Exploring strategies that go beyond classic inbound marketing. From account-based approaches to outbound and demand generation, learn how modern teams build growth in saturated markets.
Over the past year, many marketing teams have opened Google Search Console, seen a drop in clicks, and asked: “Is our content failing?”
That’s a reasonable question—until you look a little closer. Because what’s actually happening isn’t failure. It’s a structural change in how people search.
Meet the “Crocodile Effect”
Since mid-2023, a consistent pattern has emerged in Search Console data for many sites:
Impressions are going up
Clicks are going down
This diverging trend has been nicknamed the Crocodile Effect. It’s being driven by changes in how Google surfaces information—specifically, the rollout of AI Overviews (formerly “Search Generative Experience”).
Why It’s Happening
Google’s new AI-generated summaries often answer user queries directly on the results page. These responses pull from multiple sources, cite content, and increasingly eliminate the need to click through to a website.
As a result:
You might still rank highly or be cited in an AI summary.
But the user gets their answer immediately, without clicking.
This is classic zero-click behaviour, accelerated by generative AI.
What This Doesn’t Mean
It doesn’t mean your content isn’t valuable.
It doesn’t mean you’re being outranked.
It doesn’t mean your SEO strategy is broken.
In fact, if your impressions are rising, it likely means your content is still being seen—it’s just being surfaced in a different format.
This is why first-party data matters more than ever. Many third-party SEO tools can underreport traffic by a factor of 5–10x compared to Search Console. Always trust the primary source.
What to Do About It
1. Shift the success metric
Clicks alone are no longer the best proxy for value. Visibility and influence on the buying journey—even without a click—are now key.
2. Optimize for “fan-out”
One large topic may now need to be split into multiple, specific pieces. AI Overviews tend to pull from narrowly focused content that aligns tightly to individual user intents.
Example: Instead of “Microsoft 365 Security Best Practices,” consider also writing posts on:
“Conditional Access Policy Setup”
“How to Audit Weak Passwords in Microsoft Entra”
“Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Configuration Tips”
3. Track LLM visibility
It’s not just about Google anymore. Users are also searching with tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot. Some marketers are starting to track presence across these surfaces, too.
What Might Come Next
While traditional web traffic may drop, purchase intent might actually rise. Users who’ve researched via AI and LLMs could arrive on your site more informed and ready to convert.
In one case I came across recently, traffic originating from ChatGPT converted at 7x the rate of regular organic. That makes sense—if the AI has already explained your value, you’re meeting the visitor mid-funnel, not top.
Final Thought
SEO isn’t dying, but it is evolving.
It’s no longer just: “How do I rank?”
But: “Where am I surfaced, and how?”
Understanding this shift—and adjusting accordingly—will separate the frustrated from the forward-thinking in the next wave of digital strategy.
Is ChatGPT a threat Google? Obviously there’s nothing I can write about ChatGPT that hasn’t already been written 400 times, so this post is a sort of “naive plagiarism”. Still, with that in mind…
Where do you go first when you want an answer to a problem? This week I wanted to rewrite some old vb code (of which I am thoroughly ashamed) in C#. I didn’t want to do it from scratch so I looked for a tool to do the first draft.
In the past, my process for figuring out how to do this would be as follows:
1️⃣ Do a Google search on something like “How do I convert vb code into C#?”
2️⃣ Look at the top few search results and pick one or two. Often based on brand awareness or the bit of ad copy that they’ve written. In this example, https://converter.telerik.com/ appears at the top and I clicked through to have a look at their offering. Sometimes this will be an organic result sometimes it will be a paid for #ppc ad – and of course this is how Google make a lot of their money
3️⃣ So like most people my first port of call for a question is just to type it in the browser which then uses Google
4️⃣ But I noticed this morning that I’ve started doing something different. I’ve started asking questions in ChatGPT *before* I type it into the browser. Instead of a Google search I typed “Convert the following code into C#” into ChatGPT.
5️⃣ The results were excellent (see below)
6️⃣ The point here is not about how to update code to C#. The point is how we get answers to questions. Google has completely dominated this scene for a long time. But will it continue to do so? For the first time ever, for certain types of questions, I’m starting with ChatGPT then occasionally falling back on Google search.
So the good thing about this as a user is that we’re getting back to a world where great content wins rather than just the winner being the company with the best marketing team. But what if you’re a marketer??
And as soon as someone has a chrome plugin to change the default search to ChatGPT – then this starts to get interesting. In fact I’d be amazed if there wasn’t already something out there. I’m going to start hunting now, and you know where I’m going to start…
New Year, new marketing plans. Hopefully by now you’ve kicked off various activities and you’re waiting to see how those early campaigns are working out.
The other thing I see in marketing departments at this time though is burnout. Everyone is trying to do everything either because there’s no real strategy there (“let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks”). Or it could just be bad planning (“the start date for every campaign is the 1st of January”).
Either way, you might soon be revisiting the strategy discussion. Specifically, why are we doing activity A? Can we kill activity B? Is activity A working yet? That activity can quickly turn into navel gazing, when what you need is focus and a way of choosing what you should be really worrying about. To that end, I’ve been using the flywheel model below for years now. The point of the model is that you have a list of metrics and activities you can look at to check whether you would actually doing them and doing well. As a simple example: if nobody is coming to a website to talk, what should you do? Should you hire a content writer? A designer for the website? A product marketer? The diagram and notes below give what I think the “next best” activities, based on splitting the marketing flywheel into five stages.
The marketing flywheel for senior decision-makers (SDMs)
This first diagram is for senior decision-makers (SDMs). There are no hard and fast rules here, but generally these are people who are less likely to be actually using the product themselves but certainly influence the buying decision heavily.
For each part of the flywheel, I’ve put what I think the most impactful activities. If I only have time to do one thing, what is it? Looking at the first diagram, if you’re brand-new into a market (nobody knows about you) and you’re trying to sell to senior people, where should you spend your money? You must create awareness of the brand first. I nothing else will work without this first. So your first activities have to be things like PR, analyst relations, thought leadership, at some budget for LinkedIn. If you were spending money on complex lead qualification processes, when you have no leads to qualify!, then you’re burning money.
The marketing flywheel for end users
This second diagram spend users. Meaning you are advertising to the people who are actually going to be using the products. That means they’re likely to be more junior and have very different requirements (for example they’re likely to care about usability and less likely to care about long-term financial benefits in the organisation).
Here, the marketing is different. End users don’t read the same things as senior decision-makers. They’re far more likely to do a Google search for a particular problem they’ve just hit a than for an in-depth analyst report.
What does this mean for marketing budget? If there is a community of users, then you need to reach out to them. If not, PPC and SEO crucial. Either way as you get further through the flywheel the product has to be amazing (for end users, there’s nothing you can do in marketing that will overcome an unusable product).
Hopefully this is useful as a way of making sure you’re making a big impact to the start of the year without burning everybody out and without burning through your whole budget by Valentine’s Day. If your plan is to “do everything” then that’s not strategy, that’s a recipe for employee burnout and empty pockets.
ROI calculators are a pretty common tool amongst B2B marketers. On the face of it, the logic is simple – show a calculation of how the time saved from subscribing to your product equates to money and how that money is less than the annual subscription cost charged. Then surely the sale should be in the bag – who wouldn’t want to save $$, how could anyone say No?
I think this sort of calculator is useful for a limited purpose – it provides a supporting tool for your advocates in the org to help them convince their bosses to make the purchase. And for that it’s valuable. However, I’d argue it doesn’t help with the core problem – convincing buyers of the real value they’re getting – as it doesn’t help with the core reasons why people actually make purchases like yours.
An ROI calculator usually looks something like:
Your devs/finance team/marketing team/HR/etc. cost $50 an hour per person in fully loaded costs.
At the moment, 10 of them are wasting an hour a day on repetitive tasks – tasks that your product can automate away.
In any given week that’s 10x50x5 = $2,500 wasted on pointless tasks. In a year, that’s $125k.
Your software only costs $35k per year. So that’s an ROI of over 250% ! Or more simply, a straight saving of $90k a year.
At this point, you can produce your pen and ask them sign on the dotted line (well, click a button on a Docusign document) and start figuring out your commission.
Why doesn’t this work? There’s some lower level arguments to be made against a calculation like this – do you really believe the figures? Is all of that time genuinely saved or does someone else still need to do some manual work somewhere? Is the org really doing the task that badly today? And of course this is missing the implementation fees and ongoing work needed to keep the automated system working.
But I think there’s something more important, particularly when selling to senior buyers. There’s a dual problem with this calculation – firstly, that to make this saving the company would effectively have to fire someone, and secondly, in today’s environment, hiring and retaining staff is a far bigger headache than saving costs from letting people go. The calculation assumes an environment where the manager currently has too many people working for them, and is being asked to make savings. But this isn’t the reality for almost every manager I’ve spoken to in the last 10 years – the perennial problem managers have is growth and finding talent to fuel that growth. What they’re asking is “How do I find great people? I’m short-staffed, and just can’t hire the people I need. And when I do hire them, it’s such a hot job-market, I lose them unless I keep them happy!”. I can’t remember a single situation ever where someone has bought a product/service from a vendor, then “made the savings” by firing someone – it just doesn’t happen, and so is not believable to a client.
The real pain that clients have is hiring a great team, building and developing that team, then keeping them engaged. By building that great team, they not only get the obvious advantages and pride of running a great organisation, they also get multiple benefits from being able to provide much more value to the rest of the org. I.e. instead of my team being seen as a “Cost centre, to be reduced wherever possible”, it’s seen as “An incredibly value part of the company that’s helping us grow and be successful”. This “Soft ROI” is what senior buyers are really worried about. Here’s how I’d describe the world of the average finance team, from talking to our customers:
Finance teams are generally seen as a “necessary cost”. There is an unfair perception that they add little value.
They spend enormous amounts of time on manual drudge work. I’ve seen this sort of activity called things like “Hamster work”, “Treacle” and similar terms, but the idea is the same – you have humans doing work that computers were designed to do.
This is particularly bad in finance teams – practices that would be deemed unacceptable in a development or marketing department – are somehow okay in finance. I’ve seen teams working till midnight manually refreshing spreadsheets every 30 minutes, teams spending 1-2 weeks on month end (I mean, there are only 4 weeks in the actual month!). This sort of time-wasting has been reduced or removed entirely in most other parts of a high-functioning company.
This drudge work leads to a very specific people problem – how do you keep your talented people motivated? There’s a chance that, when you hired them, you weren’t fully transparent with the manual work involved – now they’re here and they’ve had that rude awakening, they’re not happy about it, they’re getting de-motivated, and they’ll start to look for other opportunities.
In parallel, your team isn’t doing any particularly interesting or value-add activity. This is problem both in reality and perception – that crucial project to work out the ROI on your vast marketing budget has been on hold for 9 months now, leading to significant waste. And your boss can only ask you so many times why it hasn’t happened yet?
This all leads to employee churn, poor performance overall, and an endless cycle of hiring, and less-than-impactful work.
This is an example from the world of finance, but of course the same could be said for other teams – though I’d argue to different degrees. The sort of waste I’ve seen in finance teams was ironed out years ago in development, where you see people automatically running 512 cloud-based tests at the push of a (build) button without a manual step in sight – the sort of automation finance teams can only dream of.
How do you present this value, if an ROI calculator isn’t enough? Through great marketing – all great marketing is based on a deep understanding of your customers’ genuine pain points and how you can resolve those pain points. Instead of (or “as well as”) an ROI calculator, I’d be writing content about the pain points above. Show how you understand your customers’ worlds, how you understand that pain and can help solve it. It’s also a question of positioning – if you position your product as “A tool that helps save time”, then you’ll never really resonate with the manager’s pain. Alternatively if you position your product as “A service that supports you transforming your team from a cost centre [to be reduced] into a high-performing and motivated function valued by the rest of the company” – and you can connect the dots between that message and your product – then this is a much stronger way to appeal to the target audience.
As I mention, I think ROI calculators still have their place. Once you’re in the door, and you have an advocate on the inside, then a tool like this can really help him/her make the case to their boss, who might want some numbers to back up the investment. But you need to win hearts and minds first – and that happens by understanding peoples’ real problems, and finding a way to help them solve those problems – ideally with the help of your product of course.
I love the book Rise of the Revenue Marketer. In it Debbie Qaqish describes the need for a change program to move your marketing department from being a cost centre (“We’re not sure what marketing do, but we need them to do the brochures”), to a revenue centre (“They’re responsible for generating a significant proportion of our company’s revenue”). Though the journey is easy to describe, it’s a long and arduous path to take.
We at Redgate have been on this path for a while now, and we’ve made enormous progress, particularly in the last 12 months. But one of the things that slowed us down was holding on to certain beliefs about how to measure marketing performance, how to measure the impact of marketing work – and holding on to those beliefs for too long, when perhaps they just weren’t true. Lots of these ideas came from conferences, blogs, books and make a lot of sense on paper. But when you get to the real world of implementing something, the reality is not always as expected.
Here I’ll go through five “myths” that I found to be unfounded. Of course, these come with big caveats – we’re one specific org, with a specific market, with particular advantages and disadvantages – so all should be taken with a pinch of salt. Still, with that caveat in mind here are my five, starting with the most controversial:
Myth 1: Attribution Models are Useful
The idea of a marketing attribution model is that you can take every lead, opportunity or sale and somehow work out “What were all of the things we did in marketing that contributed to that outcome, and what value would we give to each of these things?”. For example, I just generated a lead, I could go back and look through the path history of that individual, find that she clicked on a PPC ad, attended an event, did a Google search, interacted with us on Facebook, and so on. I then have some smart “multi-touch” model that assigns value to each of these (maybe the first or last get higher scores? There are lots of alternatives). If you then know the value of a lead (let’s say, $10), you can work out the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) for each activity by comparing the “value” (e.g. maybe $3 for the PPC click), against the spend.
But, I think this is baloney. This is a classic example where – just because you can do the maths, doesn’t mean to say the results are accurate or useful. The model is flawed for at least the following two reasons:
Data. It’s impossible to get all of the data about an individual’s path history – everything they’ve done, interacting with your brand over the last few years. Not difficult, but impossible. You don’t know about the offline activity they’ve done, you don’t know about the browsing they’ve done on their mobile, on their home laptop at the weekend, you’re very unlikely to have a link to their activity from three years ago (when they actually discovered the brand) and so on. NB: some MarTech orgs promise they can deliver on all these things, but I don’t believe them!
Over-simplistic view of how customers learn about a brand. The reality is that an individual will have 100s of different interactions with your brand all of which build up to a given perspective. They’ll attend an event, they’ll speak to a specific person on your stand who may or may not be great, they’ll read 100s of different pages on your site, they’ll talk to their colleagues about you, they’ll read third party review sites, they’ll kick the tyres of the software, they’ll see an ad on a news site (without clicking on it!), they’ll remember a comment from their boss two years ago (“Oh, you should check out Redgate, see what they’ve got”), and so on. All of these things somehow add up to a favourable view of your org (or otherwise!) and to try and model that with a simple sequential attribution model isn’t, I think, valid. The best you can hope to do is make sure every interaction with your brand is awesome and have faith that will lead to positive results.
Okay, maybe it’s not all baloney – but the approach is, I believe, significantly flawed. Nevertheless, there are some things that can be measured – which brings me to myth 2…
Myth 2: Everything should be Measured
Not sure this is controversial actually. To quote Seth Godin:
The approach here is as simple as it is difficult: If you’re buying direct marketing ads, measure everything. Compute how much it costs you to earn attention, to get a click, to turn that attention into an order. Direct marketing is action marketing, and if you’re not able to measure it, it doesn’t count.
If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure. Engage with the culture. Focus, by all means, but mostly, be consistent and patient. If you can’t afford to be consistent and patient, don’t pay for brand marketing ads.
The danger is that, in an effort to measure everything and show the return on everything, you stop activities because they’re fundamentally un-measurable. The myth is that “Because you need to show a repeatable, predictable and scalable revenue engine, you need to understand and measure the impact of everything you do”. But that’s taking the argument to an extreme view – the reality is that there will always be spend in your budget where you won’t be able to tie revenue to that spend. Ever.
Myth 3: You Need a Funnel
Perhaps controversial again. A traditional funnel implies a sequential path for a customer from something like “Awareness of problem” to “Discovered our solution [to that problem]”, “Evaluated our solution” finally “Becomes customers [then perhaps evangelist etc]”.
Again, we’ve never found this to represent reality. Of course all models are exactly that – models. They’re not perfect, but if they’re useful, that’s okay.
But I feel the funnel fundamentally misrepresents how real people actually interact with a brand. From talking to customers what you find is that there are just an enormous number of holes in this approach. For example:
The “Awareness of problem” is just too crude. The chances are that your content was very unlikely to be the way people became aware of the problem; that actually their knowledge has built up in a fragmented way over time; that they’re still learning all through the sale, even post-sale.
The idea of “stages” like this just doesn’t make sense generally. Often people are already customers of yours – and they’re finding new things you offer. Their understanding of your offering is forever a slow build up (from a theoretical “nothing” many years ago, to some partial understanding now), that it goes back and forth.
A funnel implies a single direction of travel, a path to enlightenment, ending with purchasing your tool. But, from talking to customers I find a much messier reality – people go back and forth, there are interrupts and so on. We’ve found it almost impossible to actually classify people in to different stages – it’s too over-simplistic to be useful (we’ve found).
Myth 4: Conversion Rates Matter
Again, controversial. But our experience is that conversion rates are the lever you are least able to pull. Why? Because for most orgs, they have a pretty well optimised process for converting leads at different stages. At Redgate, there are certain lead types that convert at a 70% conversion rate, within a 2 week period – and that has been consistent for about 10 years, almost regardless of what we do! We’ve spent a lot of time and effort on this stuff – its value is in “Can we improve/optimise this?” – and generally we find we can’t. Of course you monitor it, to make sure it’s not dropping (e.g. because some leads got lost), but otherwise – stop worrying.
Finally, myth 5…
Myth 5: This is an Impossible Task
I wanted to end on a positive. 2-3 years ago, I thought the task of building out a “revenue engine” that was vaguely water-tight, believable and actionable was never going to happen. There were so many holes in the data, it was so hard linking activities to outcomes, that it wouldn’t actually happen.
I pleased to say that isn’t what has happened. It’s been pretty arduous, but we are now on the brink of a model that allows us to:
See the impact of many (but not all!) of our activities
Track the resultant leads through to opportunity then revenue
Match the activities with budgets to pull out ROMI
Use this insight to stop certain activities (already cut a few things), start a few more, and adjust how we do other things.
A simple example of the last point – in 2018 we ran a number of webinars of different sorts. We tracked through the leads, opportunities and revenue from each of these and found that the impact of having a “star” presenting the webinar (someone big in our community) had a far bigger upside than expected – at little or no additional cost to us, other than the trouble of finding and convincing these stars. I.e. one webinar with a star involved would generate more high quality leads than 2-3 webinars without such a person on the event. So this year, we’re changing our program a little – fewer webinars, but each more impactful with more big names presenting.
Just a small example, but there are countless more – we’re building out a model where we know how and which levers we can pull (and which we can’t), and at what cost. It took a long time to get there, but it’s finally becoming real. Feel free to get in touch if you want to know more!
Reading one of the many number of content marketing pieces from HubSpot, I noticed the following from a basic piece on What is Digital Marketing?, after paragraphs about the virtues of Inbound marketing techniques:
Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space -- regardless of whether it’s relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren’t necessarily ready to receive it.
Now HubSpot obviously have an agenda here – their whole business model rests on the validity of the Inbound marketing approach over Outbound approaches (such as “garish” banner ads ), and so they’ve over-stated their belief in the inefficiency of ads. But are ads really garish and intrusive? Are they really “push” advertising (rather than the “pull” of good content)? What’s the problem here?
Since becoming CMO of Redgate and, perhaps foolishly, updating my LinkedIn profile to reflect this, I’ve started receiving endless emails from agencies, recruiters, marketing data organisations and so on. And many of these are what, I would call, if not rude, certainly intrusive and over familiar. These techniques have been written about elsewhere – this week alone I’ve had:
Use of “RE: Our conversation” in the subject line (really, I don’t remember this!?)
Taking names from my LinkedIn network and saying “Your colleague <Insert Name Here> said I should speak to you…” – when I know that’s not true
Assumptive closes (“Shall I book 20 minutes in for a chat on Wednesday?”)
Stalking (early messages which seem innocent enough, chatting about marketing issues, but then soon turn in to sales patter)
…and so on.
I find all this pretty intrusive. But isn’t it just the same thing as “garish” banner ads, intruding on my field of vision, when I’m trying to get something done on the Internet? Interrupting my work when it should be me in charge of my flow (as per the Inbound model)?
I think this is to overstate the intrusion from banner ads. Firstly, yes there are very interruptive ads which fill the screen, and you have to either play “hunt the X” to try and close them, or wait 15s before you can move on. These are pretty annoying. But most graphical ads aren’t like that – they’re well branded rectangles, which are as ignorable as you like. As a marketer I hope you’ve picked up on the branding, noticed a message, that the ad has lodged somewhere in your subconscious, so that next time you’re looking for a solution you think, “Oh yeah, who were those Redgate guys?”. But of course, you might just ignore them (and I’d be very surprised of you clicked on them – we all know the stats on banner ad click-through rates), and that’s fine.
I don’t feel this is nearly as intrusive as aggressive cold-calling and emailing – these are marketing techniques too, but exhibit the worst traits of “push” marketing – interruptive, based on your timetable, not mine and quite frankly, not leaving me with a particularly positive experience of your company. A well designed ad, perhaps with humour, certainly beautifully designed isn’t in the same category.
As I say, HubSpot have an obvious agenda – to push the Inbound model and disparage outbound techniques, but the latter shouldn’t all be tarred with the same brush. Ads are as popular as ever on the web, and as more options for personalisation and targeting become available to graphical media – combined with the deluge of mediocre content – I feel this un-intrusive channel will have a resurgence.
But you’ll never find me pushing the dishonest cold-call/email (“I spoke to your colleague yesterday about how we could help you..” – no, you didn’t!). That’s truly interruptive marketing, which does nothing but damage to your brand.
I’ve just finished the excellent Complete Guide to B2B Marketing by Kim Ann King. It’s very “List-ey” – it’s full of To Do lists (“Want to figure out your budgets for media spend? Here’s a 7-point list of how to do it”), which I really like. Many marketing books are rather waffly and vague, so a practical guide is always welcome.
But, here’s the rub – by the end of the book it would be very easy to feel completely overwhelmed by the list of things you need to do to be running a world-class marketing organisation! From reading the book you’d be left with the impression that you must be doing all of the following:
Fully integrated web, marketing, customer and predictive analytics
Implemented full experimentation and optimisation platform
Full marketing automation
Advanced personalisation and targeting across all channels
Complete oversight of the marketing funnel from out-of-funnel to leads to MQLs to SQLs to closed
A clean, de-duped and pristine CRM
A full inbound/content strategy
Deep and extensive planning cycles from data to goals to strategies to tactics to results and back round again – carried out quarterly
Segmentation, positioning, messaging, buyer personas and so on for every product group and segment
A Brand awareness plan for new markets
Demand generation activities across all stages of the funnel
Full retention marketing plan for your “existing customer” segment
A plan for organisational enablement for all of the above including budgets, staffing, forecasts
On top of all this, keeping on top of new developments in marketing, self-education and so on
..and this is just scratching the surface. In fact she’s very open in the first chapter about how the role for anyone in marketing today can feel overwhelming, that there is so much to keep on top of.
How do you cope with this? All of the things above seem vital, important – how can you be doing your job properly unless you’re doing all of the above?
I’ve also just re-read Porter’s great article on Strategy (https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy – you need an HBR subscription to read it unfortunately). One primary point he makes is to ask the question “What is a strategy?” and one of his tenants that qualifies an activity as “strategic” is whether or not you are making choices to not do something. For example, if at your business you want to “Improve the reporting system so that we can see product performance better” – this might be a big project, but you’re not choosing to not do anything. No-one would choose to “Make reporting worse so that we can’t see what’s going on”. All you’re doing is improving your business effectiveness.
However if your company had two products, A and B, and you said that “We’re only going to sell product A going forward and stop selling product B” – that’s strategic, because someone else could choose to sell product B instead (or stick with both, or neither).
How is this relevant to Kim Ann King’s book? You have to make choices. You have to make choices about which elements of marketing activity you are going to focus on, and to which you are going to say No. This is your job as a marketing leader, to prioritise and say no to things. Anyone can take the list above and propose “Doing all of the above”, but that road leads to a lack of focus and burnout.
How do you choose? It’s the simple, but difficult job of understanding your business, and where your problems are. To take an example from my own organisation, Redgate. There’s a section in the book about “Building a community site, with content to build trust and inbound for your brand”. But, we are fortunate to already have this (a couple of sites, http://www.sqlservercentral.com and http://www.simple-talk.com). It’s not that these can’t be improved, but is it a priority to start a new community site at Redgate? No it isn’t.
This is an easy one though – when you’ve already ticked something on the list. What about all the things you haven’t done yet? This gets more difficult, but then this is your job. Should you spend the next year cleaning and de-duping your CRM system so that you can implement advanced personalisation and targeting? Or re-branding your company? Or building analytical capability for the future? Or implementing a MarTech platform? Or experimenting with new channels?
The job is to diagnose – what are your current problems? What is currently holding your business back, your constraints? What work could you do that would move you towards your company goals next year? This latter point is vital – if your company objectives are about growth rather than, say, cost-cutting, or process improvements, this suggest different activities.
What’s very important is to recognise the different go-to-market strategy and type of company that you work in, compared to others. Perhaps my one criticism of this book is that, though it purports to be specific to B2B marketing, there’s not enough opinion on what is most useful for B2B marketing, and what’s more relevant to B2C. There’s some (e.g. that LinkedIn is more relevant than SnapChat) and there is more of a focus on lead nurturing through to sales people (more relevant to the high-value/low-volume world of traditional B2B), but there isn’t quite enough direction on “This activity is popular about B2C marketers, but really is a waste of time for you”.
This is where your job comes in – what sort of B2B org do you work at? At Redgate, really we’re B2BC. We’re absolutely selling software to businesses – there’s no way Jo Public is interested in SQL Server comparison tools. But, where most traditional B2B orgs are high-value/low-volume with all that entails (low lead volume, high ATV, significant sales nurturing, multiple buyer personas in each org etc etc), we are much closer to B2C in our business model – low ATV, high volume, mass (1:many) digital marketing and so on. So for us, certain activities are more relevant than others. As an example, most marketing automation platforms use a nurturing model based on slowly taking leads through a number of stages (awareness, leads, MQLs, SQLs etc), using personalised content – based on in-depth data and analytics for different customer segments. This is needed because often B2B organisations have complex offerings that need to be explained and “sold” to companies, so that they understand the benefits of spending $500k with that vendor.
But – what if this isn’t you? What if you sell software for $400 that, quite frankly doesn’t need explaining in this way? What if it’s pretty darned obvious what it does, and the free trial tells the end-user everything they need to know? In that scenario, is it worth investing millions of dollars in a new marketing automation platform? What’s the uplift going to be – will you ever get payback?
It’s these hard decisions that you need to make to ensure you and your team don’t get overwhelmed with new activities. You’re making strategic decisions when you decide not to do one thing and instead do another. May be you put marketing automation off for a year (despite the overwhelming message from the industry that you have to be be doing it ) and focus on finding new customer segments instead? Maybe for you, it’s about starting a significant community platform this year, and everything else can just keep ticking along?
Once you’ve decided, there’s then the equal challenge of leading the change through your organisation. Every idea (automation, branding, content, channel, sales support etc etc) will have its advocates in your company. You need to hold on to the logic for why you’ve chosen A, not B, and try to get that adopted through the company so that everyone is working to the same goals. The strategy is just the start of the process…
I’m beginning to think I might need to change the tag line for this blog. One of my earliest posts was about how we needed to apply some scientific rigour to the process of marketing attribution and therefore ROI. How can marketers be getting away with such unproven and unprovable techniques, spending all this money with so little evidence of success?
But I think I might have changed my mind. We’ve actually had a couple of geniuses at Red Gate looking in to the provability, or otherwise, of marketing ROI, and their conclusion? Nah – you can’t do it. More specifically, for our volumes, with our variation in spend (we’re not a company make a thousand sales a day, all at exactly $10 each), it’s not possible to show statistically that a sample and a control group will differ enough to be discernible at any interesting level of significance. I’ll get more details if they let me (as well as writing about the interesting point raised that – does this mean Google’s whole business model is based on FUD? On us be too scared to kill spend on things like Google Adwords? For another time…).
Anyway, I was thinking about this problem – that completely undermines this blog – and thought that actually there’s more to it than the maths. And that actually, trying to measure return on investment for marketing is very much like trying to measure return on investment for an employee.
There are many similarities between these two investments:
They are both investments. I.e. You’re spending money, either on Adwords (or whatever) or a salary. You would only be doing this if you expect to get some sort of return.
So far so simple. Next – In theory, both can be measured in terms of Inputs, Outputs and Outcomes. As I outlined in another earlier post, I try to measure campaign success in terms of Inputs (“Am I getting what I wanted? Does the advert look good and say the right thing?”), Outputs (“What’s the immediate KPI? How many webpage visits did I get? How many clicks on the video? How long did they watch it for?”) and Outcomes (“What’s the headline result – was revenue impacted?”). Similarly we can do this for an employee. Take a developer – what’s the quality of his/her code? How do people like working with him/her? (Inputs). How much code does (s)he write? How buggy is it? How often does it get rolled back from production? (Outputs). And – is the end product something people want and buy? (Outcomes).
Thirdly – there are trivial examples, I guess, of where this ROI is measurable in both situations. For marketing – you’ve never marketed ever in a particular country, say Micronesia, and never sold a single thing in Micronesia. You run some Google ads in Micronesia, and nothing else, then measure sales in 6 months time. I think you could get a pretty accurate ROI here. Similarly, if you employed someone to act as a consultant on your behalf, paid that person $100,000 per annum and, purely through having that person on your books, was able to bill $200,000 in consultancy work, then perhaps you could calculate an ROI here
But, I think these are trivial examples. In most cases, it’s almost impossible to measure the return on investment in hiring someone. Take for example a good product marketing manager, let’s call him Pete. Pete spends a lot of his time researching and thinking about positioning for a set of products. He often has great, innovative ideas and insight (though not always!). Also, he spends a lot of his time with customers understanding their backgrounds, needs, desires and issues. Furthermore, he works fantastically in a team, bringing cohesion and vision to what everyone else is doing and helping to keep those around him motivated. He also helps out with training sessions for others in the company on his areas of expertise, and also helps out with company events both internal and external.
How on Earth do you measure the ROI of Pete? Undoubtedly he’s having a positive impact on his company, but how could you measure it? How could you assess the impact he has on motivating the team around him? Perhaps that stopped someone leaving because “They just love working with people like Pete”. How would you ever know how you saved $10,000 on recruitment fees through that? Or how his work at events helped bring new customers and employees to the company? And more specifically, how would you ever measure the impact of clever product positioning on sales? I’d say impossible!
So really, I’m coming round to the view that, though we might be able to measure Inputs well, both for campaigns and for people (“Is this a great campaign? Did we get it spot on?” and “Is Pete doing well? Is he producing great work, and a great person to have on the team?”) and we can measure some Outputs (“How many page visits did we get?” and “How buggy is Pete’s code? How productive is he?”), Outcomes and therefore accurate ROI are pretty much an impossible requirement.
So what does that leave us with? Well personally, I think it’s an issue both of using intelligent qualitative assessment of work and also some faith that high quality work based on sound judgement will have the desired effect. For example, when thinking of Google Adwords – if we’ve done our research and know that there are lots of customers out there with a particular problem; and we’ve written our search terms to reflect that in an intelligent way; and we’ve worked on the ads so that they really reflect how we know customers are thinking; and of course, we’re checking that the ads are working, and continuously improving them – then, I think it’s reasonable to suppose that this effort (and spend!) will produce some results beneficial to your company. Of course, you have to check the rest of the pipeline – when they’ve discovered you through the ad, can they try your product easily (Validation)? Do they get what it is (Positioning)? Can they buy it in a way that suits them (Pricing and Packaging)? But if these things are also done well, I believe the extra work trying to validate whether or not you’re getting a particular overall ROI from Adwords is a hiding to nothing.
I was attempting some market sizing activity this week. It’s something I haven’t done for a few months and quite frankly I’d forgotten how hard it was.
I start from a premise that the future is completely unpredictable. Really, aren’t we kidding ourselves when we think we can predict how many people will buy our widget and at what price? But then this seemed rather defeatist, and I have seen market sizing produce some value, so I thought I’d try and break the problem down a bit.
The other think I noticed this month was how much fruit-specific cutlery there is out there. You can buy a Kiwi spoon, a Mango splitter, a Grapefruit spoon and endless other tat to fill your kitchen drawers. So I thought I’d use this as an example market sizing task, focussing on a new, brilliant product idea I had, the “Apple Knife” (patent pending) – a knife specifically designed for cutting up apples with a fork bit on the end for picking up the pieces. I know, genius.
So the usual method I use for market sizing is the standard “Start big, and narrow down” approach. And I try to use some sort of staging for this, a version of which is described here – try to define some sort of Total Addressable Market (how big would this market be, if we had 100% market share?) and then calculate some proportion of this, based on how many people we can reach, what market share we might able to get and so on. As a massively over-simplified example, for our wonderful Apple Knife product:
People in the world – 7bn
People who regularly eat apples – 1bn (I have no idea, btw)
People in the UK who regularly eat apples – 60m (we’re only going to sell to the UK to start)
Households – 26m (realistically, we’re only going to sell one per household)
So, in theory, so far, our Total Addressable Market is 1bn knives – if every person in the world who ate apples bought one, this is what we’d sell. I don’t think this will happen. So we have to start narrowing down the numbers.
NB: You can always narrow the numbers down in different orders – addressable geography first, or # of households first? I’m not sure it matters, but generally certain orderings are easier than others (e.g. it’s easier to find the number of households in the UK than it is in the whole world).
Anyway, here’s where it gets interesting. If I were a naive presenter on the Dragon’s Den, I might go in and argue – 26m knives will be sold in the UK, at £5 each, makes a total market of £130m, ker-ching! (let’s ignore things like manufacturing and marketing costs for now).
But, I suspect the dragons would have something to say about this. The next stage in the narrowing process is the most important and, I think, the most difficult – how many people will actually want to buy an Apple Knife? To continue our sizing process:
People in the world – 7bn
People who regularly eat apples – 1bn
People in the UK who regularly eat apples – 60m
Households – 26m
Households that will actually want one – 26m x n%
And the key of course here is, what is the value of n? If we think everyone will want one, it’s 100%, great. But, if we’re being slightly more realistic, n could be as low as 0.01% – leaving us with a total market of £13,000 (26m x 0.0001 x £5) – somewhat less attractive as an investment opportunity. Or even less of course (I’m going off the idea more and more, as I think about it).
I think the first parts of the market sizing, if not trivial, are much easier than the latter parts. It might not be easy to find, say, “The number of companies in the US that sell products online”, or whatever your top level numbers are for your business, but that’s a number which can, reliably be found – if I do the hard work to find that number of businesses, say 1.3m, then that number is correct and won’t change for a while.
The latter numbers (or percentage multipliers) are very unpredictable however. But not completely – what are the tricks for improving the accuracy of this figure? I think this really depends on how new or old your market is. And this exists on a scale. With our Apple Knife example, there are the following possibilities:
We’re already in the specific apple knife business. We’ve been selling them for 30 years, and have been selling around 2,500 per year. We reckon our new model is a bit better than the old one, so we hope to see this go up to around 2,700 per year. But it might not, so a reasonable forecast for market size is somewhere between 2,500 and 2,700 – pretty accurate.
We’re already in the “fruit cutlery” business selling around 5,000 kiwi spoons a year. We’ve got a pretty good understanding of the supply-chain, the market, we’ve spoken to our outlets, to see what they think etc, and have come up with estimates of between 1,000 and 5,000 apple knife sales a year based on that. This isn’t as accurate as “a new version of the same product”, but at least it’s close. There are also subtleties to do with how close different markets are – may be there’s a separate market for “exotic fruit cutlery” with particular dynamics? Or the soft-fruit vs hard-fruit cutlery markets are different in interesting ways? I have no idea, but the principle here is – you’re not starting from scratch.
You are starting from scratch. You’re a company that currently makes electroplating chemicals and have lots of spare cash to spend; and you think apple knives is an interesting market for you. Ignoring concerns I might have that you have no idea what you’re doing in the new market, have no reach, no brand, no unfair advantages etc etc, you also have the issue that you have nothing to base your market sizing figures on – how on earth can you estimate these numbers (though see caveat below about stealing other peoples’ figures). You might have a go and estimate figures of between 1,000 and 20,000, but who knows?
Brand new product/market. I’ve trawled Google, and I haven’t been able to find an apple knife for sale (I can’t imagine why!). So not only do you have no info about potential market size, but no-one does. Here, how do you know whether all 26m households will buy an apple knife, or not one single one?
(NB: There’s a caveat here about access to competitors sales information. You might not be in the apple knife business yourself, but if you know a competitor who is, and have seen their sales figures – or can work them out from revenue etc – then that’s a great start. However, it doesn’t take into account massive differences such as market reach, brand, channels and other barriers to entry that differentiate the competitor from you. Nevertheless, looking at other companies’ revenue is a great check – if the biggest player in the market is only make £50,000 revenue per quarter from fruit-cutlery sales, that’s a good ceiling on your estimates..)
Most examples I hit upon fall in to one of these four categories. A I say, the early parts of the calculation are relatively easy, but the latter parts, if your problem falls in to the last couple of categories – and most interesting innovations and product ideas do – are very difficult indeed.
And the basis of the problem – it’s almost impossible to predict take-up of a new product or a new innovation. If you’re producing a new laser printer, with slightly better functionality than others, at a slightly lower price, you can have a good stab at market sizing. But what if you’re innovating to provide a fundamentally different way of solving a pain-point – a pain-point which might not even be addressed at all at the moment? Though we all like the certainty of saying “This idea could make us £10m!”, we really are kidding ourselves. Instead, I prefer a more experimental, research based approach where we start on a new idea in a cheap or lean way (make a version of the apple-knife yourself and stand outside John Lewis, showing it to people and see how many would buy one), then start making forecasts when you have some idea of need and interest from the customers. E.g. if 1 in 1,000 people you asked said they’d buy an apple knife, that’s not a bad start. Though I think I’d be lucky to get that much interest..
Obviously this is a book that had been around a long time. And there are endless reviews, over the years with different opinions. However, what’s interesting from skimming through the Amazon reviews, is that there’s a real mix between people who think the book is genius and those that think it’s just not relevant today, as it was 30 years ago. And there are a few examples of one of the most cutting remarks that can be made about a marketing textbook – that it’s good for students but not “relevant in the real world”.
I do think it’s a great book, and still just as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. In fact, I’d argue, it’s more relevant.
Like all great marketing books it has, at its core, an extremely simple message. Rather than paraphrase, I’ll quote verbatim:
Positioning starts with a product. A piece of merchandise, a service, a company, an institution, or even a person. Perhaps yourself.
But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.
There then follows a lot of detail filling in what this really means, for example:
That you need to position your product to link with what’s already in your customers’ minds. You can’t create new ideas in peoples’ minds, so you have to link your product to what’s already there. And you can’t change peoples’ minds.
Today’s marketplace is so over-crowded with products and messages that, unless you come up with a massively over-simplified idea, your message just won’t get through.
You have to start from how your prospects view the market and what your competition are doing. You then try and position your product using this “outside-in” approach (“How do we fit in that market?”) rather than an “inside-out” approach (where you start with your product and try to figure out “How can we sell this?”)
You need to find the hole (or “Cherchez le creneau”) in the market which, although simple in concept, is actually the hardest part of the process. Why? Because if something was obvious (“Why don’t we create an online storage service?”), then someone else has already done and will be first in the market (and if you’re first to be successful in a market, then that’s a hard position for others to overtake).
But there are a few things that I particularly like about the book and why I think it’s even more interesting than perhaps it was a few decades ago. Firstly, as they point out, “We live in an over-communicated society”. Well if that were true in the early 80s, it’s even worse now. The low barrier to entry required to get any new product off the ground (or even a pseudo-product with a honeypot landing page) means that there are often hundreds of products out there in a similar category to yours, with the budget and knowledge to get their message out there. How on Earth can you get yourself heard over that din? Going back to the very simple task of “How do I differentiate against the rest of the market? How am I unique? Why would anybody out there want this instead of all of them?” seems an almost necessary task to undertake before moving on to more detailed, tactical marketing methods.
Secondly though, and I think the reason why I found the book so useful, is that any search for “Marketing books”, “Marketing blogs” or “Marketing conferences” today brings back a series of results almost exclusively around the areas of lead generation, SEO, PPC, content marketing, funnel optimisation, lead nurturing and so on. Obviously, all of these are vital in the world of digital marketing. But these go hand in hand with the upfront basic work of figuring out your position, your message, and what you’re trying to sell. Your content marketing campaign will struggle if you don’t know what the proposition is that you’re trying to market – and hence what you should be writing content about!
Another comment made about the book is that’s only relevant with big advertising budgets, for big brands. It’s certainly true that most of the examples provided are for brands that everyone will have heard of. But, I think this point is perhaps less relevant today – 20 years ago you needed significant budget to make any sort of splash. But that’s not the case so much now. With content marketing via blogs, and other mechanisms, there are other ways to get your message out (though obviously budget is still needed for other channels).
The last point I’d make is that I really like the emphasis on the point that forcing yourself to stick to the more rigid approach of assessing the market (looking from the “outside-in”) and trying to “find the hole” makes the job more simple (you know what you need to do first), but really more difficult. This forces us to raise the bar for new ideas and pay much closer attention to those that we think are great and assess them against much stricter criteria. It really doesn’t matter if you come up with great idea, even a fully-coded great product, if that space is already taken. Just saying “But ours will be better!” is wishful thinking that could cost you dearly.
