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’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!
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’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.
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.
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!”
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!