How is B2B marketing different in 2021? – Lori Highby from Keystone Click | DMR #230

Full transcript:

David Bain 0:00
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 230. How is b2b marketing different in 2021,

Bot 0:06
Digital Marketing Radio with David.

David Bain 0:11
I am David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio with a show for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who want to stay on top of the latest tools, tactics and trends shared right here by today’s modern marketing master. When was the last time you changed your b2b marketing strategy? Are you missing out on some big b2b marketing opportunities just because you haven’t fully embraced the latest channels? And how do you most effectively target b2b consumers in 2021? Those are just some of the questions that I’m going to be asking my guest today. And she teaches b2b sales and marketing. She’s a speaker podcaster and blogger and the founder of Keystone click a strategic digital marketing agency that’s been established for over 12 years. Welcome to DMR, Laurie Highby.

Lori Highby 0:59
Well, I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me, David.

David Bain 1:02
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on, Laurie. So you can find Lori over Keystone click.com. So Lori, how much has b2b marketing changed over the last few years?

Lori Highby 1:12
Well, over the last few years, a lot has changed. And just more so in the last year, were something that’s extremely important in b2b is relationships, that’s probably the biggest shift that we’ve seen. And so I’d say that relationships are still very important. However, they are different, how we are going about creating and nurturing those relationships. And that’s really what b2b is all about.

David Bain 1:41
Okay, so have some b2b marketers really panicked over the last year, and they’ve just been playing catching up to a certain degree because of the sea situation?

Lori Highby 1:51
situation? I like it. I haven’t heard it called that. Absolutely. I mean, there’s a number of clients that we have, and just across the, across the board in the b2b space, where a big chunk of their marketing budget was tradeshows, or conferences are just major events that they even would put on, to nurture the relationships that they’ve had. And when that is the bulk of your new business generation and marketing budget, and then all of a sudden, you can’t do that anymore. There’s a lot of quick hustle and bustle to figure out, well, what do we do? Because this is how we get new business. And this is how we engage our current clients. So yeah, major changes happening.

David Bain 2:34
Okay, so So what did the b2b marketers do then do they try to replicate what they used to do by replicating that face to face meetings, and you’re trying to do the same sort of thing online? Or did it have to replace that activity with a completely different activity, I

Lori Highby 2:48
think it’s a combination of all of the above that face to face activity, so networking, going to conferences, and learning and educating others, because that’s a lot of what b2b is, is educating the value that you’re able to provide within your product or service offering. That changed significantly from conference to let’s hold a virtual conference or a virtual trade show, or do virtual networking. Now, there’s definitely some pros and cons with that what is extremely important is to make sure it’s engaging, and you’re providing an experience that is not going to just have someone watching and listening in the background where they’re checking email and doing their social media, you want to make sure that it’s engaging, and they’re fully 100% invested in the experience that’s being provided. That takes a lot of work.

David Bain 3:42
So telco talking about providing, watching and listening experience, we’re trying to throw a lot of balls up in the air spin a lot of plates, or however you want to describe it just now while we’re recording this podcast, we’re actually broadcasting live into clubhouse, which is a very new app that we’ve discussed before here in Digital Marketing Radio, but we’re actually doing it live into the room. I see that kind of Romans joined us on the stage. If you’ve got any thoughts on the conversation that we’re having, we’ve got Kelly and Brad, watching as well. And if anyone else that’s part of clubhouse, and we’d like to join in the conversation, feel free to raise your hands or feel free to join in the conversation. And we’ll we’ll try and involve you as part of the discussion here as well. Of course, I’m discussing having this conversation with Lori. We’re broadcasting live to Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. And we’re also obviously producing a podcast recording a podcast as well. But let’s move on in terms of the b2b discussion and talk about maybe specifically what marketers have to do tactically in 2021 to be successful. So when they’re perhaps initiating a new marketing campaign in 2021, what are some of the steps that they have To do in terms of research in terms of initial steps prior to actually engaging in a marketing activity?

Lori Highby 5:06
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a fantastic question. And you, you hit the nail on the head when you said research, because that is often one of the biggest mistakes that I see marketers or companies making in the b2b space is they’re just jumping out to any platform. And without a plan of attack. And so when you’re talking about research, you really want to understand your target customer. And now they’ve changed. We’ve all changed in the last year, where we’re getting our education from, who we’re listening to that’s influencing some of our buying decisions, what social channels are we hanging out on what news sources, what podcasts we’re listening to, the better that you can understand that ideal customer, the better you can position yourself to be hanging out where they are hanging out online. And that is something that it takes time you have to get inside their head and really understand what is it that what’s the pain that they have, so that you can communicate a message that’s going to connect and resonate to them as well. So where are they hanging out, and what’s important, that’s going to add value to them from an educational standpoint, once you figure out those two components, then you can start tactically moving forward and creating content and positioning in the spot that your ideal customers.

David Bain 6:28
So we’re obviously talking about marketing, from a b2b perspective here. Does that mean that for that type of marketing, the first place for most businesses is going to be LinkedIn?

Lori Highby 6:40
LinkedIn is extremely powerful. from a b2b standpoint, I would say it’s probably one of the or it could be actually the most popular digital platform to connect with other b2b professionals, but not it depends on you know, what is that space? specifically? I personally, target industrial manufacturers, and oftentimes, I’m working with the owner of the company that owners not on LinkedIn. But they’re old school tradeshows conferences, that’s where they were hanging out. So it’s finding, you know, where are they hanging out online now? Who’s influencing them? And then getting in front of that space?

David Bain 7:21
Okay. Okay. And in terms of getting in front of them, the first thing that you’d say, most b2b, sales activities, marketing activities have a fairly long buying cycle. So I guess, one of the biggest mistakes that the majority of marketers would make would be to go in for the kill too quickly. How do you engage with someone online? without being too overt? And actually trying to sell something too quickly? to them?

Lori Highby 7:53
Yeah, well, he correct, you don’t sell at all, honestly, you provide value, you have to start with the brand awareness part. Especially if you’re going after an audience that is not familiar with your brand, you have to get them comfortable knowing who you are, and that you do have valuable information to provide a valuable product or service, whatever it may be. But first and foremost, you need to establish that trust. We all know, you know, people do business with those they know, like and trust. So you can’t go for any sales pitch until that trust is established. And you do that by educating and providing resources and you slowly drip and provide value, you know, sign up for my webinar. Here’s a ebook, you can, you know, download or listen to my podcast, you know, you continue to provide information in different platforms, not just one type of medium, you have to diversify how you’re getting your content out there as well.

David Bain 8:57
Okay. I guess the challenge with LinkedIn is that the organic reach is so good through personal profiles. But you can’t use LinkedIn ads through your personal profile. You’ve got to use company pages for that. I was chatting with AJ Wilcox, about LinkedIn advertising for Episode 225. And obviously, he’s a master of LinkedIn ads. Do you do Do you have any thoughts on that on where you should publish content on LinkedIn? And have you actually use LinkedIn ads before yourself?

Lori Highby 9:27
Oh, absolutely. I’m definitely a big fan of LinkedIn. And a lot of what we recommend is getting your team on board and advocating for the brand. So that is one of the features that LinkedIn pages has is that you can encourage employee engagement and get them to be sharing the original posts from the page. Or you know having your sales and marketing team actually publishing value add content within their own profile. So as a company or brand, providing information that they can publish on their own or encouraging them to share the original posts, from the organic perspective, paid 100%, there’s a lot of value to that. But again, I see a lot of brands making the mistake that they go straight for the kill, and they want that lead gen immediately. But we’re not, you have to start with brand awareness. And if you don’t take that approach and build that trust, you’re not gonna see a successful campaign.

David Bain 10:28
Okay, so let’s dive into maybe what that brand awareness looks like. I’m you you obviously touched on content marketing there as well. Is there any type of content that you see working particularly effectively at the moment in terms of the first piece of content that someone will see from a brand?

Lori Highby 10:45
That’s a really good question. So everyone digests information differently, some people like to read it, so I’m like to watch it. So I’m like to listen to it. So I’m an advocate of diversifying how you’re getting your content out there, so that you’re connecting with all all different types of the consumers or you know, however, they’re digesting that content. video definitely has a really strong powerful reach right now. tonnes of research at this is where a lot of people are investing their marketing dollars, but they’re also getting the best return. I mean, obviously, you have a podcast show, that’s video, your live streaming, anytime you can go live, there’s a way higher engagement rate as opposed to just publishing after you know, an edited file is done. So that’s a really good way to just start building a relationship beyond, here’s the information, but someone is able to connect with you because they can see you. And there’s this level of authenticity, that helps to establish trust faster, then,

David Bain 11:47
yeah, great points there. I love the idea of a brand actually launching their own show or or series. But I think the mistake that a lot of brands make is they do the show or the series, just by the brand. And they talk about their products or their services directly in that and really it should be let one level above that it should be the category of of content or something that’s Of particular interest to their audience. It’s one example that I always tend to bring up is there’s a lawyers in the States or attorneys in the States than they actually launched a podcast about golf, because they’d defines that their target market, we’re really passionate about golf. And obviously, there are particular services are only likely to be used perhaps just once or twice, and every 10 years or so. So they needed a way to actually keep their brand Top of Mind with their target audience. And that was a great way of doing that. And that’s kind of the reason behind be relaunching the show Digital Marketing Radio, you know, I’ve got this podcast production agency. Ideally, I think what I would have done is I would have maybe created a show all about b2b content marketing, because b2b marketers, or maybe my, my target market in terms of the people that would be likely to have a conversation with about the service. However, you’ve also got to make sure that you’re passionate about and I’m passionate about different forms of digital marketing and technology. But it’s a nice broad subject you can make a continuous show about is that the kind of way that you would recommend a business to structure the content that they produce on a regular basis?

Lori Highby 13:23
Absolutely. I mean, you basically said exactly what I would. Sorry. That’s okay, I have a podcast, that I know you’re going to be a guest on my show as well, very soon. It’s called social capital. And I intentionally identified the topic of networking one, because I’m passionate about it, but too, because as someone who is trying to create, you know, attract more business owners to do business with with our agency, I don’t want to interview them about marketing. That’s not something they’re interested in talking about. But every business owner, especially in the b2b space, it’s all about networking and building relationships. And that’s a common ground. So it’s identifying that common ground that your target audience is going to be interested and comfortable talking about. I love the golf example you had with the attorneys, because that’s something that people are passionate about. Yes. And they get excited to talk about it. Know that audiences. So I think it’s a really good strategic move by that law firm to find a topic that their audience is interested in. That’s what’s important.

David Bain 14:37
Absolutely. But I think the challenge also from a podcast is eventually driving that subscriber into becoming someone that perhaps fills in a lead forum and actually declares interest or shows some contact details to that firm. what’s the what’s a more effective ways of actually turning a listener or subscriber into someone that raises their hands and fills out a form and becomes a lead for that company.

Lori Highby 15:04
Sure, yeah, you’ve got to have strong call to actions in your podcast itself, or start building a community like a Facebook group or, you know, getting them, you have to push them to want to do something. And I’ve seen a lot of podcasts offer giveaways and freebies, you know, they get their guests to give something away, or they offer seminars, or workshops or conferences, and that’s really pulling them in to take that next step and, and sign up for something, you know, at the end of the day, it is a challenge. But if you’ve got great content, and you say, you know, if you like this, there’s even better stuff here. It’s gonna drive them to, to want to continue to listen and see what else you have, that you’re creating. Absolutely.

David Bain 15:51
And it’s, it’s a challenge. If it’s audio only, yeah, you have to have a clear, memorable URL domain name that you’re actually sharing with people as well. And a nice landing page that that I guess, doesn’t ask for too much information, but it gives you the details that you require. Did you have any thoughts on whether you should be asking for people whose company name and address or just keep it to a minimum and ask for their name and email address to begin with?

Lori Highby 16:16
Yeah, I think keep it simple. And then over time, as they as you keep adding offers and encourage them to come back, you just gather a little additional piece of information every single time. I mean, there’s there’s data that says, the more fields that someone has to fill out the like, less likely, they’re actually going to complete the form,

David Bain 16:34
great stuff, Roman, if you if you want to be involved in the conversation, feel free to unmute your microphone and share whatever you want to share. In relation to the topic here. We’re obviously talking about b2b marketing and how it fits into the kind of bigger marketing space and how it’s changed over the last year or so because of the C words. But what we’ll do right now is actually let’s segue into the second part of our conversations. Tonight. It’s time for Lori’s dance in the state of digital marketing today. So let’s start off with SECRET SOFTWARE. So Laurie, Cierra, lesser-known martech tool that’s bringing you a lot of value at the moment. And why that tools important for you.

Lori Highby 17:14
This one, it’s a good question. I really like lumen five, l u m, e n and the number five, it’s a great tool to quickly convert text into a video. And they’ve got a tonne of like canned video clips, and you can just shoot out really quick, fast videos fairly quickly. And if you’re looking to up your video game, it’s fairly low cost as well.

David Bain 17:43
brewing, okay, I’ve made a note of that there. Robin, I saw your ad unmuted yourself there as well. But if you’ve muted yourself, again, feel free to unmute yourself and share any thoughts there.

Guest 17:54
Yeah, so sorry about this. And thank you very much for this recording. MSO. Washing is on Twitter, I saw there is a periscope live stream. So I have a question guys. Laurie, what’s your first things you do for medium or large b2b company while you create SEO strategy, or something like a marketing strategy,

Lori Highby 18:23
I would look at your email list is a really good starting point or any sort of, you know, if you if you want to get moving fast, and you’re not necessarily ready to do the research and build out a full plan, your email list can be extremely powerful. So if you’re looking at your past clients or customer database, you can upload that list to some social media channels and actually one put ads in front of them so that you’re reminding them that you exist, but to also, depending on the size of your list, that social media platform will aggregate the data of that user base and identify individuals that are similar to that, and then you can start putting ads in front of them as well. But also just using that email list to get back in their inbox. I

David Bain 19:09
think that’s usually one of the first questions that we ask our clients is Do you have an established email list? Because if you do, there’s there’s a lot that you can do with that. It’s funny that so many people were saying email was going to die off quite a few years ago, but it’s still probably one of the most important marketing tools out there. And of course, you can do other things with it as well. If you’ve got a decent email list, you can build a wonderful retargeting custom audience.

Lori Highby 19:33
I have a love hate relationship with email. It’s great from a marketing tool, but I really don’t like it coming in my inbox.

David Bain 19:41
I know. I know, I know. I’m going to talk about myself. But let’s move on to something that’s from something that you currently use to something perhaps that you’re going to use NEXT ON THE LIST. So what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t? tried yet, but you want to try soon?

Lori Highby 20:01
Yeah, so I put a lot of thought on this one too. And I don’t have a specific tool because I do have to invest the time in researching it. But I just want to dig into AI a little bit further. I mean, there’s what I’m reading about AI and marketing is just kind of fascinating and mind blowing. And I keep seeing headlines of new tools that are coming out that are just gonna make, make it easier to get in front of that audience and figure out what is the message is going to connect and resonate with them. So you know, some of the tools that we’re using now have, you know, they’re dabbling in it. But there’s just so much out there that is way beyond where I’m at right now. And I think that there’s a lot of cool things coming in that space.

David Bain 20:47
There is I mean, AI is affecting paid search quite a bit. Obviously, if you put a lot of money into it, it’s not necessarily paid search, it’s paid ads. But if you if you’re paying decent money, then you’re kind of trusting the algorithms to display what you want to advertise to the right people at the right time. And I was listening to a YouTube show, actually, earlier on today from Roberto Blake, the group great YouTuber, and he was talking about how YouTube or using AI now or potentially using AI, are going to use AI to display custom thumbnails to the right people at the right time to perhaps enhance click through rate. He was saying that Netflix are doing that at the moment. And it’s potentially coming to YouTube as well. So it’s, it’s creeping all over the place. Yeah.

Lori Highby 21:31
Well, Netflix has been using data for a long time to really influence and keep people engaged, which is what it’s all about. But yeah, it’s I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. And like so I know we’re using it, we you know, some of the paid stuff that we do, but to the extent that it is available right now, there’s so much for me to learn.

David Bain 21:52
Absolutely. Well, let’s move on to this or that round. So this is the quick response round 10 quick questions, Just 2 rules here. Try not to think of an answer too much. And you’re only allowed to see the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready?

Lori Highby 22:06
I’m ready.

David Bain 22:08
Tick Tock on Twitter, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn,

Lori Highby 22:14
LinkedIn,

David Bain 22:16
YouTube or podcast.

Lori Highby 22:19
podcast,

David Bain 22:21
traffic or leads, leads, paid search or SEO,

Lori Highby 22:26
SEO,

David Bain 22:28
ads or influencers, influencers, Google ads or Facebook ads,

Lori Highby 22:34
Google ads,

David Bain 22:35
email or chat, email, more tech stack, or all in one platform in one, and one to one or scale.

Lori Highby 22:49
I would say

David Bain 22:52
save the right to the end there. Maybe that’s a good thing you seem to struggle most on the Facebook or LinkedIn. I was surprised with that one. I thought it’d be just straight in LinkedIn for yourself?

Lori Highby 23:01
Well, I spend a lot of time on both actually on Facebook, I’m really active in a number of groups. And LinkedIn is more engagement with the the one to one, which kind of goes into your last question.

David Bain 23:16
Okay. Okay. So horses for courses, that just depends on what you’re wanting to do don’t necessarily just focus in on one platform, are you more of a fan of doing what I’m doing at the moment and broadcasting in multiple places at the same time or focusing in on one occasion on one platform,

Lori Highby 23:35
and more like you and I’m pushing as much as I can on different channels at one time?

David Bain 23:41
Okay, well, let’s see what your answers to this one than the $10,000 question. Hey, if I was to give you $10,000, you had to spend over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business? What would you spend it on? And how would you measure success?

Lori Highby 23:54
Oh, great question. I would run a LinkedIn awareness campaign to promote our webinar series. And I would measure it simply by how many people signed up and attended the webinars.

David Bain 24:07
Okay. Okay. So you’re still finding webinars to be particularly successful? What what’s the format? Roughly, do your webinars take it? Are they an hour long? Are they like 45 minutes of content and 15 minutes of telling people about maybe signing up for something?

Lori Highby 24:24
Yeah, it’s about 35 minutes of content, then we open up for some q&a, and then we have an offer that takes them to that next step.

David Bain 24:32
And what kind of conversion rate is reasonable to get from LinkedIn to get people to attend a webinar?

Lori Highby 24:39
That is a great question. And I don’t have the answer to

David Bain 24:44
this, okay. We can maybe tweet that after or share that in the show notes. I

Lori Highby 24:47
mean, if you think about like email and ads, you know, two and a half percent is, I would say really strong. From a paid ads, I mean, that’s like the bare minimum. I would be comfortable with but we just started running LinkedIn ads for webinars. So that’s why it came. Okay.

David Bain 25:09
That’s okay. I’m gonna I’m gonna just stay in the subject just for one more question. And that’s I’m sure operate for webinars because I’ve hosted a few webinars, a few virtual summits in the past. And I found that perhaps only 25% percent of people who sign up for actually turn up. And is that a reasonable number? Would you hope to have many more people actually turn up? Is there anything that you can do to get people to turn up?

Lori Highby 25:36
Yeah, so we’ve, when we started doing them, that seems about accurate about 25 to 30%, would actually show up and attend after registration. But like anything else you do consistency is what’s going to, you know, continue to increase. So our numbers for registrations have increased, but also the attendees have increased. And I think it’s because the quality of the content, they it’s a lot of repeat attendees that we’re finding. So and then getting other people to advocate online that says, you know, this was a really, they have really good content to share. So trying to get those influencers out there, too. Yeah, we’ve been using zoom, and it’s been working great. For our webinars.

David Bain 26:18
Great. Yeah, I love hate relationship with most software, including zoom, I think about zoom is it’s ultra reliable. And lots of people use it. So most people have it downloaded on their computers, or however the access, so it’s generally easy for most people to join. I don’t love the audio quality as a podcaster. You know, you can’t really record these podcasts using zoom. And it’s not got a lovely looking interface. And it doesn’t seem to have evolved that much over the last year or so. But it’s reliable.

Lori Highby 26:47
It gets the job done at this stage. Right?

David Bain 26:50
It does. It does. Yeah. But, you know, Laurie, you’ve offered so much. Great thoughts, great information. Let’s change the subject slightly just just for the last question. And that’s it focuses in on someone actually someone else magical marketer. And so who’s an up and coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to? What can we learn from them? And where can we find them?

Lori Highby 27:12
Absolutely. So Eric Clark is someone that’s in my local community here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he just launched a new company called x influence. He’s helping companies really focus on micro content and building their brand and attracting leads he’s been he’s been creating a lot of his own content. It’s got a number of podcasts is a lot of video. Really strong presence on social media. I’ve seen I’m pretty active, or just playing around with clubhouse a bit. But his website is Expo influenced calm. Eric Clark on LinkedIn, you’ll find him there two

David Bain 27:51
wonderful staff. Well, you’ll be listening to Laurie hyvee. From Keystone click who On today’s episode of Digital Marketing, Radio shared lots of wonderful tips about about LinkedIn, but also about specific aspects of deep b2b marketing such as, don’t go all in on advertising to begin with, and build relationships with people to begin with, do a lot of research in your target markets. So lots of great tips in that first section there as well. We then moved on to SECRET SOFTWARE, where you shared lumen five as your SECRET SOFTWARE. So I’ll make sure there’s links to that in the show description on YouTube. On the podcast show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com. You talked about AI as your NEXT ON THE LIST as well. And of course, you shared your magical marketers, and Eric Clark is well from x and foon. So make sure include links as well as his site to your site in the in the show notes there as well. So, thanks so much for joining us again. And what’s the best social platform for someone to follow you and say Hi,

Lori Highby 28:51
this is super fun. LinkedIn. That’s where I’m at. Connect with me, Laurie. Hi. via LinkedIn.

David Bain 28:59
Wonderful stuff. Oh, thank you again, I’ve been your host ever been. You can also find me producing podcasts for b2b brands over at casting grid.com if you want to watch the next show live and subscribe to direct your marketing Digital Marketing Radio on YouTube. And if you’re already listening to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, amazon music, tell a friend is good to share. Until we meet again stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

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