, on the agency side of things, that will be able to pick and choose a little bit more and have the ability to really add great talent to their organization. My hope is that one of the things that comes out of this time is that more and more employers recognize that not being tied to a given market, but being flexible in terms of where they hire from really enables you to add great talent to your organization.

At my company, DemandSpring, we've had a work-from-anywhere policy now since I founded the company in 2012. We have people across North America. We've enabled younger people, millennials, who have had an itch to go and live in France or the UK to go and do that and continue working for us or to go and live and work by ski hills to do that. And that's enabled us to find great talent, keep great talent and drive retention, which has really helped service our clients. So I think if employers are really open to widening the aperture in terms of where they hire from, they will find great talent over the next little while, given the dynamics that have shifted. Many of the people who listen to the podcast are in senior roles, they're obviously in digital marketing roles. So if you had, if you were paid

a million dollars to sit down with a senior VP of digital marketing of a B2B agency or firm, and you only had 60 seconds to get through what you wanted to get through to them, what would you tell that executive in terms of surviving COVID in terms of how to position their B2B firm for the next five years or so? To me, it's focus. It's got to come down to focus, right? In going through what we're going through right now and coming out of it. And obviously, I think many marketers have seen a reduction in the resources available to them, whether or not it's people or marketing budget, or even just availability of target audiences that you've got to be more and more focused than ever before, right?

Identify your industries and your target accounts within those industries that are most relevant, that have the greatest propensity to buy at this time and as we go through this. And then it's how do you orchestrate your firm for delivering highly relevant conversations to them? To me, the ability to connect and engage with somebody sits today at the intersection of data and content. And we all know that there is so much noise coming at us in our inboxes, our social media channels, on the web, when we drive down highways, billboards, that you've got to client profile for the current time and your target personas for the current time. And then really make sure you have your data house in order and your content to support those target audiences so that you can have really targeted, relevant conversations that get amplified at scale through technology without losing the humanity in our communication. Going back to the earlier part of our conversation, we've got to figure out a way to become more and more human in our communication. And while we need to scale with technology, we've got to find a way to speak in a very human voice at the same time.

What does DemandSpring do, Mark? We're a B2B revenue marketing consultancy. So we work with B2B organizations in a variety of industries, technology, financial services, and others from high growth, earlier stage organizations to a lot of Fortune 500s to really enable them to transform their marketing practices to deliver against the top line requirements the organization has. So we're helping them better understand the buyer journey and buyer personas to optimize their demand system, how they take leads in, manage them over to a business development or a sales team. We help them build content strategies and we help them implement the technologies that drive engagement at scale. And what sort of size company and type of company do you end up providing the most value?

I would say we provide value to clients ranging from organizations who are earlier stage, but who are committed to transformation. We work with companies who have enough financing and a large enough team that they really understand that transformation and putting in place practices that drive really targeted high engagement throughout the buyer journey is something that is needed. Right up to, we do a lot of work with large organizations, the BNY Mallins, the Fidelities of the World, the Iron Mountains, the Cannons, the Akamai's, Staples. You know, the common thread for us is marketers who want to transform and really be highly relevant and drive engagement to buyers throughout the buyer journey that drives conversion to pipeline and revenue.

For those who are really interested in being really strategic and contributing to the top line and the necessary strategy, process, practice, and technology change that comes from that. Those are the ones that get us excited and get us out of bed in the morning. Mark, how do people reach you if they wanted to follow up and find out more about DemandSpring?

They can just email me at mark at DemandSpring, M-A-R-K at DemandSpring.com or go to our website, DemandSpring.com. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, thanks, Todd. Great speaking with you today. So that's Mark Emond of DemandSpring. Again, check out their site, DemandSpring.com.

That's it for the special holiday edition. I'm Todd Maffin, back tomorrow with The Regular Show.