Speaker 2 0:19

Hey, welcome back to Marketing Qualified. I'm Mike Griffin and I'm Chris Newman.

Speaker 1 0:23

Chris, happy Friday to Marketing Qualified. I'm Mike Griffin and I'm Chris Newman. Chris, happy Friday. Happy Friday indeed. The listeners probably won't be listening to this on a Friday. If you are, happy Friday to you all, if you happen to be listening to this on your Tuesday, commute our condolences. But yeah, it is Friday here.

Speaker 2 0:41

Mike and I both had a pretty busy week, but yeah, I'll let you kind of kick it off like yeah, uh, apologies if we are bringing friday vibes, your tuesday morning grind, but uh, hopefully that can actually help you power through a little bit. Uh, hey, speaking of power, this is not necessarily a perfect fit into a marketing topic, but, chris, I wanted to get your take on the rings of power season two. Okay, I myself. So. At time of recording, I believe there are four or five episodes that are available to consume. I have consumed four at this point. How far along are you and what are your initial takes?

Speaker 1 1:19

um, I've watched the first three and first of all, before I even get into how unenthused I am about this show, I will say that I'm even more unenthused with Amazon. Like, what the fuck is the deal with with prime? You know, I pay, like what is it? 150 bucks a year for prime. You get the shipping used to get the prime video. You get all this stuff and now I have to sit through ads, like sit through ads, like I mean, as a marketer, I'm, I should be for this, but I'm still very against this. Like what? Like why? Why did they make this big change all of a sudden?

Speaker 2 1:50

well, here's the thing, though as a marketer, you have a right to be upset about shitty ads or those that are not tailored to you. It'd be one thing if I was getting like pampers, diapers, advertisements right for my son that I happen to know to self need to order more of later today, but this shit has absolutely nothing to do for with me most of the time, right, I mean, are you experiencing a similar type of situation there?

Speaker 1 2:15

I mean, I pretty much just black out whenever I see an ad at this point and then I come to halfway through the show and then realize that I'm still blacked out because the show is so fucking boring. But, um, yeah, well, I do want to circle back to the like, the commercials and the ads, uh, after we kind of talk shit about this show a little bit. But, um, yeah, I do want to talk to you a little bit about, like, connected tv, because we're actually looking at doing an experiment with uh, with a connected tv provider, with a new uh commercial that we actually just shot at my job. But to bring it back to the important things with this show, I just the only thing I can really say is that there's only one character that I'm rooting for and it's Sauron.

Is Website Chat Dead or Alive?

Speaker 1 2:56

Like, he's the only he's the only interesting character on this entire show and I kind of want him to succeed in all of his plans, just so that you know they can be miserable for a little bit. And then, you know, lord of the rings starts. And then we have great characters like gandalf and you know, argorn and frodo and like all these characters, because there's literally nobody on this show to root for.

Speaker 2 3:18

Your take, sir, I so, first of all, spoiler alert, sauron gets it done. Well, the boy, do I have a trilogy for you if you're rooting for him? Uh, yeah, I, honestly, I I want to disagree with that, but I can't like, in good faith, I a lot of like really flat characters. A lot of the fucking made-up characters that were put in for no apparent reason are not adding a tremendous amount of like depth to the. There's a decent world building, right, I like that we're exploring rune, for example, but I mean I would be just as happy looking at source material characters in a bit more like, uh, I don't know, just giving them more air time than we ever had a chance to in the trilogy for obvious reasons, including the hobbit.

Speaker 2 4:03

I, uh, I am not a fan. Uh, I know that I briefly lamented to you off air about just even like, the languages that are being used for the different groups of elves makes no fucking sense. Why would gilgallad and galadriel be speaking in cinder, cinderian, cinder, whatever the fuck that language is, instead of the? No, they're nolder, they should be seen quite near. I'm gonna, I'm gonna rest my case there um, it's not you, you kind of.

Speaker 1 4:26

You kind of sound like a maga republican, like we're. We're in america, you speak english, god damn it. We're in middle earth, you fucking speak, cinderin, I don't.

Speaker 2 4:37

I feel like an asshole. This is not uh, not not a compliment you want to receive, not a compliment, uh I just, I just Not a compliment Digest, digest.

Speaker 1 4:47

We all know that there's no MAGA Republicans on this podcast right now.

Speaker 2 4:51

There are not. What we do have are some hot takes. So you guys know, you guys listeners know this is mostly unscripted. We do have some loose guidance for us, a couple of things we want to touch upon today. One of them, I think was there was a Chris entry here right Is chat dead. Start things we want to touch upon today. Uh, one of them, I think was there was a chris entry here right is chat dead. Start there, pivot into newsletter, friend or foe, and then we'll toggle into paper lead programs. Both of us, I think like almost entered this into the agenda at the same time here and we have, we have some thoughts. So let's, uh, let's talk about chat. Is it dead? Is it living? I don't know what a third option to be, but it feels like there should be a third.

Speaker 1 5:29

Uh, take it away um, when we, when we say chat, are we talking specifically like website chat, like the classic, like drift, like conversational marketing, like all that kind of stuff, or are we talking like even broader beyond, like that kind of stuff?

Speaker 2 5:44

Interesting. My head goes to the website version that you mentioned. The drifts, the conversational marketing, that type of stuff Got it.

Speaker 1 5:52

Okay, I mean we use it more. It's more for like a support standpoint for us, Like I don't think that we use it for marketing really at all. We do have it on the site and I feel like it's kind of one of those things where it's kind of like a necessary evil right now. I think that if a business doesn't have it on their website, they'll most likely be fine as long as you have enough different avenues to let your customers reach out to you. But I wouldn't say it's dead. I just think that it's not as important as everyone was saying it was going to be, you know, four or five, six years ago.

Speaker 2 6:27

Follow up questions. What do you think it's more important to have on a website? You and I obviously occupy the B2B marketing space. Feel free to take it with that like narrow lens or even broad. Now, wider than that, do you think it's more important to have a chat available even if there's some bot, that's part of it right, like a bot and live chat option or a phone number prominently available on the site? What do you give preferential treatment to?

Speaker 1 6:55

there. Um, I mean, as somebody who hates picking up the phone, I'll only ever call anyone if I absolutely need to or if it's the only option with like these goddamn health insurance companies and shit like that. But yeah, I would default more towards chat just because it it tends to be a little bit less. Like I can like multitasking. I don't need to drop everything I'm doing to have a phone call. Like I can still, like you know, start a chat and then still be doing other stuff at the same time, which is why I like texting and you know it's not, as I guess chat's a little bit more on demand than like texting. But I think that you know a lot of B2B businesses don't even have like a company line, like a lot of places are completely remote and they don't even have like a number that you can call.

Speaker 1 7:39

Really, I think it also I mean just it all depends on your audience too, like if you have a different audience, if you have an older audience who would prefer to pick up the phone, then you should make it as easy as possible with them to get in to contact you.

Speaker 1 7:52

But if it's, if your audience is like marketers like you and I, like you know mid thirties and you know busy about our days and like don't really like to pick up the phone, then you know having multiple avenues, like whether I can email somebody or submit a ticket, or if I need something a little bit quicker, then chat's usually a good option to get in touch quicker. But from a marketing standpoint I've never really seen much success with just using chat to close a deal. Sales reps don't really use chat that effectively. I don't really think there's much you can do from a marketing standpoint. I think that the AI chat bots just making sure that they can crawl your site and have relevant answers to your questions. I think that that can be important. But an actual human behind chat doing marketing and stuff and a lot of the drift stuff I haven't really seen a lot of cases for that fair.

Speaker 2 8:47

I would like to point out, as you were describing us, you left out the bullet point under the persona description mid-30s, busy, extremely successful.

Speaker 2 8:56

Okay, that's handsome correct, lest we forget to mention handsome. Uh yeah, you also made a good point about like. Okay, so it depends on who you're selling to. If you are going after an older generation that prefers interacting via phone, it's almost if I didn't know better, I would posit that you were suggesting the website experience should be aligned with the people that you're trying to sell to. Is that what you're trying to tell me?

Speaker 1 9:24

Yes, yeah, you said it much more eloquently than I did, but yes, that's.

Speaker 2 9:28

Well, it's such a preposterous idea. I wish that you had been around to make such a strong case and back me up on that at multiple points over the course of my career.

Speaker 1 9:38

Oh yeah, I mean, if you ever need somebody to talk to your boss and tell them why you should do something. I'm always happy to join and help persuade the powers that be who hire you for your expertise, and then just go about and do whatever they're going to do anyways.

Website Experience Should Match Your Audience

Speaker 2 9:52

Correct, we can go full stepper. Who's this gentleman behind you here? Oh, this is Chris. He's got a similar idea as me. Yeah, I think that makes sense.

Speaker 2 10:03

And then, from a support standpoint, like I'm just thinking, remember when conversational marketing first came out and it was like you have to have at first a bot experience that can route it to an appropriate titled person. I think SDRs were usually the favorite topic of people to be on the other side of this chat experience, but that's continued among two things, right. First of all, I feel like you have to have an adequate amount of volume in order to even route someone to a chat. This was also supposed to replace forms back in the day, remember that. So instead of filling out a form, you were more apt to give your first name, last name, email whatever to a chat.

Speaker 2 10:41

I don't have any data to suggest that that panned out. I also don't have any data to suggest that it doesn't. What I can tell you is that a lot of the places that I'm looking to purchase software, consultancy et cetera from even my own organization right now are moving in general towards not gating at all, except for that high intent conversion. I think we've talked about this on air a couple of times in the past. So, like the value out there from a chat perspective, not really as prevalent as maybe it once was.

Speaker 2 11:08

Uh, I don't know. I feel like, if you are expected to it you said earlier it's never helped close a deal right and I, in your experience as well as in mine, I wonder if at one point it was good at generating like the mql level stuff. Maybe maybe like a deal acceleration to close is like another touch point before it actually gets to close one revenue. But I I'm kind of skeptical of that. Even right, like if someone listening has data to show that this was at one point a thing and can back up or counter the assertion that we're making that it's actually not that effective like a demand capture channel. Would love to hear from you, would love to see any kind of like data that you have to share on that because yeah, and let, so let me ask you this thing as well.

Speaker 1 11:58

So what would let's say that there's a website, who's you know? We're going to do the whole conversational marketing thing, we're going to do chat, we're going to get our pricing page, which?

Speaker 2 12:07

if you've listened to any episodes.

Speaker 1 12:08

You know how we feel about gating pricing and not being straightforward with with that kind of stuff. Uh, for those of you listening to the audio version, mike just did a simpsons-esque fish fish shake the homer simpson fish shake. Um. But so if you had a choice between doing like a classic product that grows sign up for a free trial or know, sign up for a freemium version versus a conversational marketing like you have to chat and then you know you collect all this information, basically scheduling a demo through this chat interface or whatever which would you personally do and which would you do if you had to make the choice between the two of the marketers? I don't.

Speaker 2 12:50

I don't think I would do it. I don't think I'd do it. I think I think, if I had to say, I would go about trying to get like in touch with that high intent conversion, the demo, give me a software overview, whatever the thing is. If I had no other choice, then I think chat would only win if it's the last option for me. I think I'm a traditionalist in the sense of how I prefer to get that information because, like there's a little bit of a buffer timer, like heaven forbid, it is a live person on the other side and I'm just doing like an initial data gathering type of experience. Or I'm looking to set up something in the future because I'm multitasking during a work meeting or something like that. I'm going to have like the capacity to go all in and consume the information that I might be singling on, requesting and available to receive at that time.

Speaker 1 13:34

So that that's my take. What would you do I mean product led growth all the way like I'm the kind of person I want to get in there, I want to try it. I think that having chat inside of a product is extremely important, because a lot of people don't want to submit a ticket and you know wait for a response, especially if it's a new business where they don't know. You know how good the support is, you know how long it typically takes to get back to you. If you want something a little bit more immediate, I think that that can be good, but it has to be within the context of being inside the product, poking around, testing it out, seeing how it works and then, once you have questions, having people available there to help you.

Speaker 1 14:04

I think that that is really important. But yeah, if I'm looking at buying a piece of software, I want to try it like all day long, like even before I talk to somebody. Like I can't count the number of times where I've tried a free trial. I'm like, okay, this looks cool, this might be something that we want to look into and then book a demo with the sales team from there so we can get into the sales process. Try to negotiate discounts, like, so we can get into the sales process try to negotiate discounts like all that kind of stuff which I wouldn't want to do through chat.

Speaker 1 14:33

It's much easier to you know, just do that on like a Zoom or something.

Speaker 2 14:35

That's fair. I guess I hadn't considered that, because when you're getting your hands dirty in the product beforehand whether it's a free trial or whether it's just, like you know, a guided demo type of thing then you can come more prepared to an eventual conversation with, like specific questions that are actually going to expedite your time to okay, yeah, I'm with you that that makes that about the sales reps.

Speaker 1 14:56

and then qualifying me. It's actually like me qualifying you, like I want to make sure that your software is going to work for my needs. And you know I can't really do that until I get into the product and you know, start poking around, look through the help center and you know, see if your product can actually do what I need it to do. And then you know, join the call to ask more. You know pointed questions like skip the whole song and dance with like the inbound discovery call and like the BDR and all that kind of stuff. So let me get into the product, let me start, you know, playing around with it a little bit and then I'll send you the questions that I have ahead of time so you can prepare. And if you need to bring like a sales engineer or something on the call, then you can prepare yourself. But it'll just be a better use of everyone's time at that point.

Speaker 2 15:36

Yeah, 100 percent, 100 percent. Have you ever heard of a service called Video Ask? I have not. No, ok, good on you.

Speaker 2 15:45

So this is at the closing chapter of our chat conversation. So at a previous gig we used video ask and this was, instead of like the chat widget, you'd see in the bottom right hand corner with like a HubSpot or a drift or something like that it was. We ended up deciding to be my stupid fucking face that would show up and I had this like 59. I remember it so specifically. There's a 59 second spiel. It's like hey, welcome to whatever the website was right here you can find and the whole thing was like me guiding you across the website. You can find case studies here. You can talk to sales if you're interested here, if you want to just poke around one of our best performing downloadable assets from like a resource perspective, that was available for you to do as well, and I left the company.

Speaker 2 16:27

My tenure there ended before it had a chance to do any like real assessment of it. I would hypothesize that it made like zero difference, right? It's like who's the schmuck in the bottom right? You get gonna get rid of him faster than I am the stupid like logo or whatever, so that, uh, if you're, if you are, a video ask, I apologize, I don't have anything, uh, especially useful to say. If you're considering video ask, then do it, and then let chris and I know how it goes useful to say.

Company Newsletters: Friend or Foe?

Speaker 1 16:52

If you're considering video, ask, then do it, and then let chris and I know how it goes. 100. Um. One thing I actually found funny when you were mentioning uh earlier, when, you know, trying to convince your boss to do something, just having like a, like a buddy or an ally just standing right behind, like who the is this guy? Like, why did you bring this person into the meeting, or something? Um, I actually came across a pretty funny red Reddit thread the other day where this guy basically posted a screenshot of an email that he got. Basically, like everyone knows that he's going to get laid off. It's like one of those mysterious like oh, can you join this meeting at 10 o'clock? With no context or anything about it.

Speaker 2 17:24

And the guy's like.

Speaker 1 17:24

I'm getting fired, right, and everyone on Reddit was like, was like, yeah, you're totally getting fired. But, um, I thought that one of the commenters actually had reddit's fucking great, by the way, like for seo. Like I find reddit so much more now, like even in the past year, like I like google stuff and reddit comes up all the time and like it's, it's just great, like I, I love, I love reading it. Like there's a lot of bullshit on there, but if you can learn to read between the reddit bullshit, you can actually get some pretty good insights. But I digress, we should have a whole episode around like Reddit marketing and all that kind of stuff. But, yeah, one of the comments on that Reddit thread brought up an actual pretty hilarious idea and I actually brought it up with one of my buddies who's a lawyer.

Speaker 1 18:02

If I ever get one of these mysterious, can you join this meeting? And then you, you know you join the meeting and like the hr persons in the meeting or whatever, uh, pretty much know right away that you're, you're getting canned. But the uh, the person on reddit recommended bringing a full lawyer to that meeting as well, just to make it even more awkward for everyone. So you, you know, let's say you're, you're joining a zoom mic and and you, your boss is there and head of hr is, or whatever, and then you bring in, like me or like somebody else that you know, like you know, blake, or something. Blake, no, sorry, not Blake, blaze, my bad.

Speaker 2 18:38

He gets that all the time.

Speaker 1 18:39

Yeah, you can bring Blaze into the meeting and you can see this is my attorney, blaze. He's going to be listening to this call, and then they really need to be buttoned up. They might not even be comfortable doing it themselves. Because why should it be two on one? Why can't it be two on two and at least have a witness, like they need a witness there to make sure that they fire appropriately? And it's usually always HR. Why can't you have an H? Why can't you have a witness as well?

Speaker 2 19:02

That's amazing. That is fantastic. I would never pick Blaze to be my representative, but I love the idea of having support for yourself in the room when the company does right. That's fantastic.

Speaker 1 19:19

It's only fair, yeah, and who knows, maybe it might actually work and they might reconsider firing you. They're like, wow, this guy lawyered up, they've got this, he's got this guy on retainer and he's going to go to bat. We're not going to fire him, we're going to promote him.

Speaker 2 19:34

That's amazing and you don't tell them right that the person's going to be there. The full lawyer's going to be joining.

Speaker 1 19:39

You give them the same amount of transparency about that meeting that they give to you.

Speaker 2 19:44

So they don't tell you that HR is going to be there.

Speaker 1 19:46

You don't tell you that HR is going to be there. You don't tell them that you're bringing your lawyer.

Speaker 2 19:51

Touche. I think that's reasonable. I think that's totally fair. Damn, okay, yeah. So once again, disclaimer we are not legal experts. This is not considered advice. Follow our guidance at your own peril. We do not take any responsibility for the cascading effects of follow through or lack thereof.

Speaker 1 20:11

And if you do get laid off or fired, there is light at the end of the tunnel. It'll suck for a couple of weeks, but you'll just get back on your feet and nine times out of 10, you'll be in a better position than when you were at the company.

Speaker 2 20:24

That's valid. That's totally real. It would also give you more time to consume your favorite newsletters. So there's our segue into the newsletter topic, or podcasts, or podcasts we would humbly submit, or your favorite podcast, or even, like outside, looking at your top 20 favorite podcasts.

Speaker 1 20:40

Anyway, the point is here I'm going to pose a very simple question to you company, newsletter, friend or foe um, it's a hard question because I do see the value in newsletters from some standpoint, but I think it's kind of like. It's just like blogs, like everyone has a blog, everyone has a newsletter. People are busy and most of the time they don't ever read these. Like I think there's only a couple newsletters that I read, like once or you know, a couple times a week, like morning brew is one. I think that morning you got some pretty good content, but honestly I can't think of the last time that I've read a company newsletter. Like I don't even read our own company newsletter, and it's not because the content's not good, it's because I literally just don't have the time and would you say the company newsletter?

Speaker 2 21:30

do you mean something that's sent out internally or something that you're sending to prospects, existing customers and what have you yeah like a customer-facing prospect newsletter. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, what understanding that you don't often have the bandwidth to consume the content within. What is the content within? What are you all shipping out? What have you seen other companies that you've been at in the past ship out? What does it contain?

Speaker 1 21:54

yeah, I mean, the product updates are always good. It's always good to kind of show that you're a iterating on the product and launching new features and that kind of stuff. I think that those are always good and interesting. Um, I think newsletters are probably the best way to get the word out around those types of um improvements and stuff other than like in-app notifications and that kind of stuff. Um, I mean, a lot of places I've seen like they'll just like put together a bunch of blog posts that they wrote and then and then send those out and you know it might not necessarily be segmented or broken down for the audience or whatnot.

Speaker 2 22:26

Um, right, yeah, right, I feel like you know who does a good job of this and this is again like complete, like previous, employer bias here, but like HubSpot's very good at breaking out different types of newsletters for what you're actually interested in. I think that's the big, and you just mentioned it like tailoring for audiences and what have you. That's the biggest pitfall that I've seen is people just send all the people in your CRM the same shit in the same newsletter and that's just a great way to drive unsubscribes to have a terrible click through rate. If you're ever been trying to like measure engagement on this thing, right, I feel like even the blogs that you mentioned that are often included in company blog or company newsletters, I should say there's not any like data backed up. It's like, oh, here's our top blog posts from this previous month and they've only published two, so the two win by default. Right, it's not stuff that people will actually find interesting. And I feel like if the purpose of the newsletter is to and let's talk about it from like a demand generation, demand capture standpoint for a moment right, if that is to drive people further down the funnel, spur engagement, then shouldn't you actually put things in there that are of interest to them, like.

Speaker 2 23:36

Another pitfall that I see is like only product updates to people who may not even be using the software yet. That's stupid. Another thing is linking to a resource. Like, let's say, there is a popular case study that's available, but you're promoting that as like the leading asset and there are people that may have just entered your crm, they're just starting to learn more about you. That's a hard push.

Speaker 2 24:03

So the content there matters, I believe, and what I'm advocating for at my current gig is to have it be more of like. Uh, more of like just an engagement like. The point is not to like drive down the funnel so much as like to get engagement to build trust. So things that we're thinking about doing are like submitting a relatable meme or the persona there. We have like have a meme contest, have people bring stuff in. We'll do you know an arbitrary award. We'll send like an amazon gift card or something like that.

Speaker 2 24:32

Uh, we'll do other types of things meant to spur engagement, like pick a favorite quote from an industry leader and like vote on that. Just like get some type of thing you want to be. Look when your newsletter hits the inbox of your prospects. You don't want it to be an immediate deletion, right. You want it to be something that like, maybe, if they don't have the bandwidth to read it right away, they're going to keep it in their inbox to go back to you on their commute home or something like that. So making it something to look forward to. I just don't think that, like including all the things in a poorly segmented way if it's segmented at all is a recipe for success yeah, I, I agree with that.

Speaker 1 25:09

um, what examples of newsletters like what do you read? Like what do you read? Any like company newsletters? Or like what types of newsletters do you find appealing?

Speaker 2 25:20

I in the space that I occupy, the industry that I'm in right now I've yet to find like a super compelling company issued newsletter, like another software company newsletter that is actually of use to me for the very reasons that we were just talking about. You mentioned Morning Brew earlier. I don't skip an issue with that. I love. I genuinely look forward to the newsletter hitting my inbox each day, including on the weekends. I'll go into my work email, which I have subscribed to, to read the weekend edition of that. It's extremely well done.

Speaker 2 25:50

The other one that I subscribed to and had decent success with partnering with them from like a demand generation standpoint at the previous gig is D2C Newsletter. I think they have really helpful stuff. They show examples of like client success stories. I actually read a lot of that newsletter as well. And then back in the days when I was more involved in like the point and click in HubSpot I'm less so doing that now because I have an entire team dedicated to that. But the product updates I love the fact that there were the video updates that you can consume if you want to read everything. I like the frequency at which they were sent, the fact that it was parsed out from the other type of promotion, the other pieces of content that HubSpot might be interested in promoting. So I have a short list, but I think it's a pretty good one for my needs. What about you?

Speaker 1 26:33

Yeah, I mean I think that you know from like a B2B standpoint, I can't really think of any that I like look forward to getting and read consistently from like any of the vendors and like a lot of places. Like they might just send out a short newsletter like promoting webinar or something Like I don't join webinars, it's just, it's just not in the cards, like I always say I'll subscribe to one and like I won't join live but then I'll watch it later. Half the time they don't send out the link, but when they do I usually don't watch it anyways. So I don't even waste my time with those right anymore. But right, I mean some newsletters that I like, like I really like no Mercy, no Malice.

Speaker 1 27:14

If you're familiar with Scott Galloway at all, he's one of the co-hosts of the Pivot Podcast. I like that newsletter a lot. It is a little bit longer, but it's not one of those newsletters where it talks about like multiple different topics and like links out to different places and posts or, you know, videos or whatever. You can consume the whole newsletter inside the newsletter and then, once I'm done, I can just delete it. It's out of my inbox and I don't have to like ever leave my my mail program um I like that one a lot.

Speaker 1 27:36

I like morning brew, like I mentioned. Um, yeah, I think that there's something to be said about like just you know, obviously being respectful of people's time, like if they're you know, if they're busy, you not having the newsletter take more than a couple minutes to read. And then also, like I'd be curious if there's any data showing like just a newsletter where you can consume the whole thing, like there's no links, it's just the whole newsletter, is the text in the newsletter and then you know, that's, that's all it is. Like it's harder to get engagement data, like, obviously, like people like putting links in because it can help to show engagement, but even just not expecting somebody to click in the link and go to their browser and if they don't have good service or something for whatever reason, if they're on the go, then just keeping everything all contained in one, like an actual, true newsletter where the content is in the newsletter itself, not living on some website outside of the newsletter.

Speaker 1 28:29

I'd actually be curious if those perform better, or at least more people read them and consume the content.

Pay-per-Lead Programs and Their Effectiveness

Speaker 2 28:35

That's such a great question Cause you think about other mediums that exist, right. So some of my favorite podcasts that I listened to there's content that is that you can only get it on their YouTube channel. It's not published at Spotify and Apple podcasts. They don't really promote it or do reels for it on Instagram. It's only YouTube. So if a newsletter type of approach is or, sorry, if a newsletter exclusive is where you're going to find like a hard hitting article to your point, you're going to sacrifice some of that, like click through and attribution maybe, but like I wonder if there is an appetite for that amongst people that would receive it. Really interesting experiment to run. If you're listening and you've done something similar to this for newsletters, let us know. One thing we just mentioned that might take a hit as a result of that newsletter-inclusive approach is traction, attribution, possibly lead generation. This last topic here is exclusively about lead generation and we're talking about pay per lead program. So, chris, how do you define pay per lead and what's your high level take to get us started here?

Speaker 1 29:41

So when I think of pay per lead it's I kind of think of things in terms of pay per click, like classic Google Captera, like that kind of stuff, where people click on an ad or a listing or something. They come to your site or you know whatever landing page you're sending them to and then they might convert to a demo or a trial or whatever, or they might not. Whereas paper lead it's more of like a guarantee, where this company is either pre-qualifying the leads for you or they're sourcing the leads themselves and then sending them to you. Um, yeah, it it's more of like a guarantee, like you might agree to a set amount per lead, like you know 50 bucks a lead or whatever, and then the company fulfills that obligation and then you know you can decide to renew and do something else or not. So I can talk through a couple of the programs that we've run.

Speaker 1 30:26

We've had really mixed results and it's one of the instances where you know less money in more quantity of leads isn't always better than quality. So we we've done a couple of different trials. One of them was a program for $45 a lead. They promoted our content, an ebook that we wrote in both their newsletter just going back to newsletters, they have their own newsletter on their website and on the website banner ads and everything. So we contracted for $45 a lead and we met them. We contracted for the minimum of 100 leads. You know, 4500 bucks. All these people downloaded our content theoretically they've read the ebook and whatnot and then we send them over to the sales team to start reaching out, to try to get some conversations going, and we didn't get a single meeting out of all these 100 leads.

Speaker 2 31:17

O for 100.

Speaker 1 31:18

O for 100, exactly. And all of these, like from any other source, whether it's a trial or a demo or even just our standard people come to our website and downloading our content on our own website. We can usually expect, if it's content, maybe 10 to 20% of those people will book a meeting and enter the sales funnel. If it's demos, it's obviously gonna be much higher. If it's trials, a little bit less than demos, but more than content. And yeah, it was just a complete and total failure. It was one of those things where I also I want to spend some time, maybe on the next podcast, talking about this a little bit more.

Speaker 1 31:58

This was one of those things that was sent to us. It was somebody who was outbounding us for like a year, just constantly spamming like people multiple people on the marketing team. Finally, like they wore us down and they sent it to me and they're like hey, can you look into this? We agreed to do the tests and everything and then we ran it and it was just a complete waste of time and money.

Speaker 1 32:15

And that's where I'm always like if I haven't heard about you and if I'm not actively looking for these solutions then and I can't find you on Google, then is it even like going to be good, like, why are you outbounding people If you have such a great product like they should be coming to you? This is this is why I'm kind of jaded towards outbound and why I usually just delete these emails, because I've been burned a couple times by over promises and under delivery. But I'm curious if you run anything like this and kind of your take on it, mike yeah, so first of all, I think I agree with the totality of what you said.

Speaker 2 32:50

I didn't want to ask, so obviously you didn't get any meetings out of the leads that downloaded this piece of content from the lead share program. Did they do anything else? Do you know? Do they consume any other piece of content or do anything on the site or not, not that we know.

Speaker 1 33:04

So it's because they downloaded the content on the publisher site. We don't even have HubSpot tracking or anything. They were all net new leads. There was nobody. That existed in our database already, but we just didn't have any track. Even if they came to the site, we wouldn't know unless they filled out some form on our own site.

Speaker 1 33:23

None of them have come to our site afterwards and signed up for a trial or anything like that. For all we know, we have this bucket of 100 leads that have done nothing and again, like it was more of like an awareness play, like there's not say that you know there might be some untrackable stuff that down the line you know they might mention to a colleague and then the colleague signs up and then becomes a customer at some point, but that kind of dark funnel like we don't know of, but it just seems like you know. I mean, obviously these people weren't ready for a call. A lot of them probably weren't even actively looking for new software or anything.

Speaker 1 33:59

So it just seems like kind of a big waste.

Speaker 2 34:01

It does seem that way and that actually mirrors what my experience with these programs have been, and we would look at it usually to your points, like a negotiated upfront cost works out to a certain dollar amount per lead. Had to send multiple batches of leads back to some of these places, so send out in a newsletter and in some instances it's a direct outreach from basically, like their SDR team, the third party and mixed results party.

Speaker 2 34:38

Uh, and mixed results, if the goal is to get like net new leads, then at like a very top level it's been effective because there is a guarantee or you end up getting a refund and so you know you don't take like the monetary or spend hit there. But in terms of moving the needle on things, I just think, yeah, it's like a. It's a bad idea to think that that's going to do the trick in terms of generating high intent conversion, certainly immediately right, if, if ever. So I mean like I think the goal, the goal posts, the objective is what I'm trying to say should ship for these type of programs.

Speaker 2 35:07

It's less than like cool, like we're going to get these leads but they're not going to convert in a pipeline anytime soon. But we are going to have like an awareness of who they are now and then maybe we can do like a linkedin match audience to the company domain. It's like that follow them around, warm them up via some display or whatever type of abx motion needs to be done. But it ain't going to be like a money in, money out in a short time frame, like I think the expectation for these things used to be, because nobody buys like that anymore.

Speaker 1 35:31

Right, Exactly, and I think you bring up a good point too, like that's why it's more important than ever to have like actual, like like good marketing metrics and KPIs to follow. Like if you're only gold on leads, you know I can get you leads, I can get you leads all day, but they're not going to be qualified, they're probably not going to become opportunities and they're definitely not going to become customers. So that's why I always started the customer first and kind of work backwards from there. You know, if you're sourcing a bunch of leads and they're not becoming opportunities, then why even track them? You know, it's kind of just like a vanity metric at that point.

Speaker 1 36:01

We might as well just start, you know reporting on impressions Like if you want impressions, but you know there's a time and place for impressions right like those have a place.

Measuring Marketing Success Beyond Leads

Speaker 2 36:10

Like no click market. No click ads are like a big thing right now and I think there's a way to present that to folks internally to help get buy-in for it. My impression of rings of power hopefully will change, bringing us full circle here. We are almost at the end of our free zoom, so I look forward to hearing what you think about episode four when you watch it and any other episodes that have rolled out. If you like like the podcast, please subscribe, share with a friend via text or however else you do it. If you have feedback for us, don't forget to email us at pod, at marketingqualifiedio, and let us know what you think, appreciate you guys coming along with us. Have a good weekend or a great rest of your Tuesday morning commute, if that's the case, and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks, y'all.