How to Scale Marketing with AI and ABM?

Shownotes

This episode of Sunny Side Up discusses scaling marketing at a fast growing tech company with Sally Winter, Marketing Director at Benefex. Sally shares insights on implementing AI strategies to stay competitive and challenges in the B2B landscape. She details how her company effectively measured ABM campaigns through a repeatable model leveraging existing content and targeting personas. Sally emphasizes the importance of great content and brand building for future buyers. She also discusses scaling teams and measuring influence over vanity metrics. Valuable lessons are provided on using events for emotional connectivity and recommending books on transforming the b2b journey.

Best Moments

• 01:14
  Sally Winter discusses the strategic significance of AI in modern marketing and how it will fundamentally change jobs in marketing.
• 06:24
  Sally emphasizes the challenges of understanding and buying the right AI solutions for objectives, as there are now over 9932 marketing technology solutions.
• 13:52
  Sally shares insights on her company's successful ABM campaign that led to a $10M deal, including leveraging existing content and targeting personas within their limited budget.
• 16:07
  Sally discusses lessons learned like having a repeatable campaign model and the familiar core pain points that prospects tend to share.
• 21:10
  Sally argues that events are still important for brand building and the emotional connectivity they can provide audiences.

About the guest

An award-winning content producer and SaaS marketer, Sally specializes in the workplace technology sector, where she’s led marketing functions in start-ups, scale-ups, and multinational enterprises. She’s currently the Marketing Director for Benefex, the tech company that uses employee benefits, recognition, and wellbeing platforms to power exceptional employee experiences for global companies.

Connect with Sally Winter

Key takeaways

• AI’s strategic significance in modern marketing and challenges in b2b implementation
• Importance of understanding AI innovation in martech and buying solutions well
• Using existing content and a repeatable model to run effective ABM campaigns on a limited budget
• Building brand awareness before lead generation as only 5% of buyers are in market at a time  
• Measuring influence over just vanity metrics from events and activities
• Scaling teams while cutting across functions like marketing, demand gen, and customer success

Quotes

“AI is going to fundamentally change marketing. And it’s going to fundamentally change the types of jobs that people do in marketing forever.”

-Sally Winter

Highlights from this episode

Could you share the strategic significance of AI in the modern marketing landscape and how it’s starting to shape campaigns?

Sally discusses that AI is having a significant strategic impact on the modern marketing landscape. She notes that AI will fundamentally change the way marketing is done and the types of jobs in the field. According to Sally, AI is becoming a priority for CMOs and marketing directors. She stresses that as we head into 2023 and beyond, marketers will have to be talking about and understanding how they can use AI in their strategies to stay competitive.

What would you say are the key concerns and challenges in implementing AI into B2B businesses? And how companies can drive innovation in their AI strategies?

Sally highlights several key concerns and challenges with implementing AI in B2B businesses. At a macro level, she notes issues with unregulated tech companies and emerging risks like bias, misinformation and data privacy issues. At a micro level, she mentions challenges for information security teams in understanding how data will be used and potential short and long term risks.

To drive innovation, Sally suggests companies address these challenges by developing ethical and responsible AI practices. She also recommends understanding AI innovation in marketing tech solutions and “pinpoint tools” that can help with objectives like SEO, content and landing pages. Buying AI solutions wisely and avoiding a “Franken stack” is important too, as transparency is still lacking in many AI technologies.

How would companies use events and other non-brand focused activities to build brand recognition? And how to achieve emotional connectivity?

Sally believes events can still be an important brand-focused activity, even if not explicitly measured that way. She says showing up at key industry events with a large presence can build recognition over time.

To build emotional connectivity, Sally recommends connecting with audiences on an emotional level by speaking to their pain points and objectives. She cites the example of having the biggest, flashiest event booth to leave an impression. Sally also emphasizes the power of just being seen at events to build familiarity with the brand.

While events may have other goals like lead generation, Sally stresses the importance of also using them to raise general awareness of the brand for when prospects are not actively in-market. Creating an emotionally positive association can help the brand stay top of mind later in buyers’ journeys.

How did your company effectively measure and run their ABM campaign? And what lessons can marketers learn from this story?

Sally shares that her company built a repeatable model to simplify decision making for prospects, while leveraging their existing content research. They segmented prospects by relevant personas and took those personas through the marketing funnel.

Early funnel efforts used brand content on LinkedIn to raise awareness among HR professionals at their target company. Middle funnel emphasized shared beliefs, while late funnel focused on building trust.

Lessons included the importance of great foundational content that can be easily repurposed. Having a detailed but repeatable campaign model also allowed for efficient execution at scale. Marketers can learn to focus campaigns on familiar core pain points shared across accounts.

Resource recommendations

Books

Sally suggests “Transforming the B2B Buyer Journey” by Tony Wade. She found it a useful reframing of familiar buyer journey concepts.

Shout-outs

-Sally recommends Melanie Hill, CMO at Zillis. She believes Melanie could provide valuable perspectives on scaling B2B marketing.