For our February event we headed to the popular co-working space, Salt Mine. The event focused on strategies and tactics B2B marketers can employ for little to no money. Both presenters are local to Utah as McKay Allen hails from Ivanti (formerly LANDesk) as the Director of Global Digital Marketing while Chad Waite is currently the Marketing Manager at AvantLink. We loved both presentations and think any B2B marketer could try a few of the strategies or tactics mentioned in their presentations.
Chad Waite
Chad’s presentation focused on serendipitous marketing, a key strategy employed in AvantLink’s marketing. The concept of serendipity is one most marketers abhor since it leaves things to chance when marketers like to measure and track ROI on every link, ad, and dollar.
While Chad admitted multiple times throughout his presentation that serendipitous marketing can be a bit of a “black box”, it’s clear that the AvantLink’s brand has benefitted from the six serendipitous tactics Chad outlined in his presentation. Here they are!
- Live Casts (low impact) - Chad’s teams have leverage live broadcasting on a number of channels including social media as well as webinars. While Chad classifies these casts as low impact, he and his team are often encourage and surprised the amount of engagement generated from such little effort.
- Exhibiting at Tradeshows (medium impact) - The best way to measure the ROI of tradeshow to track who you spoke to. However, Chad cites the “peripheral impact” of being at a tradeshow as the biggest payoff.
- Sponsorship (medium impact) - AvantLink took over the sponsorship of the annual Park City trail maps in large part because its employees like trail running. Their employees loved it and even hung pictures of the map up around the office.
- User Conference (high impact) - Five years ago AvantLink started holding yearly user conferences to design to connect affiliates with advertisers. Chad mentioned that was a ripple effect of [good] unintended consequences that have helped them acquire clients.
- Speaking/Education Sessions (high impact) - It’s difficult to plan or predict the benefits from these opportunities, but the benefits are always there according to Chad.
- Fighting Proposed Legislation (high impact) - Since AvantLink serves the affiliate marketing community, it would have been negatively impacted by some proposed legislation in Utah. While the intent of their actions was to defeat the legislation, it helped them earn publicity in their industry, even from their direct competitors, which led to new clients.
Want to know what Chad thinks of this black box? “We know that there has been enough success with this through the occasional validation of our efforts that we continue to invest heavily in serendipitous marketing. That we continue to do these tactics that we may not necessarily know exactly what we’re doing, it’s experimental, or what they are going to yield...”
Chad’s well-put conclusion, “Go ask your CMO for a bunch of budget that can’t be tracked!”
Having so much fun at #SLCSEM. Like OMG. So. Much. Fun. pic.twitter.com/GnuTboca5W
— Darin Berntson - Doc (@iGoByDoc) February 16, 2017
McKay Allen
McKay’s presentation focused on three key ingredients to any marketer’s gameplan: Process, Metrics, and Tactics. McKay pulled from his experience working as a news reporter (he learned some awesome headline writing and deadline hitting skills), marketing at a startup, Convirza, and now Ivanti to share advice applicable to any B2B marketer.
Process
As the Director of Global Digital Marketing at Ivanti, McKay tracks key stages in the sales funnel. He mentioned that collecting data that outlines your process can be difficult at any company, large or small because of too many systems, or not enough of them. Here’s what Ivanti’s sales funnel looks like.
- Prospects
- Leads
- MQL
- Opportunity
- Opportunity 30%
- Opportunity 70%
Metrics
McKay spent a health amount of time talking about metrics and the importance of driving the narrative with data. Here’s our favorite quote from McKay from his presentation: “These are not marketing metrics, they are business metrics!”
- Leads
- Leads per Month
- Cost per Lead
- Lead to Opportunity Rate
- Opportunities
- Cost per Opportunity
- Stagnant Opportunity Rate
- Opportunities by Lead Source
- Leakage Percentage
- Revenue
- Customer Acquisition Cost (loaded or unload)
- Cost to Acquire Customer Recovery Rate
Tactics
Next, McKay dove deep on a few tactics you can use on the cheap to drive leads. Here are our two favorite tactics he mentioned
Content - Content is still king! McKay shared the concept of Big Rock Content where you take a big asset (say a whitepaper or ebook) and repurpose it into a number of blog posts, emails, and ads. McKay also talked about Volume Content and how it’s the best way get Google’s attention by publishing two or three 500-ish word posts each day. The results were pretty fantastic!
Webinars - Webinars don’t have to be some fancy thing and they don’t have to include 50 Powerpoint slides. Just start! Partnering with influencers can help grow your webinar audience quickly.
Process, Metrics, Tactics. The 3 steps for any company. #slcsem
— Robert Brady (@robert_brady) February 16, 2017
As always, thanks to those who were able to attend and see ya next month!