Ben Taylor:

And really the whole premise is just, again, that you want to get the most competitive advantage with the dollars that you have.

Announcer:

Welcome to the podcast, B2B Insights, our take on a podcast series where we dive in and discuss all things B2B marketing. B2B Insights is brought to you by AvreaFoster, one of the most respected brand and digital marketing agencies in the Southwest. At AvreaFoster, we build authentic relationships so brands can grow and prosper. Learn more at AvreaFoster.com.

Matthew Petrikin:

Welcome to B2B insights. I’m your host, Matthew Petrikin, business development here at AvreaFoster, and I’m joined, as always, by my co-host, our CEO and founder of AvreaFoster, Dave Foster.

Dave Foster:

Hey!

Matthew:

How’s it going?

Dave:

Doing great!

Matthew:

Good. I know we’ve got an exciting episode for us today.

Dave:

That we do.

Matthew:

Yeah, so let’s dive right into it. I want to introduce Ben Taylor. We’re thrilled to welcome Ben Taylor, our director of digital strategy here at AvreaFoster, who’s here to share some insights on data-driven marketing and his own Moneyball approach. Ben, thank you.

Ben:

Thanks for having me.

Matthew:

Absolutely, it’s always good when we’ve got some Moneyball sports analogies going on in the work world; it always helps people like me to understand things better. Ben, are you a big baseball fan, given that that’s kind of what led you down this Moneyball approach?

Ben:

Absolutely, yes. I grew up playing baseball, played all the way through high school, and then I didn’t have the 6 foot 4 build that is required. So I took that in early in my career, and then I just wanted to get back into baseball, but then I ended up in marketing. Then I saw the movie Moneyball, read the book and I saw a lot of mirrors between that and what I was doing day-to-day. And so then I created this whole concept, and it’s just stuck with me for the last, I don’t know, 15 years or so.

Dave:

Yeah, and you’re coaching, basically.

Ben:

I am coaching the 20th season this season, too.

Dave:

Wow! Really, I didn’t know it was that long.

Ben:

Right in the thick of it, yeah, a bunch of 13-year-olds.

Matthew:

I’m sure that it’s fun to take the digital marketing and strategy approach day to day, and then go out on the field and apply some of that and some coaching.

Ben:

Absolutely. Yeah, I always say you’ll find me on the diamond, and I mean nothing by jewelry. It is only a baseball diamond. That’s where I’m at.

Matthew:

Well, that’s awesome. Well, I know we’ve got a lot to go into today, and I want to jump right in. We talk about a lot of these conversion rates and optimizations within digital marketing and finding leads. What exactly is conversion rate optimization and why is it so important in the B2B space?

Ben:

Yeah, it’s a great question. So conversion rate optimization, to me, is really about getting the best bang out of whatever buck you’ve got. So if we mirror it back to the whole Moneyball concept, the whole premise of that book and the movie is based on your New York Yankees, which, oddly enough, they’re in the World Series right now. You’ve got your Dodgers who can afford Ohtani, and then you’ve got your Oakland A’s, who are now becoming the Las Vegas A’s or whatever, but they’ve got very little budget. So how do you play the two together? And the movie plays out, right, where it comes down to a core set of numbers in a lineup. And how do you replace your star players that go on to make these gobs of money? And when I looked at that, I was going, all right, that makes sense to me, for companies of any size. You’ve got international companies that may have just gobs of money, and you’ve got your local, Texas companies that they’re just as effective. But how do you level the playing field? And so for me, it’s conversion rate optimization.

So if we’re talking about digital, you can pour a ton of money into a campaign, but if it’s not converting then all you’re going to do is say, well, how much more money do I have to dish in order to gain the output that I need. So CRO comes into play, and it’s effectively getting the most return on your marketing efforts without having to just focus on the dollars spent. So it’s really an equation of getting better results with the traffic that you already have, and then from there, working something organically that’s working really, really well. How do you then scale that versus something you’ve been trying to push, but it’s just not working? It’s not converting and so that, to me, is the essence of conversion rate optimization.

Matthew:

Wow. What a fascinating challenge that these companies have. How do you approach conversion rate optimization when you’re working with clients across such a wide range of budgets, from 1,000 to 10 million dollars? Does your strategy shift significantly, or do you focus on similar core principles across the board?

Ben:

Yeah, for me, it’s largely the same. So I’ve managed budgets of exactly what you said and for me, it’s really about the content performing as best as it possibly can. It comes down to a core set of a couple of numbers.

The first is, what’s the level of visibility of any piece of content? So if it’s on your front page, obviously it’s going to have different measurements. Then something that’s maybe tertiary on your site that people get to navigate to based on the purpose of that piece of content. And so for me, it’s really understanding what is the purpose of every piece of content, and how do I get the journey down to those conversions. So that’s kind of correlated back to the whole Moneyball approach.

You have your Ohtani’s of the world, and then you’ve got your Aaron Judges, but then you also have your really fast leadoff hitter, and so a baseball lineup. Going back to my passion, it’s all about every single position in the lineup for a specific reason. And so when we think about a website or digital performance, every channel has its purpose, and then every piece of content has its purpose. Nothing’s all about the home run. There’s one piece that may be your home run hitter, and it’s to hit the home run, but you have to have people get them there so they can hit the bigger and better shots. So that’s how I’ve taken it, whether it’s very little budget, and I’ve had clients that are like, “I have $500”. I have one, it was a holiday campaign, and it was, I think it was December 5, and I got this, “Hey, we’ve got a $2 million product launch, and we need the whole campaign to be over by December 22nd — Go!” I was like, what? So it works on both sides, and in both cases, right? You have to get the best out of what you’ve got.

Matthew:

Absolutely.

Dave:

Yeah, so Ben, content obviously plays a massive part in that CRO equation. And it’s interesting, because sometimes the content that I think is going to really pull well doesn’t pull at all. And something that I don’t think is going to pull at all pulls better than anything else. So how does that play into the essential side of CRO?

Ben:

Yeah, I mean, each piece of content is really the culmination of the foundation of your site. So you can have a really good homepage that tells all about whatever it is that you’re aspiring to do. But if you don’t have secondary content that backs that up, maybe it’s case studies or it’s white papers, or quotes from clients that talk about the proof — the social proof they’re looking for.

So you can call your homepage a really solid homepage. It may be the prettiest thing ever, but if it doesn’t have the collective content to back it up, then it’s really missing on that. So for me, the core question that I always get is, why don’t I have the number of conversions that I need? And my site’s pretty right, I just redid it. And the worst thing is, the worst conversation that you can have over coffee or whatever, is somebody that’s just spent a gob of money on their new website, and it’s the pretty new toy, then I have to come in and be like, “I don’t know. Your form’s there, but how are you getting people to it?” So I kind of coined this term “progression rate”. And sometimes it raises eyebrows, because everybody’s like, what does that mean?

And so for me, if you’ve watched the movie Moneyball, there’s that scene where he’s looking through just a ton of cells in a spreadsheet. And then he discovers – I want to show you this… and I always like to think that I’m like the Billy Beane of digital marketing, but that is never going to happen.

Matthew:

But you’re well on your way!

Ben:

But it’s even for our own stuff, right? I’ve got a whole spreadsheet, and there’s thousands of rows and cells, and I’m looking for that one nugget on this page that is super hidden on the site, but when we look at the core metrics of what its purpose is, how do we then amplify it? And so for me, that’s the gold piece of content that we’re looking for.

Dave:

So it’s not enough just to have great content on your site, obviously. You talk about that, obviously you’ve got to have it. It’s got to be in the right place and be driven by metrics and data to advise what you’re doing in iteration of that content. But how do clients make sure that that works across all digital platforms?

Ben:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So the way to really think through which piece of content is going to work across — let’s use Meta as an example. That may look different than a piece that’s going to work really well on paid search. Which also may look different from what’s working well with organic search, right? So the three of them, I always say that each social channel, like any social media strategist, would tell you that TikTok has a different way of doing content than Meta, or Instagram or Twitter. They all kind of have their own vibe and approach, and I argue that really that’s every channel.

So for me, the way to think about the content is you’re creating this experience across each channel. So if it’s social or paid or organic, what are you wanting them to do? So if it’s organic, I know that my front door is widest open through subject A. It’s really highly searched upon. But that may be historically what’s searched upon the most. And then there may be a new subject that comes up, and it’s trendy but it’s certainly not like you can’t gain organic steam with it because you’d have to bang out a ton of content and hope for the best. So that may work on social. So then you pour into that, and then on paid search, typically, that’s going to be paid display — that’s going to be your hero, like you know that that’s going to bring the lead based upon all the metrics that you’ve measured in the past.

So each channel has its own purpose to end the experience of driving the lead, and sometimes they work together, and other times, like I said, it’s kind of a unique purpose for that part of their journey, and then replicating it as best you can. For instance, on social media, if you see something working really well, I’ve had conversations before where they’re like, “Well, yeah, that’s what we do on Facebook” — and my question is always, “well, if it works there, why don’t you put it on your site more”? Well, it’s an isolated landing page. It has action. I’m like, wonderful. You should try it on your site. I’m not saying put it on a light box when somebody lands and it’s like, look at this new piece of content, but put it in a call-out box somewhere on your site and see if it works. If it doesn’t create, you can hide it again. No big deal. But it’s all about the art of testing and trying, tinkering with any given website, really, every piece of content you’ve got just to see what can work.

Matthew:

Yeah and that brings me to this point of, can you give us an example of how you successfully repurpose content for the client?

Ben:

Yeah, excellent question. So to give an example, there was a client that I had in the kind of gift card space, and they were all about this — everything from they had the whole gamut. They owned essentially every piece, whether it was the redemption of the gift card, the promotion of it, the stanchions at the store, all of it — they had a kind of arm in each of it. And when I looked at their content, I started to see that digital rewards was kind of an area where it was a conduit that would work well. Because I can give a digital gift card, right? And so that can work well. So what we did is we just created a guide of digital rewards for employers specifically. It was basically, how can you give digital rewards right to your employees and here’s some use cases. This was the simplest piece of content probably I’ve ever recommended and created with my content team. At the time, I was like, this will go on that page and see what happens. I know that this page is heavily visited. It lacks other than the talk with us, which that’s a level of commitment. And so I wanted to say, can I get that lighter commitment and grab their name and then use my intel to kind of long tail the journey. And that worked when we created the guide from an organic standpoint. So I started to see, wow, this is actually one of our heaviest pieces of content that we’ve ever had that’s being downloaded quite a bit. And so then we started — well, let’s ramp it up. Let’s put it across paid social. Let’s use some paid search again, like each of them had their own level of success.

But my favorite example is we had done this in 2019 I believe, then 2020 hits and the whole world is shutting down. What made sense then? Digital. And so it was effective — I had to go to the C suite and say, “hey, we can, in theory, ramp this up”. The rest that’s like, in person…

Dave:

…gotta go.

Ben:

It’s gotta go, right! Pause! It makes no sense, right? People are not having corporate parties — it’s just not happening. And so it was the biggest gamble professionally that I’ve ever made, and it was this recommendation of we can literally spend $60,000 a day on these. I think it was three keywords and promote this guide, and then make sure we’re watching it like a hawk. And we did, and it was super uncomfortable for me, but it worked. It drove a ton of leads, and it ended up with a pipeline that was just busting at the seams. But it all started with digital reward. It seems to be an area where we’re seeing traffic — how do we back into it? And that’s how we accelerate it. So, that’s kind of the one nugget example where I’d say, not everybody has $60,000 certainly, I didn’t think I was going to. But you might have — I can go spend a couple 100 more a month, right? And see what you can get out of it.

Matthew:

Yeah, that’s a great example. And it’s also wild, the landscape that had shifted during that time frame, it really opened people up to take a Hail Mary risk like you did. One thing that really stands out is how CROs can stretch a marketing budget. Can you explain why CRO is such a cost efficient strategy and how it helps brands maximize their existing resources without constantly increasing spend?

Ben:

Yeah. So the way to really think about CRO is, you’re focusing on your existing traffic. So it’s all about, how do I get the most value out of my existing traffic? So the way that I translate that to is, it’s almost the opposite, where you have transactions, if you’re talking about consumer centric, but in a, in a B2B environment, you’ve got, still a value per page. And so if you back into the journey of, ultimately, a sales opportunity that closes, you can back in — they viewed these pages, and so therefore each of these pages has this value, and that journey. And so for me, it’s all about value per visitor and so by doing that, you understand the value of each piece of content and the visits to those pieces of content and then, how do I maximize out of that?

So if I’ve got a piece that, for instance, it’s high volume, but rarely nets in anything, nobody progresses out of it — it may be a core, it’s an About Us page. Well, certainly I’m not ever going to champion, “hey, take that off”. If I did, that’s a problem, but it might be. Maybe that’s secondary. Maybe that’s not even on your hero navigation – your main nav. Maybe it’s in the secondary portion somewhere. It’s in the footer, for sure. But your primary places where you’re sending people to, are really the optimized pages. So everything, and that includes not just the content, but it may be that, some of the pages have really large images or lots of videos, and so the load time can come into play or just speed the page. And so you’ve got to really take those into consideration, to really make every piece of that journey work. And so from there, the reason it’s cost efficient is because once you can nail down the “free” — I did that for free and it drove X number of people. Well, what can it do for me on $100? 100 bucks a day or whatever. Wow!

Matthew:

Start that ramp-up!

Ben:

Yeah! And so literally, I was having a conversation just a week ago with one of our clients here, and it was this tipping point of where we started to see, with a core set of their existing opportunities, that they haven’t closed it officially yet. But I started looking, and I’m like ultimately, they’re coming from three different queries, so we’re bidding on all kinds. But how do we allocate to those three? And what’s the impression share? And so how do we invest more and then see. And so, a couple of months will go by, we’ll test it, and it may be that — hey, we haven’t hit that tipping point. We’ve invested more dollars, we’ve seen more success. And so I’m going to keep going till there’s a peak, and then I’m going to stay at that peak before there’s the drop off right of return. We’re investing too much, and it doesn’t make sense. So that’s really how you can stretch the budget from an effective standpoint, versus just kind of the old, looking in the air — “I think we could spend whatever”, it doesn’t make sense.

Matthew:

Yeah and you talk about this ramp-up period, how long, typically, is that ramp-up period? In terms of that trial and error process, until you hit that peak, what does that look like for some of these companies?

Ben:

Yeah, it varies. It can vary fairly widely. I always ask the first question, what’s the length that you’ve got for your campaign or highlighting of your service, or whatever the case may be. But the ramp-up, you can accelerate pretty quickly. So it can be anything from in two weeks time, you can have a pretty good idea of initial conversion. By four to six weeks, you’re usually able to tell those initial conversions what happened in the sales process. Did they get stuck? Are they really having conversations? And then after two or three months, depending on size and scope on whatever the offer is, you’ll start to go — okay, yeah, there’s a closed deal. And so for me, the initial observation is two weeks and then I’m going to work on my visibility there. And then, after two months, I’m understanding full funnel of what is working. And then I might change my visibility, or I might go, visibility is great! I need to work on this part of the process, but it’s all about really creating that entire funnel. So it all should happen pretty quickly.

Matthew:

Yeah, I like how that’s visual and mapped out precisely. What are the takeaways for a B2B marketing team looking to succeed with CRO?

Ben:

Yeah, my favorite question probably, on the subject. So for me, it’s an age-old question. I always see dashboards, and it’s, “we drove this many 1000s of page views and this many 1000s of visitors”. And the classic question I always ask any prospective client — do you have analytics on your site? And they’ll say yes, and they think that that’s what I mean. “Well, I know that there’s 34,000 people coming to my site”. Okay, but do you have analytics on your site? Then they are like what are you talking about? Do you understand what those 34,000 are doing? So it’s way more than just visitors to a site. It’s ultimately how many of them convert. And so, you know, Dave and I have had conversations here with our piece as far as AvreaFoster goes and what we’re doing, and ultimately, what’s the share of each of those? So what does it look like across the whole site? What are we doing and really getting the most out of our spend? And so for me, the key takeaway is that I always tell folks, sometimes I’ll talk when I’m on a flight or in an airport or whatever, and they find out what I do — they say, “Oh, you’re in digital marketing. So do you have tiny budgets or huge”? And my favorites always is, I have all of them. I’m kind of that kind of guy that just gives the answers that’s kind of strange. But the encouraging part to all digital marketers is you can… I’ve even done work for small nonprofits and have very little to spend. Or, like I said, I’ve had 10 million annual budgets, or these crazy “go spend $2 million in 21 days”. To me, it doesn’t matter. The size of the budget, the success is always going to be in how your content is performing in relation to this entire conversion rate optimization concept.

Dave:

Okay, so let’s talk a minute about some core numbers. I mean, when you think about tracking to your point, CTR, progression, regression, you name it. In terms of the type of numbers that you should be looking at. But can you kind of help us get a feel for what’s what to measure?

Ben:

Yeah, so I always encourage folks I run into, to really think through digital marketing in three aspects — get your awareness, consideration and conversion. Anybody that’s been in this space knows that those are the three stages. But a lot of people, they miss that on the measurement side. It’s “I know I’m in that stage of my product launch, my service launch, or whatever”. But you have to understand where is each piece of content? And we were talking about that earlier, with the whole Moneyball approach, you might have a page that has high awareness and visibility — so it’s your front and it’s the homepage. It’s that required page — the product marketing team mandatory to put this on the homepage in a call out. So it might have high visibility, but when somebody taps on it, clicks on it, it doesn’t do anything. The users find out about the topic, but they kind of move on. And so then the inverse of that is, you have, your lower visibility, but higher consideration. So it may be that you’ve got a secondary page on the site, and it might be the simplest, ugliest page on the site, and that’s my favorite. When it’s not pretty, I’m like, “but it’s pretty good”. And so the idea there is, it’s got low volume, but it’s got really high consideration. And so how do I take that and not replace what is mandatory by the product marketing team, or whatever the case may be. But how do I put that in the journey to bring that in, and so that’s the consideration, and then conversion, ultimately. That’s going to be looking at your sales form, or whatever the outreach looks like for the actual conversion. If it’s a chat bot — all those sorts of things. And how do I get that to be more effective? What fields are mandatory, what’s optional? And the nugget that I always give any sales team is, if you can use a chat bot as part of the experience, the historical and we’re still early in the chat bot stages – but the early signs and when we’re a couple of years into it now, but the early signs of chat bots are, if you can get them to engage with a chat bot, I think the conversion rate as stands as recently as a couple months ago — it’s a 60% increase over your typical sales form. Because it feels engaging. So it’s really taking all of those pieces and putting it together, versus just — my favorite question is, how do I drive more leads? And I automatically will ask, “Well, where are you at on awareness, consideration and conversion”? Let’s start there. And they’re like, “Well, I just need more leads”.

Matthew:

The golden question!

Ben:

If everybody knew the answer to that one simplified question, business would be booming for all, right?

Matthew:

True.

Dave:

Very true. Okay, so Moneyball, when we brought you on board, we talked about this, and it was something that intrigued me in how you approached digital and how you bridged that gap over to something that most people can understand in the baseball world. Which was, I think, fascinating. So you’ve coined that, pretty much this term, and brought it to AvreaFoster and so we’ve kind of started applying it here.

Ben:

Yeah. I mean, for me, you know, I champion the term and I’ve put it across different years of my career. And really, the whole premise is just, again, that you want to get the most competitive advantage with the dollars that you have. You may be a startup or you may be an enterprise that’s existed for hundreds of years. So you’ve got your inherent competitive advantages, but when you get down to digital marketing specifically, how can I get the best advantage? And so the goal in bringing Moneyball here is really to give our clients every competitive advantage from a digital marketing standpoint, that we can, making sure every journey that’s part of any campaign or any organic effort — that we’re really getting the best out of it.

And so for me, kind of, what I always say is, you’ve got your digital strategy – you can level the playing field. And so it may be my favorite, and then it’s kind of actually somewhat accurate — you’ve got these beautiful baseball stadiums, and I’ll actually use the dichotomy… let’s use Yankee Stadium. The old Yankee Stadium was known as the best. But you’ve got Yankee Stadium. You got Dodgers. Dodgers, they don’t have anything extra in their stadium. You’ve got Wrigley, those sorts of things. But they’ve built something. And so for me, it’s about the playing field. All the extraneous pieces are gravy on top. So you use that illustration and say, what is my playing field? My website, right? I might have all the trinkets around my website. I might have all the channels covered. I’ve got everything, bringing it to the stadium, right? My stadium is beautiful, but on the playing field, are you leveling it, or are you working up a hill that’s so far uphill that just you’re automatically working against everything possible? So the worst thing that could happen is you’ve got a baseball team that has a low budget and high inefficiencies. You can usually see that lopsided right in the standings. Or you’ve got your high efficiencies and this is going to tear me up saying it, I’m in Dallas. So the Texas Rangers just won the World Series. Loved it. I was there. It was awesome. But there’s something to be said about the Astros, I understand the one year. I’ve got many opinions on them, but the point is, highly efficient organization, highly successful over the last six, seven years. So it’s just a great example of using your playing field and working to the best that it can.

Dave:

Yeah. Great analogy.

Matthew:

Yeah and Ben, it makes us happy watching this being played out for our clients, and even for ourselves. When you’re helping the sales and marketing team really outreach and get involved in that way. And I’m appreciative that you’re on my team, so we really are glad you were able to share some insight. And talk a little money ball and baseball with us.

Ben:

That’s right, glad to be here. Thanks for bringing me on.

Dave:

Thank you, Ben.

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