Gary: Hey, everybody. Welcome to today’s episode of What Great Looks Like. Today we’ll be talking about fueling demand with content. In our last episode, we talked about the creation of proprietary data driven content as a way to generate documents that builds awareness, generate attention from the analysts community and the media, and most importantly, arming your sales team with talking points that support your message without being too salesy.

Today’s guest, Steve Bonadio, VP of marketing at Tive, collaborated with me on such content. When we work together at the telehealth vendor Vidyo.

At Vidyo, we produced research that illustrated counterintuitive findings about our target audience that we thought was valuable to all telehealth practitioners. Steve and I will talk about how we promoted content back then, and we’ll also discuss how the landscape to leverage content for brand awareness and generating demand has evolved in recent years.

Steve, thanks so much for joining me today. Tell our viewers a little bit about yourself and what you’re up to at Tive. 

1:35

Steve: Hi, Gary. Great to be here, and thanks for inviting me on your podcast. My name is Steve Bonadio. I’m the VP of Marketing at Tive. We are a leading provider of supply chain and shipping visibility solutions.

So if you ever want to know where your shipment is, what condition it’s in, and if it arrives safely and on time. Tive is the place to go.

I’ve been around in the B2B world for quite a few years, Gary, started my career about 20 years ago in B2B marketing. in product marketing, I’ve had some corporate marketing roles.

And in the last several years, I’ve really focused on demand generation and revenue marketing, with a company called Vidyo. That’s Vidyo with a Y, where we worked together, for a couple of years, a company called Ivalua, in the enterprise procurement space. And for the last 18 months, I’ve been with Tive, running our marketing organization and scaling our business.

2:30

Gary: That’s awesome. And you are actually a celebrity in the space. Because I recall you being on the cover of CRM magazine back in the day.

Steve: Yeah, that was an early stage of my career, my 15 minutes, if you will. I spent the early part of my career in the industry analyst community. So I worked for a company called Meta Group, which was acquired by Gartner.

And I was responsible for our CRM research agenda, giving advice to fortune 500 end user organizations, vendors on their marketing and go to market strategies and so forth. And then I was on the cover of CRM magazine, I think, in 2001 or 2002, and ultimately made the transition in 2004, to the marketing, the B2B marketing world, where I cut my teeth at Oracle for three and a half years, building up my product marketing skillset.

3:20

Gary: That’s awesome. we’re going to have to find a copy of that picture somewhere, my man. 

Steve: I’ve got it somewhere; my wife framed it at the time. It’s probably in some box somewhere that we never took out of the box when we moved ten years ago. So I know it’s somewhere.

Gary: Very cool.

So when we worked together at Vidyo, we created reports that were driven by research about our customer base. We worked with an external agency to understand trends about our market and their usage, their uptake, about our technology. And having that kind of report helped us share that with our prospects about what they could be thinking about.

How did you use those reports in your demand gen activities?

4:03

Steve: Well, at the centerpiece of our demand generation strategy is incredible, thought provoking, thought leading content as a mechanism to engage with our prospects and our customers, our partners, in a manner which is noninvasive. So when you look at Tive’s marketing, for instance, we’re not really marketing our products per se until such time we get to a phase in the buyer journey where that’s appropriate.

What we’re trying to do is relate to the pain points, the challenges that our customers and prospects are facing, and build really great content that’s prescriptive and enables us to, in some form or fashion, address those challenges and get them to think about them in more detail. So thought leading content is the centerpiece of a good B2B marketing strategy, I believe, and survey based or primary research based, content tends to outperform any other content, with maybe the exception of customer stories and case studies.

And I’ll tell you why. The reason in my mind is that people love data, good, credible data, rather than having thought leaders, purported thought leaders are influencers tell them what they have to do or should be doing. Let the data from a group of peers, hundreds of peers in some cases, as sample sizes go, guide where they are facing challenges and then build content around what you’re learning from the primary research.

So we find that those types of reports tend to outperform any other. In fact, at Tive we have, earlier this year, we put out our third annual, what we call State of Visibility Report. Primary research base went out and interviewed over 200 logistics and supply chain professionals. so it was highly targeted.

It was global in nature. And we built the content, not only the master report, but all the derivative content, the social media content, the blogs around the findings from that report. And we find that’s a really good way to engage with our customers and prospects, because the credibility factor, particularly if you’re using credible third parties to help you build out those surveys, build out that content, which we do, and leverage industry partners who are well known in our industry, like FreightWaves and Supply Chain Brain and others to help build that content.

And it serves as sort of the starting point of that journey where we’re trying to engage our prospects and customers with that excellent content.

6:45

Gary: And that’s really cool, because what you’re what you end up doing. And first of all, it’s proprietary, right? Nobody else has that research that you’re doing, and you use it to illustrate why people should be caring about that problem and how to solve that problem.

Right? It doesn’t talk about your product. It talks about the challenges that your target audience faces and by definition, the peers of the people who are reading the report. Right? 

Steve: That’s exactly right. As I mentioned, the credibility factor’s huge. We’re not talking about ourselves. We’re talking about pain points and challenges and business issues that we know our ICP audiences care about.

And that is our mechanism for getting them engaged and facilitating their awareness, as an offshoot of Tive, which is exactly what we want to do. And then using that as a stepping stone to engage with them further through other means, through other channels, through better,, more content. through our sales and sales development teams who might have outbound motions that we developed based on that earlier engagement.

There’s someone, on LinkedIn. Adam Robinson, has been doing quite a bit, with retention.com and our B2B, but he calls it inbound-led outbound. and I think that is a winning strategy for us and for B2B marketers in general.

Gary: Talk to me a little bit more about that. I’m interested, what channels do you use in those campaigns, and how do you break down the document?

Because not everybody is going to read the big report on all the channels. Can you dive into the details a bit on that for us?

Steve: Yeah, the one the one shift. And this gets back to, you know, some of the early day ABM discussions we were having in 2017, 2018. The one big shift in my mind is getting more focused on intent driven accounts, high intent driven accounts, not relying on a single thread or a single channel to engage with those of those accounts.

But leveraging the great content and messaging we’re developing again, it could be from these survey based research, projects and others, to create multiple threads and an omni channel or a multi-channel approach to these campaigns where we have the content, let’s say, a survey based report The State of Visibility as an example, as the centerpiece. but then we are pulling out soundbites, chunks, other things from that report.

We’re refactoring them to make them appropriate for different channels, let’s say via LinkedIn, both organic and paid LinkedIn campaigns, via our blog and our website. So pulling those out and making them available in different formats as a means to engage people through the channels through which they want to be engaged with. So it’s gone from sort of single threaded to multi-threaded in that light, butalso not relying on, you know, a single platform or technology to get that message out.

So, you know, in 2017, 2018, ABM platforms were still somewhat, in their early days, fairly nascent in nature. Today, platforms like 6sense and Demandbase have become more pervasive among the B2B marketing community. That’s a channel for running programmatic display ads to a set of targeted accounts that you want to reach.

But the secret sauce, if you will, and the tricky part, too, is the sequencing of those, let’s say, ABM-derived campaigns via a 6ense or a Demandbase and coordinating that with all of the other channels. So we might also be running paid organic LinkedIn campaigns. We might also be running Google Ad retargeting campaigns via Performance Max.

We might be running email nurtures to those that reach a certain part in the buyer journey. And by the way, all of this is aligned around our ICP, the personas we’re trying to reach and the content and the channels are aligned to where they are in the buyer journey. Are they early, sort of in the awareness phase of things, or even pre awareness, or are they more late stage, middle stage of the funnel where they’re, you know, at a decision making or purchasing stage?

We need all of our channels, all of our content to be aligned, across the board. And that’s the tricky part. It’s the sequencing. It’s the integration of all these things. It’s not the technology. it’s how we match everything up internally and then execute flawlessly across the different channels. and it’s highly dependent on where a buyer is in his or her journey.

I would say another piece to this is bringing in a personalization layer, which is very, very important. So these campaigns are becoming less and less generic and much more personalized. So we’re sort of moving from that one to many, ABM ABX approach to the one to few. And, you know, 1 to 1, we can talk about if we want, but that tends to be very time consuming and expensive to execute on.

and then let’s not forget SDRs who are sort of the tip of the spear with their outbound motions, getting them engaged and helping them to build their cadence, to build the messaging that they’re putting into the cadence is to personalize those cadences with some of the tools we we now have available that we didn’t 5 or 6 years ago.

And to the SDR point, the other secret sauce element to these programs is they’re very, very much driven by collaboration, teamwork across functions within our business. So making sure that sales, sales development team, the SDRs, and marketing all understand what the goals of these campaigns are, what channels we’re using, what content we’re using, what is expected of each and every person that has a stake in these campaigns, and making sure we’re all on the same page as we pull the trigger and build these things out and execute them in the field.

13:02

Gary: Yeah, that collaboration is so important in the communication. Right. Because if sales doesn’t know what’s coming. That’s where they come to you and say, we need to do a campaign on this, where we need to do a campaign on that because they’re worried about where their pipeline is coming from. But when you’re really working closely with them, that builds the confidence in your organization of what you’re delivering.

Which leads me kind of to the next question, which is how do you measure the success? Right. It’s not about MQLs anymore, is it? 

Steve: It’s not. In fact, we don’t really even track a report on MQLs anymore. For us, it’s a couple of things.

Because content is such an amazing mechanism, proprietary content that is, in search engine optimization and SEO and driving organic search traffic to our website, one of the key metrics we use is inbounds. Quality inbounds that convert into opportunities for our sales team. So are we driving more inbounds, and higher quality inbounds. And quality can be subjective. But in our model we’ve made it less subjective. Is it aligned to our ICP. Is it the right persona. and what are our conversion rates at every stage of the funnel?

So we can measure this all and we do measure it, making sure that not only are we getting more and more inbounds for more organic search traffic due to our content strategy, but are they converting, at ever increasing conversion rates? So that’s a really important metric. The second piece to that, then, is of those early stage opportunities, which in our model, the SDRs have created based on those inbounds coming in either to our website or through our or our phone number or to our inbound chat channel.

Are those early stage opportunities converting into qualified sales accepted opportunities? and therefore, have a pipeline number ultimately attached to them. So are we generating those qualified pipeline opportunities and pipeline in general? And then finally, of course, is the end of the road. Are those qualified pipeline opportunities and sales accepted opportunities, converting into closed one business for Tive and ultimately leading to bookings, revenue and growth for the business?

So we think in terms of what are the business impacts of the programs, the campaigns, ABM, what have you, content marketing, what is the business impact of that, and is it facilitating the growth of our business? That is the ultimate metric for us. Vanity metrics like MQL and engagement, and other things are, I think, important for understanding individual campaign performance, which is, you know, what we want to know as marketers so that we can always improve on our campaigns.

But for a business, that stuff is almost meaningless. We need to be supporting the growth targets of the business at the end of the day,

16:17

Gary: That’s cool. And then how do you communicate that across the business side? Do you have to get buy-in on what your new metrics are, or is that something that’s been readily understood at your level of the business?

Steve: I think it’s been readily understood. I mean Tive is an incredibly collaborative and transparent business. and you know, goals are set. Everybody’s communicated to and collaborative in building out those goals. Those goals may change quarter to quarter, as they do in any, you know, fast growth business such as ours. but we’re very communicative and transparent about what the expectations are, not only at the top, but for everybody in the organization and how those goals cascade, throughout the organization so that we all know as teammates and team members, what’s expected, and we’re able to track and measure, we’re also able to be proactive.

So, you know, reporting isn’t an after the fact thing, although we do some of that, like any business, right? After the end of a quarter, we’ll roll up all our numbers, you know, and, you know, report to the board and all that which is to be expected. But the dashboards we’re creating, that update in real time, I think, are much more important in that they reveal potential areas that might need attention. Gaps.

So why this month our Inbounds? We’re two weeks into the month and our inbounds are 40% of what they should be based on historical averages, what’s going on there? inbounds are, you know, one of our most valuable channels, if not our most valuable, right? Everyone loves people coming to our website and raising their hands. Who wouldn’t?

And they convert the best into opportunities. But let’s say there’s an issue or potential issues. We need to be notified of that and be super proactive in figuring out and diagnosing, well, what’s going on. Is there a problem? Is there something we need to address? And peeling back that onion? In some cases it could just be the market.

It could be timing. It could be, you know, those first two weeks after a quarter of people are kind of exhausted, not only us, but, you know, our prospects and customers. It could be lots of factors, but we need to be able to identify that there could be a potential issue. and the dashboards and metrics that we’re updating in real time give us that view so that we can be proactive in fixing things up as necessary.

Gary: That’s awesome. That’s really helpful, Steve, I appreciate this at this point. We’re at that stage in each podcast episode where I put my guests on the spot and I’m going to ask you for three best practices that you would advise our viewers to keep in mind as they embark on campaigns that focus on proprietary content.

19:10

Steve: So the first best practices is get your house in order, get your infrastructure and your martech stack in order. One of the first orders of business that I had for me at the time was really to put in place the processes, and the technology to support those processes. And I won’t get into what our tech stack is and what it entails.

But without a scalable demand gen engine to take everything from a raw lead to converting that into an MQL to converting that into an opportunity, to converting that into, you know, a closed won opportunity, having a real seamless process, having everybody engaged in that process and knows their role in that process. and having that scale as our program scale is key.

You know, we have this mantra here at Tive: No lead left behind. Every single lead gets followed up, and if you don’t have the infrastructure to support that, then your good things are going to fall through the cracks. You’re going to lose out. You’re not going to be able to follow up with leads in a quick and expedient fashion.

And ultimately, you’re going to be leaving opportunity and money on the table. So you got to get the infrastructure, the foundations in place, to be able to scale your demand gen programs, irrespective of the types of programs, whether they’re content marketing programs based on proprietary research or if they’re any other type of program. So get your house in order, facilitate number two across functional, collaborative, transparent relationship with all the key stakeholders.

And there’s more stakeholders than you might think. Clearly, the sales, sales development, SDR alignment is very, very important. But we strive to also be very aligned with our Product team, which feeds into our product marketing and our messaging and also product launches with our Customer Success team, to make sure that we are communicating the right messaging and everything to our customers or partner team as well.

And the partner side of things, even our finance team, to help them to understand that these programs we’re building and quite frankly, spending quite a bit of money on, are expensive, you know, so we need to make sure that finance is aligned with what we’re doing, that we we have a clear view of what the KPIs for success are, and that includes, you know, what I mentioned earlier around opportunity creation, around in-bounds, around opportunity and pipeline creation and ultimately close one bookings and revenue and growth for the business.

And third, I would say, is you need to be able to measure, measure, measure, measure, think about what KPIs align with everyone on those KPIs. Make sure you can measure them in as near real time as possible, not only to do ad hoc and post quarter or post campaign reporting so that you can continuously improve on your programs and campaigns.

But also to be early warning flags when things are not looking as they should, and might require some action on our part. corrective action on our part to fix something that we didn’t know was broken, but that the real time or near real time KPIs are telling us they’re waving a little red or amber light, saying, team, you got to look into this and figure out what’s going on.

22:41

Gary: Awesome. Well, Steve, that is super. Thank you so much for taking the time and sharing with me and our viewers. and, to our viewers and listeners, you know, be sure to subscribe to the podcast. What Great Looks Like. Like and comment. Love to hear your views. get notifications so that you can learn when the next episodes are coming out.

So Steve Bonadio, VP marketing at Tive, thanks so much. It’s great to see you. 

Steve: Thanks, Gary. Enjoyed it.