inside the demand generation agency

Inside the

Demand Gen

Agency

Interview Series

It takes an entire agency to create a meaningful lead

INSIDE THE DEMAND GENERATION AGENCY

Welcome to HiP’s Inside the Demand Gen Agency! In this new ebook, HiP turns inward to its in-house experts for their thoughts and insights on executing content-centric demand generation. Herein you’ll find in-depth interviews with each of our department leaders. They’ll share their expertise and experience in the day-to-day operation of our demand gen agency while communicating tips, best practices, and a broader understanding of our organization and its contributions to our clients.

See for yourself why I so often say, “It takes an entire agency to create a meaningful lead.”

With more than 25 years in the demand Generation industry, Bret Smith has built a name for himself as a thought leader in the fields of Sales, Sales Prospecting, Lead Generation, and Content Marketing. In this time, Bret has presented in countless webi-nars and spoken at tradeshows across the country. He was recently named a “Top 25 Marketing Influencer of 2014” by InsideView.

Before founding HiP, Bret was a successful entrepreneur, cofounding WebAttract, LLC, and the Head of Americas Sales Prospecting for Pitney Bowes Software. Outside of the office, Bret is a loving husband and father of six children.

BRET SMITHFOUNDER & CEO

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QWhat is the Client Services’ mission at HiP?

Client Services’ mission is to ensure that we successfully manage our clients’ campaigns from beginning to end, by communicating our clients’ needs to the rest of the team at HiP to get everything done on schedule. We run a huge volume of demand generation campaigns each week, so we maintain the balance to make sure everything runs smoothly to be able to make client deliveries on time. Based on what you know of other B2B agencies, what is unique or differentiating About HiP’s Client Services?

Here at HiP, Client Services doubles as the marketing automation team. This enables us to have more flexibility over scheduling and staying on track to fulfill campaigns within schedule and within

ALLIE STRONGCLIENT SERVICES

DIRECTOR

scope. Whenever we run into an issue with a specific campaign, whether its’ engagement was unexpectedly low or the ESP ran into a sending issue, we are able to quickly make the changes necessary to ensure that campaigns stay on schedule for on-time deliveries to our clients. This also gives us a direct view into the progress of demand gen campaigns, providing us greater detail for client communications.

What traits do you look for in an effective Client Services person?

An effective Client Services manager is someone who can see the bigger picture of maintaining client satisfaction overall, which managing all the small daily tasks that go into running the high volume of campaigns smoothly. This means having an ability to communicate on a client-specific basis, and being flexible to all the daily chaos that ensues from our campaign volume.

INSIDE THE DEMAND GENERATION AGENCYINSIDE THE DEMAND GENERATION AGENCY

Q&A WITH ALLIE STRONG

CLIENT SERVICES

Allie Strong is the Client Services Director at HiP. Allie graduat-ed from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a BBA and a concentration in Marketing. After 3 years of business experience, she arrived at HiP and has been a driving force in HiP’s Client Services department ever since. At HiP, Allie and her Client Services team are tasked with executing client cam-paigns, delivering leads, and ensuring high quality outcomes for clients.

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Can you relate for me ‘a day in the life’ of executing a typical client lead gen campaign?

Campaigns are broadcast in two segments each day to break up campaigns with similar target groups. Client Services receives the campaign creative from the Creative Services team, pairs it with its appropriate target group, and broadcasts accordingly. Those campaigns are data-matched by our Data team later that evening once the campaign has received maximum contact engagement. Those contacts are sent through our Call-Verification (CV) team to ensure their authenticity the next day. At that point, Client Services receives the leads back and preps them for client delivery. Does your Client Services team leverage agile project management, reporting systems, and client communications as part of its roadmap for client success and retention? Can you offer details and examples around each?

We absolutely do, and we’d be completely insane without them! We use a whole series of checks and balances to make sure that we’re on track to fulfill client campaigns within their time-line and to keep the rest of the HiP team up to date on where each campaign and client stands.

After a few months of searching, we were finally able to come to a consensus on a project management system for HiP to utilize (to make all of our lives easier). We went with Axosoft, which is typically a software development PMS. This enabled us to personalize the entire system to mimic our unique work-flow. We’re only a few weeks into on-boarding the system, and everyone absolutely loves it.

We also use the Integrate platform for reporting and delivering leads, providing a method to double check that each campaign is being delivered with the appropriate data. We are able to deliver leads to clients in whatever manner they prefer, whether it is directly through the platform, via API, or by a simple CSV file.

What other steps, meetings, SLAs or processes do you have in place to ensure client expectations are met?

Internally, we stay in constant communication with each other to ensure that all client needs are being met, and that all the pieces are in motion to stay on schedule. We meet with the data team and the creative team at least once each day to make sure that we are on the same page and ready for the next day’s broadcasts and deliveries.

As for our clients, we firmly believe that each and every client has a unique set of requirements, wants, and needs, and we shape our process around those individually. Certain clients like to communicate via email on an as-needed basis, while others like to have scheduled calls to discuss overall planning. We love either.

What techniques do you use to conserve business when a client relationship is damaged or broken?

The best technique is obviously to never let a relationship make it to that point. Unfortunately, sometimes it happens – where we seem to be moving in different directions. Any time I have seen this happen, it’s been due to poor communication or miscommunication. The first step is always to sit down with that client, one-on-one, and go over the issues. Once these have been put on the table, acknowledge these

We firmly believe that each and every client has a unique set of

requirements, wants and needs.



issues and figure out how to move forward. If this means shifting the communication methods or honing the internal processes to better serve that particular client, then by all means, we’ll make it happen. Sometimes on the agency side it is easy to get stuck in our process, as we get lost in the daily chaos. However, taking the time to understand and listen to your client may enlighten you to a newer, better, and more efficient way of doing things.

Where do you see Client Services going in 2015 and beyond?

Client Services here at HiP will maintain its role as the hub of current client relationships. We are striving to make our communication techniques more efficient and effective, and ensure increased client satisfaction across the board. As HiP itself grows and new clients are on-boarded, the Client Services team will have to adjust the way to do things while maintaining our flexibility and efficiency. Each new client brings a new set of requirements, needs, and desires, which provide us an opportunity to get creative about our current process.

Technology, at HiP, drives every aspect of the business. What are the types of tools you and your team use each day to accomplish our task of quality demand creation for clients?

We would not be able to deliver quality leads to our clients without a robust database of contacts and companies from which segment pursuant to the demographic and firmographic requirements of our clients. We utilize a relational database model using SQL (Structured Query Language) to pinpoint and extract target groups for loading onto our ESP platform for email broadcasting. In addition to the contact/company data, we also capture and store hard bounce and unsubscribe records in our database for exclusion from all future campaigns. We also capture engagement metrics across all our

campaigns which allows us to send broadcasts on multiple IP’s by non-engaged vs. engaged for which we are realizing 5-10% open rates for our previously engaged contacts. Beyond our relational database, Excel is our primary tool utilized to extract, translate, and load data across our various systems. Ultimately, creating a lead at HiP, begins with your data. Can you describe the “journey” a contact record makes from data source to client delivery?

Contacts start life out in our database with all the corresponding demographic and firmographic information. On a monthly basis, we send the entire database through email hygiene to identify undeliverable and spam-trap contact records which are then removed


Q&A WITH ED GUNDRUM

ED GUNDRUMVICE PRESIDENT

OF TECHNOLOGY

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TECHNOLOGY

Ed Gundrum is HiP’s Vice President of Technology. Ed joined HiP after spending more than 10 years at Pitney Bowes Soft-ware, where he supervised data analysis. His background in information management, coupled with his business acumen, make Ed an important contributor to tactical and strategic de-cision making. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Utica College and an MBA from Golden Gate University. As the Vice Presi-dent of Technology, Ed and the Data team are tasked manage-ment of HiP’s contact database, as well as analysis, reporting, and modeling.

from our database. Upon receipt of an insertion order, we extract the matching contacts from our database and load them into our email platform for the campaign broadcasts. Engagement results are extracted after the campaign is complete and loaded into our instance of Salesforce.com for processing by our Call Verification team to primarily validate titles and phone numbers. Once Call

Verification is complete, the resulting “valid” contacts are identified and provided to Client Services for review and delivery to our clients. The final step in the contacts journey is to upload records back into our database and apply updating information discovered by our Call Verification team, such as title, phone number, department, etc., which is important, especially if the contact has changed jobs or been promoted, and allows us to segment them correctly for future campaigns. What is the biggest Technology challenge you face in the business today?

Our use of technology allows us to accurately segment our data and to provide the most targeted leads to our clients. Our biggest challenge is efficiently and effectively managing the volume of data that we have and maintaining its accuracy. Data stewardship is crucial in allowing us to deliver targeted leads to our clients, so we are constantly reviewing titles, departments, and functional levels to ensure these are maintained and updated accordingly. We use

automation/scripting as much as possible, but we are always looking at better ways or available tools to assist in this endeavor. Where do you see HiP’s use of Technology and Data going in 2015 and beyond?

We will continue to focus on data stewardship and refined segmentation models in 2015. This will allow us to “right-size” our target groups, which in turn will reduce email volume and produce results more closely aligned with our client needs. Focused target groups also reduced fatigue and unsubscribe rates, improves outcomes, and reduce time spent internally on reviewing and filtering the campaign results, on call verification, and overall reduced processing time. Another area of focus for 2015 involves building a Topical Engagement Model which will utilize two plus years of engagement by campaign “topic” to produce a score of each contact’s interest in various topics (e.g. Cloud Storage, Marketing Automation, Network Security, etc.). Our hope is to layer these scores into our segmentation model and to build our target groups with thosecontacts that have shown a prior level of interest in the offering of our clients. Additionally, we hope to build out a campaign quoting tool which will allow our Sales team to quickly determine the size of target groups available and quickly provide accurate and competitive quotes.

Let us know what you think.

Do you have any questions for Ed?

How does HiP’s data processes compare to that of your organization?

What are your biggest challenges in working with data?


Q&A WITH ED GUNDRUM

Our use of technology allows us to accurately segment our data and provide the most targeted leads to our clients.

Zach Klinger is HiP’s Director of Business Development. Zach is a proud Ithaca College Alumni, earning both his Bachelor’s and MBA there. Before joining HiP, Zach began his business devel-opment career with ChannelEyes – a Gartner Cool Vendor that offers an enterprise mobile platform design to streamline com-munication with channel partners. Zach brings his unique brand of relationship-oriented selling to HiP’s Business Development team. Since arriving at HiP, Zach has helped to on-board a slew of new brands and agencies, both established and emerging.

Based on what you know of other agencies in the B2B demand generation space, what do you describe as differentiating about how HiP gets the job done for clients?

Demand generation is a combination of science (data, automation software) and art (targeting, content). The main HiP differentiating factor is our blend of this duo. Rather than utilizing a rigid, step-by-step approach to demand gen, HiP treats every campaign uniquely, providing it with the attention and strategic vision it deserves. First and foremost, we allow our clients to tell their own story. We operate as brand guardians, aiming to act as the unseen seeder in the harvest process. We get to market with exceptional speed while remaining flexible and agile during the campaign creative process.

Our creative services team and small army of copywriters produce derived content (abstracts, landing pages, thank you pages, etc.) to be approved by the client within 48 hours. The carefully crafted message is then broadcasted to a precisely defined target audience during optimal time frames. HiP keeps historical broadcast records that allows us to track engagement by days of the week, time of day, type of offering, target group, etc. – this is key. It’s also vital to note that clients have dozens of targeting options ranging from job title, industry, department, geography, company size, revenue, etc. Another big differentiating factor of HiP’s services resides near the end of the process. Our team of call verification analysts verify each lead delivered. Without ever fatiguing the lead, a member of this team will likely speak to a gatekeeper to confirm the current employment and title of the lead. A brief 30 second call makes a noticeable


Q&A WITH ZACH KLINGER

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BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

ZACH KLINGERDIRECTOR OF

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

difference in lead quality and return rate. In sum, HiP is efficient. Despite implementing intricate practices throughout the campaign process, HiP never fails to act swiftly and effectively to deliver the highest quality leads from your defined audience. With HiP as a content-centric demand gen agency, we strive to ‘drink our own champagne’ when we do demand generation for ourselves. Can you describe what that means to you?

In short – this means utilizing methods that are tried and true. Our own internal best practices, if you will. Start to finish would look something like this: First – ensuring that we choose the most appropriate asset for the defined target audience of that particular campaign (content, language, tone, design, stats, etc.). Is this going to resonate with my

audience? Am I accomplishing my primary goal? The primary goal being high-level brand awareness and familiarity with the product or service at hand – and perhaps shaking loose some low hanging fruit. Second – optimizing subject lines, abstracts, and calls to action. We cover all of the minute details before broadcast. Third – responsive form and email design for mobile users. It is crucial to account for this audience.

Fourth – optimizing the broadcast schedule by utilizing historical engagement data. We like to get granular – time of day, day of week, and accounting for time zones and target group fatigue, etc. Fifth – the big question is always, what do you do when the campaign is over? We like to personally send one to one email leads, thank them for their interest in the topic, and finally, offer to answer any questions or provide guidance on future endeavors. We’ll also provide a supplementary piece of content to keep the lead engaged. This methodology is tried and true, and has produced fruitful demand gen harvests for HiP and our clients countless times. In most companies, sales and marketing alignment is an elusive goal. How would you say that’s different at HiP? Why does it work here?

Sales and Marketing alignment is crucial in any business for a plethora of reasons, including setting expectations, planning and executing campaigns, analyzing results, and determining what success looks like. Advantages at HiP include close office proximity. Yes, it makes a difference. This is especially helpful because the next success factor to our alignment is the interweaving of work. My Marketing Director, Matt Leap, involves me in writing campaign language and I typically serve as his proofer of copy/content. Imagine that? In turn, I ask my Marketing Director to assist me with crafting follow-up messaging to leads. Essentially, we intertwine our efforts while leveraging our individual strengths. I’m more process, big picture, communication oriented while Matt is more detail and numbers oriented. We also take on joint projects to collaborate, most recently working with our Creative Services Director, Jory Hutchins, to redesign our entire website. We both understand our success is vested in the other’s performance. Successful marketing campaigns equate to sales.



We get to market with exceptional speed while remaining flexible and agile during the campaign creative process.

And of course, more sales means more money in his budget! Finally, we travel to trade shows together and stay well versed in the other’s road-map.

So what do you keep in your business development briefcase?

Being responsible for business development at HiP requires attention to detail. Typical buyer persona’s include syndicators, agencies, and direct clients. Depending on their needs, solutions will range from traditional email marketing lead generation, sales prospecting, or webinar/event audience recruitment. I’ve been fortunate enough to help implement each of these solutions to companies from syndicators to start-ups. Oh, and in regards to my physical business development briefcase– I don’t have one. But that is a great idea!



JORY HUTCHINSCREATIVE SERVICES

DIRECTOR

Jory Hutchins is the Director of Creative Services at HiP. Jory joined HiP as a Web Designer, soon after graduating from the Col-lege of St. Rose. He quickly rose through the ranks to his current role. Jory brings a diverse skill set that encompasses technol-ogy, design, communications, and project management. Jory and the Creative Services team create the derived content that enables client campaigns in addition to miscellaneous content creation in support of Marketing and Sales. The creative output of Jory’s team graces the walls throughout our office, with stellar examples of work done for Dell, Google, VMware, IBM, Oracle, and many others.

In your opinion, what is it about HiP as a demand generation agency that is unique from more traditional marketing agencies?

What sets HiP apart from traditional marketing agencies is our speed to market. Most all of our creative team is in-house, and because of this, we are able to get through the creative process very quickly and supply a proof of concept for the client usually within 48 hours. This means that the asset will get copy written by one of our experienced copywriters; sent to a web designer to develop a creative set comprised of an email, a landing page and a confirmation page; and ultimately tested to ensure browser/email compatibility, all within 48 hours. This speed to market requires an experienced and dedicated team with a strong attention to detail to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Can you describe ‘a day in the life’ of a new client asset as it flows through our design process?

The design process of a new client asset was outlined briefly in the last question, but let’s dive into a more detailed view. First – The asset is sent to a copywriter who writes the promotional copy of the asset, including enticing titles and subject lines. Second – The asset and copy is sent to one of our in-house web designers who create an email, a landing page, and a confirmation page. All of our designs are responsive and in-line with modern web design trends. We ensure that every design we create can be viewed on any device which is very important considering nearly 60% of our readers open the email on a smart-phone.


Q&A WITH JORY HUTCHINS

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CREATIVE SERVICES

Third – The email, landing page, and confirmation page are tested in Litmus across all major email clients and browsers to ensure that the content can be consumed properly no matter what combination the reader uses. Lastly – The proof of concept is sent to the client. If all looks good, then we are clear to begin broadcasting. If they want any changes, we will gladly make them and send them back for approval, but usually the client is very pleased with the first proof of concept. What important design, copy-write, or analytics tools are involved in the HiP creative work-flow?

As mentioned, everything we create is responsive by nature. Given the current technology trends shifting towards mobile, this is a no-brainer. We use a series of basic templates to ensure each email is consistent and responsive. We also utilize third-party tools in our design process. One of these tools is Litmus, which allows us to test each of our designs to ensure that they look good across all major browsers and email clients. Another tool that we use is SendForensics, which allows us to dig into the code/copy to look for issues that could affect deliver-ability of the email. Over time, we can use this tool to find which phrases and words most often affect deliver-ability and avoid them in the future giving our emails the best possible chance to reach every in-box. What is your group’s greatest challenge today?

Trying to stay on top of web design trends and incorporate them in our designs. Like technology, web design is a constantly changing field and requires us to be always changing our designs to stay modern. What was modern one month may be considered outdated the next month. These shifts can be easy to miss when we are producing the number of designs that we do each month, which is why we are always sharing links and bookmarks that we find when

doing personal research. We try to sit down as often as we can and discuss our designs and how we can improve them. As we progress into 2015 and beyond, what is your sense of new tools, approaches and technologies that will become part of the design process?

Our biggest focus moving forward is to get a robust content management system on top of all of our topic-based domains where we host our content. This would make it much easier to get from the email to the promoted content and when that happens, everybody wins. Aside from the CMS, we are always looking for new tools to test our designs and track how they perform to ensure that we are doing our part of the HiP process to the best of our ability.


Q&A WITH JORY HUTCHINS

JIMMY DORATOCALL VERIFICATION

COORDINATOR

Jimmy Dorato is HiP’s Call Verification (CV) Coordinator*. Jimmy is currently an MBA student at the College of Saint Rose. He’s been part of CV from its original deployment and has helped it to evolve to where it is today. Call Verification has become an im-portant part of HiP’s lead delivery process, providing clients with the most accurate and up-to-date contact data possible. Jimmy and the other CV team members are tasked with calling contacts and confirming that our information is up to date. *Since this interview was conducted, Jimmy has been promoted to Data Oper-ations Manager, giving him expanded responsibilities to manage the CV team, manipulate production data, and ensure timely delivery of such information.

Tell us what Call Verification entails at HiP. What technologies are used?

The Call Verification team at HiP focuses on one thing: data validation. We take the data from campaigns and confirm the title, company name, and phone number, thus ensuring the top-quality records are delivered to our clients. Most of our verification comes from speaking with an operator or a front desk receptionist at the companies that we call. This works out well because these people are often more than willing to help us – friendliness and politeness is key for us. Friendliness tends to produce more friendliness. There really is nothing better than a friendly exchange that gets the information we need for our clients. As far as technology, we use a

combination of Salesforce and an add-on called InsideSales to sift through the data quickly and efficiently.

This combination allows us to make anywhere from 200-300 calls per day, without ever once dialing a phone number. We also use LinkedIn for the information that is not available through the phone, that is, when we get someone’s voicemail or an unsure operator. These three pieces of technology are what allows us to do our jobs with such efficiency. Furthermore, InsideSales custom-built a button for us in their system, which allows us to search names LinkedIn and return matched values without leaving the interface. This saves both time and effort for all of us.


Q&A WITH JIMMY DORATO

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VERIF ICATION

How is call verification different that lead verification? What are its goals?

Well, lead verification is a lot more hands-on and (usually) requires the lead verifier to actually converse with a potential lead to gather the required information and interest. Call verification is more basic data collection; more often than not, the verifier never talks to the actual lead. In simple terms, call verification would be done before lead verification because we would want to ensure the phone number, title, and company name of the potential lead qualifies, before we take the time to get to know them better for our clients. When you aren’t able to make contact by phone, do you have an alternate method to enhance call verification?

As I mentioned before, LinkedIn is a great tool for such a situation; however, there is really no substitute for getting someone on the phone and validating the information that way. It is no secret that information gathered online is not always accurate or up to date. With LinkedIn, we have to trust that the information is right, which requires the lead to keep it updated. This really lowers our confidence level in the information. We strive to be 100% sure of all of our data before we deliver it back to the Data Department. If there is any doubt we are sure to let everybody know. How has your expanded role in data changed how you view CV/Research?

My expanded role has really given me a better view into the HiP process as a whole. Outside of just call verification, there is a ton of work that is put in by our Data Department in broadcasting our clients’ messages to the right target groups, collecting that data from those broadcasts, and then checking (and double checking and triple checking) that everything is right before Call Verification even sees the data. As a result, I am even more careful when I am doing Call Verification and research because attention to detail and validity is so important throughout the process. In all, it has shown me just how

many moving pieces there are in creating and delivering a lead to our clients. At the same time, it has cemented the validity and importance of call verification in the lead generation process. Without the Call Verification team, we would have a much lower confidence level in the records that go to our clients – and, as we all know, if the clients are unhappy, nobody is happy.


Q&A WITH JIMMY DORATO

CATE MILLER CLIENT ENGAGEMENT DIRECTOR

Cate Miller is HiP’s Director of Client Engagement. Cate was HiP’s first hire and has been associated with the company for all of its 6 years of existence. In this time, she has worked in various areas across the business, including Data, Voice Pros-pecting, and Client Support. Her current focus is the manage-ment of HiP’s largest, long-term client relationships.

Can you tell us what Client Engagement’s mission is at HiP?

In a broad sense, Client Engagement’s mission at HiP is grow client relationships. To do this, I try to be as adaptable as possible and focus on client satisfaction.

When a current client runs a campaign, I am involved from the very beginning. I quote new offers and coordinate campaigns in association with our Data, Design, and Client Services teams. I’m lucky to work in such a communicative environment; it certainly makes my job a lot easier!

By gathering knowledge from my co-workers and staying up to date on our current contracts and campaign schedule, I am able to give the best possible information to clients on new offers. This ensures we follow best practices and give the client the best achievable outcome! How is HiP’s Client Engagement what is similar or different, based on what you know of this role at other B2B agencies?

One major difference in my role here at HiP, versus CE teams in other agencies, is my collaboration with other departments. As I mentioned before, communication is key for success! Another key differentiator is our detailed client records. This documentation allows for more


Q&A WITH CATE MILLER

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CLIENT SERVICES

insight when quoting new offers, suggesting time-lines, and predicting yields. This data is not just my holy grail, it can also be useful to my teammates in Sales, Marketing, and Client Services. What’s ‘a day in the life’ like for HiP’s Director of Client Engagement?

Though I try to plan as much of my day out as possible, the majority of it is unpredictable. I handle everything from quoting new offers to drafting insertion orders to covering off on broadcast schedules and deliveries with clients. As Client Engagement Director, I have to be ready for anything! What safeguards or processes are used to make sure we meet client expectations?

At HiP, we have our own set of unique “best practices”. To guarantee that we can deliver our clients the best possible leads, we segment our data into target groups, based on various fields from our database (department, employee range, title level, etc.). Therefore, we only send a client’s campaigns to the group that is most likely to consume the content. Over our long campaign history, we’ve discovered optimal broadcasting times, which we use to drive the most engagement. We are also very conscious of fatigue to our contacts and we make sure to leave an appropriate amount of time between scheduled broadcasts to the same group. This ensures that people stay interested and consume the content without feeling harassed. Finally, our data is also consistently hygiened, which helps us make sure we have the most up-to-date information on our leads. When a client relationship is damaged, do you have techniques for conserving the business?

Absolutely – although we never want that to happen – we always have to be prepared for such a situation. As I said earlier, we listen to clients and try to accommodate them as much as we can. Obviously, there are some situations where both sides are just too

far apart. Even then, we do everything we can for a clean and amiable break. This goes back to being easy to do business with, we do our best to be a well-oiled machine here at HiP. In the remainder of 2015, what are Client Engagement’s biggest challenges and initiatives?

I’d say our biggest challenge for the remainder of 2015 is scaling. Between ongoing business with our current clients and constantly incoming new business, we have to grow to meet increasing demand. Client Services is always trying to build upon the prior month’s business, which means there are always challenges ahead. There’s nothing I want more than to see HiP continue to grow and enjoy even greater success!


Q&A WITH CATE MILLER

We’ve discovered optimal broadcasting times, which we use to drive the most engagement.

MATT LEAP MARKETING DIRECTOR

Matt Leap is the Marketing Director at HiP. Matt has a Market-ing Degree from Champlain College and brings several years of both B2B and B2C marketing experience to HiP. He heads up all of the content marketing endeavors at HiP, supporting both new customer acquisition and customer development. As importantly, he’s proven himself quite valuable in strategic plan-ning and in the development of our efforts in branding, promo-tion, reporting, lead generation, and lead nurture. Matt is also a frequent contributor to the HiP blog, known for his insightful original posts.

Matt, you previously were in marketing management with a consumer brand. Can you tell us what is different in your day-to-day when you compare that experience to working for a B2B agency?

At my previous job, I primarily focused on eCommerce. My top goals were driving qualified traffic, optimizing the website for conversion, and reporting on my efforts. Though we certainly worked toward repeat customers through our subscriber base and re-marketing efforts, things centered on the individual transaction. Our analyt-ics made things incredibly transparent–the success (or failure) of

a campaign could be put into very definite, monetary terms. It’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, very clear ties to revenue made it easy to justify the costs from efforts like AdWords. On the other hand, it creates a temptation to overlook efforts that didn’t have as direct a role in revenue.

Here, in the B2B world, purchase decisions are simply more complicated; there are longer sales cycles, greater educational needs, larger purchase amounts, multiple decision makers, smaller target audiences, and so on. To compensate, we have to put a much greater emphasis on content and strategy. Conversions in the B2B


Q&A WITH MATT LEAP

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MARKETING

marketing/sales funnel aren’t as cut and dry as a transaction Content marketing efforts are notoriously difficult to measure. We have to spend more time ‘reading tea leaves’, so to speak. We look at measurable behaviors that we believe are precursors to the purchase and assign relative value accordingly. Through segmentation and personas, we’re then able to monitor and shape the buying vision with

as much relevance as possible. This type of focus on individual prospects is something that you wouldn’t see in a lot of B2C industries, especially eCommerce. These days, a marketing manager has to be a technologist as much as anything. What tools are you using to measure SEO, assess deliver-ability, manage social media, etc.?

That’s a very accurate observation. Today, digital marketing has really taken center stage – it’s become more prominent than many traditional outlets. With this shift comes new capabilities for placement, personalization, and reporting. Pair that with an industry-wide fixation on data and you can see why technology has become so important to marketing. There seems to be marketing technologies for just about anything these days. There’s no shortage of information and communications around these offerings (as my inbox can attest). Finding useful tools certainly isn’t an issue, rather, it’s the evaluation and prioritization that proves to be a challenging. Just about any tool out there will provide

some sort of value, the key is to weight that value in terms of implementation time, impact on work-flow, compatibility, and opportunity cost. At HiP, we have several tools to support core areas of our marketing efforts and our business as a whole. We recently subscripted to MozPro to help us improve SEO on our new site. Moz allows us to track links/mentions, optimize for specific keywords, and compare our efforts to our competitors. As for deliver-ability, we use a tool called SendForensics (both for our own marketing communications and or clients). SendForensics allows us to judge the deliver-ability of a message before sending. It provides a deliver-ability percentage and recommendations–both in terms of content (word choice, tone, coding syntax, etc.) and infrastructure (DKIMs, IP reputation, etc.)–to improve. Finally, we use Hootsuite to manage our social media accounts. Hootsuite allows us to schedule posts across multiple accounts and networks, as well as provides some reporting capabilities. On the horizon, we’ll be adding a marketing automation system to help tie our efforts together. By integrating with our sales team’s Saleforce instance, this system will help us to more intelligently and effectively nurture our leads. In 2015, implementation of content marketing is the standard by which many brands and agencies are gauging their success. At HiP, can you share what your mission is in that regard?

Essentially, our content marketing efforts have five key goals, which we often refer to as pillars. Those goals are brand awareness, lead generation, thought leadership, process differentiation, and demonstration of value. Each pillar has a set of sub-goals and tactics associated with it. Each pillar of our strategy (and its associated activities) is measured independently. For each pillar, we have a “scorecard”, which allows us to track key metrics over time. Though these metrics don’t tell the whole story on their own, they provide reassurance that we’re moving in the right direction for each of our major goals.


Q&A WITH MATT LEAP

By integrating with our sales team’s Saleforce instance, this system will help us to more intelligently and effectively nurture our leads.

As HiP’s Marketing Director, how do you find the execution of content marketing for lead generation to be different from its use in raising brand awareness?

As I mentioned, both lead generation and brand awareness are separate pillars of our marketing strategy. Accordingly, both have different sub-goals and tactics associated.

For example, for lead generation, we currently use a combination of inbound and outbound tactics. On the inbound side, we use gated content, blog subscriptions, and contact forms to generate leads, while on the outbound side, we use primarily events and email marketing. As for brand awareness, we use blogging, social media marketing, and SEO optimization to help establish a strong web presence. We also do some event sponsorship, promotional items, and various co-branding activities to help promote our brand.


Q&A WITH MATT LEAP


There are many takeaways from this ebook! Fundamentally, though, what it demonstrates is that agency success in content-centric demand generation today depends upon the sustainable orchestration of many factors. Those key elements include: Leveraged thought leadership content.

Intelligently and responsibly managed outbound communications.

Applying historical data and engagement insights to optimize outcomes.

Marketing automation to optimally manage production and collect/analyze intelligence.

Clearly, without today’s marketing technology, achieving consistent outcomes would require a herculean effort. That said, without applying the passion, engagement, dedication and intelligence of those behind the controls, our mission would be impossible to achieve. As I stated at the outset … “It takes an entire agency to create a meaningful lead.” BRET SMITHFOUNDER & CEO

inside the demand generation agency

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