11 Things B2B Marketers Should Know Going Into 2023

How cool is it that Spotify does Spotify Wrapped for podcasts? 

I loved seeing the visualization of Demand Gen Chat’s performance in 2022:

It was so fun to see that we were able to grow the podcast so much in season 3 — it’s getting me excited to start planning for season 4! 

But before I dive too deep into season 4, I wanted to share some of my learnings from season 3, where I chatted with B2B marketers that are doing truly excellent marketing. 

Here are my top 11 takeaways from my conversations with them:

1. Create competitor pages that are actually good 

Dev Basu, CEO of Powered By Search, talked about how you can create competitor comparison pages that your prospects will actually want to read. 

Here are the top things he sees companies doing wrong when it comes to competitor pages: 

1. Not creating them: People will be searching for comparisons between yourself and your competitors. If you don’t create those pages, your competitors will create them first (and then you no longer control the narrative). 
2. Feature overload: Don’t throw a giant, scary table on your comparison pages. It’s overwhelming.
3. Dunking on your competitors: Your comparison page can be a good opportunity to disqualify prospects who wouldn’t be a good fit for your product. It’s okay to write good things about your competitors — because there are prospects who are a good fit for the, but not a good fit for you.

If you want to learn more about this, he actually wrote an entire playbook on this topic

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

2. Do self-reported attribution right

Sidney Waterfall, VP of Demand from Refine Labs, is a big proponent of self-reported attribution — but she sees so many companies doing it wrong. 

Here are the two main mistakes companies make: 

1. Ask people how they heard about you… but put it on the thank you page

The first point really scares a lot of marketers (including me). “But what about our conversion rates?”, they say. But Sidney says you don’t have to be as worried as you might think. 

What they usually do is add in the question and A/B test for a few weeks to see what happens, just to make sure nothing tanks your conversion rate. Usually, there’s minimal impact on your conversion rate (I was also so surprised to hear this). 

They’ve had 4-5 customers implement self-reported attribution on the thank you page instead of the form against their recommendation… but eventually, they go back and put it on the form. 

2. Use a dropdown menu instead of a free-fill form 

There are a few reasons not to use a dropdown menu. First, people might just randomly choose something so they can get through the form. 

Also, dropdown menus can be too vague. She had a customer that used a dropdown menu, and they found that more than 28% of their Closed Won opportunities wrote “other”. Not super helpful. 🙃

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

3. Motion ads are in 

The “Astrodog” ad from Superside is one of the best retargeting ads I’ve ever seen. I came across it on Facebook one day and it was one of the only ads I’ve seen where most of the comments are positive (if you spend any time on Facebook you know how rare that is).

I asked Amrita Mathur, VP of Marketing at Superside, for a peek behind the scenes at how that ad came to life.

Amrita’s team knew that motion ads did well. And they had previously tested an illustration they called Astrodog that everyone loved. 

So they decided to combine the two — and it’s been one of their top-performing ads of all time. 

(But this was months ago. I’m sure they’re doing even more cool things with their ad creative now!)

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

4. Direct mail is not the campaign

Marketers tend to jump to direct mail as an easy win for ABM. I asked Hillary Carpio, Director of ABM at Snowflake: What do marketers do wrong when it comes to rolling out ABM?

She said the main thing people do wrong is making direct mail the entire campaign. Instead, it should be a touch within your campaign. 

If you send your item without other touches, it won’t be as effective. 

Here are 5 boxes you need to check if you want a successful direct mail campaign:

• Know your purpose before sending
• Connect the items within the box to your messaging 
• Provide a postcard with a link or QR code, so they can book a meeting on their own time (Bonus: Use Chili Piper so they can book the meeting immediately) 
• Include a follow-up SDR sequence about the box 
• Make sure the item starts the conversation and gives them something to think about

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

5. Measuring success with customer marketing 

Customer Marketing is a fairly new field (but growing quickly). A lot of marketing teams I hear from measure the success of Customer Marketing through traditional metrics like number of people in the reference pool, number of reviews, etc. 

But Katie Meeker, Director of Customer Marketing at iCIMS, told me about how they measure the success of their events by overlaying the NPS scores of customers who attend certain events vs ones who don’t attend. 

Over the years, they found that customers who attended regional events had a 13-point higher NPS score than those that didn’t, which showed that those events were working.

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

6. Find your raving fans (and keep them)

My favorite part of connecting with Corrina Owens, Senior ABM Manager, Enterprise at Gong, was hearing her talk about their UserGems program. 

Or, as they call it internally at Gong, “sales’s new favorite intent signal”. 

UserGems helps them quickly identify who their raving fans are and where they’ve landed. Then they do personal outreach, congratulating them on their job and giving them tools and kits to get them set up for success.

But the key to this program’s success is true personalization. They talk to the former CS team to better understand them, their individual interests, and what motivates them — so that any outreach they receive is truly meaningful and personal to them. 

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

7. Teal vs. Midnight Blue is not a good A/B test

Darrell Alfonso, Global Marketing Operations at AWS, thinks you should approach each A/B test as an opportunity to learn about your audience and what resonates with them (and I fully agree). 

Here’s an example of two subject lines you might A/B test: 

• Register now for this webinar
• Last chance to register 

But those subject lines are so similar, that you might chalk up any difference to something small — like some emotional response felt by the reader. 

Versus if you tested these two subject lines: 

• Last chance to register 
• What this CEO thinks about cloud computing

That’s a test you’ll actually learn something from. If one of those treatments wins, it could change everything about how you’re going to promote your upcoming webinar.

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

8. Set the right tone at a new job

If you’re starting a new job soon, I would listen (or re-listen) to this episode with Ashley Wilson of Momentum.

As the COO and co-founder at Momentum, she appreciates someone who’s able to roll up their sleeves and point out areas of improvement really quickly. She says, “I’m hiring you to come in and make us better. So make us better!” 

She also advises new team members to find those small, quick wins to show you’re able to learn the business quickly — rather than getting too stuck in strategy and planning.

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

9. Getting over the “cringe factor” when posting on social

I loved talking with Tim Davidson, Sr Director of Digital Marketing at Directive. He has so much great insight about posting creative content on LinkedIn, but my favorite part of this conversation was bonding about how we feel so much cringe when our partners see us recording videos for social. 😅

I asked him how people who are just getting into the influencer space can get over the “cringe factor”. And he said… just do it. The more you post, the better you’ll get at it and the more comfortable you’ll get. You just have to start.

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

10. Setting KPIs for marketing ops

I loved chatting with Colin White from Clearbit about KPIs. In this conversation, he shared how he approaches setting KPIs for everyone on his team. 

This includes Marketing Ops — who can be so hard to set KPIs for, other than “make sure everything works.” 

Interestingly, the marketing team at Clearbit is measured on the same goals as the business development team — Sales Accepted Opportunities (SAOs).

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

11. Go “all in” on inbound accounts

True sales-marketing collaboration is hard to come by. Which is why it was so fun hearing from Latané Conant, Chief Market Officer at 6Sense, about how her team  works in lockstep with sales. 

At a lot of organizations, there can be a battle between marketing and sales about whether opportunities are inbound-sourced or outbound. And when marketing’s job stops at opportunity  creation, we’d just let sales worry about conversion down the funnel. 

But at 6Sense, they go “all in” on inbound accounts. The main metric marketing focuses on growing is pipeline — and marketing and sales work together to achieve those goals.

🎧Listen to the full episode here.

Season 4 of Demand Gen Chat is coming this spring! Make sure to subscribe in your podcast app of choice or join our newsletter where I recap each episode: https://www.chilipiper.com/email-signup

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