Growth Marketing Advice for B2B Marketers👇

Last week we had a BLAST at Marketing Island, Revenueland Edition.

Breaking down Growth Tactics for B2B Marketers with my Marketing Besties, August Noble, Aidan Brannigan, and Liz Spektor.

But since I know not all of you were able to make it, I wanted to rewind the clock and share some of the tips and tricks Liz Spektor broke down last Thursday.

So here are 5 of the VERY BEST growth Marketing tips from Liz. 🔥👇

1. Where Do You I Start?

“When you start a new job as a Marketer responsible for growth, the question comes up about where to start.

The first thing to do is immerse myself into everything around the customer. The pain points, what industries are you winning in?

Do a full audit of the business, try to understand every dimension of where you’re winning, where you’re losing, why you’re winning, why you’re losing (RETWEET). 

Understanding all of those things before even starting to come up with a plan of what channels you’ll be on is IMPORTANT.

Then when it comes to selecting channels it’s very much about who is in your core audience, beyond what industries they’re in or job titles. Look at their demographics, are most of them male or female, what are their age ranges? (Don’t be everywhere, be where your target audience hangs out.)

Starting to think from that lens, especially at a product-led company is really important because it’s very similar to DTC in the way where you want to match the channels you select to the demographics of your audience and how they’re buying. 

You must understand that before throwing spaghetti at a wall.

2. Good vs. Traditional Marketing:

What truly separates traditional Marketing from GOOD Marketing is understanding the demographic of your audience and picking the ad placements that are unique.

Not unique like a cool LinkedIn placement with great creative, think outside of those channels.

Over the weekend, I purchased Bose headphones, and in the box there was a discount for Audible.

The connection there between Audible knowing somebody who purchases headphones is going to be more primed to listening to an audiobook in the first 10 days of purchase, that’s the moment of Marketing where you’re like this is a connection that makes sense (absolutely LOVE this anecdote).

I’m always looking for moments like that to plug into whatever brands I’m working on and finding those delightful moments to create partnerships with people in places where they’re ready to start using Apollo outside of just using LinkedIn and Facebook, which all your competitors can use.

That’s the secret sauce, especially when you’re talking about a saturated market. 

3. How to Convert on Paid Channels with Short Form:

This is going to be a huge PSA to my B2B Marketers. Go look at what DTC brands are doing. 

No matter if you’re a product led company like us at Apollo, a sales led company, regardless of industry, follow the DTC brands that you love and see what they’re doing with short form video on paid channels.

(DTC is usually 2-3 years ahead of B2B and makes a great place to take inspo from!!)

The main thing for a short form video is the hook, the first 3-5 seconds if they’re not interesting or captivating to your audience you’ve lost them. This is true across ANY platform.

Spend a lot of time stepping outside of the box of B2B, doing your own research across the board and focusing on those 3-5 sections.

And this is also where I get the question of how much video do I need?

Do you need 30 videos a month? 

This is where doubling down on iterations is really important. Let’s say you have one really good video that describes what your product does.

If you hire a freelance editor, you can swap out the first 3-5 seconds of your video and create 10 or 20 variations of that one core video, but with five different hooks testing different messages.

That within itself is a very powerful learning tool because you can understand what hook pulls your audience in. And then based on those learnings, double down on what your next set of videos is going to be. 

So when you think about the quantity of videos, it’s less important to have

hundreds of beautifully produced short form videos and more of a focus on the actual hooks and creating iterations of one really solid video. 

4. Don’t Get Trapped in this Mindset:

Everyone’s competing for the same audience. 

The part to me that is just so crucial for B2B Marketers to know, is stop creating this distinction of the consumer and their personal life versus their professional life.

If you think about someone even on LinkedIn, how many times have you scrolled LinkedIn at home as a social network? (Lol now that you say that, A LOT.) 

It’s not like we’re only using LinkedIn at work or only in the state of mind when we’re on LinkedIn to do work related things. 

Historically we’ve been very much as B2B Marketers taught, “This is professional, we have to do it this way.”

We don’t take notes from DTC, but we should. 

I think the bridges are starting to mend more strongly and it’s very obvious now that we need to meet consumers in the same way that they’re met with other products that they’re purchasing and Marketers need to make creative decisions based on how they’re purchasing other things as well. 

5. Marketing and Sales Alignment:

I will preface this by saying that it is very different from company to company. 

Everyone talks about sales and Marketing alignment, but then putting it into actual practice is much harder. 

From my lens of running growth Marketing and being on demand-gen teams, I think the biggest part of that connection is having sales feel involved in the process of campaigning. 

That’s where I feel like a lot of Marketers get defensive and say sales is not closing the leads that I’m sending them, sales is saying they’re low quality.

It becomes a little bit more of a battle environment versus a collaborative environment (which NO ONE wants).

Bring your SDRs into the fold, they’re the ones on the ground level listening to your prospects, speaking to your prospects, making those cold calls, understanding what sticks and what doesn’t.

Once you bring them into the picture you will have such a quick feedback loop with messaging. You can pass the five hooks you’ve created for your short form videos to your SDR team and ask them based on what they have heard from prospects if they think it will land.

(And with that you have a feedback loop within minutes.)

A really important element of that is making them feel involved in the messaging process.

Another big thing that I’ve always heard in my career has been “Marketing’s not doing a great job reaching the accounts that we want to close.” 

To solve this, involve your sales team in the list building process. 

I have a specific list serving across multiple channels, I have the same kind of setup happening on the outbound side where I’m working with our sales team and they’re going after a smaller subset of that list and reaching out to them as an additional touch point.”