Episode 81 – The website should be your primary source of leads

My guest on the show today is Megan Sinkinson Withrow. She is the Head of Creative on the Go To...

The post Episode 81 – The website should be your primary source of leads appeared first on Sideways8.

My guest on the show today is Megan Sinkinson Withrow. She is the Head of Creative on the Go To Market operations team at Ionic Security. She established her career in the agency and freelance world where she gained experience designing for companies ranging in size across a broad set of industries. Now that she serves a technology company in house, she’s working to develop a single brand across customer journey touchpoints where she’s experimented with the teachings of the pragmatic marketing framework Gartner, CEB, Challenger Marketing, IDEO U’s Design Thinking and Hubspot’s inbound marketing methodology.

Adam: [00:09] Hi and welcome to the Good People, Good Marketing podcast, a podcast about digital marketing and how to make it better so that good people and good organizations can have good marketing as well. I’m your host, Adam Walker, co-founder of Sideways Eight, a digital marketing agency, and 48in48, a nonprofit dedicated to hosting events that build forty-eight websites for forty-eight nonprofits in forty-eight hours.

 

[00:28] My guest on the show today is Megan Sinkinson Withrow. She is the Head of Creative on the Go To Market operations team at Ionic Security. She established her career in the agency and freelance world where she gained experience designing for companies ranging in size across a broad set of industries. Now that she serves a technology company in house, she’s working to develop a single brand across customer journey touchpoints where she’s experimented with the teachings of the pragmatic marketing framework Gartner, CEB, Challenger Marketing, IDEO U’s Design Thinking and Hubspot’s inbound marketing methodology. Megan, thanks for joining me on the show.

 

Megan: [01:09] Thank you so much for having me.

 

Adam: [01:10] Well, this is going to be fun. I’m really looking forward to interviewing you and getting your take on all things marketing digital or perhaps even event marketing which we might dive into. So with that said, let’s just go ahead and get started. Related to digital marketing, or with the caveat, if you want to talk about some event marketing, tell us something that’s working well.

 

Megan: [01:31] You mentioned in the bio, I’ve been applying some of the teachings from the IDEO U Design Thinking and so finding that applying those design thinking principles beyond just graphic design has been something that I’ve just found to work better and better over time. So as businesses are becoming more customer centric, we’re seeing the role of marketing expanding more broadly across the customer experience. And so we’re marketing to people who operate in both the digital and physical world. So it’s important to empathize with the experiences on both sides for desirable results in digital marketing. So as you mentioned, work in the tech industry and particularly B2B, business to business, so starting off with the positioning and the personas is part of what Design Thinking is. I’ll give you a real high overview. You’re pretty much going to start with people and their needs. You’re going to empathize with your audience, define the needs, the problem, and your insights, ideate, prototype, and test.

 

[02:58] So taking that design thinking and applying it to one of the biggest information security conferences in the U.S., we knew that our audience was going to be there and we understood that the kind of experience attendees we’re having had gone from something more for the technical buyer to somewhat of more of a schmoozy type of conference. And so the quality of the leads out on the trade show floor wasn’t what it had been in the beginning days of the conference. So the company started out just playing the way most do there at the conference, and then saw that you get five to twenty minutes with the show floor personas. So over time we iterated and started to create an offsite experience where we ended up just getting a lot higher quality time, at least an hour with executives versus the variety of the types of personas you’d find on the trade show floor.

 

[04:13] So over the years, we iterated on what that was like and how we were going to generate leads to this kind of an event because while it sounds obvious, oh, let’s get people off of the show floor and into more of an experience that we can bring them what they need, a break from the buzz of the floor and someone who’s going to have a more personal experience that’s going to resonate with them well, getting people to walk even more than they already are at a conference is tough. So we went ahead and have been improving year over year on how to find the right kind of message to resonate with people to get them to take that time to go a little bit further. And what ended up happening is we even got feedback from some of our guests that it looked like we were punching higher than we were.

 

[05:16] It looked like we were spending more than our competitors based on the kind of space that we provided when really we were ultimately spending less per lead. So leading into back over to the digital world, there was a big opportunity because this event is so highly attended, but a lot of companies are reconsidering their investment in events because the cost per lead can be so high. So the website should really be your primary source of leads, so that’s where we’ve been putting more focus into the areas of improvement.

 

Adam: [06:01] Right. I totally agree. And if you don’t have a good website that can take those leads and begin to convert them and send them down the right sales path or funnel, you really don’t have a good methodology that you can scale. So I think that’s really important.

 

Megan: [06:19] Yeah. So this leads me into your next question.

 

Adam: [06:24] Great. What’s not working? Tell me. I always love to know what’s not working that we can learn from.

 

Megan: [06:31] So let’s see, so in this B2B space, in this data security industry, our buyer persona is primarily the chief information security officer, but over time, analysts are acknowledging, and other competitors in the industry acknowledging, that there are other lines of business who are and should be influencing this buying decision. And I say should be because if you’ve got those who are actually implementing or developers who are influencing these decisions, you’re going to increase the chance of customer success with a smoother implementation. We’ve got buy in across the people who are going to be working with this technology. So for our website, the way we were positioning ourselves was pretty broad and so what we’ve been finding in some of these things like these events where we got the chance to be opportunistic, we’re finding that as we narrow the use cases that we can position ourselves around. We can better empower the users on our website to find the right kind of way that they can use our technology to solve a problem for them.

 

[07:56] So one thing that we’ve had a tough time with is having enough resources for content generation on the website. We’ve changed, like I said, the way we’ve positioned our ourselves on the site a few times and so we don’t always have the chance to do a full on redesign. So as we are honing in, we’ve got to take some of this persona work that we’ve been doing to mature the messaging and one thing that I’ve found is that sometimes in user interface design, people think a lot about the path that you want people to go down. And so while we want to be able to measure and create a thoughtful lead flow, you still want to empower those that are visiting your site to see that, especially with technology company, there could be a number of ways that you can fit different capabilities to solve different problems.

 

[09:11] So you don’t want to start too big. So something I would recommend the listeners is to really think about how you can take your use cases and think about where are people going to find solutions to these problems and then pulling from the Challenger methodology, creating commercial insight and packaging that up. So we’re working to update the website to reflect this iterative messaging work that we’ve been doing on our team. And then the goal next is to build account based marketing into our website maturity model and our outbound digital marketing.

 

Adam: [10:09] Nice. Nice. I love that. Okay. That’s great. And then the last question, of course, related to digital marketing, can you tell me something you’re excited about?

 

Megan: [10:18] I am excited about this next phase of the website. We hadn’t really done much user testing for this site so anytime you’re going to have a first time user testing, you’re establishing a baseline. So in establishing a baseline, the only place you can go from there is up. So it’s a great place to be to be thinking about how we can better organize the information on our site and ultimately shorten that sales cycle so that people can pick a good use case to start with as they have that first conversation with sales or move beyond information that we’ve provided to them.

 

Adam: [11:06] So I’ve got to ask, are you using anything specific for user testing to start with?

 

Megan: [11:10] We’ve got a contract with a company called User Testing and so I’ve been working with our head of UX to define the parameters that we would set so that he can go out and find the right group of users. So we’re going to basically pick demographics and the kind of people, the kinds of qualifying characteristics, and then what path do we want them to go down. And some other little bonus bits of fun that you get out of that experience or what’s the five second test. What do people pick up on in just the first five seconds that they’re on your site and so those kinds of little insights I think add a lot of value, too, than just the numbers.

 

Adam: [12:02] Yeah, absolutely. Well, and a lot of people just aren’t asking those questions too. How many people really will dig into user testing or even start any kind of testing to truly understand how users are interacting with the site, at least doing he map testing or ab testing or something? But very, very few are taking the time to do that correctly. So I’m really excited to hear that you’re doing that.

 

Megan: [12:20] Of course. It wouldn’t be Design Thinking without testing solutions and iterating. So another great little tip that I’ve learned from some of my teammates is in some of the projects that I’m involved with there’s a lot of content that’s changing and then the way that, in me and my role, deliver the visual communication, trying to focus on one change at a time as we iterate, if it’s a bigger positioning project and we’re taking that back to our sales team to go and test validate in the market or test with friendlies. It’s been really useful to try iterating one bit at a time when we have that kind of an opportunity so that we understand a lot better where to focus the next revisions on rather than wondering what of the many different kinds of changes was what worked best.

 

Adam: [13:30] Right. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s great. Megan, let me see if I can recap a little bit of what we talked about. So, for what’s working well, you mentioned Design Thinking principles that are beyond just graphic design are working well. And you said you start with positioning and personas, you start to understand people’s needs, then you ideate on that prototype test and then iterate from there. And I think that’s a really great way to look at marketing and really just everything that we build in general because why not test in incremental fashion and iterate and get better and better as we go. You also mentioned that the website should be your primary source of leads. We talked about how you’ve got to have a solid website with solid funnels and solid path so that you can really direct people to what they need as they begin to engage with you.

 

[14:15] For what’s not working well, I think you were mentioning broad positioning does not work well. So when you begin to narrow your focus, you begin to see additional opportunities that you were not able to see before. And people are able to recognize you as an expert in some of those areas. You also said resources for content generation are sometimes difficult to come across. And you said to start with use cases. So think about where people are going to find solutions to their problems and then begin to solve those problems and that’s a good starting point. And then for what you’re excited about, you said the next website phase is exciting. You’re doing user testing to establish a baseline to really understand where users are at so that you can ultimately then begin to increase engagement because all you can go is up from there, which is fantastic. So did I miss anything in that recap?

 

Megan: [15:02] You nailed it.

 

Adam: [15:03] Fantastic. Well, do you have any final thoughts you want to share with our listeners?

 

Megan: [15:09] I’d say I think being in a creative role in a high tech company, one thing that’s been a lot of fun is just expanding the experience that you can have across the customer experience touchpoints. As marketing shifts, again, like I mentioned in the beginning, to more and more customer centric, differentiating yourself by providing useful content or ways that you can help your customer be successful in using your solution is just really fun so that you’re not done once you’ve passed the lead over to sales. So retaining your customers is just such a fun playing field as someone who likes to help others and not just feel like you’re doing glorified advertising. So I think it’ll just really help you go back to the beginning of this whole design thinking principle of always empathizing. So I hope that everyone can keep in mind the ultimate game is just finding the best solution and not just selling so …

 

Adam: [16:46] That’s right, that’s right. Finding the best solution and hopefully being the best solution in some of our industries, but definitely finding that. So well Megan, this was really great. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for joining the show.

 

Megan: [16:56] Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It’s been a lot of fun.

 

Adam: [17:02] Thanks for listening to the Good People, Good Marketing podcast. To get more resources about digital marketing, make sure to go to goodpeoplegoodmarketing.com where you can find more podcasts, blogs, and other fun resources. Also, if you want to find me, your host, you can find me on Twitter @AJWalker and on my blog at adamjwalker.com where I blog about leadership, productivity, habit building, and the craziness of having five kids. Thanks, and tune in next time.

The post Episode 81 – The website should be your primary source of leads appeared first on Sideways8.