Speaker: Rocco Seyboth, VP Marketing, LinearB
What was the biggest a-ha moment of your marketing career?
Rocco Seyboth: The biggest a-ha moment of my marketing career was realizing that B2B marketing didn't have to be so boring. You are selling to people from big companies, but they're just people. They have sense of humor. They like to have fun. And when they're evaluating brands they want to buy from, they're not thinking about how professional your marketing is. They're just trying to figure out if they can make some kind of connection. So that means talking to them like they're people and thinking of them as consumers instead of buyers from some big corporation.
When did taking a risk in your career pay off?
Rocco Seyboth: I feel like I've taken a lot of risks in my career. The ones that have paid off the biggest have been people. I've been lucky enough to hire some marketers that had no experience or at least not any related to the job they were applying for. They weren't an obvious fit for the job they were applying for. But I saw something special. Either they really lived and breathed our core values, or they had a skill like creativity or the ability to solve problems or just being hardworking. I've learned from watching some of those incredible hires go on to do amazing things and really punch above their weight class. I've learned that experience does matter, but sometimes it's worth taking a chance when you find that special person, and for me it's paid off.
What advice do you have for marketers trying to take their career to the next level?
Rocco Seyboth: I have two pieces of tactical advice for marketers trying to take their career to the next level. The first is write every single day. Unless writing is your job in the marketing organization, for the rest of us, we may not be doing that. And yet it's an incredible skill to have. The only way that we'll get better at writing is about getting more and more reps. So even if we manage technology systems or we plan events or we run programs or we do paid media campaigns and all of those functions. It may not be our job, our core responsibility to write messaging or copy. But we could get a lot better at our job, if we were great at writing copy, and the only way we're gonna get better at it is to write every single day. The second piece of advice is about how to learn and soak up new ideas. I find that the absolute best way to get great ideas that people aren't already using throughout marketing is by looking at vendors. Vendors' job is to push the needle forward with their product, and so quite often, the best thought leaders are at start ups that are trying to sell things to us in the marketing organization. A lot of times we ignore those vendors because we feel like they're trying to sell us. And yet that's actually why what they have to say is incredibly valuable. Some of the absolute best advice, ideas, areas of inefficiency that could be improved. I've gotten from young, up and coming vendors who did not have a name but who are cranking out a lot of thought leadership content around their product. And so those are my two best pieces of advice for marketers that are looking to up level their career.
Tell us about the impact of a successful campaign that your team recently executed.
Rocco Seyboth: For B2B marketing, LinkedIn campaigns are great because you can target your persona, the exact ideal customer profile, and it's very targeted and you can control your spend. It's a really powerful marketing tool for campaigns. We were running a pretty typical B2B LinkedIn campaign playbook, where we target an ad for a gated piece of content, like an ebook, to a certain persona. When the person clicks the ad, they landed on our landing page, and in order to get this piece of content, they had to pay for it with their email address. Very standard. We decided to take a risk recently where, instead of advertising a traditional piece of B2B content like an ebook, we decided to run an ad promoting a blog. A blog that had a lot of personality, was informal and still had a lot of incredible ideas for our audience. But was informal. And then we decided to do something even more radical. We ungated the content. So now when the when the customer clicked the ad in their LinkedIn feed it just went straight to our blog they didn't have to pay for that content with their email address. And guess what? The results skyrocketed. We actually ended up converting more email addresses. And more importantly, we had more people raise their hand, and ask to have a conversation or a demo with our sales department. So our cost per lead actually went down. We actually converted more email addresses. And more importantly, we got more people who were interested in progressing further and talking with us all because we took a risk on giving great content with personality and ungating it so the maximum amount of people possible would be able to read the content.
What do you see as the role of video in marketing going forward?
Rocco Seyboth: We use video several different ways at LinearB Obviously, there's the highly produced videos where maybe you're in a studio standing in front of a green screen and there's a teleprompter, and we find those videos really valuable, although tend to use them in high situations like the home page of our website in the top hero because they take a lot of time to prepare for, they can be very expensive. We also use tools like Drift video and Vidyard to create, faster videos with less production value. But where the content is still really valuable and useful to the customer, we also just use our iPhones to document as much of what happens at our company as possible. We find that our customers are really interested in learning about the people at our company and what we do, and the process we go through to make our product and deliver our product to them. And so that reality TV type video that mostly gets done from an iPhone is really powerful. And then we're also leveraging a lot of personalized video in sales and marketing where we create individual videos for customers in a certain context, like when they first download a white paper or when they sign up for a free trial or when they first sign up for our service. There's a lot of technology today that makes it easy to create personalized video and customers really love it. We use those videos, four different types of video, throughout everything we do at LinearB.
