Beyond MQLs: Is B2B marketing afraid of brand building?

In addition to a familiar Brew Digital voice , we've also gone to one of our partner companies , collecti , to speak with their performance marketing manager . Hayden Woods-Williams , digital Marketing Team Leader at Brew Digital , is chairing the discussion , so I will hand it over to him for more formal introductions , but I do hope you enjoy what they have to say .

Do you think brand has always been a part of that or do you think it's a new conversation ?

You know , particularly on paid , we've always had the concept of a cold layer audience that we need to reach and engage with and then remarketing to these people to bring them further down a funnel you know the funnel is a new concept the flywheel , any way you want to look at it . That all has existed .

But I think what is new or newer certainly is the idea of tying brand to those end results , and that is probably more commonly now referred to in some ways as that demand generation strategy . And how we think about the need for brand to be able to prove itself , I think , has certainly changed .

There's definitely an entire podcast right just on breaking that down but ultimately , yes , I think that , especially in b2b , where the deals are so complicated , the number of people involved in these buying committees is is only growing and the amount of time it takes to close the deals is only growing as well that we're able to start looking at how important it

is that your brand is trusted by people in those committees , and the declining performance of things like nqls tells us that the old strategies that we've been relying on aren't necessarily working , and there's research that backs it up . You know you have harvard business review that 90 the b2b buyers buy from a brand that was on their day one short list .

So how else do you get yourself on that short list than doing brand building ?

Team Marketing is so much more than just providing the sales team with an influx of people they can call and without that kind of fundamental brand building activity which may not be directly attributable to lead one and you can follow that all the way through to revenue Without that function you're not creating enough Chris mentioned it but you're not creating the

demand . I was on a webinar recently with G2 , and they were talking again very similar statistics that you said , chris , that actually within a buying group , I think it's something like 80% of the buying group need to be aware of the brand already when it gets introduced to the buying cycle for them to even consider it .

If only one person within that buying committee knows of that brand , you're just not going to get past the first stage of procurement or that first stage of selection .

yet . So the messaging is just not aligned and and we see it time and time again with clients that they just jump straight into their usps and it's like that's enough to to get the the person to inquire and then we'll convert them . But it's not because if you haven't established a need for your product or all , it doesn't matter how good your USPs are .

If the need is not there , you're just going to miss a trick .

So how can companies you know in the b2b space have brand activity but still drive those leads that sales and kind of cro'ss and CEOs want ?

That's not moving the needle for me . That's not doing anything .

So actually , if we start aligning ourselves more with revenue metrics and doing these brand-led activities you know demand generation strategies that provide value , that in a year's time when that person is in market in our funnel and having a conversation , if they're then referencing the fact that these are the things that led me to your company and here are all of

the things that can help persuade that deal you reverse engineer those funnels and you start to see that the brand building and interactions you were doing a year , 18 months ago actually did have some sort of impact .

the expectations of sales and marketing in order to get the the most out of um . Well , brands demand gen um and that kind of feedback loop . How can marketers work closer to sales without it being this ? You know , this is a sales sale or this is a marketing led sale ? How do you get out of that way of thinking ?

The growth in those teams , those those need to be aligned with marketing now , and even outbound , is tied a lot more to marketing than it used to be .

So I think simply just by viewing them less as separate functions with different objectives and more as teams with shared objectives and marketing has a responsibility to influence the whole funnel , not just up to mql you start to see that shift .

I generally see there's a shift towards the chief revenue officer position didn't exist 10 years ago and now all of a sudden everyone is being labeled as growth marketers or you've got this office of the CRO and stuff like that and they are kind of leading the charge from a sales perspective and , like I said , treating marketing like it's a lead gen team only .

I think boardrooms just and sales teams and marketing teams just need to trust each other to do what they do . You know marketing is a essential function of a business and it hasn't changed for decades . You know the . The fundamentals of marketing are the same , like what is the product , what is the service in terms of the price ? How do we position it ?

How do we monetize this so we get the the most value out of it place ? Where is it going to get distributed ? And then , on the promotional side of things , how do we create that demand and how do we , how do we kind of drive adoption ? Those are the four P's of marketing . They have never changed .

At the moment , marketing for me is being told to focus on one of those P's , which is the promotion side of things and the rest of it is being asked to be looked at in other teams . That , for me , I think , is where we kind of need to change , is get those fundamentals back in the marketing team .

Let them drive the strategy and then the sales team will benefit from it . Because if you could , if you , if we can create the awareness at the top of the funnel , it will filter down and then , rather than exactly what Chris said , stopping at that MQL point and going here you go , sales team , you know , here's a lead .

That lead is as good as buying a cold email list and giving that to the sales team to call sometimes , because if it stops at that point , where is the further nurturing ? Where is the support that marketing can give the sales team ? It's not just a handoff . Now you call that person and stay in email comms with them .

What else can the marketing team to do support that sales cycle to a conversion ? It's just about getting that unity together rather than siloing and going here's the handoff . Marketing's done this . Sales is job . Now it's how can we create full funnel support really and a lot of metrics ? It's not just always .

Revenue is obviously a key driver for a lot of businesses . But if marketing are only being deemed a success if , if it turns into revenue , that's where it falls down yeah , definitely .

So if you're looking at how much Jim from Collecti has checked out your website and and your tool and only focusing on Jim , you're missing a whole lot of information . Um , now , just thinking about Collecti now , I think I remember you saying to me that you don't actually have a sales team at Collecti , right ?

So we're working with a similar picture of saying , okay , well , these are the people that signed up and tried out the product , what are the things that influenced them to go on to upgrade a trial , take out a paid plan , or even just why do they stay with us for more than a year ? What increases that customer lifetime value ultimately ?

And that's just more data . It's just data from elsewhere , in a different style of funnel , that we need to be able to reflect back on the channels and changes that we're making . And I think that to your you know you mentioned measurement there , hayden that's one of the biggest shifts .

We're all moving away from this idea that there's a perfect picture of data like one-to-one attribution is in the rear view mirror at this stage , and that's perhaps increasingly true when you're looking at products that have marketplaces and convoluted buying journeys . It's not just one lead , as you say , or even one account .

It's who is it within the business that is trying that product and what can you do to enable them to demonstrate value to the other users .

And then we have to be able to bring that back to the earlier stages of marketing , create the right content , create the right resources to help other people see that value as well you mentioned there about um , about you know , one-to-one attribution and full attribution being in the rearview mirror .

isn't the same one as it was six months ago , a year ago , and we don't perhaps communicate that or expect we expect everybody else to understand it as well , and I think that the attribution is one part of that . That we're still asked to be able to say this delivered this exact result , but contextually , you know that has changed .

There's obviously still a case for attribution and the models that we're using is changing . Previously , things like incrementality or marketing mix modeling , which would be used for brand , have been gatekept by big companies that could afford to deploy those resources . But those are are changing , I think , as well .

So some stuff is disappearing and other things are coming in to take its place .

job is being questioned so much you're instantly on the defensive so you never actually tell people what is happening . Reports are numbers in a sheet that people don't necessarily understand , and there is so much power in a consistent , regular update to people senior teams , lower kind of entry-level job employees telling them what is happening in marketing .

And you have external clients that are , so they'll be focused on running their business . They pay you to deal with the marketing part . So , adding in that context , I think , as you say , hayden is incredibly important .

We report on so many metrics to try and prove our worth sometimes and actually , if you're a CEO and you're driving a business forward , do they care how many followers you got on your YouTube channel or on your Instagram feed or that your engagement rate was 5% ? If they don't see that in the bottom line figures , they don't care .

And this is that disconnect and that's why I say we're guilty of it ourselves . We've gone from being a strategic function in a business that is aligned with kind of business goals to trying to prove our worth with metrics that no one else cares about .

So it's about finding that unity again with the different functions within that business , taking it back to being a strategic function , not just a tactical function , and making sure that businesses understand that it's not short-term wins that we're looking for , it's that long-term success and pulling it back to that brand .

Long-term success is built in a solid brand strategy .

I'm kind of going to go straight back to the beginning and I really want to understand whether you think that brand has been ignored too much over the last few years I think one of the things that you need to consider when it comes to judging whether or not it's been ignored is also the stage of the company .

No , probably not , and in that sense , you're not neglecting something . When you're just trying to close your first few customers , you're just doing your go to market and getting things off the ground .

But when it comes to businesses that are now looking at their lead pipeline and saying , why isn't this converting , why aren't we winning when it comes to these final stages , then the answer we seem to keep coming back to is that , yes , the brand has been neglected .

We've been too focused on that tactical element and not able to look strategically at the longer term . What do we need to be doing to make sure that we're winning ? A year , 18 months away from that ?

You know , ultimately , at the end of the day , we're all marketing to someone , whether or not they're sitting behind a desk in their office or whether or not they're on the bus . You know we're all trying to to kind of push that message . But what b2c do very well is that focus on brand and b2b .

I think , in my personal opinion and not all of the market , but a lot of b2b businesses have been so driven by their own product or their own service that everything is always about look at our features , look at this , look at that . It's never about aligning that to the marketplace or pushing that message . Like I said , right , the kind of style .

It's never been about pushing that message of creating a demand within the market that you're after .

It's always about how can we convert people that will use our tool and I think companies that I see that do it well and we use them and we're quite close because they're a partner of our parent company but , like mondaycom , are one of those b2b brands that have driven brand beyond anything .

Like you know the name mondaycom before , you know what they do and they're very good at driving their brand wherever they can . Even to the point and chris , you might be able to talk on this in when it comes into kind of performance channels , they're very aggressive about attacking competitors , um , and they drive their brand there .

a position now that they're broadening their market and they've identified that actually they just want to be synonymous with the day of the week , which is such a broad place to be at but ultimately allows them to just capture so much interest .

But there's brand that's important much earlier in the business life cycle , I think as well , when you're just trying to be associated with a specific category , one icp , one thing that you actually do . I'm a performance marketer , but that doesn't have to be paid .

You know there's a lot of work that can be done , whether that's founder led things , building the personal brands internally and externally that align your business with the people you're trying to sell , to align you as a person with the businesses you're trying to sell to , and the channels that we operate on rewards that now as well .

So there's ways to do brands that don't involve you spending a hundred thousand a month , bidding on a day of the week , even though for a business like monday at their stage , you know that's clearly effective and the fact that we are talking about them now proves that it has some sort of influence yeah , I remember sitting on a webinar once with mondaycom and

hearing the budget that they had for those early campaigns . is is just mind-blowing read somewhere once that they spent at least 80 percent of their last raise on paid advertising , which might have just been a blog that needs fact-checked , but they're .

Have you ever been in the position where you've seen ignoring brands really , really impact results for the company that you're working for or working with ?

So there's far more examples of companies doing it right because you are aware of who they are , and I think that's kind of it's always going to be a close to home question , because if you're in a business that you know is at that point in time where the strategy is based on let's face it MQLs and that's the only kind of rationale in there , you know that

because you're in the trenches with them .

It's that if you're in that position and you look at your own company and you say shit , we're not investing in brands and we're seeing conversions drop , you should probably look at your marketing mix and invest in a place like that . That's my tip to take away from this .

Okay , to wrap us up , I want to hear , if possible , a personal story of a brand you've worked with or worked for , where investing in brand has really increased and improved the performance of the , the actual revenue and bottom line yeah , sure , I'm , I'm happy to start with that .

us stand out more . But earlier on last year we started looking at reverse engineering , the things that people were using in the product in order to better position us earlier to providing value .

They started introducing templates into mosaic as a product and we now drive huge volumes of traffic through our website , through our brand pages , and get collected in front of these users much earlier before they're starting a trial or trying the actual product itself .

And we see that that feature that was developed in collaboration between product and marketing because there was demand and it increases activations , is now resulting in more trials and by bringing paid , organic , other channels traffic to those pages where we provide upfront value through templates .

They're very practical , they can be taken away , we get more people using the product and that's revenue .

Adobe is a very well-recognized brand and drives their brand forwards based on you know , the product kind of sells itself because they use their own users content to show you how powerful the tool is .

We had an example and this kind of talks about actually when you're in a marketplace where there's already well-established players and the importance of brand , where there's already well-established players and the importance of brand .

So I worked with a startup , but basically from inception through to funding , through to launch , and that was a takeaway app and at the time the takeaway app had produced features and were speaking to restaurateurs and takeaway owners about the struggles they have with Just Eat and the struggles being that Just Eat kind of monopolized the market .

They charge extortionate fees to the restaurant owners in terms of the percentage of each sale but because they've monopolized the market and have now created a need for the consumer that they don't find the restaurant directly , they use just eat because of the convenience , the restauranters can do nothing about it .

They they're kind of almost subservient , to just eat in order to keep revenue . We worked with a business that was putting the power back in the hands of the restaurant owners in the sense that they paid a flat monthly fee , so they didn't have to pay a percentage of each order .

They paid a flat monthly fee and at the time we had features in the app such as splitting the bill , so if you're a party and you order a pizza , you can split the bill . There was lots of investment going into branding because the restaurant people or the restaurant owners were on board , because we're playing into their hands .

But the worry from the restaurant owners was how are you going to take market share from just eat ? Because it's great that we pay you a flat monthly fee , but until you can provide us with a steady stream of orders that we can replace just eat , we're not going to kind of completely switch over to you .

So we did a kind of a locational launch that started in the Midlands , in a certain area , and then we started to do some B2B trade shows , and this is the issue when you are a smaller business trying to build up brand .

We were doing the right things , so much so that Just Eat took notice of what we were doing and then completely blew us out of the water , because any advertising that we were doing , all of the features that we had created within three months all of a sudden appeared on the Just Eat app and within maybe six months of launching of this startup idea had just

completely vanished . So I guess the lesson in that is we were doing the right things in building a brand , but but sometimes , if your market is already monopolized you know we use monday as an example you would find it very hard to go up and compete against them . I did a very quick google search on those numbers , chris .

In 2021 , they spent $200 million on video marketing , or the advertising budget , which represented 95% of the company's revenue . That is from an article on Google that was dated 9th of January . We would have to double check that . I am not committing to those numbers , but I'm just reading it off of Google .

So , yeah , the point is there is think about you have to understand that market . You think about now how Uber again is in that market . You're going to have to have a very strong product and backing if you're going to enter a market where it's already kind of monopolized or saturated , even if you have that investment in brand in the first place rich .

You can put as much money into the brand as you like , but if the service , the product , whatever you're actually saying doesn't have a differentiator and isn't good enough , then that's 225 million dollars down the drain on video or your other channels we will wrap things up there .

They have to work together . Anyway , that is all we have time for . Thank you so much for listening . We really hope you've found some useful snippets and there are a few things that you can take away and implement today . We love that you've made it this far through the listen .

We love making this content and would really love it if you could share this content with colleagues , enemies , friends , whoever . Make sure to check out our past episodes , subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts , and we'll see you on the next one . I've been Hayden and these are the Masters of the Universe .

Tom is going to hate me because I did not stick to time at all , but hey , what are you going to do , tom ?