Building Consumer Trust with Education-Based Marketing
Kate Adams shares her insights into building consumer trust with education-based marketing, how to generate leads with webinars, and providing customer engagement tools to attract consumers.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Cast Me In Studios.
And today we are joined by a special guest, Kate.
How are you?
I am great, Ian.
How are you?
It's such a pleasure to be with you today.
Yeah, pleasure to have you on the show.
Excited to chat about marketing of Lidity.
Excited to chat about your career and some of the cool stuff
that you have been doing.
So let's get into it.
First off, how did you get into marketing and demand
in the first place?
Fasten in question.
So in college, I found communications.
And I thought that was really interesting.
Initially, I went to college as a Spanish teacher,
quickly realized that although I enjoyed speaking Spanish,
I did not enjoy teaching it.
And so I decided that I was going to not do the education
piece, so I kept Spanish and picked up communications
as a major because I really always
found kind of like influencing people,
getting people to do something really, really fascinating
and have been with it ever since.
And so flash forward to today.
Tell me a little bit about your role, have Lidity.
Yeah, sure.
So I am fortunate enough to be the senior vice president
of marketing here.
I lead the marketing discipline here,
working with a wildly talented team of product marketers,
content marketers, demand gen marketers, customer marketers,
channel marketers, all of the folks here,
really just fortunate to lead the team
and lead marketing here at Bolidity.
All right, let's get to our first segment here.
We're going to the Trust Tree.
This is where you can be--
You are like it.
--a honest, adjusted to share those deepest,
darkest demand gen marketing secrets.
Tell us a little bit about what validity does.
Yeah, sure.
So at Bolidity, we believe that one of the core challenges
that are facing businesses today is in their data.
And we believe that with better quality data and better data
analytics, that today's businesses
can acquire, retain, and delight more customers.
And so we have products that help you do exactly that.
No matter where you are in working in your customer lifecycle,
we have a product that can help you.
So whether it's when you first acquire somebody
and you're trying to verify if their email addresses is valid
or not, we have a product that can help you
called Bright Verify.
Whether it's, hey, I'm trying to get a clean list
so I can execute my next campaign
and have as good a response rate as I possibly can.
We have a tool called Demand Tools that
sits on top of your CRM.
Or if you're trying to understand,
hey, my email outcomes are not improving over time.
And I really, really need to generate more revenue
for my email program.
We have products called Everest and MailCharts
that can help you do exactly that.
Then make sure that you get out of the spam folder
and into the inbox.
So that's what we do at Validity.
Gosh, we do not want to be in the spam folder.
Truly my biggest pet peeves of all things.
Yeah, it kills me to think through all the time
that my team spends on copy and creative
and creating, crafting these amazing emails
only for them to not ever get in front of anybody.
Indeed, that's in the light of day.
And so who are you sending these emails to?
Who are your customers?
What does that customer base look like?
Size and shape?
Yeah, we have a large customer base of thousands
of different customers.
That customer base really looks like kind of the hoo-hoo
of the Fortune 1000.
We are fortunate enough to work with some of today's biggest
customers.
For example, Meta is a customer of ours.
You pick anybody on that list and they are more than likely
at customer of ours.
And the beauty of that is not only can we
help those huge enterprise companies,
but we can also help very small startups as well,
of which we are fortunate enough to be able to call them
customers as well.
So our customer list is incredibly vast.
And so I'm always delighted whenever I get a chance
to be in the room of one of our customers.
Yeah, and who within that organization buys validity?
What does that persona look like they are going after?
A couple of different folks.
The folks that buy from us for email solutions
or from a marketing perspective are heads of digital,
CMO, VP of marketing, digital marketer, anybody
in email marketing, anybody in SMS marketing,
because all those folks can use our email solutions.
And then on the other side, we have a lot of CRM admins
who buy our data quality products.
We also have a lot of rev-ops folks,
so sales-ops or marketing-ops or rev-ops.
A lot of different folks, folks in the IT space.
So it's really fascinating to see the breadth of folks
that find value in our solutions.
How do you think about structuring your marketing
to pursue those different personas?
How we think about structuring it is we operate
what Topo called the double funnel,
which is target and volume.
And so how I think about that is everybody's familiar
with that ABM or account-based marketing pyramid
of one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many.
I think that one-to-many bucket is more about
just good high-quality marketing, right?
So being able to market to the types of businesses
and anybody of those personas
and making sure that I can reach them
with a compelling message.
And then I think about that one-to-few bucket is like,
that's where we define our target account.
We've looked at things like what industries
are our customers in.
I can tell you the top five industries,
that 70% of our ARR is in today.
What other attributes they have,
such as what email service provider they're using,
what CRM they're using,
how many marketing people on their team,
how many salespeople on their team,
what countries they're in,
all of those things.
We put all of those together and we define,
here's all our target list,
and then we work with the sales team to them,
say, "Hey, here's that target universe."
That's not saying,
"Hey, we can't sell to anybody outside of those industries,"
or "We can't sell to anybody outside those ESPs
or those CRMs."
That is definitely not the case.
It's just that we're prioritizing those accounts best
because we know that those accounts
are more valuable to us from an ASP perspective
and more valuable to us from a conversion rate perspective
and more valuable to us from a retention perspective as well.
Then we go to sales and say,
"Here's the universe.
Select X number of accounts for each of your book of business."
They make that selection,
that becomes our target account strategy,
and then we are full focused,
I would say 85% of our paid budget,
or paid media, paid advertising programs budget,
goes into those target accounts
and acquiring those target accounts.
We're doggedly pursuing those accounts
and making sure that we can generate interest and awareness
and all of the above into those target accounts
and generating leads for the sales team
to go work in those target accounts.
Then at the same time,
we also have volume accounts coming in.
Folks that are outside of that universe.
Then on that one-to-one part of the pyramid,
that's where we're aligning with our strategic account
executives to make sure that we can generate the man
in the biggest enterprise,
is that those folks are working in
so that we can get them a flood in the door.
>> I'm curious, are you creating campaigns then by vertical,
by persona, by size?
How much segmentation are you doing
in the crafting of that stuff?
>> Right now, we create a lot of campaigns
that are all focused on those target accounts,
but we are about to start creating a number of different
campaigns that are vertically aligned as well
to those key industries.
So like finance and insurance is a key industry for us
in one of our products,
so we'll start creating some of that data,
some of the content for those folks
and executing those campaigns.
For the most part though,
we are hyper-focused on those target accounts
and how can we make sure that we have events
where those target accounts will be in attendance?
How do we create a webinar program
that those types of accounts would wanna attend?
How do we do direct mail campaigns to those accounts
that end up right buyers within those accounts
to in order to grab their attention?
It's stuff like that.
>> Okay, let's get to our next segment.
The playbook is where you open up that playbook
and talk about the tactics that help you win.
>> You play to win the game.
>> Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play to just play it.
>> So what are your uncuttable budget items?
>> Uncuttable, so we're deep into event season right now
at the time that we're speaking.
So virtual events were huge for us over the last two years.
In-person events as the world has opened back up
have been really important to us as well.
So we really doubled down on virtual and in-person events.
A lot, those have been huge.
And for our audience and specifically in different regions,
we're in Lattam or in Amiya.
Those regions are very in-person based culture.
That's been incredibly important for those regions
but globally overall.
So I think events have been really important to us,
but I think other areas of things
that I would not cut from our budget,
we also execute our own monthly webinar campaigns,
our webinar programs, of which we went from one to two to three
that we run on a monthly basis.
And we've been able to rely on those.
Those are what I think is the constant drumbeat
for lead generation for us that we're able to get.
And a really important component in our customer lifecycle
where it's like acquisition.
I think about that as like after acquisition,
that's the next best action.
So if I acquire you through an emo campaign,
like that's a next best action for you
is to get you into one of those programs
and the response has been incredible.
And when we went from one to two webinar programs
that they were gonna cannibalize each other,
but we've actually just been able to generate
twice the amount of demand out of those programs
which is then incredible.
- I wanna dig into that pretty fascinating.
That's what I think the common thought is
if we increase the number, then, you know,
maybe we're gonna have a decreased amount of participation
or something like that.
Did you vary the time that you were doing them,
the length, is it the same sort of thing?
Is consistency key?
Like what's the best way to go about that?
- What we were really specific about was making sure
that there was a purpose and a tone
for the program we were currently doing
and that we were gonna have a different purpose and tone
for the program we were gonna add.
So what I mean by that is for a state of email
which is a wildly successful campaign
that the team had been executing actually long before
I joined the organization, Guy Hanson starts
every one of our programs up by going over the most recent
email benchmarks and then he has a special guest
and they're talking about like high level theoretical
concepts, right?
Like how to drive more personalization?
What's the latest stats with male privacy protection,
et cetera?
When we went and created inbox insider
the team went and created inbox insiders
they were really purposeful to say,
this is for the doers.
This is for the, this is a more practical program.
So now you wanna know how to navigate,
how to do something as it relates to that
navigating male privacy protection.
Like this is the show that you wanna get to.
And so making sure that they had a very separate purpose
it wasn't that we were just gonna go do state of email
twice every month.
It was the purpose was gonna be very different.
- Yeah, I love that.
I think that so much of what makes webinars successful
is that expectation that you know exactly what you're
gonna get out of it and having those
sort of consistent repeatable quality.
There's a clear function for why they would attend.
I'm curious, do you have a freestanding demo
and that sort of thing as well?
Or is it whatever comes out of that
and feels the funnel is great?
- I think a lot more about our webinar programming
for some listeners that this will be like contrary
to everything that they believe
and some people have a religion about this.
My religion about this is I worked for
David Kansil at Drift and he had a saying that was like
give, give, give, give, give and the get will come to you.
And what I learned in my career,
actually when I was at Drift and I was working there
was that I love marketing to marketers.
Like I love it with such a passion
because I learned so much in doing that.
Like I just learned so much and it's amazing
to be able to think up through what would make me
interested in this, what would I want?
And I was fortunate enough to be able to do that
here at Bolivia as well, getting to market
to a whole different set of marketers,
digital marketers that are focused on B2C
and D2C motion.
And so I really am thinking through,
Ian, I just lost my complete train of thought.
Sorry about that.
- No, it's all good.
We're talking about webinars leading to demos
and it seems like you're not thinking about that.
- Cool.
So here's my religion on this.
It's a give, give, give and the get will come to you.
So I will give you what I believe is the next best action.
I will give you that pre-ebook with a QR code
that you can go grab that at the end of that webinar program.
But I am not there to give you a demo.
I am not there to push a product at you.
I don't believe that with you giving me
your most precious gift, which is your time,
that I should then make that a sales pitch.
I think that I should make you better
and I think if I can make you a better marketer
in that 60 minutes that you provide to us,
that you will remember that
and you will believe in our solutions more.
- I think that part of the utility of events
and webinars and why they're such a mainstay
is because sales gets a list.
And so what you're saying is that like you believe
that it shouldn't just be a list that can be called upon.
Like how do you kind of rectify those two things?
- It is about sales getting a list.
Let me, I don't want to mince words.
Sales gets a list from our webinars,
all the attendees they follow up with.
But what I do is I coach that sales team
to follow up with it in a meaningful way,
which is like, here's the program,
here's what was covered in that program.
Follow up with those folks and say,
hey, how did you like Guy's session?
Look, our webinar program relates to what our product does.
It relates to the value that our products deliver.
So they can follow up with,
hey, I loved when Guy talked about the fact
that Apple represents 67% of the smartphone market
and now you're blind on open rates for that.
Were you aware of that?
And how are you guys navigating this new challenge
of not being able to see who's opening your emails
on an iOS device?
Like how are you guys navigating that?
That's a great conversation starter for them, right?
So I think you can do both.
- And I think that it seems like you said
a pretty clear expectation with sales on that stuff.
Is that kind of how your relationship goes?
As you say, we're here to help you
as much as humanly possible,
but there's also an expectation
that the people who are consuming our stuff
that they don't need to be beat over the head
or what's your sort of strategy
with building that relationship with sales?
- With sales development,
there's a principal in the marketing team,
which like the first team principal that we have is,
we all carry the revenue number.
So I may get really clear to every marketer here.
Like I understand that some of what I decided
could be taken as, oh,
I'm just painting pretty pictures in the corner
and other people are worried about revenue.
I generate revenue by providing valuable education
and making people better email marketers at the end of the day.
And as a result of that,
they trust and rely on our products.
And I think that when the time is right,
we go and we meet them with a demo request.
Like I follow up with all of our webinars and these
are like, hey, let me know if you want a demo request.
We follow it from a marketing perspective
and an SDR perspective.
But look, at the end of the day,
how we think about it or how I know my SDR team
is about is like, they know they're following up
with humans that it's not just like another lead
within the database.
And my expectation is that they go do the research
on that company and how we could help
and how we could help solve their pain,
not beat them over the head.
Like, I don't think anybody is out there right now,
maliciously calling anybody in the hopes
that make somebody have a bad day.
- I think there are people out there doing that,
but definitely not from validity.
That's for darn it.
- Not from validity.
Yeah.
- I wanna go back real quick to events,
which you touched on.
The world is opening up.
I'm curious, what was your event strategy
going into like this sort of thing opening up
and what kind of response are you getting
from people coming in person,
perhaps for the first time in six months, a year or years?
- So, throughout the pandemic,
we saw that virtual events were wildly successful for us.
Like, we were really able to connect with people
in a meaningful way and drive business.
As we went into this trade show season
when things opened back up,
virtual events weren't really an option anymore.
Like, everything was like, yeah, cool.
We're doing it in person.
Look, some of them have been hit or miss,
quite frankly, where it's like,
I feel bad for event organizers these days,
'cause I think it's harder than ever.
We used to do 5,000,
we got 10,000 to our virtual event.
What's gonna happen when I go back to in person?
Am I gonna get the 5,000?
Am I gonna have 10,000?
Am I gonna have less than that?
I have no idea.
Some events that we've been to have been way more successful
and way more well attended.
And people are like, oh my God, finally, back in person.
This is amazing.
I'm so excited to be here.
That is a resounding message that I hear from everybody
who is at the event.
But some of those events have been not as well attended.
And I think, quite frankly,
people are making a decision,
like if I'm gonna travel again,
I'm gonna travel personally first
over professionally, potentially.
And I think the travel industry
has had its own set of challenges this summer
that have made travel less enticing.
- It's so tough.
I mean, it's just such a fluid situation.
You just don't know what events people are gonna go to.
You don't know any of that sort of stuff.
- That's with everything in marketing,
it's experimentation and it's trial and error.
Like just because it's all these things
are like one of one, right?
You can't really make any judgments for any of this stuff.
It's like, well, nobody went to this conference this year.
I guess that's just a bad conference now.
No, actually that was just the weekend
that also competed with this other thing
or that was a bad travel weekend
or maybe that's just like everybody is trying to get this
first summer where they can go back
and spread their wings again or whatever it is.
That's what it seems like to me at least.
- I agree.
I talked to my team a lot about like,
we're gonna fail.
That is one thing that was for sure,
but failure is how we learn.
And so as long as we can learn
but I don't know that necessarily next year
I'm gonna like think of you the shows
that weren't as well populated this year
and say, there's no way we're not doing that one again.
I think it's like, let's go have a conversation
with the vendor and see what did they learn last year
and how are they doing it differently this year?
- Yeah, any other final thoughts on events
or stuff that you are thinking about for the future?
It's like every single demand-gen person
is thinking about events
and like we're all just trying to learn as much as we can
as quick as we can about this stuff.
It seems like these like small batch events
that we are doing digitally
that those could still be a best practice moving forward.
- Yeah, totally.
I think those smaller scale events
we've seen a lot of success with them
and like bringing people together.
I think people are still hungry for connection,
still hungry for connection,
especially like all different works
have all different scenarios.
We're in a hybrid scenario where it's three and two out
but like lots of people work from home all the time.
So there's lots more people that are looking
for an opportunity in that work
that they really haven't had in the last two and a half years.
So I think those smaller scale events
are definitely here this day.
We are really also doubling down on like tools
or like a product-led growth type of motion here
and that's something that we're exploring a ton
from our perspective.
Like, and we have some really powerful ones
in the portfolio already
and our product portfolio already,
one of them being sender score,
but we're gonna double-inchable down there as well.
Like how many valuable kind of product-led tools
can we provide to people so that they can get like
a taste of value and they can get like real value for free.
They also know that they could go get more value
out of that tool later too.
So getting those product-led growth gears going
is something that we're looking at
making a big investment in here as well.
- You know, it's funny.
I just signed up for a tool this afternoon
that my team had been hounding me on.
We create over 40 podcasts at Cascam.
So we have two different use cases for it
on like the business side.
We work with literally like hundreds and hundreds
of guests for our podcast.
So anywho, it's a tool that kind of touches both sides
of our business and both different sides of our business
have been kind of like asking me for this tool.
And it was just like really expensive
and I'd used it in previous companies, great tool,
but it was just really expensive.
I just didn't know that they sort of launched
a freemium version of this.
And it's like one of those classic things like,
I don't know if this was something that they had
just not marketed or maybe I'd missed it or whatever.
And I went to the thing today and I was like,
oh, okay, here we go, we're buying it.
And it was like just like that, you know, two seconds.
And I'm sure that company in that system,
they're like, this dude has been like for years.
But I think that that's the sort of thing
when you're thinking about, you know, PLG
and for so long, like how many fence sitters
do you think you have in your prospect base
if they did get a taste would just be like,
okay, like I'll do it, you know?
- Yeah, I think the days of like the software
being behind the curtain are over.
How many times have we talked about as the man-gently markers
of like, oh my gosh, yeah, like we qualify people
before we get the demo.
And how many of the calls do you listen to?
And it's the person just like, can you show me the demo?
Can you just show me the demo now?
They just wanna see the software.
Like that's the biggest thing.
Like I just wanna see if this thing can do it.
It's like give people what they want, you know what I mean?
I think it's really interesting.
- Yeah, we have that all the time of the vast majority
of people who come to us are like already like dead set.
I wanna podcast or video series, all that sort of stuff.
So like why podcasts or like why video or like writers.
And literally we don't even like have that part in our deck
90% of the time cause it's like you skip over it.
But it's a great point that what we talk about all the time
with like the dark funnel and all this stuff is like,
they've already done all the research on that stuff.
By the time they hit, you know, your website,
they literally wanna just talk to someone,
get through the demo and then start sort of brainstorming
next steps.
It's just a different sort of world.
And if you have the opportunity and you're fortunate enough
to have a product where PLG can work,
it seems like there's some companies out there
that are just flying using that.
- Yeah, totally.
- How do you measure success?
- Pipeline.
So for us it sales accepted opportunities
and sales qualified opportunities.
That's the primary one.
- You mentioned PLG as something that you're investing in,
but any other big trends that you're thinking
for B2B marketers that we should be aware of?
- Getting people into a product and getting people's hands
on it.
And if you won't do that, I think at some point buyers
are gonna think what are you hiding?
Why won't you just show it to me?
Or make it available so I can show myself?
I do think we've got a cookie list world coming up,
thanks to Google soon.
So I think there's gonna be a lot of change
headed towards many marketers about zero party data
and first party data being super, super important
and no longer being reliant on other people's data
to inform what's going on within your funnel.
That will actually be a really big trend.
And I think we'll continue to be a big one
from a demand-on perspective.
How do you really show people that you know them
as opposed to have this whole diatribe
on tokenization versus personalization
just because you know the taxonomy
or marketing automation platform uses
to insert first name does not therefore mean
you are doing personalization.
And the relevance is king, relevance always wins.
And you could see it in your own data, right?
When you get to that right segment
with the right offer at the right time,
man, there's nothing better than that.
I think that's really what personalization is.
It's like, how do you think about that
in a meaningful way and drive as much as that as possible?
Let's get to our next segment, The Dust Up.
So we talk about healthy tension,
whether that's with your board, your sales team,
your competitors or anyone else.
Have you had a memorable dust up in your career?
Look, I'm in marketing.
So undoubtedly most of my dust ups have been with sales
because we all know it's like that healthy tension
between marketing and sales.
And most of the time we are like holding hands
and singing kumbaya, but there are a bunch of other times
we've all lived it, right?
It's like sales is like, where's the pipeline
or where are the leads?
And Margaret's like, well, you don't follow
but the leads that I give you
or you don't actually do anything with the pipeline
or you can't win the pipeline that are giving you.
It's just like constant tension always back and forth.
So it's always there.
By the way, any marketer who tells you that doesn't exist
is probably lying.
There's always that tension, right?
Like there's always that thing between sales of marketing.
The thing that I've done to try to mitigate a lot of that
is like one, be very clear with them
that like the reason that we exist is to generate revenue, right?
Like the team wakes up each and every day thinking
about how they can start and continue conversations
for our sales team, whether that's our account management team
or our new business team or our sales development team,
whatever that is, that is what the team makes up thinking
about every day and that's what they're gold on.
But yeah, there's been some of that.
And I think I by myself often forgetting what it's like
to not know about all the intricacies
of our sales and marketing funnel
and all the intricacies about how we generate leads
and what happens to a lead after
and what we do from in terms of how we use six cents
for predictive lead scoring and all of that, how that works.
And so sometimes when people come at me with like questions
that seem to me like they are not understanding
like what we're doing or not listening to what we're doing,
I can tend to get defensive about that.
What I've come to understand is I just actually need
to do more education.
Like I need to pause and be like,
oh, he's asking this question
'cause he doesn't get how that works.
So let me take a step back and lock it through that.
- I love that's a great answer.
It's a great reminder that there's so many things
with marketing that are like ridiculously complex
in their own right.
It's a great point to just take a step back
and be like, perhaps I'm not as educated
or we're just not speaking the same language.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Okay, let's get to our final segment, quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like how qualified helps companies
generate pipeline faster, tap into your greatest asset,
your website to identify your most valuable visitors
and instantly start sales conversations.
It's quick and easy just like these questions.
Go to qualified.com to learn more.
Quick hits.
Kate, are you ready?
- I'm ready and let's do it.
- Number one, with a hidden talent or skill
that's not on your resume?
- I don't put my running on my resume.
I'm not sure that I should count that as a skill,
but I run quite a bit.
- Favorite book podcast TV show
that you've recently been checking out that you like?
- Oh my gosh, well, I mean, I would be in apt
if I didn't say demand-gen visionaries.
But that's definitely one of my favorite podcasts.
But outside of that, I listen to Pivot a lot
with Kariswisher and Scott Galway.
And I just finished the book "An Ugly Truth"
on Audible of all about meta and Facebook
and how that came to be,
which was really eye-opening for me.
So that was really interesting.
That's just almost recent in favor of stuff,
but yeah, that's my answer on that one.
- If you weren't in marketing at all,
what do you think you'd be doing?
- I have a couple of things.
Like my dream would be I would love to like own
some sort of like cafe or like surf shop,
although I don't surf,
but I would love, really love to learn how to surf
in like some beach side community.
I have a big place in my heart for Wells main here
on the East coast.
So I would love to own like a Jew shop or surf shop
or something else and do kind of property management
for people on the side.
And I don't know, maybe do that.
Come and go as I please.
- Good answer.
- Not think about MQLs.
(laughs)
- What advice would you give to a first time
head of marketing or see a mother
trying to figure out their demand-gen strategy?
- Follow a lead, right?
So that's what I would say is like follow a lead,
understand secret shop,
either secret shop or just follow it
from an operational perspective
on what happens in your process today.
Like what happens so that you can get current state
what is happening today.
And then you can step back and say,
what are the opportunities for improvement?
- I love it.
That's all we got for today.
What do we miss?
- I'm hiring.
I've got roles in field marketing and brand marketing
and channel marketing.
Just about every marketing discipline,
we're gonna go from 18 to 30 people here by a year's end.
I would love to speak with any interested marketer
in the Boston area who would love to join us.
- Yeah, and as you just heard from the last 40 minutes
that Kate is awesome.
So we'll link that up in the show notes.
For all of our listeners, go to validity.com.
If you're a marketer, check it out.
Hit the learn more button, head to a webinar.
Obviously they got a lot of great stuff for you.
Thanks again so much for joining the show
and we'll talk soon.
- Thanks for having me.
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