G'Day, everyone.
It's Michelle J. Raymond, back again with another episode and this week
listeners, I'm excited because we have a fabulous guest who comes
with 20 years plus of B2B marketing experience, and she is gonna share the
ways that you can get some quick wins.
Moni Oloyede, thank you so much for joining us.
So happy to be here, Michelle.
Thanks for having me.
When I came across, first of all, your Substack newsletter, which I'll be
dropping, any of the details so people can reach out and connect with you
directly on LinkedIn or Substack or all of the cool resources that you've got.
The thing that kept popping up was that you are passionate about
getting back to good marketing, which is marketing fundamentals.
I'm excited to talk about it, but we're gonna do that right after this quick word
from our podcast sponsors, Metricool.
Okay, Moni, we're gonna go straight between the eyes because my first
question that I have for you, and it comes up when I'm talking to my clients,
is that I'm confused "is marketing to serve stakeholders or am I old fashioned
in thinking it's for customers."
When you peel back the layers and really look at it, you're really
serving stakeholders, honestly.
You're serving executives, you're serving board members.
That's what those metrics are about.
That's what all those numbers are about.
'cause your customers don't care about those things.
So you're serving board members?
I know that that's what's going on because when people reach out to me, the first
thing that they say is, we need help insert, let's say, getting more Company
Page followers because our chairman, our CEO, our someone else from outside of that
particular department Has seen that we've got less followers than our competitors,
and so the strategy then bends around.
Somebody else said this, but like honestly, where should we be focusing
and what's like one proactive thing that we can do to take this back
into control and serve our customers?
It's so, it's so classic and I, listen, I sympathise with the, the practitioner or
the people who are on the ground, because I'm sure they've had this conversation
a thousand times internally of like.
Why are we doing this?
Why can't we just do that?
Are you sure this is the way?
like we've all tried to steer the ship in a different direction to no avail.
So the, the advice that I give my clients and to, to the business owners
that I talk to is like, let's focus on kind of getting customer research.
Let's focus on validating that this is the right direction to go.
One of the things that you can do is start with the good old form, right?
So, for example, on a form, we say first name, last name, company title.
That's all kind of wasted space.
We have a bunch of data providers out there that can pin all that data for you.
Instead, let's ask the essentials email, first name, last name, and then
let's use that space to qualify or validate why they're taking the action.
So if you have a white paper, for example, let's ask, are you downloading
this white paper 'Cause you're dealing with X problem, Y problem or Z problem?
or you downloading this paper 'cause you're trying to solve X
problem, Y problem or Z problem.
If you have that kind of qualitative information, you can inform the next
step or you can then say, Hey guys, let's create this type of content.
Because the problem is really the Z problem, right?
It's validating information.
Yeah, and it's actually using analytics to solve a problem that you are actually
looking into, not reverse engineering.
And I'm not gonna go into analytics just yet because I'm gonna save that
for later on because there is something that I Think is even more important for
our listeners to understand that we need to be measuring the right things and
getting back to marketing fundamentals.
There's something else that came up in your content that I found myself
nodding away to, and that was all about the power of niches or niches
depending where you are in the world.
I'm on team niche, so we're gonna stay there, but I think one of the
issues that I have found is that when clients are talking about, yeah, I
know my niche, they're business owners, it's just not gonna do it for them.
When do you see this and what's a better alternative that can help
people really get those wins when it comes to their marketing on LinkedIn?
Michelle, I see it all of the time.
Okay.
Every from, listen, I deal from small business owners, startups
to enterprise level companies.
Everybody's scared to niche down, and their biggest fear is that they're
going to alienate or lose customers.
Right?
That's always the fear.
Actually the opposite is true.
Right, because if you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one,
that's the benefit of niching down.
You have to, and the biggest companies do.
I always give the example of, let's say Apple, right?
You think Apple is like, oh my God, their customer base,
everybody, everybody has an iPhone.
They talk to everyone.
They really don't.
They have a very particular audience that they speak to.
They speak to predominantly males, predominantly in that sort of mid
20 to late, early forties, late thirties kind of demographic.
Very educated, tech savvy.
Like you see it at the conferences, you see it on kind of the online who that's
an archetype of a person is very niche.
Those people are their evangelists and they tell everybody else about the phone.
That's how marketing really works.
You find your niche audience, you evangelise these people to
tell everyone else around you.
It's called word of mouth.
The most powerful piece of marketing that we actually have.
Niching down is your best benefit, because that's how you speak directly to
the pain point and the desired outcome.
Look, I hear you.
I have this podcast and I have another one called the LinkedIn Branding Show,
where we often talk about niching, but I have a confession, Moni, and I think you
are the right person to share it with.
I know this stuff.
I hear this stuff from other people and I nod my head and I agree with them, but
when it came to my own marketing, when I just reviewed my website over the holiday
break, I had to rock in the corner and say, I'm not taking my own medicine.
People in the world know me for all things LinkedIn Company Pages.
That is my area of expertise.
That is a thing that they come to me.
Do you think if you found my website that you would even really see
the word Company Pages mentioned?
No.
No, no, no.
I decided that it would be great to just be the LinkedIn person when
it came to my website, so I get it because I've been there and done that
myself, even though I know better.
So this is definitely not hating on any of the marketers out there because I
think it's scary because your brain says.
No Moni, If I cut off all of this market, I'm gonna lose sales.
As opposed to if you narrow in, you're gonna win more.
Like it's just so against what your brain tells you.
Counterintuitive.
Absolutely a thousand percent.
I think the reason why is because a lot of people don't understand that the
marketing's in in the message, right?
And the message has to resonate and connect.
And the best way that you can do that is get as specific as
you can about your audience.
The way that I go about it with my customers and the people that I coach
is like, let's use descriptive words.
Don't give, get away from demographics, right?
Use more descriptive words.
Passionate, excited, frustrated, and like let's go into what the issue is
deeper from a psychological standpoint.
And then that's how we kind of use that language to speak
to those types of people.
And then we can go further and further and further and further.
Because it is a process, right?
You just don't jump to Company Pages, right?
You start with LinkedIn and like, what's the real issue here?
What do I hear over and over again?
What is this problem?
And then you kind of go deeper right?
You do if you follow your own advice, and I'm pleased to say that What do you know?
This is gonna be mind blowing.
After I took my own advice and that of many smart marketers out there
and actually narrowed in my website, which then led to the branding on
my Company Page, the branding on my personal profile, the content that I'm
putting out, these podcast episodes.
What do you know?
Guess who they're talking to now?
My ideal audience, guess who's been booking more high quality calls with me.
This stuff is amazing.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's bananas.
And you just pointed out a, an excellent point was that a lot of
companies, especially B2B organisations, because they're so broad, they
attract people who aren't their ideal customer profile all the time.
And they waste cycles with people who are never gonna buy from them or not
the right person to buy from them.
Right.
Which probably leads us into the next question that I have, and it's one that,
because I came from 20 years of B2B sales.
I have never sat internally in a B2B marketing team.
So when people start talking MQLs and all these other bits of jargon, I have
to tell you, my eyes glaze over a little.
But I know that that's a big deal.
But is the problem that marketing's kind of been reduced to just focusing on MQLs?
My gosh, Michelle, we can be here for like six hours on this topic.
Yes, it is a major problem.
It's one of the biggest pet peeves that I have about kind of B2B marketing
currently, is that you're reduced to these analytics in a way of, the only
way to prove your value is through leads, MQLs, and then ultimately how that drives
pipeline, which then ignores All of the myriad of things that go into marketing.
We just talked about niching down your audience.
We just talked about messaging branding's in there.
Market positioning is in there.
There's so many different things in these volatile markets that are changing.
Just look around you.
It's nuts, right?
All of those things play a factor and it gets reduced down to an MQL, which
means what exactly in an organisation?
What's qualified, right?
That that definition gets changed day to day within an organisation, let
alone across many organisations, right?
It's kind of nuts.
It to me feels like, and again, I'm not coming from experience, and
if anyone is listening or watching this over on YouTube, drop it
in the comments and let me know.
Like, what is the challenge that you have within your
business when it comes to MQLs?
Are you sitting here nodding your head going, yes, this is the problem?
Because as you've just said, the consequence is You've jumped over so many
of the first, and I would say even more important foundational steps to get to the
end points and adjusting based on that.
And I thinking then is the consequence to this, we forget about things
like brand and then just become in a competition with our competitors
to see who gets the most form fills.
Like what happens if we don't get this right and focus just on MQLs?
Yeah, it's, I mean, there's, there's so many issues that are a result of
this sort of overly focusing on MQL.
One of them is that Again, we've now reduced marketing's function
to leads, which then reduces our function to only promotion, right?
Normally there are four Ps, right?
Product placement, price, promotion, and now we're just the promotion.
So all of those other three things are now functions of other departments.
Other people take care of those things and then dictate them to marketing, and
you see the results of those two as well.
It's like a simple one is price like marketing's supposed
to be Responsible for price.
Now that's sort of like finance or maybe the, the engineer product teams,
the executive teams take care of that.
And in a lot of B2B organisations that I've worked in, you have
8,000 SKUs because of it.
Like, you know, you discount this thing and now you got this SKU.
And we're coming up with this because we haven't done the market research
to understand what the proper price of this product should be.
Right.
Just one example.
So the other problem with it is in a B2B setting we know that's a buying committee.
So again, what's a lead?
know that the buying cycle is longer because the price point is higher.
So it's like, are we saying that somebody is qualified because they clicked on
four emails and downloaded a white paper?
They're now gonna buy a half a million dollars of software.
That's what we're saying, the logic breaks down very quickly when
you start to sort of poke at it.
So even in the best case scenario, how is this really gonna work and be able
to prove that you are doing your job?
In any way you look at it, it's kind of not.
So you screwed yourself and to your larger point, we now have an entire
generation of marketers who assume that the job of marketing is to
create content and get leads, and they don't understand the four Ps.
They don't understand branding, they don't understand market
analysis and positioning.
All that stuff is gone, right?
So they go, the C level goes, I need a strategy.
And you just come up with a content plan and some tactics.
That's not a strategy.
Yeah, I see it all the time, like when I'm doing Page Audits and I'm looking
going, every single post is some kind of lead gen style of posts, which is
Mm-hmm.
Go to our events, sign up for our form, we want something from you, so we can put
you in our funnel, is essentially what I would, you know, summarise them as.
And people are so aware of that now, and it's not that I don't
want to hear from marketers.
When it, I'm ready and it's the right type of thing and it's valuable,
I'm absolutely ready for it.
But the content that I see is literally someone else in the business.
Wants you to go and do a post about this.
You know, we've got a trade show coming up, so make sure you tell everyone
we're at Stand J 22 in Hall this, and we'll be there for three days.
And it's like, who cares?
Like your whole industry is posting exactly the same thing.
And this is where I think when we're being driven by the wrong things.
And by people outside of our departments, then everything
falls over the LinkedIn content.
But as you say, those marketing fundamentals.
They go out the window and then we say, LinkedIn's broken.
You know, because we're not achieving our goals.
And so this is why I really wanted to have this conversation with you
today, is to say, look, we gotta get back to what we know works.
Those four Ps, I don't know how long they've been around for, but
long enough to be proven right.
Right, right.
And just to jump back to our first conversation, right.
This is back to if you serve the customer, a lot of these issues go away.
The lead gen is serving the stakeholders.
If you understand the customer, which we don't, right?
We really don't.
We don't understand what they really value.
We don't understand how to build relationships with them.
We don't understand consumer psychology.
None of that stuff is done.
If you understood all those things, then you would know how to bring them along.
We don't, like you said, how do I get them in my funnel as quickly as
I possibly can to throw them down this magic lead scoring thing that's
gonna make them to MQL tomorrow?
I need to tell you that.
My next question, listeners, I am literally pulling the pin on the grenade
and I'm about to toss it and know that this is going to cause a mini blow up
because there's something else that I watched, a whole video that you had.
It's in your featured section.
I watched the whole thing on YouTube.
Let's talk about.
Marketing attribution and its role in this craziness.
Now, it's is not something that I've ever been responsible for in the business.
Again, this is why I've got you here with your expertise, but is marketing
attribution the saviour for all of these problems, or is it sending
us further down the wrong track?
So let me be very clear.
Okay.
I think this is Moni's Personal opinion marketing attribution
is a complete and utter scam.
Okay?
It's a waste of time.
It's a scam.
It will never work.
Don't it.
Okay.
That is, that is my humble personal opinion.
I know it's a literal billion dollar industry, so it's going to
like upset some people to say that, but I think it's a complete and
utter scam and a waste of time.
There is no point to doing marketing attribution.
And just to be clear for like maybe people who don't know who are listening to this.
Marketing attribution is the concept of attributing a kind of result, Most
likely pipeline revenue to marketing activities because we know conceptually
that there isn't one thing that is driving people, it's multiple things across.
So the idea of attribution is you can give credit to multiple
marketing tactics and activities to say how they are contributing
to bottom line pipeline revenue.
No, you can't.
Look, I watched your presentation in this video, as I said, and the piece
that got to me probably most was the fact that for all this digital
tracking, it doesn't have any real ability to track anything that happens
between two real humans face to face.
Or non-digital ways.
And as you said earlier, word of mouth is so strong and should be one
of our big focuses, and yet a lot of these tools I'm thinking aren't
capturing this type of precious data.
I think this is the most critical data that we could gather, but it's missing
in action when it comes to the tools.
And I just wonder what you have to say about this, you know, that
you can share with our listeners.
Yes.
This is a theme again, fundamentals, right?
Because these tools can't track offline activity very well.
IE word of mouth and conversations, or even just like networking
engagements and stuff like that.
It overemphasises the digital tactics and under emphasises the offline
ones where the offline ones have way more impact than the digital ones.
So we do a bunch of digital stuff in order to attribute right some
revenue when actually they are not the most valuable things that are
important from a marketing standpoint.
So you end up spinning your wheels, even if everything kind of goes right, you
still making assumptions about why someone is engaging with you to begin with.
You assume someone's downloading your white paper or attending
your webinar because they have intentions of buying from you.
Says who?
Where did you get that from?
Like you just made that up.
You just assume they're ready for your sales cycle.
How?
So it's it's an assumption based model to begin with because it
assumes that every task that you're tracking has some impact on revenue.
It doesn't.
Right.
Ouch.
So you're setting yourself off to fail to begin with.
Oh dear.
Look, and I don't think anyone does this intentionally because
you know, with all of the tools that are out there, they're pretty
slick at their marketing in general.
And I think to be fair to marketers, a lot of them feel like right now That
they have to justify their existence with the large language models.
AI coming for them.
Everybody expects them to be experts at everything.
Are you doing your job when it's really difficult to put
a number on things like brand?
You know, like, and, and so you know, this is, I can see why people are drawn
to it and I can see the advantages, but as you said, I also see how this is taking
people Down the wrong path, as far away as possible from these marketing fundamentals
that I know in their heart they know are the right thing to be focused on.
But trying to get that conversation across the line with other colleagues,
I think is maybe where some of this tricky stuff comes from.
What would you say to somebody that's struggling and listening
to this and going, I absolutely agree with what Moni has to say.
I know that she's right, but I can't have That conversation in my business
'cause people aren't listening.
I'm sure you've come up against it before.
It is the number one response that I get.
Right.
It's like, I agree with you.
You're right.
I don't know how to have this conversation with my boss, C-level, whoever.
Right.
It's classic and I experienced that too.
Like you're not alone.
Like I was in corporate for 15 years trying to have these conversations
and getting stiff armed in the face.
Yeah.
so I totally understand it.
I think the thing that we have to do first is empathise.
Right.
One of the things that I had to do was be like, if I'm gonna put myself
in C-level shoes, that pressure is coming from somewhere, right?
The board or the private equity or whoever wants their money,
like they gave this company a lot of money and they want it back.
So that pressure is coming from that, right?
So that's, that's one.
Number two is communication.
What I had to understand is the, they don't fundamentally understand
marketing, so the only way they can communicate the fact that I need to
know what you're doing so I can then communicate that back is through money.
That's the only way they have to communicate that with.
They're looking for validation.
They're looking for, if I give you money, how do I know that you're not wasting it?
Okay.
That's what they want to know.
You can do that through validation.
It's your job marketer to move the perspective.
Okay?
It's right.
This perspective right now is all on analytics and you know, pipeline revenue.
What they really just want is assurance and validation.
If you kind of work through what I said like.
some feedback from your prospects, not your customer, your prospects,
the people you're going after of this is the right issue.
This is the problem.
This is psychological, emotional, right response that they are
looking for, and you can feed that back into your marketing.
It gives some assurance that like, okay, we now understand we have to do.
Here's the campaign that we're gonna run.
This is what we're gonna be expecting from it.
If it doesn't work, we have the problem.
We just need to tweak these sorts of things and then move forward.
Then we can crawl, walk, run to getting you to the actual revenue.
And guess what?
You'll be focusing on Your audience, your actual customer's, prospects,
getting real information from them, and that's gonna help you be
successful at marketing ultimately.
And that's all I want for our listeners of this podcast, is them to be successful
at marketing and generate the results that the business is looking at.
So I appreciate you expanding on that.
There's one last thing that I want to talk about, which I, I know
you're also passionate about this.
Sometimes out there in B2B land, it could be the B2B Institute, it could
be the Edelman Research Institute.
There's all kinds of places that information comes from, but
sometimes there's some B2B stats that get thrown out there that
become gospel and we run with them.
And one of those ones is that, you know, 70% of the buyer's journey
is done before they reach out, that we all wanna be self-serving,
we don't wanna talk to people.
And I think that sent marketing down a path as well that
maybe isn't really beneficial.
Can you talk through your views on this?
'cause I really enjoyed actually making myself stop and think, how
is this driving my behaviours?
Just as much as what I'm guiding my clients.
Are we going down the wrong path if we just take this as gospel?
Yeah, I think it's the, probably the most widely misinterpreted stat in, all
of B2B marketing, because you're right.
What people hear with that stat is that, you know, 70% of the buyer's
journey is already done before they reach out to a sales person, is
that I need to create more content so they can research on their own.
What that stat really means is I don't want to be sold to, so I'm gonna
avoid you as much as possible until I'm ready to actually buy something
because Everybody knows as soon as I fill out this form, I'm gonna get
8,000 emails and I'm gonna get hammered with a bunch of sales calls, right?
It's like, and I'm not ready for that yet.
I'm not ready for that level of pressure, so I'm just gonna wait.
They would love to talk to a salesperson, right?
I need information.
I wanna know what the price of this thing is, you know, and I wanna
know the features, I wanna know how it compares this other thing.
I'd love to talk to somebody about that, but as soon as I do, I know I'm
opening the floodgates to get hammered and pressured because salesperson
gotta make quota and they're gonna be on my neck for the next however long.
Right?
So the understanding is they're not trying to self-educate.
Okay?
They're trying to avoid being sold to and pressured, and that's
the interpretation of the stat.
Yeah, it's a little challenging in my mind.
Again, coming from the sales side of things.
I did see in a world where you have access to so much information that people
had done a lot of the research before they came to me, that was just a given.
And we were talking more about logistics, like you said, like it
could be pricing, when's it available?
You know, should I take this model or that model?
And you know, I worked in an industry, the beauty industry in manufacturing
and You know, our sales cycles were probably 18 months to 24 months
in general, so a couple of years.
So of course people were doing their research along the way just in case,
or getting ready for when they may actually need it, or they may never have
reached out, I wouldn't have known, but it was just something that I thought.
We always seem to default to more content as being the answer.
And when we do more of the wrong things I remember when I was younger, you know,
and Lil's gonna laugh at me because I refer back to my childhood athletics days.
It was my whole, like my glory days.
And I remember training with my mum who was teaching me, you know,
and training me in the backyard.
And you know, we were talking about how practice makes perfect.
And she pulled me up and she said, no, perfect practice makes perfect.
If you keep doing more of the wrong things over and over and over again,
you don't actually get any better.
You don't get closer to your goals.
You don't break those records that you're looking to do.
And so I find now that people, we've got so many tools That we can
use to create content at volume.
Like you've, you've got no one's business, it's never been easier to
create more content, but if it's not the right content, it is literally useless.
And I would say even sending you backwards, which You know,
in, in today's world, we don't need any help going backwards.
There's enough life pressures, world pressures, industry pressures
that we just don't need that.
And I think that's where I've been taking a second look at this, the
answer, customer research, serving our customers, those marketing fundamentals.
Is there anything as we wrap the episode up today, if I gave you one last thing,
one last chance to share something that you're passionate about, what
would you leave our listeners with?
Yeah, I think I would love to give an example of like what it really means
to sort of understand your customer.
'cause I feel like people will be like, well, what do you
mean I, I totally understand.
Well, you know what I mean?
I get it.
And it's, you don't really understand how surface you are with it.
So I spend a lot of my corporate time in cybersecurity.
It's one of the toughest industries to market in.
'cause that's a very.
They're tough, right?
They know all the games, you know, they're very skeptical.
It's tough.
One of the things that about cybersecurity is like, it's very technical.
All the marketing is super, super technical around like, you know,
internet of things and network security and all these high
level terms and stuff like that.
What people miss about that audience is that the psychology
of it is 99% of the things right and 1% wrong, and that's my job.
Like I screwed up.
It's over.
Like what's it like, that's your day.
Do you know what I mean?
It's like, you know.
Nobody in this organisation really values what I do.
But if something goes wrong, they're the ones that looking at me.
No one looks at me when everything is right.
They only look at me when something goes wrong.
Right?
That kind of thing, like marketing to that with that kind of understanding Will
change the language in which you use the messaging to then talk to that audience,
but you don't see it because we hang on the surface of all the technical stuff,
and here's the, the technical problem and not the issue with the actual individual
what I mean is, go back to human, right?
Who is this person?
They're a 3D person, right?
They have feelings, they have emotions, they have Faults, they have motivations.
They're what is their day to day like?
What is those pressures like?
What is the environment that they sit in and come from it from that
point of view, that will improve your marketing tenfold, I promise you.
Versus just, you know, they need a security set.
There's a phishing problem, and now we need network security, right?
Which is what everybody says and does.
So that's just an example of like, what do I mean by really understand the person?
'cause that's gonna inform your marketing and take you to levels that are,
you're gonna dominate if you do that.
Yeah, lead with empathy.
Actually put yourself in their shoes and understand what is a day in the life
of that person on the other side that You are trying to, you know, influence
their buying decisions at some point or someone within their business.
And I, I think that is the thing again, that you and I are just so
aligned with that we keep skipping over the important parts, which is
the people that we are there to serve.
And this plays out in LinkedIn content when we're talking
about marketing fundamentals.
This shows up in the types of content that you're putting out there and
the wording you use and who it's directed at, and it could even
be the graphics that you choose.
There are so many different ways
Yes.
that this is playing out, not just on your website, not just in your email
campaigns, but also on LinkedIn as well.
So Moni, thank you so much for everything you've shared today.
I appreciate Getting the insight from someone that's worked on the other side.
It's like a, a, a look for me into that world that I can't get
because I've never been there.
So I appreciate you sharing all your experience with the listeners.
Thank you so much for having me.
I appreciate it.
I'm always down for a lively conversation So thanks for having me on, Michelle.
We might have to come back and have those other six hours of
conversations in another episode.
But thank you so much.
And listeners, I will be putting all the details on how you can connect with Moni.
I absolutely highly encourage everyone to go and check out the presentation
she did on marketing attribution because I think it's gonna have you really
questioning some of the things that you may have thought were important, but maybe
not as important as you once thought.
So until next week listeners, cheers.