During our weeklong event, Data World, I had the pleasure of hosting a panel on demand generation with Yuval Bramson, Online Marketing Team Lead at AppsFlyer, and Russel Banzon, Senior Director of Marketing at Gong.
We got candid as we shared our methods for managing spend, preferred attribution models, the KPIs and alerts we monitor most, and optimization success stories.
I’ve summarized the highlights, but to get the full story watch the panel.
How do you come up with a marketing budget?
The general consensus was that each company should align its business goals and regions. There are two main approaches to this —bottom-up and top-down. By working in an organized method, companies can balance between both approaches to see which works best. We need to adapt to changing trends by re-evaluating and testing tactics and strategies.
Don’t over-index on one channel
The pandemic has shown that proven methods are not always proven when the unexpected arises. So if you give events or LinkedIn or other means of digital advertising too much prominence in your strategy, and prices go up, you’ll need to be flexible and change your tactics accordingly. Audience members surveyed said LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and Twitter are still the most popular channels for digital efforts, but panelists encouraged experimenting with other channels, such as content syndication. Ultimately, many said that adapting quickly has proven key, especially in the current climate, to prevent loss.
How do you plan on the size of the marketing budget?
“You have to come up with a budget only with true partnership across sales, finance, and marketing, “ Banzon said.”Unless you have those three folks working in interlock, and understanding one another’s world, having the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes is a very key ingredient of how budgets are made.”
I added that it’s also about understanding how your funnel converts, and what assets marketing has to bring to the table for the rest of the funnel to really do their job” and to reach the company’s targets.
How much do you decide how much to invest in marketing, and how do we decide where to invest our funds?
Bramson added that each region and market are different in their needs and “You need to reverse engineer each conversion rate and funnel marketing lead. We invested a lot in our infrastructure in the way we measure things and in the way we keep everything transparent across the organization.”
Alignment is important. It usually starts with having a philosophical conversation about what stage of growth your company is in. From there, you can better assess whether you can go with a conservative, financial approach or a high-track approach – usually it’s a blend of both. You need to align bottom-up and top-down strategies. And you need to keep your eyes on efficiency metrics, but also be in a growth-mode mindset.
What is your favorite attribution model?
“My favorite attribution model is the one that matches your business and sales process, and who you sell to,” Banzon said. “We created a custom model within Bizible to understand all of our sales stages. But it starts with a lot of data, and then being able to synthesize it down, but without spending a day and a half on it.
Bramson agreed that the best attribution model is the one that makes most sense to the business, adding, “Although [Appsflyer] is an attribution company obviously for the mobile space, it wouldn’t suffice just to attribute MQLs, leads and SQLs to the different channels. We want it to be savvier than that.”
What is your most used CRM tool or marketing automation combination?
When polling the audience and panelists, Hubspot and Salesforce was the most popular marketing automation combo. This didn’t surprise me, as I’ve seen all sorts of tech stack combinations at companies where I’ve worked, from Hubspot to Zapier, to Tableau, and all sorts of databases. At Anodot, we use our own medicine. We have Anodot for monitoring across each of the different platforms we use, as it proves to be the most holistic viewpoint from which we can understand what’s driving conversions across the funnel.
What do you use to monitor your day-to-day performance?
A pervasive challenge to monitoring is an over-reliance on dashboards. The problem with dashboards is that you can see results but can’t easily consume the insights. Businesses today can’t afford to wait a full quarter for analysts to crunch the data and provide insights. By then, it’s too late. The entire world has changed.
Although it might feel like a daunting process, it’s better to make decisions based on limited data – even if it’s imperfect, than make no decisions at all. Based on data, you can make more informed decisions on where to steer your campaigns.
Avoiding information overload
Dashboards are endless, so it’s important to have developers build monitoring systems around the issues most critical to your business, so you’re focusing on KPIs and alerts that matter to you.
There were just the highlights. For more tips, you can watch the panel here.
You'll believe it when you see it
