Gatehouse Media just released its early performance results from the 2017 roll-out of self-serve platforms, developed by iPublish, in just some of its 300 plus markets.

The results, presented in a webinar by LocalMediaAssociation and a case study by LocalMediaInsider, show both savings of multiple FTE’s,  in addition to roughly $1.25 million in new revenues, including $500,000 from reverse publication of obituary special sections.

In addition to obituaries, the first three verticals deployed include  private party and recruitment classifieds.

The private party platform, iPublish  Marketplace, was primarily a cost-savings as customers placed orders online instead of through the call center.

The recruitment desk  used the platform as an easier “back end” to place orders for a variety of products – with an easier placement of upset – as customers called in. Now the platform also has a DIY option customers can use.

Obituaries had the fasted revenue growth.

In 2016 the Vendasta  was named 42nd in the Profit 500, the definitive list of fastest growing companies in Canada, from Canada Business Magazine.

Powering the growth is a robust marketing strategy. The company, which sells omni-channel marketing platforms to SMB´s via local media resellers, applied its marketing skills to its own plan.

Today a sophisticated marketing engine  generates 1,000 to 2,000 leads a month. Sales have grown by  50% per year for the last three years with projected sales of $30 million in 2017 and a team of 300.  The company now supplies SMB marketing tools to 1,100 reselling partners in the U.S. and Canada.

Here’s how they did it.

Location: Saskatoon, Canada

Core Team: Brendan King, CEO; George Leith, CRO, Jeff Tomlin, CMO,

Founded: 2008 Projected  2017  Revenues: $30 million

Background

In 2012 Vendasta started selling online reputation management tools for media and agency resellers. Their basic business model was three-tiered subscription, plus wholesale pricing per product.

“Today when a consumer sees an ad, they go into the research phase and go online before they ever go to the door of the business.

“There is this entire additional stack of products that local businesses need. We enable the media to sell the entire stack,” Leith said.

“We made the decision consciously or unconsciously that we needed to put ourselves in the shoes of the salesperson, or a day in the life of the agency…Nobody had paid any attention to those people.”

“We finally made that connection, to build out the platform into a complete stack that includes a CRM, that we were already a long way down the road.”

The upgraded platform can send a snapshot report or conduct a needs analysis “without a call on the client.”  Sales increased by 50% to a projected $30 million by the end of 2017.

The role of content marketing

The company’s success, Leith contends, is based on marketing “muscle.”

“A new way to get in front of the customer is with content… We could not do what we do in the organization without marketing.  They create content for inbound marketing and, also, curate it for nurturing so that salesperson can send it easily to the end customer,” Leith says.

The Vendasta team that will top 300 by the end of 2017  is composed of 100 developers, 60 sales reps and 16 marketers, supporting an ecosystem of  14,000 salespeople in the field.

Leith says that a core philosophy is to let ideas “bubble up from the customer,” as well as from the marketing team. The content is organized into a powerful lead generation system that produces 1,000 to 2,000 leads from the website monthly.

They also design “content and lead generation for partners,” Leith said.

There are three tiers of audiences for marketing: the media company that buys the software, anyone in a sales role calling on small businesses and the third tier is content marketing developed for the small businesses themselves.

With 100 developers in R&D, “innovating at a blistering pace,” a  huge task is just educating and delivering information through the ecosystem about new products, services they provide,” Leith said.

All content created for salespeople also builds credibility and becomes a differentiator when media and agency resellers are deciding which digital service provider to use.

The result is a virtuous cycle, more of a content web than an indexed library.

Here’s a quick tour of how the marketing works:

• The Website

“The sales department are storytellers. But a good web presence is going to do some of this work,” Leith said.  He advises to “Identify your customer base and give them something that shows them that you are someone they can trust.”

Vendasta’s home page is primarily aimed towards media and other resellers; a “Request a demo” is a colored button, not just a tab, at the top right of all pages.

Numerous pop-up case studies

Numerous case studies on the site give critical information about strategies that  media companies have used to be successful in growing revenues.

Numerous case studies on content are aimed at all three levels of customer.

Plus pop-ups for best practices

Reports on “best practices” help both sales reps and their SMB customers. A portion of the most important are also used as pop-ups to capture leads.

• The blog

The blog has a critical role in keeping both the internal sales team up on the innovations, plus communicating to 14,000 sales people logging into the platforms around the world.”

“With 100 developers, we are innovating at a blistering pace,” Leith said.  “It’s a challenge to keep internal sales and the 14,000 sales reps up to date.”

All new innovations, press releases and content are posted on the blog in order of recency.

Where relevant, interstitial ads embedded in the blog promote related case studies and best practice reports with email capture.

For example, three recent blogs include an infographic on “163 stunning social media stats,” a press release on being ranked #42 in Canada’s Profit  500 and  B2B Audience Targeting Tips for LinkedIn and Facebook .

In the center of the B2B targeting blog is a promotion for a “Customer profile worksheet,” one of the recommendations before creating an ad campaign.

There is also a pop-up at the end to obtain a LinkedIn best practices report on using Autofill, also in return for an email.

Each promotion and blog includes shareable links and counters.

• Helping SMB’s with content aimed at their customers

Content designed for SMB’s to use is also available with a Partner Log-in.

“The same (marketing concepts) apply to the businesses we help. They should have a content engine and we are helping to provide content in a vertical-specific manner. The vertical content is white labeled so the agency or reseller is the trusted provider of that content.”

All sales resources are housed together in a what the company calls “the single source of truth.”

• Distribution

As important as the content itself is magnifying its visibility via multiple distribution channels including conferences, email newsletters, social platforms and paid advertising.

• LinkedIn advertising

Vendasta uses both Facebook and LinkedIn advertising in their lead generation strategy. However, a notable recent success has been the use of LinkedIn advertising for a lead generation program. The 1.1% CTR was so unusual that LinkedIn headquarters called Vendasta‘s marketer, Jamie Taylor, and took him to lunch. Of course, he wrote a blog about it, with two related email capture pop-ups.

• Email

Critical is email, which effectively “re-markets” to new leads and keeps all the constituencies up to date.

An opt-in to the email can receive a notice every two to three days. These  fall into a few categories:

• Product and sales webinars/videos

These are all educational webinars and videos on new products and concepts:

• Local Media Scoop

These are colorful blog posts that inform in a highly digestible format, like Dear Agencies: You’re Screwed based on a pep talk from CEO Brendan King. It includes observations learned, and company announcements.

• Product Insider

This email showcases new products and what’s in BETA. Blogs are promoted at the end of the newsletter.

The result of the content and distribution is a virtuous cycle of leads creation and development supporting 60 Vendasta sales reps and 14,000 media and agency reps around the country.

“My advice is to market your organization with relevant content and see who is interacting with the content,“ Leith said. “The days of fitting the package to the needs of the media company are gone.

“The right mix of content you supply should be the one the customer needs.”

Companies who are interested in building or adding to their own content marketing capacity, we can help with strategy, B2B writers and distribution channels.

Use our free tool to create customer personas, the building blocks of  successful marketing strategies.

The slider walks you through the process, then generates a four color one sheet you can use immediately, to inform new employees, designers and marketers about who your customer is and what they want.

So what is a customer persona?

A customer persona is simply an imaginary person created to replicate a typical purchaser.

The format is a condensed, one page description of a sample client, who is actually an aggregate.

Customer personas allow team members to fully understand the customer on a human and emotional level, even when the sale is highly analytical.

They are so powerful as a foundational element of marketing that companies like Vendasta, whose marketing powered rocket-ship growth of 50% year over year for the last three years, hands them to every new marketing employee.

While a few marketers are extremely intuitive about messaging, best practice is not to rely on genius when you can share accurate intelligence with your team.

Which persona should you add first?

We recommend starting out by creating the most obvious persona that  your sales team already understands. Then segment your customers into large and small, and into different verticals.

For example, if your company develops marketing software, it may license the platform both to local media and to digital agencies, some small, some very large. Make a short list of the groups your customers tend to fall into.

What will you be asked about your customers?

The basic information is title, company size, age, education, and then delves more deeply into motivators and concerns.

The meat: Adding customer goals

What are key goals they are tasked with this year, long term? How will they measure success? Will it be a revenue goal, a cost-saving goal, a productivity goal or a competitive alignment? The Persona Machine will help you walk through and share critical motivators.

The potatoes: Adding challenges and fears

Just as important as motivators are your customers challenges and fears.  Your team needs to be able to recite by heart the customers challenges and obstacles to purchase. 

What slows down on the job? What are their top obstacles to making purchases, or making a purchase from your company versus a competitor? Which competitors are they likely to be talking to?

What are they looking at for information?

Once your content and advertising teams are on message, it is equally important to distribute these messages on the platforms that your customers are using for trade information.

Which associations, blogs, social networks and trade media are they reading? Who else do they rely on internally or externally for recommendations?

The image

The last important piece of the Persona Machine is uploading an image. Your customer’ images convey a variety of demographic and emotional information.

We have one huge rule about images:  please start with real photos of customers, before going to Google images for a fashion shot.  Don´t guess. Don’t visualize who your customers are without seeing them. Rather, obtain real images, even if you cannot use them in internal materials, you will be way ahead go the game.

We looked for images of brand loyalists at the VP levels in corporate local media – that is, people who control hundreds of millions in revenues and can make or break a software company. These are real images of these VP´s from case studies this month on LocalMediaInsider:

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How do you get the information

There are a number of ways to obtain information that makes a customer persona into a critical building block for marketers, versus a random guess.

A quick and dirty way is to bring a lap-top or mobile device into a sales meeting and fill out the form with sellers over muffins or pizza.

Maybe you also want to bring in support teams that take customer calls. Have some fun discussing your customers personalities!

What if you need more data

There are other ways to create data on your customers. One technology company had an intern make a list of top ten customers – i.e., the actual people who managed purchases –  and looked them up on Facebook and LinkedIn to create a spreadsheet, which was then used to create a composite.

He was able to identify a variety of data points, including  job title, educational background, last few jobs, age and male versus female,  to feed into the aggregated model.

If the customer type needs a more detailed analysis, an email survey with a phone follow-up can do the trick. If your company needs custom survey support please let us know at the end of this article.

Need more help? We are committed to helping journalism based media connect with transformative technology.

B2B marketers are not great at using social media to generate leads. It’s not just our opinion, only 7% of technology purchasers say they are influenced by the social media that  76% of technology companies are creating (Walker Sands, Marketing Charts).

For the most part, marketers repost content on social platforms, without building  a clear lead generation strategy, or creating content valuable enough for a prospect to trade for an email. But there is another way to using social media that is often overlooked: Advertising on LinkedIn. Like Facebook for the B2C market, ads are super targeted, and a relatively cheap source of leads if used correctly. Here is a case study that shows how to do it. 

Company: Vendasta

Key executive: Jason Taylor, Demand Generation Strategist

Initiative: LinkedIn advertising

Challenge

When Taylor set out to create a LinkedIn advertising campaign,  it was a relatively new experience for the company. The challenge was to drive  a significant number of actionable  leads for agencies and newspapers for the sales force to close at an acceptable ROI.

He wanted  lead generation program, not a clicks to the website or blog posts, but valuable information his market wanted enough to trade their email, and which also qualified them as a prospect.

Strategy

Some of the work creating campaigns was already created by a competency in understanding customers and a deep knowledge of messaging. Here are some of the tactics Taylor deployed:

1.  Utilized a customer profile.  Customer profiles are already deeply embedded in the Vendasta culture. Ever new marketer is given a set and you can see the evidence in the clarity of messages  (shameless self promotion, you can create as many as you want, edit, download, share and archive on this site, here. We just want your email).  So Taylor had this piece to start with.

2.  Identified a data driven component in the message. “Agency churn exceeds 50%” is a statistic this market is paying attention to.  Again, the massive content strategy and blogging that Vendasta engages in allowed Taylor to more easily surface this  kind of compelling data.

3. Found an amazing image. Taylor notes images increase engagement by 200%. The empty office (a failed agency) helped focus on the pain point (ouch!) and engage agencies.

4. Selected the the audience “type in”  the job titles. There is a drop down for this, but Taylor says the options are overly broad and competition for “senior” executives is fierce.

“You only want the right people clicking or your budget will be gone in no time. Really narrow down your personas (e.g., small business owner, digital director, founder, etc.)”

5. Selected groups as part of the target. When Taylor deselected “groups”  his CTR dropped from 1.1% to .3%. Best practice is to keep group selections turned on.

6. Understood that the content, not the ad, gets the leads. Taylor did not suggest exactly how he creates lead generating content in the crowded marketplace for digital information, but he did say that generic content like “50 Social media tips” will not perform.

7. Created a lead generation-based ad and landing page. 

Here just the 6th and 7th top performing ads created for the program. The landing pages matched these ads with an email capture in return for valuable information.

Results

Results from the approach were so impressive that Taylor was able to  write  a content marketing blog with the classic headline,   “How I Got LinkedIn To Take Me to a Hockey Game (Without Spending a Fortune)”

• Taylor says he generated 1000 MQL’s (marketing qualified leads)  over a six month campaign
•  CPL was $70 and a 93% qualified lead rate.
• LinkedIn, perhaps interested in creating case studies of their own, was so interested in the 1.1% CTR, that they contacted him to find out how he did it, and even took him  to the Maple Leafs hockey game – a big deal in Toronto, where tickets can cost $500 a seat and a beer is $20. You can read his full blog here.
• The first ad was more effective than the second one,  as “Churn” is more  specific concern than “challenges.”  Identifying these hyper specific issues can be picked up with careful attention to the customer persona (you can build one from our tool on this site here).  This in the agony business can almost  feel their heart rate increase at the word “churn,”  it is an emotional hot button issue in business. No one likes it.

With so many competitors sure to read  his blog, it is not surprising that Taylor failed to disclose his top five ads in this blog.

Conclusion

Taylor succeeded in part by getting  into the heads of prospective buyers – a hyper competitive space with low barriers to entry  – and fully utilizing the targeting power of LinkedIn ads.  The four data collection reports he listed all focus on the pain-points with words like “churn,” “challenge” and “survival.”

Taylor at LinkedIn headquarters

Technology purchasers consume a lot of different kinds of content before making a purchase. So which types of content should the marketing team focus on?  The following list uses current data to show what and why  C-Level, VP, IT and and sales leaders are looking at when making decisions, and which kinds of content are most important.

1. Press​ ​releases​ 

The first source of information in the pre-search phase, besides peers and colleagues, are trade journals.   Make sure your  press releases  do not bury the lead, but have a  “news hook” and are sent to all a curated list of editors. What goes into the press release?

•  Major upgrades, and new products and verticals.
• New accounts.
• Industry information that proves your story. Example: If you sell email platforms,  statistics that use of the type of email functionality your company provides has has grown  by 50%.
• General markers, has business grown by 200%  YOY? Did your platform process $600 million in transactions (as one of our client’s did) That helps sell the validity of concept.

2. White​ ​papers​

White papers are the second most-used way that executives “keep up” on technology in the pre-search stage (Walker Sands Survey, 2016).  These are longer,  and typically more statically-rich and/or  include best practices. The more general they are, the less useful, so if you can curate data from your own customer base,  that is a win-win for everyone. White papers should be useful enough for ads and onsite lead generation programs.

3. Blogs

¨Blogs¨ are  a way to collect all your case studies and shorter bits of information,  build SEO, and  help educate key executives in how their industry is changing.  Typically you can house all the content in a running blog, then separate out the more  important “evergreen” content into a Resource Center, or list under each vertical.

Here are some of the kinds of content that go into the blog

•  Short write ups and images of  key data  points on mega-trends that support your company’s value proposition. Example: iPublish media pulled seven blog pieces from data on the rise in SMB´s DIY purchases of marketing and two trend articles on the importance of trusted content.
• Negative warnings on the problem your platform solves. Example: The  #1 reason (your market) is losing (fill in the blank)  is (fill in the blank).
• Company news too small to warrant a full press release. Welcoming smaller customers onboard, added capacities, client webinars.
• Attendance at upcoming events.
• All the other content as it is released, including PR, case studies, etc.

4. Newsletters

Newsletters are designed to distribute links to this information more widely without spamming them by delivering every individual blog post and announcement separately.  Some companies get their newsletter going quarterly newsletter,  as a report that shows  couple of new clients, case studies,  product upgrades, other blogs.  Later on you can run newsletter more frequently and segment so that customers receive more of the internal information, and prospects in the discovery and research  phase receive the more external messaging

5. Case​ ​studies​: The #2 influence on the technology purchase decision

Along with product demos,  companies who purchased  marketing technology said that case studies are the most important influence on the buying decision (Walker Sands Survey, 2016).

Using a third party can overcome reluctance by making it a win/win for your  customers, who are also motivated by peer recognition for  “best practices” using your platform.

6. Product demos

Product demos  the #1 influence on technology purchase decisions (57% Walker Sands, 2016). If you are not getting some kind of  outside feedback on your product demo, you are losing out.Use your product demo, to answer “main concerns” as well as build the case for a purchase.

7. Internal and External Peer recommendations

By the time that key executives are actually making a decision, the role of the sales person typically goes quiet. Only 5% of executives rely on representatives at this stage of the game. Instead they are talking about the demo and the case studies internally, and getting more recommendations externally, as they  decide either whether to do this, and/or which company to choose.

Peer recommendations from inside and outside companies are always top five factor in both instigating a search, selecting a vendor and deciding which company to select.

Internally, the product demos and case studies are going to be the most influential on the internal group. Their main concerns are typically cost and ease of use. Build these concerns into the presentation.

Externally, make sure you have great references from the case studies, or from clients that have not given you one but who are willing to vouch for your team.

Where is the website in all this? The website  is critically important, especially in the research and engagement  stage, as potential purchases are deciding if they should continue to the demo. Studies shows that the website is in the top five influencers in making a decision between companies. This passive search needs to discover your  key messages, and the users should  understand the products and verticals, and find demo buttons right away.  See this report for a more detailed analysis of how content influence the technology purchase at each stage, and what internal constituency care about. 

From its inception, TechRefs decided that transparency was a core value.

To ‘walk the walk’  we are publishing this policy.

Most of these initial “rules” have come from questions we’ve experienced over the years, having been on both sides of the issue.

So what exactly is transparency in a business context?  And why is it important?

Transparency is a higher level of disclosure that is typical in the circumstance. It means more than just telling the truth; but rather telling the whole truth.

No surprises. No hidden agendas.

The key reason for transparency is that builds trust.

But it is also the right thing to do. There is nothing worse than finding “something you once said” unexpectedly appearing as an endorsement on the website of a company you do not, actually, intend to endorse. This has happened to us, and we did not like it.

Transparency also saves time.  People are proud of their contributions to their industry, but they will speak more freely if they know when and where the information they give will be used.

Our policy is to let people we interview know:

• Who we are calling for, and why

Let’s say Ms. Smith VP of X has assigned us to gather some case studies and along the way, see if we can obtain a testimonial.

We will probably never contact a source and tell them, “Mr. Smith the VP of X Company asked me to contact you to get a quote bragging about how great their software works.”

But we will tell them,  “Ms. Smith, VP of X  is sponsoring a program to share best practices using the platform,  and has mentioned you have had some great success, can we schedule a time to talk? ”

After the case study is done, we’ll request permission to use excerpts in other ways if needed.

If we are writing for a third party, the same rules apply. “Mr. Jones, VP or Y, has nominated your company for a Sample Award. We like to write up an article/entry to submit.”

Our company is co-owners of LocalMediaInsider and MediaExecTech, so we write direct submissions to those media if they fit the standards and criteria. If not, they can still become part of the “Brand Insights” program and run as native content.

• Where the content will be published initially

Sometimes executives would love to share, but don’t want competitors to see what they are doing, or they have other concerns.

We let interviewees know if the content is intended for the back page of a client’s resource center, an email capture program, or a cover story for Forbes magazine.

• If the content is being repurposed, we send a ‘heads up” email.

Even taking a few lines from a case study to use in a testimonial requires courtesy email, but not a formal “yes.”

Rather we will send a  quick, “Hey, we are going to put this up on our website. Let me know if you have any objections.”

• No “on the record, off the record”, is used.

In the years we’ve spent writing case studies, we’ve never found a time when it was appropriate to override a professional’s request to kill a quote or even a whole story.

If a source asks “don’t include that” after they said something, or in an email a week, it is taken out.

• If a problem arises with the story itself, we take it down.

It is more important to keep the circle of trust intact, even if we have to pay for content we cannot use now and then.

Having said that, here is what we will not do in the name of transparency:

• Send a note to the source saying, “Please edit.”

That’s just asking for problems, as well as asking people who have spent time on the project to do more than their share of the work.  If they look it over and have no objections, that is plenty.

• Send a note asking: “Is it’s OK to publish this?”

We will send the article with a publication date on it, so they can respond by that time.   They will let you know if there is a problem

• Itemise every channel the information may be used in advance.

Saying that “we plan to use this interview in a webinar, the best practices one sheet, and lead generation case study on LinkedIn. Do you agree to that?”  would scare the heck out of anyone. Use the place, and most public place, the information will appear.

Afterwards, we just send notification of future uses, with a “Let me know if you have any objections.”

• Engage in multiple requests for ‘style changes’

Occasionally we find someone who loves to edit! At some point, there has to be enough respect for the client or source to just leave the copy alone.

Finally, we realize that trust is earned. It builds the same way any brand does, over time, with consistency across all of the relationships.