Tools and organisational processes - Powering demand generation with technology
We’re lucky to be tech-rich at Cognism. We regularly use a lot of useful tools to power our marketing strategy.
However, at times when you can’t have all the tools you want, choosing the right tools is so crucial.
So I’ll tell you about my top three choices and how we’ve applied these tools in practice in recent history.
1. Qualified
Now you may notice that technically… Qualified isn’t on the list in my LinkedIn post above. And that’s because it’s a relatively new tool for us at Cognism.
When we started our ABM program (yes we now run ABM - more on that later!), we needed a tool that could help us stop being so ad hoc with how we chose our target accounts.
Rather than having this be led by our sales team, we needed a way to identify the accounts that were most engaged from our target lists to create 1:one campaigns around.
In comes Qualified.
Essentially, Qualified allows us to see which companies are engaging with Cognism, whether that be on our website or via our paid ads. We can then score these visits based on their intent. For example those visiting a pricing page would be scored higher than those visiting a top of funnel blog page.
Qualified also allows you to have custom criteria which can filter these company results. For example, ours will only show us SaaS companies within our sweet spot size range of 1-5k.
Based on this information we can put specific companies into 1:one campaigns. And also monitor how they’re engaging with the content we serve them from this point onwards.
Following the journey all the way along to see when target accounts move into opportunity stage and beyond.
Another great feature that helps us stay up to date with any movements within accounts is their Slack integration, which sends alerts when specific accounts are on your website.
Beyond this ABM use case, Qualified is also the tool that powers our website chat experience. In fact, this was originally the primary purpose for purchasing the technology.
And it’s had a profound impact since we brought this tool on board.
The design and user interface for web visitors is much smoother and better looking - catching people’s attention much more easily.
Now I will admit, with our previous tool, we hadn’t been fully committed to a strategy which could be a contributing factor. But it’s because we found it a bit more difficult to get excited.
Whereas when we made the decision to switch to Qualified, I knew we had to have a plan in place to make the most out of this spend.
It was a complex tool to get used to, but only because there was so much capability with it. You can customise it in any way that you want.
We took this as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start again - this time, getting really involved in making this the best journey it could be.
Once we got into the flow of implementing it, iterating on what we created and assessing the data on its performance, it was clear to us that it was having a huge impact.
It was much more focused around relevant call-to-actions, personalised experiences, and regionalised experiences.
The results speak for themselves. If you take a look at the graph below, you’ll notice an immediate jump in January 2024. That was when we swapped our old tool for Qualified.
Looking at the same month, one year apart, we have increased our MQLs by a whopping 739% by switching from our old chat tool to Qualified.
2. Wynter
Wynter offers a very quick way to get feedback from specific prospects in a market. Such as in a specific industry, company size or job title - for things like website or landing page messaging, or ICP survey insights that can help guide your positioning.
One of the common ways that we use Wynter at Cognism is through surveys. Recently, we ran a survey asking our ICP how they’re thinking about their business and how they’re thinking about their growth.
Our aim was to build a picture about of our ICP’s current needs and pain points. We wanted to build better personas, taking into consideration what really matters to them today and how that can be tied back to the ways that our product helps them.
If you find something interesting during this process and want to dig down into this further, then you could do this with 1:1 interviews. Setting up interviews through Wynter is much faster and easier than doing it manually!
Another incredibly valuable test you can run through Wynter is preference testing. You can show a selection of different value propositions and can quickly get answers on which is the most compelling.
You might have noticed that I’ve used the words ‘quick’, ‘quickly’, ‘faster’ and ‘easier’ a few times here. And that honestly is one of the best parts about this tool. While you can do all of these things without Wynter, what makes this tool so useful is the speed at which you can get the answers you need.
If you did this without Wynter then you’d likely do one of two things:
1. Organise it through an agency
Which can be expensive and time consuming (you’d think it wouldn’t take up your time asking someone else to do it but it does - it takes a lot of project management to get this right…!)
2. Do it yourself
While you could use customers - it generally brings up more responses about features and grumbles about your product versus the wider perspective you’re looking for to answer your questions.
So you could then try to ask prospects by adding a pop up to your website asking prospects to participate in a survey or an interview. But then you run the risk of interrupting prospects in the flow of signing up for your product. Which is obviously not an ideal scenario.
Instead with Wynter, you take 10 minutes to set up your survey or other research method and within 12-48 hours you have your answers.
3. HockeyStack/Dreamdata
When it comes to attribution, you can never measure everything. You have to accept some level of the unmeasurable because so much of what happens in today’s buying process is in the dark funnel.
However, having said that… a tool such as HockeyStack or Dreamdata can go a long way to plugging the gaps.
Before this, we could only attribute MQLs to first or last touch in Salesforce based on UTM tracking. But that doesn’t tell you much of the story.
Whereas in HockeyStack/Dreamdata, we can see and attribute influence for any MQL that comes in and the content touchpoints that they had along the way. And this carries through deal stages, allowing you to track to influenced revenue.
Here are a few places where they help to illuminate a fuller picture:
Demand generation - allowing you to see impression or page view level data and how these impressions or page views translate down into MQLs, pipeline and revenue.
While you can never be 100% on whether a content piece definitely ‘influenced’ an action, when in conjunction with other data like engagement or CRM data, it makes decision-making on what content to push much easier.
Paid - uncovering insights throughout the buyer journey from the first impression to closed-won. The data allows us to identify signals from high-intent accounts which are then used to evolve our strategy so that we get better penetration within them.
This means we can better attribute ROI from our create demand campaign activation while also helping to reduce wasted ad spend.
SEO - they give our SEO team the ability to tie the SEO projects and blogs we publish back to revenue. Meaning we can see which blogs influenced pipeline and deals won.
We can then study why those blogs were successful and copy their structure and CTAs to replicate those successes on other pages. It’s also good for trend tracking - seeing how things like pipeline, revenue, demo requests from SEO progress over time.
Having tools isn’t the be-all and end-all - you need to be able to apply them in practice and make the most of them to justify the spend.
But if I were to recommend any tools to you, it would be these.
Driving pipeline and revenue with aligned DG and paid teams
Cognism is a marketing-centric business. Our CEO understands and trusts marketing - most importantly, knows the impact marketing can and does have on generating business.
Therefore we tend to get pretty substantial budgets to play with. And a lot of this goes into our paid media activity. Our paid team is then entrusted to try to get us the best return of investment with this budget that they can.
I see my paid team as almost an in-house agency. They work alongside other teams to facilitate the activity needed.
And the team that paid work with most often is Demand Gen. For context, the Demand Gen Managers are split by region or segment:
- EMEA (Mid market and SMB)
- NAM (Mid market and SMB)
- Enterprise (Global)
So each of these DG Managers act like mini ‘CEOs’ for their segment with different goals, targets, budgets and work cross-functionally with other teams, including paid, to ensure we have what we need to reach our goal.
In other words, it’s almost like each of the DG Managers is a client and the Paid team is an agency servicing all these clients - but everyone is under the same brand.
I also see the Demand Generation team as a bit of a bridge between the other teams.
They are the go-between with Product and Paid making sure that the right messaging is incorporated into the creative and copy for ads. And ultimately that everyone is aligned and pushing for the same goals.
Here are some of the ways that we ensure our Paid team and DG team are aligned:
The monthly reporting is co-owned.
We have a DG x Paid monthly report whereby the two teams have to share the progress and performance of the previous month or quarter. This ties their destinies together.
This also means they have a shared view of the state of play which makes it much easier to identify the places where focus is needed.
Regular meetings to close the feedback loop.
Paid and DG are constantly in touch to share results and consider optimisations that should be made.
This also isn’t just meetings between Paid and DG, this is also regular meetings with Sales to ensure that the knock on impact is having the desired effect. This might sound obvious but in so many organisations this is neglected.
These calls also allow us to highlight important factors to adjust our paid efforts with, such as: are we losing deals to a particular competitor at the moment? Or is there a particular pain point that is being referenced this quarter?
Content campaigns are marked out with deadlines in the content roadmap
Any content coming from DG Content Managers that could fuel paid activity is mapped out in advance with deadlines in a calendar.
DG Managers can look ahead at what’s to come then plan their creatives with paid.New projects are properly briefed
Any new initiatives out with ‘business as usual’ have to have a comprehensive brief.
This is to make sure:
- There’s a defined reason as to why this work is being proposed
- We know how it will be measured
- And generally avoiding ‘random acts of marketing’.
These briefs look like this:
Growth is hidden in your existing processes
“Do more with less”
I’m sure many of you are sick to your back teeth of this phrase, as it’s all we have heard for a few years now.
It’s a tricky market, and during times of economic uncertainty, we tend to return to making sure we have the most efficient engine possible to weather the storm.
Here are three ways in which we’ve optimised our marketing engine to be as efficient as possible:
1. Direct booking solutions
When someone completes an inbound demo request form, we want a team member to reach out to them promptly. Ideally, avoiding any impatience that might lead them to seek out a competitor and gain a negative impression of Cognism to boot.
To give the smoothest customer experience we can, we have implemented a direct meeting booking system for a portion of our inbound traffic.
We’ve all experienced the frustration of filling out a form only to be directed to a 'thank you' page, unsure of when we’ll hear back. Typically, when you complete a form, you’re either ready to talk to someone or you want a clear idea of when you will.
With this in mind, our solution allows prospects to schedule specific dates and times for follow-up contact.
The need for immediate contact is reduced because the prospect knows exactly when the conversation will take place.
Of course, it’s still important to offer as many early slots as possible for those eager to speak with us sooner.
This has a positive knock-on effect too.
When individuals can choose their preferred meeting times, they’re more likely to attend. This accelerates the sales process and boosts conversion rates across the funnel.
At Cognism, the impact of this solution was significant, as it doubled our conversion rates from MQLs to opportunities and meetings attended.
2. Used the avidity score to prevent churn
The avidity score looks at 6 key product usage metrics to measure customer health. These are:
This system allows us to monitor a customer’s journey from the initial onboarding to meeting each of their objectives.
Each factor is weighted based on historical data regarding its potential impact on the risk of churn. The outcome for each factor is scored, and when combined with the weighting, generates an avidity score.
We combined the scores and demonstrated that they correlate with renewal rates throughout the customer lifecycle. Essentially, a higher percentage indicates a healthier customer.
This system helps the customer success team, account managers and marketing team identify which accounts fall below certain thresholds.
Accounts scoring below 43 were marked red, those between 43 and 73 were amber, and anything above 73 was green.
This approach provides a clear indication of where issues exist and where attention is needed. The faster we can identify at-risk accounts, the better our chances of retaining them.
The avidity score helps the customer success team alert the marketing team to any problems. The CSM identifies at-risk cases, explains the reasons, and outlines an action plan.
The customer marketing team can then develop targeted plays in a customer success platform to improve the adoption stage.
The avidity score is crucial to our customer marketing efforts, providing a reliable metric for assessing the likelihood of churn.
3. Used account scoring to identify upselling opportunities
We use firmographic data to identify which accounts present an opportunity for up-sells and cross-sells, such as:
- Their sales headcount.
- The number of SDRs.
- If they have a CRM.
- If they have a RevOps team.
- If they have a sales and marketing automation tool.
Each variable is judged as follows:
The higher the account score, the more likely the account is to retain or expand.
This information is then passed over to both customer marketing and the AE on the account, allowing them to create and deploy strategies to expand the account’s contract with us.
Content marketing - Acting as a subject matter expert
I mentioned in the last diary that doing online events and podcasts doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m not naturally extroverted and used to find these types of things really nerve-wracking.
But I know that I can act as a subject matter expert for Cognism - and SMEs are a big part of our strategy.
We’ve worked with external SMEs, but another more accessible and often cheaper way to implement an SME strategy is with your internal team.
You essentially become a B2B influencer for your business. Sharing content on LinkedIn, hosting a podcast, doing speaking events, contributing to other company’s content and generally doing what you can to share your expertise and get your business out there.
Now I won’t lie, as Cognism has scaled, it’s become much harder for me to commit to as many of these activities.
But I know this kind of work is really helpful for the business.
‘How?’ I hear you ask.
Well, here’s a quick demonstration. Here are the results we had on a company page LinkedIn post when we launched our recent Demand Gen playbook:
Versus the results we got when I shared this news from my own LinkedIn profile:
While the numbers of people liking my post are also not massive - there’s still a big difference in how willing people are to engage with individuals versus company pages.
And when you compound this by sharing from multiple SMEs in-house, this just amplifies the impact you can have.
For example, Fran, Cognism’s Global Head of Demand Gen and Liam Bartholomew, VP of Marketing, also shared posts on this:
So that is now a possible 1,177% increase on engagement from a company page versus from SME profiles.
Not only this, but these kinds of SME posts offer us an opportunity to push thought leadership ads on paid. These tend to perform well as they look like normal UGC.
So far in 2024, LinkedIn thought leadership ads were responsible for 35% of our influenced pipeline.
So it’s about finding ways to scale this activity without requiring as much time resource from me.
Which for us, means I work with one of our demand generation content managers to workshop ideas, create content outlines for podcasts, create decks for public speaking events and build the bones of what we want to put out into the world.
And then I put this into my own words.
I think that’s the most important part of this - the ‘into my own words’ part. Because I think people would be able to see through it pretty instantly if I had no part in shaping the content. It wouldn’t be authentic anymore and it would compromise the whole thing.
But it’s often the ideating and first draft that takes up the most time when it comes to writing content - we’ve all had that blank page dread before, right?
So this simply speeds up the process. It also works as a helpful reminder as the content manager will be in touch regularly to discuss what the next content ideas should be - so it can’t fall to the bottom of the list.
Now I know many people reading this will probably think ‘AI can help you with this’, and you’re right. That’s something we’re really excited to explore more at Cognism.
In fact, I’ve just implemented an OKR for every team, challenging them to find one repeatable workflow that can be improved using AI.
We’re in Cognism’s scaling phase, and I know that very soon the board will expect me to show how I’ve made my department more efficient by leveraging AI in the right areas and ways.
I’m trying to move the team from one-off, random AI use cases, to a predictable process that we can scale.
People are wary of AI, but AI-powered tools could be the answer to unlocking extra capacity and output, which I can’t be mad about.
How we make our content outperform our biggest competitor
I believe that in content marketing, quality, authenticity and integrity are vital. Readers won’t engage with content that doesn’t provide them with value or the answers they’re looking for.
Regurgitated content summarising everything else on the internet will only turn readers off.
Your goal with content - whether that’s TOFU thought leadership or BOFU SEO-focused content - should be to get the reader to engage. Without this, all other content marketing goals are likely to flop.
So it’s about providing your audience with something they actually want to engage with. We want to predict what our ICP actually wants to read about at the various stages of their interactions with us and provide it in the most valuable way possible.
In many ways, we’re lucky that we are marketing to marketers and salespeople. We have so much expertise in-house with those personas.
This means we can use our internal subject matter experts to create content with authority and substance around subjects that are poignant to our core ICP.
For our marketing persona, our competitive advantage comes from sharing what we’re building as we’re building it.
We’ve been very vocal and transparent about our switch from lead gen to demand gen. We’re now sharing the process of us scaling this into new territories, market segments and as the team itself grows.
This has been a huge source of our audience engagement. Because it’s not something you hear about on the majority of company blogs.
Marketers are interested in our journey and us sharing our learning process holds value for them.
For our sales persona, we share everything that any sales team would need to know about cold calling and outbound.
This links so closely to our product that it serves a strong purpose. It provides our core persona with value, while also keeping us tightly associated with what our product does.
Feeding our create demand motions in this way, followed by our money keyword strategy capturing that demand, has put us in a really strong position.
Here are just a few wins we’ve had from sticking to this philosophy:
- We’ve doubled our LinkedIn followers in the last 365 days.
- We’ve increased our podcast downloads by 64% over the last 12-14 months.
- We surpassed our target for engaging enterprise accounts in our live events by 666% in Q1 and 384% in Q2.
And as I mentioned in the LinkedIn post above, we can also see this translating against our largest industry competitors.
The graph below shows how our blogs at Cognism and Kaspr are performing in contrast to their blogs - despite us being smaller and less well-resourced companies:
And not only that, this approach has seen us taking the place as HubSpot’s biggest organic competitor.
Creating enterprise-specific content
How to market to enterprise accounts has been one of the biggest learning curves we’ve undergone over the past year or so.
When we decided to move up-market and start actively targeting enterprise accounts, we had some assumptions about how we could go about this - but we had nothing concrete. This was new and uncharted territory for us.
I’m sure based on my previous diary entries that you won’t be surprised when I tell you what we decided to do first. A Wynter test!
We ran message tests to each of our personas in an attempt to better understand this market segment’s needs, pain points and status.
For our marketing persona, I had a hunch that our usual demand generation content wouldn’t fly. Because generally, enterprise organisations are still running lead generation plays.
It’s much easier to change the way you do things in a scaling or smaller organisation, where processes and thinking are much less entrenched.
And our Wynter test only further validated this belief. In fact, we found that the definitions for what demand generation was within the enterprise segments of our audience were wide. In most cases it was actually lead generation lightly veiled with some demand generation language.
Most were still creating long-form eBook content to put behind a gate, and then passing content leads onto their sales teams.
So we came up with an idea. A bit tongue in cheek. To create the ultimate eBook on how to write eBooks. But applying all of our demand generation principles to it.
In other words, we created an eBook the way that we would do an eBook now, if we were to run an eBook play. And the content essentially explained how we created it and why it’s better to do it the demand gen way:
- Ungated.
- Value packed with insights from subject matter experts.
- Unique and original.
- Contained multiple formats, e.g. we had an eBook podcast mini series plus a video series on YouTube explaining each chapter (in case the user learned better by watching or listening versus reading).
The idea being that if you give people the content they want to read, that gives them real value, then they’re more likely to have a positive experience with you and remember you in future.
Versus the old-school way of giving them an experience that doesn’t fit their intent (e.g. they downloaded your eBook on “top sales trends of 2024” and then got a cold call from a rep trying to sell them a sales intelligence platform).
Those who aren’t in the market to buy are more likely to be annoyed by the premature call. Without a business need, you can’t be persuaded into purchasing.
Now, I still believe that the rationale for this project was on the right lines based on the information we had at the time. But this eBook campaign didn’t exactly cause any fireworks.
Ultimately, I think it came down to the fact that eBooks are so well established as an activity, that most people are going to continue doing them the way they always have done.
And those who want to dip their toes into demand gen are going to do it in a more radically different way to a slightly altered eBook approach.
When I was reviewing what content had performed the best with this segment, it was actually things like the CMO Diary and other content discussing our journey to $50M ARR.
I’d have assumed that these numbers were too small to be of interest to enterprise accounts, and therefore discounted them as content options.
But this was an important lesson to learn. We don’t need to make ‘enterprise-specific’ content. We don’t need an enterprise-specific media machine.
Instead, we just need to make sure that we create content that’s generally interesting, valuable and engaging.
We also need to keep a close eye on the data to ensure that it’s generating engagement among the accounts we want to have in our orbit.
If you’re interested, here are the pages that attract the most enterprise account engagement for us right now:
Neither of these campaigns were specifically built for an enterprise audience. They’re just positioned in a way that speaks to this audience in the ads directed to them.
Check out the ultimate eBook on producing eBooks here:
The evolution of the demand generation content marketer
Having a demand generation content team is quite unusual - so again, there’s no blueprint on how to get this function right.
Which means we have had to develop our own playbook for this over time. There have been a number of iterations:
In the early days, the DG content team was kind of an extension of the SEO team. They worked within personas, creating content targeting specific keywords relevant for the persona.
But I felt we were missing out on some of the more journalistic-style, thought leadership content.
So this later evolved to have DG content managers within each of the persona pods acting more like journalists. Deeply understanding the personas and going out to find the stories these personas care about.
This was when we worked with Todd and Obaid on implementing the Easy Mode framework (see diary entry 2 for the breakdown!).
Easy Mode had us creating a ‘realm of relevancy’ which was all of the things that we could talk about, that fed into our wider POV (point of view).
Our company-wide POV = B2B buyer behaviour has changed.
This would then filter down into complementary POVs per persona, for example:
DG content managers spent a lot of time creating thought leadership around these specific points of view.
But after a while, I felt we were moving away from what had led us to be successful in the past. And we had found we were over-engineering our content process.
I wanted to bring us back to basics and focus again on what we wanted to be known for.
Which brings us to today’s team structure and philosophy.
We have our DG content team acting as an agency. They’re a stand alone department rather than working in persona-based pods.
Rather than creating persona-based content in silos, the DG team now works across personas to create content. The DG managers are then tasked with distributing it to their designated segment or region.
The content is mapped out on a roadmap so it’s clear to the DG managers what’s coming and when.
Each of the personas has a core thing that we want to be known for:
- Marketing = the switch from lead gen to demand gen.
- Sales = cold calling.
- RevOps = European data quality and expanding into new markets.
And within each of these topic areas, we have ‘big rocks’, which are heavy-lift content campaigns.
Lead gen to demand gen = The diary of a first time CMO + DG Playbook
Cold calling = SDR Zone and cold calling report
EU data quality and expansions = Fix your funnel and the ultimate guide to new market expansion
We aim to revive these campaigns continuously over time. For example, when we update our internal processes, we’ll update the DG Playbook course on how we do demand gen at Cognism.
We had to overcome one issue recently, which was a matter of productivity. Big rock content can take many months to complete.
But that was resulting in a lack of regular content being produced.
To avoid having months and months go by without output, we came up with this idea:
Rather than have the big rocks lead the way, flip this on its head.
What content do we need for the big rock that can be created in instalments, building towards a big rock?
For example, this diary will take a number of months to write. But we can’t just not output other content in the meantime. So what are the themes of this diary content likely to be?
- New processes we have developed since the last diary, such as our ABM strategy >>> Create blog content on our ABM strategy that can then feed into the content we add into the diary.
- Our experiences expanding into other regions >>> Record podcasts on this subject which can later fuel these chapters of the diary.
- Team set up >>> regularly updating my LinkedIn with how we’ve restructured the team. Posts will then be filtered into my diary.
This way, we can ensure that we’re creating content on a regular basis that feeds into what we want to be known for, while also building towards a big rock campaign.
Change can be difficult for some to accept, but as I mentioned in my post, my team is well-conditioned for change.
We’ve gone through a number of iterations based on the data we have and the needs of the business at that point in time.
But this evolution has been necessary and without it, we wouldn’t have come to our current setup. I’m confident that this can be a really successful content process.
Our updated content strategy
Our content strategy has changed a lot over the years.
This is partly due to our business goals and resources changing over time. Our outlook and views on content have also evolved.
In entry 2 of this diary, I discussed the Easy Mode content strategy and promised to share how we’ve changed our approach since then.
To recap quickly, we found Easy Mode to be a very useful exercise. It helps you break free of restrictive content formats and challenges you to think about subject matter in a new way.
However, we found that in practice, it was a complicated framework to keep up with. And we didn’t see the content translate to results in the same way that we had done in the past.
I believe this is because we had already nailed ‘what we want to be known for’ before we tried Easy Mode.
I came to the conclusion that we needed to bring things back to basics.
Asking ourselves, what is it we want to be known for?
For our sales persona, that’s outbound - specifically cold calling.
For marketing, it’s our switch from lead gen to demand gen - and wider demand gen strategies and tactics.
And across the board, we want to be known for EU data quality.
We’ve then created ‘big rocks’ around each of these core ‘what we want to be known for’ themes.
For sales and cold calling, it’s our cold calling report, which we plan to update each year with our primary research into cold calling trends.
We also have the SDR Zone, which is a hub of outbound resources, including cold calling scripts and cadences - and soon, we will also host our ‘cold calling live’ events within the SDR Zone.
For our marketing persona, our big rocks have included my Diary of a First-Time CMO Vol.1 (and now Vol.2!), which details our demand generation journey.
Plus our Demand Generation Playbook, which we plan to update with our developing processes as we evolve them.
And then for our EU data quality big rock, we’re working on ‘The Ultimate Guide to European Expansion’.
What’s great about big rocks like these is that they tend to catch people’s attention much more than our other media machine activity. This is because they’re huge content assets that (hopefully!) deliver a lot of value.
However, because they’re large content assets, they can take a lot of time to build. Which means we could go months between delivery dates if we were to only work towards big rocks.
So instead, the DG team now works in a phased build towards a big rock.
What I mean by this is every content output has to be within one of the big rock themes, so that it’s slowly contributing to a wider library of content that can later be used to feed a big rock.
For example, we plan to publish several blogs and videos about converting US marketing and sales playbooks for different EU regions.
This content will later be repurposed and rewritten to feed into our Ultimate Guide to European Expansions, while still allowing us to publish content in the meantime.
So this is how we have come to structure our demand generation content:
I realise this may look like chaos at first glance, but to me… it’s colour-coded clarity!
How does it work?
The DG content team maps out their plans for the upcoming months with deadlines. This means that the DG managers can see what content is coming and when - especially with Asana’s timeline view:
The tags help filter the board to find content that supports each of the relevant themes.
This method of planning content allows us to remain agile and flexible about what we produce and when, while still having enough foresight to plan for these larger content assets that we know pack a punch.
Plus, it allows us to see how we can filter ‘what we want to be known for’ into everything we do, from media machine channels to our big rocks.
Distributing our demand generation content
Now I’ve shared our updated content strategy in entry 39, it’s a good time to share some insights into how we distribute that content through our demand generation managers.
Our demand generation managers’ main channel for pushing content is LinkedIn paid ads (although they also use other channels, like email, for example).
And we think about there being levels to this.
The first level of distribution on LinkedIn is organic social. This is where we test which content themes catch people’s attention.
For example, this recent blog post our DG managers created on GTM AI:
I talk a lot about how we utilise SMEs throughout our demand creation process. Well, this is another of those instances! We test the content through our SME profiles, sharing posts that cover its themes.
For example, my post on AI:
We know from our audience’s engagement with these posts whether they’re interested in the subject matter.
If we get positive signals, the DG managers move onto our first level of paid activity. This is to simply put some cash behind the SME post, boosting its reach to new audiences as LinkedIn thought leadership.
This is light touch and minimum time investment but gives us a chance to further validate the topic. As a by-product, we also grow SME profiles.
If this thought leadership ad performs well, we proceed to the next level.
This is where we get creative with the ad, but it’s still a low-lift. We call these ‘ugly’ posts, as the aim is to get the ad live as fast as possible to get quick results.
This time, these posts have CTAs to drive people towards the original blog piece that fuelled the SME posts.
What we look for at this stage is to gauge whether people like the ad, or whether they’re actually clicking through and engaging with the long-form blog post.
An ad may get great engagement, with likes and comments. But this may be because the post is short. We need to figure out if our audience is interested in reading the content it’s based on and willing to read the full article.
If we see strong click-through rates and time on page, then we have the validation we need to invest more time in creating a longer-term ad with proper creative.
This ad will run for a number of months, driving traffic towards the blog post.
Even further down this validation process, if the DG managers see long-term success in sending people to a specific content asset through paid ads, they may consider building an email content nurture around this same article.
Generally, we only do this when a content asset generates pipeline, as an email nurture takes more time to create.
A crucial part of this content production and distribution story, however, is the feedback loop. Which content pieces made their way throughout the entire validation process? Which ones could be improved? And which ones just flat out didn’t work for our audience?
We hold monthly calls between the DG content and DG managers to share the recently published content pieces, discuss campaign plans and arguably most importantly, feedback on results. It’s when both teams share important data points.
This feeds back into the initial planning stages for DG content and what they’ll produce for the following months and quarters.
Being a woman in C-suite in a fast-moving scale-up
This subject has probably become more topical than ever over the last 12 months as I had my first child.
It was challenging to down tools and step away from work as we were entering Q4 (which is planning and budget season). Accompanying this there was a lot of change happening in the C-suite at the time.
Admittedly I didn’t step back for very long, getting back to work after 3 months (which in the UK is quite a short amount of time to take off).
But I wanted to be able to continue being part of key meetings and joining final stage interviews for core marketing hires.
Looking back I definitely felt a pressure to return to work and reclaim my seat at the table.
It was a very difficult juggling act between new mum mode and CMO mode.
If you’ve fought to get to the CMO seat, to maintain tenure and position within your organisation, it can be very hard to step away from it.
While I often wonder if I was setting a bad example for other women at work by my swift return, I’ve sought to make sure that the unease and pressure I may have felt won’t be shared by others.
And I should say that a lot of this pressure and unease was fully self inflicted!
I’ve also had to introduce new coping mechanisms for my imposter syndrome since becoming a mother.
I can’t always rely on working the longest hours, because I have a little human who also needs quite a lot from me.
I think the last 12 months has been a ‘growing up’ period for me in the CMO seat. It’s been about being able to prioritise my impact in the most important areas, setting myself some new boundaries between work and home life, and importantly, finding my voice more.
One great unlock for me this year has been about approaching any situation head on.
I’ve learnt to be direct, to address things upfront and without fluff. It saves time and it stops any resentment or misunderstanding gaining traction by going unresolved or unaddressed for any length of time.
It also prevents narratives forming in my head.
Marketing is only effective if it’s memorable
Marketing can go a long way in driving a product or brand’s growth - but this only works if the marketing activity is memorable.
As B2B marketers, we’re often working in highly competitive markets. Trying to get attention from prospective customers is hard and only getting harder.
If your marketing campaigns aren’t building relevant memory structures in the minds of your target customers, then they won’t remember you. Which means when they enter a buying phase, they’re unlikely to shortlist you as one of the vendors they’ll consider.
It’s possible that a buyer will do a quick Google search and if your SEO is strong, they’ll come across your brand and explore your product that way.
But generally, people choose brands they know and trust. Or ones that their peers know and trust.
Which is why reaching these people early on with content that establishes you as a well-known and trusted brand is such a super-power.
Here are a few of things we try to prioritise when creating memorable campaigns:
- Associating Cognism with category entry points.
- Baking emotion into our marketing.
- Creating a distinctive brand.
Category entry points (CEP)
Category entry points or CEPs are key moments in a B2B buyer's journey that trigger their search for a new product or solution.
For instance, at Cognism, a CEP might happen when a potential customer is expanding into a new market and requires contact data to support their sales team in that region.
Our goal is to align the Cognism brand with as many of these CEPs as possible, so when these moments arise, our company comes to mind and is considered a potential vendor.
This approach is a great shortcut for building brand associations, as many businesses struggle with defining what they want to be associated with.
It’s important to align broadly with the category your product belongs to. But it’s even more effective to identify specific situations where your product is needed and build associations around those.
At Cognism, one of our primary use cases is supporting sales teams in cold calling. We create B2B campaigns focused on enhancing cold calling success. For example:
- Running continuous content ads on LinkedIn featuring cold calling scripts, guides, and trends.
- Hosting a live webinar series on cold calling as a training resource for sales representatives.
- Collaborating with cold calling experts like Morgan J Ingram to distribute our content.
- Our internal sales leaders share cold calling content on their personal LinkedIn profiles.
Baking emotion into your marketing
I’m not suggesting that we try moving our buyers to tears - that’s unlikely in B2B marketing!
But tapping into emotions such as joy, sympathy, or nostalgia can have an impact on how memorable campaigns are.
Humour is the most common way we do this at Cognism. B2B marketing is so often super-boring and so that’s what people expect. When you inject an element of humour into your marketing, people are surprised and hopefully laughing!
It helps to make us look more human and relatable. It’s the kind of content that people are more likely to want to engage with.
Proof is in the pudding. We recently did some work with System 1 to test our ads and we were pleasantly surprised with the outcome.
For context, System 1 uses Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize winning research around decision-making as the basis to measure ad effectiveness.
He concluded that how you feel is the biggest influence on buyer behaviour versus all the rational facts and figures. Therefore this ad test is measured on the level of emotional intensity it provokes and how memorable it is as a result.
They identified that 75% of B2B ads have no positive business effects and 0% get a perfect score 5 star rating. It’s a tough test.
Star rating = Long-term brand growth based on an ad’s creative effectiveness, calculated by measuring emotional response to an ad.
So we were thrilled to see some strong scores (and we have only gone from strength to strength since, implementing the advice we received as a result).
What this scoreboard shows you is that we score within the top 4% for the first ad, and very close behind for 2 others.
The other two metrics shown here are:
- Spike rating = Short-term sales potential, derived from strength of branding and intensity of emotional response.
- Fluency rating = Measures strength of branding in the ad. Fluency is driven by the % of viewers recognising the brand by the end of the ad.
And as you can see from the scorecards, we generally scored well for both of these metrics.
Some additional feedback we got from this test was:
Our use of humour in ads is ✨ exceptional ✨
Their words, not mine!
Humour is the most profitable emotion, according to System 1 - which is lucky seeing as we capitalise on this regularly.
It’s fun for us to create, and it’s fun for our prospects to watch. Therefore they’re far more likely to want to engage.
Creating a distinct brand
Building a strong brand goes beyond just having a recognisable logo. It’s about the overall brand identity, including a unique look, feel, and voice.
I want our brand to stand out so clearly that, even in a crowded market, people can easily identify content as ours.
It all started when we rebranded a few years ago - we worked with Pentagram to come up with a whole new look. For reference, we went from this:
To this:
Now I realise that a rebrand is a big-step undertaking if it's only cosmetic. The only reason I decided we needed to do this was because we were constantly running into an identity crisis in our old brand.
It was a necessary step for us to be able to scale AND be recognisable.
It was a big project. Imagine, we had to go through every page we had live, every asset, every banner, every everything! And change it over to the new branding.
But since then, we’ve expanded our brand look, including coming up with our own style for illustrations, icons and more.
To build an effective, memorable and recognisable brand, consistency is key.
And now we have a brand that people recognise no matter the type of content we produce. It’s obviously Cognism.
And it better represents what we actually do. The connecting shapes in our logo signifies us connecting people with who they want to do business with.
We aren’t just assuming this is a more effective brand either, it’s been validated time and time again through tests we have run on paid, landing pages etc.
Even when comparing us to other SaaS brands or competitors, we look distinct - and that's the aim.
ICP deep diving
Checking in on your ICP regularly to assess that it is still your ICP is important.
Because a disconnect on your ICP can lead to a domino effect of misaligned marketing and dwindling pipeline.
This year, we really focused on redefining our ICP. Our CRO suggested we undertake the ‘CHASM project’, which is in partnership with the CHASM Group (a consultancy firm). Essentially, it’s a big research project to work out:
- Who our best customers are.
- What they need.
- And how we can position ourselves to deliver them with the best solution.
We wanted to use this research to shape our product so it fits our ICP. And here was our process:
Step 1: Identify where you win
We started by researching:
- What we’re great at.
- What are our product strengths?
- What do customers love us for?
- And what makes us standout in the market.
We actioned this by conducting internal and customer interviews, analysing retention data and reviewing case studies.
Step 2: Build out a strawman of your headpin
Imagine you’re tenpin bowling, aiming for the headpin right at the front. Because if you hit that, all the rest will follow.
We then went about creating a ‘strawman’ for what that headpin customer looked like.
Essentially collating the characteristics of customers with the best NDR/GDR, Customer Satisfaction scores and NPS.
From there we started to determine and define common characteristics across these customers. This then led to a V1 of our strawman, something that will always be slightly fluid.
Step 3: Define a broken process
Now that we had our ‘where we win’ and our strawman, we had an idea of our best-fit customers and what they saw as the most value in purchasing Cognism.
So now we set about describing the issue they faced that led them to making that purchase in the first place.
This is the "broken process”, a process that isn’t working for them currently that requires fixing.
We set about validating the broken process we landed on with existing customers, prospects and former customers. We did this through long and in-depth interviews to see whether the process resonated with them.
Step 4: What’s the compelling reason to buy?
We also defined a compelling reason to buy. Due to that broken process, what’s the driving force behind purchasing a solution to fix it? What’s the outcome of that broken process that’s intolerable and needs fixing?
We also defined this aspect, and after validating the broken process in the interviews, went on to validate whether our perception of the reason to buy was correct too.
Step 5: Apply this to your GTM strategy
The next step was to take that information forward into our go-to-market efforts. In other words, how do you apply what you’ve learned about your ICP?
You could simply view an ICP as the people you target and therefore, as defining the audiences you build in paid ad platforms or email lists.
However, although knowing your ICP will immediately impact how you build your targeting, it's just a fraction of what it should affect.
So having done the work to research and define our ICP, the work began to change everything in our GTM. This is something we refer to as the ‘whole product offering’ including:
- Messaging and positioning.
- Demand gen audiences and targeting.
- Product roadmap and development.
- Pre and post sales.
- Sales enablement.
- Sales process, e.g. discovery, structure.
- Partnerships.
- Content roadmap and creation.
- Customer marketing strategy advocacy, retention and expansion.
The list is extensive. It’s the harder part of the process.
It’s easier to define an ICP, change your targeting but do little more to meet the needs of that ICP that you will have spent so much time to identify. Hence why it’s a cross-functional project; it’s relevant to everyone in the team.
Listen to Liam Bartholomew talk a little more about this in this post and snippet:
Less about revenue growth, more about retention
Following on from bonus entry 2 - I wanted to share a little about what we found during the CHASM interviews and how we applied it.
First, a little back story. Generating new business is the fun and exciting part of marketing - and business in general.
But it’s not the most important part.
Because if you can’t retain any of those customers, then you’re on a constant hamster wheel of having to generate new business to keep the lights on. Meanwhile you’re burning through customer satisfaction and loyalty!
Eventually, there’s no new customers to win - and your brand has a bad reputation for not delivering, with a whole lot of churn to boot.
We noticed our retention rates were dropping at one stage, and it made us nervous. Because we want to be the epitome of quality, value and delivery.
And if we have customers churning, that suggests we’re either delivering value to the wrong people, or under-delivering to the right people. Neither of which is a positive or long-term plan.
Not only this but in an era of efficiency, we need to find ways to optimise our internal engines to improve LTV. Which meant going back to basics and checking in on our ICP.
Here’s where the CHASM project came in…
We ran the process I outlined in the previous post, and here’s what we came up with:
This was our ‘strawman’ or ‘headpin’. In other words, the culmination of data on who our ICP are.
When we dug into what their broken process was, we discovered a significant number of these rapidly expanding tech startups are failing to meet their sales targets in EU markets.
This is due to rigid outbound sales approaches, which overlooks the diverse regulations, customs, and procedures unique to each European market.
This helped us to form an idea of what the ‘compelling reason to buy Cognism’ would be:
‘Lack of and poor quality or inconsistent pipeline causing us to miss our numbers in target markets’.
At this stage, we conducted a number of interviews to try to validate our strawman, broken process and compelling reason to buy hypotheses.
Here are some of the key takeaways and themes from these interviews:
- The broken process we describe above resonated with every single interviewee.
- The common solutions to the broken process depended on their company size.
- Larger companies invested in outside consulting for support.
- Whereas smaller organisations tended to adopt a trial, error and abandon approach.
- US sales processes don’t tend to work well in Europe as they’re perceived as too aggressive or transactional.
- Most companies when expanding into new markets try to apply the same playbook that worked in one region to another - which rarely worked.
- There was a consistent desire to understand more about particular social and cultural norms, market analysis and competitive landscape in unfamiliar target regions.
Everything we learned from the CHASM project and our interviews is now being implemented in our GTM motions.
These insights have driven who we target, the content we create and the future of the product too.
But I’d argue that the biggest and best change is that we’re building a product to meet our ICP’s needs now.
How to reach the modern B2B buyer
If you haven’t listened to this episode of The Loop podcast, I’d suggest you do. Listen here:
It’s still to date our most popular episode. And I’m not surprised!
Most B2B marketers will recognise that the traditional funnel doesn’t really fit the way that modern buyers buy. But Antonia, CMO of PwC went beyond condemning the old way, presenting a new way to look at the funnel.
She shared a step-by-step framework for mapping the buyer journey, aligning channels, metrics, and tactics to meet customer needs at each stage.
We have thought about this a lot at Cognism, how the AIDA model is no longer fit for purpose. It implies a linear, one-size-fits-all buying journey, with specific activities neatly mapped to each stage. It assumes that buyers follow a straightforward, rational path from awareness to action.
In reality, our individual buying journeys rarely adhere to this rigid structure. Instead, they often resemble the more complex and non-linear process like the one below.
Our approach to this messy, unpredictable and often unmeasurable buyer journey is to focus on the various stages of buyer intent.
This means creating content that caters both to those who are currently in-market and those who are out-of-market but could become future customers.
Here’s how it breaks down:
In-market buyer content
We divide in-market demand capture content into three areas:
- Demand capture - Paid search and affiliates.
- Demand capture - Pricing page and product demo requests.
- Demand capture - SEO strategy.
This content targets in-market buyers who are already aware of their needs and actively seeking solutions.
The goal is to direct these buyers to specific parts of our website designed to capture demand, such as pricing or demo request pages.
By using strategies like paid search, organic search, and affiliate marketing, we can guide potential customers to the right information, helping them choose our product over competitors and allowing us to gauge their level of intent.
Out-of-market buyer content
For out-of-market buyers who aren’t actively looking to purchase right now, we create content that falls into two categories:
1. Education and exploratory - main website pages
These pages highlight the products we offer, the various use cases they can solve, key features, customer testimonials, comparison tables, positive reviews, how they work, and integrations.
2. Education and exploratory - blog and resources
Most of our content planning happens here. This is our media machine value loops and is often where our big rock campaign content falls into. By breaking down our content in this way, we can try to provide everything that anyone at any stage of the buyer journey might need or want to see.
The Demand Gen Playbook
The Demand Gen Playbook is one of our most successful DG campaigns to date.
The aim was to build the the first and most complete demand gen resource for B2B marketers who were fed up with traditional B2B activity. In usual Cognism style, we wanted to deliver it for free, ungated.
We wanted to collect the disparate ideas of demand gen, found across 1000s of podcasts, blogs, webinars and LinkedIn posts and distil them down into one actionable framework.
Allowing users to learn our step-by-step process to implement a framework that’s already proven.
It was a collection of around 45 lessons, all lasting around 5-10 minutes, delivered by our internal marketing experts as part of an on-demand online course.
This was a big lift to put together. If no-one engaged with it, it would’ve been a lot of sunk time and effort, and no reward.
But we knew this asset could provide our audience with a lot of value.
So it all came down to how we distributed this content. How would our ICP know it existed?
We really lent into the messaging around this being the first course of its kind, collecting together the dribs and drabs of demand gen knowledge into one, easy-to-consume course.
We emphasised that it was a unique offer, giving us clear messaging that would hopefully accelerate distribution.
Once we landed on this positioning, we needed a creative concept to deliver the message.
We decided to use one of our favourite tactics to generate some interest and drive engagement for the course - comedy!
I’ve already covered in entry 10 why comedy is such a useful tool in B2B marketing, and we love to incorporate it into our launches.
In this instance, we did that with a launch video. Here’s a screenshot from the original campaign plan describing the video brief:
Essentially, we wanted to simulate an interview style video whereby we’d ‘ask marketers demand gen questions’. Such as:
“Where did you learn Demand Gen?”
“How do you make a Demand Gen plan?”
The video runs through a number of cliche or downright dumb answers. Highlighting the fact that there is no one place where marketers can go for this information.
The video ends by seeding the launch of our Demand Gen Playbook and offers a pre-launch sign up link.In the short time between the launch video and launching the Playbook, we had around 1,400 people on our waitlist.
I think another relevant aspect of the campaign - which came a little later, when people were consuming the course - was we built word of mouth into the course.
We had a video halfway through the course asking people to share why they enjoyed the course on social (and that my team would give them a shout-out if they did).
That word of mouth tactic gave us priceless social proof that we could then use in the Playbook’s promotion.
We also had a number of other activities including organic social posts, paid social, email marketing and SMEs posting about the launch. All this helped to compound the early success signs.
Since the Playbook’s launch, we’ve had 60,000+ page views on the course homepage, which has translated to $1.9million in influenced revenue.
Paid ad wins
There is so much value hidden in the basics. I say basics, but that doesn’t mean most people get it right or that this stuff comes easily. We obviously had to have missed some of the ‘basics’ for Liam, our new VP of Paid, to be able to fix it.
But when Liam came on board, he was keen to find low-hanging fruit that could quickly make an impact. Here are a few of the things he did.
Revenue analysis
Essentially identifying who our ICP is (where we win) and aligning our strategy to focus on them. This was a customer analysis project using first-party data from Salesforce.
Liam looked at the audience make up of our customers (regions, job functions, job titles, seniority and industry) plus the channels that influenced their journey. He then compared this to how our ICP was modelled to ensure accuracy.
Then, he updated our LinkedIn targeting to better mirror the traits identified.
Media planning
Similar to the previous initiative, Liam reviewed our budget allocation based on the criteria he discovered.
The paid team conducted an audit of LinkedIn Ads - both our biggest investment channel and main demand creation driver. To do this, they used HockeyStack, working out the percentage of MQLs and pipeline influenced by each.
For example, in one instance, Liam found that our EMEA “content” ads influenced 60% of MQLs/pipeline but we only spent 30% of the budget there.
He also identified that we were over-investing in social proof and thought leadership ads.
Similarly, 70% of our EMEA pipeline was coming from SMB but enterprise investment wasn’t translating to deals.
So essentially, he created a media plan which was geared towards maximising marketing effectiveness and delivering results against our core ICP, reducing wasted spend, and improving ROI.
The main purpose was to give better control so that we could influence metrics more easily.
Google Ads quick wins
Our Google Search campaigns were running both exact and phrase match keywords in the same campaigns and ad groups.
A big quick win was breaking these out into separate campaigns.
So we’d have “competitor A - exact” and “competitor A - phrase” with separate budgets.
Exact keywords trigger your ads for search terms that are most closely related to your keyword (in theory, the same exact meaning, if not identical term).
Phrase match keyword targeting is slightly looser. Here, search terms must contain your keyword (or very similar) but will trigger for long-tail versions of the same search.
By breaking them out, we can more easily control the keywords we were showing up for, and intentionally invest budget into either keyword type.
Most of the time, we found exact match campaigns drove lower costs and better lead quality. We’ve since leaned into investing budget here first, scaling with phrase where needed.
Retargeting
When we audited our LinkedIn Ads campaigns, we spotted we were only using a 30-day look back window for our remarketing audiences.
We were just hoping our awareness campaigns would reach people once they had engaged with us for 31+ days.
We were also only running direct-response “offer” ads to these 30-day audiences. Either encouraging someone to book a demo or take up our “free 25 leads” offer.
We levelled up our retargeting strategy by extending this look back window to 90+ days, creating a larger audience of “warm” prospects.
The bigger audience size meant we could maintain our persona targeting (sales and marketing) but also run campaigns expanding to the wider buying committee (such as C-suite, operations, and procurement).
We diversified our creatives and messaging to include other types of ads like social proof, thought leadership, competitor battlecards, objection-handling content and on-demand video demos.
This further supported our “demand gen” philosophy for the channel.
ABM early results
In the above post, I mention a few signals and results that show us that our ABM efforts are working - but there are a few other metrics you can use to identify that your ABM is having the desired impact.
Such as:
Penetration rate
We serve ads to accounts and measure the penetration rate. This validates our ABM approach.
The penetration rate is calculated on the number of marketing touchpoints it takes to move an account into opportunity.
As you can see from the graph, we launched the campaign in August and are seeing an incremental increase in penetration rate month-on-month.
As we want to build awareness and brand recognition at the 1:many stage, this is a good way to show our impact.
We look at the engagement intent of an account over time and how this changes as they move through the funnel.
As you can see from the engagement graph, in June we saw one specific account with loads of touchpoints and intent, where it quickly became an opportunity and progressed to the validation stage.
And then you can see in early July, the intent and touchpoints increased again, and the opportunity moved straight into the negotiation stage.
This shows that ABM isn’t just there to bring an account into the funnel; it’s there to move deals in opportunity through each stage faster.
BOFU web visits
To supplement this, we then look at the increase in BOFU web visits. For example, we had no demo or pricing visits from a target account this year until the campaign went live in June.
Then we had 2 demo and pricing visits in June and 10 demo and pricing visits in July.
With this data and the intent signals, we can show that marketing brought the account into the funnel and helped move them through it.
A deep dive into Cognism’s 1:one ABM tactics
1:one ABM is truly at the heart of account-based marketing. While 1:many and 1:few are still important parts of the process, it’s in 1:one where the real depth of personalisation and precise targeting happens.
We implement various strategies within our 1:one framework. Let’s get into it.
1:1 ABM: Building Custom Microsites
Once we identify a target account, we craft a personalised microsite specifically for them. These microsites prominently feature the company’s name in the headline and address key challenges we believe they’re facing.
The next section explains how we can solve these issues. For example: "We created this microsite to demonstrate how Cognism can help [insert company name] drive more pipeline and accelerate revenue growth!"
Below this customised introduction, there’s a tailored demo video, designed to directly highlight how Cognism’s product would address their unique needs.
To drive the message home, we restate their challenges beneath the video, saying something like, "Companies like yours are facing challenges such as…,” followed by social proof that demonstrates our ability to deliver results.
These microsites perform exceptionally well, generating strong engagement with our target accounts. Here are the outcomes from one of our recent personalised microsites:
- Average time spent on the page: 5.6 minutes.
- Over 70 visits since August.
- 150+ views of the interactive demo.
This engagement clearly indicates that there’s interest in our solutions!
ABM: Email Nurtures
We share these microsites with the account’s decision-makers through personalised email nurture campaigns.
The goal is to foster a connection between the decision-maker and their assigned sales rep by providing the rep with tailored email templates and messaging that offer real value.
These emails have much higher open rates compared to the standard emails our reps typically send.
Here’s an example:
Targeted Paid Ads
Our ABM ads are crafted from thorough research, paired with our product’s advantages. Our goal is to pinpoint the specific gaps in the target account.
By analysing previous Gong calls, we get a clear picture of their pain points, which we then reflect in our ads.
Here are some approaches we take with our 1:one ABM ads:
- We incorporate relevant social proof into emails, showcasing similar use cases and addressing challenges that align with the target account, reinforcing the value we bring.
- We include the account rep’s photo in the ads. For accounts that were previously in discussions, this personal element can remind decision-makers of the rep, encouraging them to re-engage, especially if the timing is more favourable now. This also helps to add a human touch to our brand.
- We tailor ads for different departments. Instead of focusing solely on the sales team, we create ads that resonate with other teams that could benefit from our product. If the sales department wasn’t interested before, we’ve successfully reconnected by targeting the marketing team’s needs instead.
And yes, we have solid proof that our ads are effective!We measure ad performance through dwell time - the average time viewers spend on the ad before moving on or clicking.
For our 1:one ABM ads, the average dwell time is 5.2 seconds, compared to 3.7 seconds for our always-on ads.
Additionally, the click-through rate for our 1:one ABM ads is significantly higher at 1.45%, versus just 0.82% for our always-on ads.
This clearly demonstrates that personalised ads drive much stronger engagement.
Hosting Exclusive, Customised Dinners
Once we had a clear understanding of our target accounts, we developed an in-person event strategy, with a focus on bespoke dinners.
As I mentioned in entry 26, we don’t attend many events; we’re very selective because of the high cost and uncertain ROI.
However, these in-person gatherings provide a great opportunity, as they bring together numerous decision-makers in one place.
We invite key decision-makers from our target accounts to join us alongside other enterprise leaders, offering them the chance to network and connect outside the formal event structure. Plus, who doesn’t appreciate a complimentary dinner?
At the Forrester event, we partnered with LeanData to host an exclusive, invite-only dinner, and invited several of our target accounts.
Afterward, we followed up by sending them a copy of my Diary of a First-Time CMO: Volume 1. We also launched personalised LinkedIn outreach and intensified our account penetration efforts, resulting in a $75,000 opportunity.
Similarly, at SaaStr, we co-hosted a dinner with Gong, which sparked six new conversations with senior decision-makers at enterprise companies.
These dinners not only helped convert conversations into opportunities but also opened the door to discussions with new accounts and customers.
Bringing Cognism Enrich to market: A PMM perspective
We launched a new product this year, which was a long time in the making. Cognism Enrich, which allows you to fill gaps in your data to make sure you have the most complete and accurate data set possible - either as it enters your CRM or as a scheduled action that automatically updates your CRM data over time.
Enrich was built on two main principles. Speed to lead and combatting data decay.
Speed to lead is all about providing the most complete and accurate data for a contact as it enters your CRM, which is where Instant Enrichment comes in.
This enables:
- Correct routing to reps.
- Faster, more efficient, and valuable follow-ups.
- Increase in overall productivity as reps are actioning quality data.
Combatting data decay is about maintaining your CRM’s health. Scheduled Enrichment enables RevOps teams (or equivalent) to continually cleanse specific cohorts of data at a frequency of their choice to ensure that it’s always actionable.
This enables:
- Higher data accuracy across all contacts and accounts, which leads to higher connect rates, email deliverability (minimising bounce rate and increasing domain authority).
- Increased confidence from the sales team in that the leads they’re actioning are as up-to-date as possible.
This product is currently only for Salesforce users, however other integrations are planned.
But as you can imagine with any new product launch, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes. And our product marketing team was powering away to bring this campaign to our audience.
Here are some of the steps they took to ensure we had everything we needed to launch Enrich smoothly.
Prelaunch
Research and create messaging and benefits hierarchy
Once our product marketing team has received word from our product team that there will be a launch on the horizon, they jump into action to begin building relevant messaging.
This requires crucial research into our customers’ and prospects’ (for each core persona) jobs to find relevant messaging explaining how our new product could help them achieve these jobs.
Messaging must take the following points into consideration:
- What are the job titles that will get value from Enrich?
- What are each persona’s JTBD (Jobs To Be Done)?
- What are the pain points within these jobs?
- What capabilities do they need?
- What would having a solution for this problem mean?
- What are the buyers’ needs and non-negotiables for buyers (based on buyers’ words during research interviews)?
- What is the value proposition of the new product/feature?
- Do we have sufficient ‘reasons to believe’ that will SHOW the customer how it will make an impact?
Here’s an example research summary for our marketing persona:
This also serves as a useful document to share with the wider team. Product marketing isn’t the only team who touches new product launches.
This is something that spans many teams. Especially in the case of our Enrich launch.
The level of input from various teams depends on the tiering of the feature or product that PMM puts in place.
For example, a Tier 1 launch would involve many departments and span across multiple content types. But a Tier 3 would be handled by PMM or Product directly. Maybe including customer comms, or an in-app pop-up for example.
But in this case, Enrich was a mega-launch that had many stakeholders.
So sharing the results of the research phase and messaging results across teams for this mega-launch was crucial. We needed a unified front when creating anything for the product launch.
Generating launch content
Using the research and messaging documents the product team created, the team got to work creating the necessary content pieces needed either internally or for customers and prospects.
This included things like landing pages, demos, sales enablement documents, competitor comparisons, promotional videos - even a data decay calculator.
This database of content was shared with the wider team along with a timeline for when each stage of the launch would happen. Everyone had to be informed on when each element would be released.
This expanded from just marketing collateral; we were managing a lot of different stakeholders. Whether it was getting the CPQ on Salesforce ready for the sales team, or helping with sales enablement training sessions over Zoom, to writing a brief for our video team for promo videos.
All of the information that was collated, created and required for the launch was then added to a company wide, internal landing page called ‘The Enrich Hub’.
This was the single source of truth for all Enrich details and content, aligning marketing and sales about what to say to customers and prospects about the product.
Launching
Testing our product
We wanted to test our product before releasing it to the wider audience to ensure we had ironed out any bugs or faults ahead of time.
So we rolled Enrich out as a BETA first. We conducted customer calls and sent out surveys to gather as much feedback as possible about the product. This feedback helped us improve its functionality.
It also offered us an opportunity to start developing some case studies based on the successful enrichment projects these champions shared.
On the note of case studies, we felt it was important to ‘drink our own champagne’, and so had also been rigorously testing and implementing our own product internally. Meaning we could also share our own case study on how our sales process improved.
Campaign launch
Our launch campaign contained a number of elements. From top-of-funnel education around enrichment, such as blog posts like this:
To product pages like this:
SME posts like this:
And ads like this:
Migration
Each product launch is different and comes with its own challenges. For us, there were quite a few logistical things to be ironed out in our launch.
Prior to having our own Enrich product, we had been paying Salesforce for their native enrichment app as an intermediary solution.
But when we launched our own Enrich product, we wanted our existing customers to begin using our solution. Which meant trying to migrate as many people over from the Salesforce solution to our own.
This required time from our customer marketing team, customer success and account managers to encourage customers to make the switch.
This wasn’t an easy task, as lots of people had built their workflows within the Salesforce app - and with anything there’s inertia to adopt change.
Therefore this has been a long-term process over the course of the year, with only the final people recently having been migrated.
Post-launch
Campaign performance
One of the most important parts of any campaign is measuring how successful it was. So we knew it was important to have a comprehensive dashboard where everyone could see data and results.
Showing us results like:
- Marketing sourced revenue from closed-won deals from Enrich.
- Average deal value from marketing sources revenue from Enrich versus average deal value from all marketing sourced revenue.
- MQLs from Enrich UTMs.
- Opportunity pipeline.
- Saved cost associated with the migration from our previous Salesforce solution.
Warming up a region with marketing
I promised I’d go into a little more detail on how we came to learn that going marketing-first into a region was the way to go.
Liam explains a bit of this thought process above, but I can go a bit more in depth on our experiences doing both a sales-led and a marketing-led expansion.
I’ll start at the beginning. At the time that we moved into DACH, we were only just starting to build our demand generation engine, slowly switching from lead gen which had been the norm for a long time.
As I mentioned in the first diary, I felt that we had a very efficient lead generation strategy in place. At the time, hadn’t yet proven my theory that demand gen could work better.
So when the proposition came to move into the region, I didn’t really have an argument to say that we should do this through a demand gen lens.
It was a bit of an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ type situation, whereby this process - by which I mean sales-led - had worked in getting us set up and running in the UK.
So we felt like this was our best bet when moving into DACH.
We started where I’d imagine a lot of people would start. Which was to hire someone in the region as our Head, who could build out a team. The idea was to get some local knowledge and expertise to help us.
And not long after this, we were hiring SDRs and getting set up with an office space.
Nothing might alarm you about this setup, because it didn’t ring any alarm bells with us yet either.
But what ended up happening, which you’ll remember from entry 37, was a lack of understanding and research on our ICP, leading to us being unable to sell email marketing or email contact data in the region.
Which meant a lot of wasted time, wasted manpower and a stunted start to our ‘exciting’ expansion.
We then unfortunately had to lose staff by attrition and scaling back our spend. We had to claw back some of our investment.
Whereas, when we expanded into France, we went marketing-led. We proposed warming up the region and testing the waters with content before we hired salespeople there.
Which meant starting with our website. Making sure we had a place to direct any traffic from existing demand in the region (which we knew existed because we had acquired Kaspr, which was a very similar product to Cognism).
We then had to build SEO acumen. And create some ads specific to the French region and audience.
During this phase, we tested messaging, creatives and content, and most importantly, whether our ICP matched our expectations.
And we did all this before we invested anything major, negating a lot of the risk that we had tangled ourselves in during our DACH expansion.
Essentially, by going marketing-first into France, we were creating demand before we tried to capture it.
And then, once we had too much demand for the existing team and infrastructure,, we then - and only then - hired a French sales team.
Take a listen to this podcast episode on the topic!
The last word
Wow, and that’s us at the end of my Diary of a First-Time CMO, Volume 2!
If you’re reading this, thank you! I had such a positive response to the first diary, so I was excited to write another.
But with anything, you always worry it won’t be as good as the first. So if you’ve made it to the end, I do hope you found it interesting.
I’d love to know which of the entries resonated with you the most, which you found the most useful, and what you’d have done differently if you’d been in my position.
Connect with me on LinkedIn or continue to get insights from me through my newsletter. I offer up some CMO tidbits every other week in The Loop newsletter (scan the QR code to go to the sign-up page!)
And if not, then you never know. I joked last time about writing a second diary, and here we are. So I guess what I will say this time is - maybe see you later!
