In this episode, Geordie Carswell, Chief Marketing Officer of ActualTech Media, joins the podcast to talk about the stuff no marketer wants to talk about right now: lead generation and content syndication!
Watch the full episode and read the recap below:
But First, What is ActualTech Media?
“For about 10 years, ActualTech has done lead gen and content creation for the enterprise tech space. So everything from cybersecurity down to cloud, to DevOps, to a number of different niches beyond that,” Geordie shared. “But our specialty is in using webinars for lead generation, but we also do all kinds of other sources like appointment setting, content syndication, a ton of different mechanisms, whatever it takes to get lead gen done.”
As a sponsor and speaker at CyberMarketingCon in December of this year, ActualTech Media also does surveys and is joining forces with Cybersecurity Marketing Society to do a survey on buying behaviors of cybersecurity buyers.
“We’ve got an audience of U.S. based cybersecurity and InfoSec professionals. And we thought it would be cool to go out to them and ask them a number of questions about all the different buckets of cybersecurity and where they stand, what their plans are, what their needs are, what their concerns are,” said Geordie. “But also talk about who it is in their organization that is involved in buying decisions, how their purchase cycles work, how they evaluate vendors, all of these different things that I think will be useful for the members and should put together an interesting presentation in Austin.”
Okay, Let’s Get Into it: What do you have to say about MQLs and attribution?
MQLs and attribution both have their place in cybersecurity marketing, but it really depends on the size of your team and whether or not your team has the capacity to follow up with a ton of volume being brought in from those MQLs. But even without having the sales team to follow up, many marketers are faced with having to obtain large volumes of MQLs each month or quarter.
“It depends how you’re measured, right?,” shared Geordie. “If you’re in an organization that’s a little bit old or old school and they still look at measuring you as a marketer based on what you’re able to deliver in MQLs this month or this quarter, then you’re going to perform to where you’re measured because that’s how you keep your job.”
However, this is shifting. Many organizations are now doing a blended model of MQLs and pipeline from those MQLs.
“So that doubles the pressure, right. In terms of trying to get quantity and quality at the same time, which we all know can be extremely difficult.”
Is There a Way to Do Lead Gen in a Way that It Fits Inside Demand Gen?
Lead generation receives a pretty bad rep on LinkedIn with many people arguing that it sucks and that no one really reads or watches the content they download. People are most likely doing laundry or something else in the background during the webinar or downloading and ebook and never reading it. Yet departments are still doing lead gen activities like webinars, ebooks, and Gartner reports. So the larger question is whether or not there’s a better way to do lead gen activities that’s an evolution from the old school MQLs to sales model.
From Geordie’s perspective, it’s a focus on engagement rather than download of an ebook or attendance at a webinar.
“So I think about this from the perspective of engaged or not engaged. So what, when we think about the people, I don’t care whether they came in, where they came into the “funnel.” I think what I’m interested in is where they are paying attention.”
Take webinars for instance, there are a variety of ways to gauge which attendees are most valuable in terms of leads.
- You have those who are attending and those who are engaged during a webinar.
- You have those who just registered and were no-shows and will watch later.
- You’re looking at the registration report and you have those who attended live. Those people are far more valuable.”
But engagement is really hard to come by for other types of content like ebooks and white papers. You can know if they downloaded it, but not if they read it.
How Do Your Customers Track Attribution from Webinars All The Way to Opportunity Creation?
Part of marketers’ processes for opportunity creation involves training the SDR teams around the leads that they are handing over.
“Let’s say they’re running a webinar program, they will talk to the SDR teams or SDR management in advance and say, here’s what we’re doing, here’s what the messaging is, here’s the deck, here’s the one sheets, here’s the handouts that we’re gonna use, here’s the polling questions, here are the follow-up scripts that we recommend you steal something from.,” shared Geordie. “Then through all of those pieces, they’re able to say, look, we really had an impact on that revenue when it did come through, because look at all the things that we did to help make sure that it went from, you know, MQL to opportunity.”
This gives the organization an opportunity to speak to prospects in an educated way about how they engaged with your content during a webinar. That pre-education work helps marketers and SDRs communicate with prospects in an engaging way.
What about Topics of Webinars that You See Have The Most Success on Your Platform?
“One, it depends on your goals, right? So if you’re trying to pack the house because you need to hit a certain number of leads for the quarter to fill the pipeline and meet your individual metrics, that’s fine. The broader you would go in topic, the more chance that you’ll get a larger audience.,” said Geordie. “If you are focused on opportunity creation and needing to go down funnel a lot, then the more niche the topic.”
Narrowing a topic from ransomware in general to “how to remediate ransomware in retail environments” will attract more specific audiences and individuals that are more closely aligned with your ICPs.
The key here is to balance your topic with your goals. Are you looking for a packed house of 500 attendees or are you okay with 50 to 75 that match your ICP perfectly?
Do You Do Content Syndication? And What Are Your Opinions on It?
Content syndication is one of those things you either seem to excel at or fail at (or sometimes a bit of both really). We’ve experienced both ends of the spectrum.
“Okay, so I have some thoughts on this one thing, I think it depends on who your company is. And it also depends on who your goals are, or what your goals are,” shared Geordie.
Content syndication often gets a bad reputation because leads will not always divulge that they read the piece, or even remember that they read your piece, so things like brand recognition comes into play.
“So let’s say that you are Dell, right? Just as an example. And you, your SDR phones up a content syndication lead and says, did you, Hey, it’s Geordie from Dell. I’m just wondering how you enjoyed our ebook on cloud migration and their comment is, sure. But while I have you on the phone, we’ve got an RFP coming up for XYZ,” said Geordie. “Boom, that becomes an opportunity and hopefully gets kicked up the can. And then they go, wow, that content syndication program worked really well, did it? Or did you just happen to call and you had a brand that was familiar and they were ready to talk to you?”
However, if you’re a smaller organization, even with a kick butt piece of content, content syndication likely won’t lead to pipeline generation in the way that it would for a larger org.
—
You can keep up with Geordie through his LinkedIn and explore Actual Tech Media at actualtechmedia.com/cms.
Interested in learning more from Geordie? Check out his upcoming session called “Survey Says… Real Security Buyers Answer Your Top Questions for 2024” this December at CyberMarketingCon.
To catch Geordie’s full episode on the Breaking Through in Cybersecurity podcast, listen at Spotify, Hacker Valley Media, and Apple podcasts.
Lead generation in cybersecurity can be costly and finding an affordable webinar provider who can cover all your needs like one-of-a-kind post-event reporting, recordings, and analytics can be difficult. This is why our friends, one of our sponsors for #CyberMarketingCon2023, ActualTech Media might just be a perfect fit for your webinar needs! ActualTech has low CPL costs that will help you generate QUALITY cybersecurity buyer leads and sales opportunity pipeline!
Recent Comments