Highlights & Takeaways From GMC2019

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Background:

I attended the 2019 Growth Marketing Conference to learn what strategies other companies and vendors are using to improve marketing conversion & pipeline creation.

The conference hosted spectrum of topics to address the pain-points that startups, SMBs, and enterprise businesses face. It also facilitated network opportunities to sync with other attendees in our industry. I focused on B2B Marketing discussions for Enterprise.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Intent Signals can be mapped to funnel stages

  2. Why we need to measure the incrementality of campaigns through A/B testing

  3. Apply North Star metrics to guide marketing (LTV:CAC)

  4. The entire customer experience is our product (nurture->acquisition->retention)

Balancing Optimization & Innovation

Andy Johns (former Head of Growth at Wealthfront, Facebook, Quora, and Twitter), ironically called out how too many young companies are focusing excessively on “Growth Marketing”. He explained that:

  1. The best lever for initial growth is in finding product-market fit (innovation).

  2. A great product will organically grow popularity through word of mouth.

  3. There’s a plateau to how much marketing strategies can optimize a funnel

  4. A poor product will result in low retention and will lower the LTV:CAC ratio

Johns also equated Funnel Optimization vs Product Innovation similar to how we invest in Stocks in youth and Bonds in retirement (high risk high reward vs low risk low reward).

At the end of the day, it pays to be non-consensus and right--invest in product & market research, identify unaddressed market needs, and navigate customers to realize the full value of the product in a way no other company can.

Application of Intent Data

There were a couple speakers who talked about how we can leverage intent data to better understand when Accounts have high intent to purchase. This involves on gleaning insight from external web activity, as well as how accounts as a whole are behaving. But how can we capture external data?

Fortunately there are vendors for this!

Function

Compares similar products by feature, side-by-side. Data is publicly available at cost.

Use Case

Product Comparison data can be disclosed via subscription. If a person is comparing products, it can be a signal that they are ready to purchase.

Function

Company Surge data identifies which businesses are actively researching your products and services, signaling when and what they want to hear from you. Data is publicly available at cost.

Use Case

Can signal when a company/account is highly interested in your product, regardless of what Atlassian campaigns they engage with.

Weakness is with larger accounts (i.e. 10,000+ ppl) where different teams may have different objectives.

After data collection, we can map the actions individuals make to different stages in the awareness funnel

 
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Hyping Up Customer Interest

Premise behind this is that customer interest varies over time (it increases and decreases based on what they are exposed to). In order to convert a customer, we need to build up to the point of highest interest and execute on the conversion opportunity at that time (not before or after).

This was previously done more in the B2C space but there have been some successful examples of using this technique for B2B as well.

Example: Postmates Corporate Campaign

  1. Identified accounts/users already associated as being high-potential

  2. Offered free coffee for their team within 20 minutes (~20$)

  3. In the time between accepting the offer and delivery, the sales team presents user with a 1:1 Demo of how the product can help their business

Example: Match.Com Customer Psychology Journey

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North Start Metrics

Lifetime Value vs Customer-Acquisition-Cost

As a success metric, many companies use LTV:CAC as a success metric. Achieving a high ratio relies on doing the following:

  1. Maintain high customer retention

  2. Double down on subscriptions, expansion, and cross-sell efforts

  3. Optimize Customer lifecycle Marketing + Conversion (do more with less)

  4. Ensure that marketing channels aren’t saturated and that new campaigns are being strategically implemented in respect to LTV

Campaign Incrementality

Main point was that existing attribution models (LTA, LINTA, MTA) are ineffective at attributing the degree of influence a campaign has in improving conversion.

The speaker argues, instead, that lift should be measured through A/B testing and that the delta in results should dictate the % attribution. They did not touch on how the results could be used to spin up a new attribution model for tracing pipeline back to campaigns.

Indistractable - Nir Eyal

In a world of addictive apps, how do we stay focused on what we set out to do?

We can start by breaking distraction into a series of Internal and External Triggers…

Internal Triggers: Defined as uncomfortable emotional states we seek to escape from.

  • Most distraction comes from internal triggers, not external triggers

  • Its important to discover the discomfort we're trying to escape from

  • Comes down to effective time management, aka pain management

External Triggers: People coming by your desk, notification popping up, etc.

Working Past Internal triggers

  1. Take note of how we are feeling when the sensation occurs

    1. The Blamer - Technology is at fault (Wrong, its our self-control)

    2. The Shamer - I am a horrible person, I must suffer (Wrong, can worsen our self-control)

    3. The Claimer - Its my responsibility and I can work past it (Right, it's an iterative process)

  2. Introspect and ask yourself why the trigger exists

  3. Surf the urge - No need to make an ultimatum, can apply the 10 min rule to things like social media

  4. Make calendar for personal and professional tasks

    1. Make time for traction (plan the time not the output)

    2. We don't know how long tasks will take (not fair to plan for completion)

    3. Measure self against whether or not you were distracted

Working Past External triggers

  1. Raise flag to indicate to others that you’re focusing (Do Not Disturb)

  2. Ask if the trigger serves your work

    • Adjust notifications

    • Self Control Apps (Forest App)

Attendees & Networking

The conference used this convenient app called Brella that made it easy to connect with others in Marketing Analytics.

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However…

There were also a ton of MarTech companies and Consultants that specialized in Growth Marketing. They were hungry for work and spammed the inbox.