B2B Growth Marketing – HOW TO GROW

Today’s guest is a BIG SHOT. Head of Growth Marketing at Apollo to be exact.

Meet Liz Spektor, a creative demand gen leader who is a specialist when it comes to connecting products to customers and applying data-driven decisions to your digital and OOH campaigns.

In other words, SHE JUST GETS GROWTH (and she’s shared her B2B Marketing growth strategies for Q4 with me on the pod).

Here’s what she had to say in her own liiiiiightly edited words (plus keep your eyes out for a resource just for you towards the end of the email).

1. Where Do You 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 yourself into everything around the customer. The pain points, what industries are you currently 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. (The best Marketers ASK QUESTIONS FIRST.)

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

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?

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 ad placements that are unique (say it LOUDER for the people in the back).

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

Last weekend I bought 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.

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 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, 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.

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 seconds. (If you can’t put a juicy hook together, then the video topic might not be captivating enough.)

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

You don’t have a huge budget, do you need 30 videos a month? 

NOOOO. 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 tool because you can understand what hook pulls your audience in. 

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 (retweet). 

4. Don’t Get Trapped in this Mindset:

Everyone’s competing for the same audience. 

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

If you think about someone even on LinkedIn, how many times have you scrolled LinkedIn at home as a social network? 

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

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 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.

Marketers need to make creative decisions based on how they’re purchasing other products and apply them to B2B. 

5. Marketing and Sales Alignment:

Marketing and sales alignment is very different from company to company. 

Everyone talks about 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 (too real).

It becomes a little bit more of a battle environment versus a collaborative environment.

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. (Okay read that again bc I LOVE IT.)

And with that you have a feedback loop within minutes.

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. (This is a MUST, but there’s a handful of other vital steps you need to take to reach MORE of the accounts you’re looking for. I broke them down here in a report with RollWorks!!)”