Marketers know that investments in brand pay off.
But if you’re having a hard time getting your CFO to buy in, you are not alone.
Let’s get some tips on getting buy in on brand spend,
in this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning in to closing.
Time to show for go to market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley, head of marketing for Unbounce, Insightly, and LeadsRx.
Today I’m joined by Patrick Cumming.
He is the head of marketing for KlientBoost, a marketing agency.
Patrick, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Val.
Okay, so it sounds like this issue that we’re about to talk about crosses
both continents.
We connected on LinkedIn
because I saw you talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
Full disclosure, I love my CFO,
but I want to be able to better communicate with her.
So what prompted you to start talking about brand spend through this lens?
Yeah.
Good question.
So I spotted a trend,. I think, on LinkedIn,
but also in a lot of the communities
I’m hanging out with, places like, exit five, for example.
And I was really happy about this because I actually have a background
in brand marketing.
So first agency I worked in was brand marketing agency, and I was kind of
like the digital marketing bolt on to that, to that brand service.
So it’s very close to my heart.
So I was excited to see B2B marketers were getting excited,
about brand marketing.
But I did notice that the conversation was
they weren’t really sure how to implement it,
they weren’t really sure how to measure it.
And obviously, most importantly, they weren’t sure how to get like the CEO
and the CFO to to actually, you know, invest the spend in it.
When they knew it was an important activity.
So for me, with us being an agency, getting that CEO and CFO buy in
on just any type of marketing spend is basically it’s essential to our survival.
And so for me, it felt like a topic that was not only going to resonate
with our audience,
but it was also something that we could speak with some confidence
on, because that’s essentially what we do every quarter.
You know, when we’re doing a quarterly business
objective, we’re trying to prove our value to CEOs and CFOs
because they ultimately control the budget. Right.
Okay, well, let’s dive right into your tips.
And,
I’m going to really engage with you on this
because it was something. I was literally just working on yesterday.
So, so your first tip is to align brand metrics to financial metrics.
So for example, marketers talk about traffic,
but CFOs want to talk about pipeline.
So talk to me about how you start doing that.
Yeah. For sure.
So I see a lot of marketers make this mistake,
and I’ve I’ve made this mistake myself a lot of times, too.
So I’ve been in the meeting with the managing director,
with the head of finance.
And, you know, I start talking about impressions and clicks and, and CTRs
and their eyes just kind of glaze over and then they’re like, cool.
What about revenue? Right.
And so while it’s still super important for us to optimize those metrics,
we really need to find ways to connect that activity to the metrics that,
you know, the CEO and the CFO care about, which really is
when it comes down to it, pipeline and revenue, like
what is the forecast of of revenue going forward
and how much of that forecast are we actually converting?
And so an example I use for this is like one way that you can start
translating things is let’s say you’re going to launch a new brand campaign.
For example, instead of saying we’re expecting to see an uplift in traffic,
what you could say is we’re expecting to see 80%
more ideal fit prospects visiting the website.
And then based on our current pipeline conversion rates, we would expect
to see somewhere in the region of like, you know, a 30% lift in pipeline
over the next days, over like the next 90 days or something like that.
And so that talking about ideal clients and talking about pipeline,
that’s really language that the CFO understands.
And I think it takes away some of the fear, risk and confusion from those calls.
So you kind of communicating with them on the same level
instead of just overwhelming with stuff,
you know, overwhelming them with stuff they don’t really understand.
I’m definitely
going to take that term, future pipeline, when I’m talking about brand spend.
Because that’s what it is.
It’s an investment in in the downstream.
But if you put it the word pipeline with it,
I think it does resonate a lot more.
So, so I love that one.
Do you have another tip about search?
You suggest that marketers might want to frame share of search,
as a market share signal, and I really like that, too.
Talk to me more about that.
Yeah. For sure.
So I think with trying to understand market share, it’s it’s such a challenge.
Unless you invest in either an insane amount of time
or any amount of money, into trying to figure that out.
And so what you can do with share of search is you’re essentially measuring
the percentage of brand name searches that you receive in comparison
to the percentage of brand name searches your competitors
receive for their own brand name.
And so we use like a super simplified example.
So let’s say we have two competitors.
So there’s three of us in total.
And let’s say we all get 100 searches a month.
Then what we can kind of deduce is that share of search is roughly 33%.
And then we can, with a decent degree of confidence, kind of estimate that,
that kind of like reflects market share too.
And so the idea is that as you gain, share of search,
you can naturally expect
to see an increase in pipeline and revenue, which again, is
just a really strong conversation to have with the, CEO and CFO.
And I would say I’ve similarly seen this
track, anecdotally in our own marketing.
So for example,
we will typically see a 20 day lag from a search to an inbound opportunity.
And then from there we’ll
we’ll see another 60 day lag from an opportunity to revenue.
So what we can say is, you know, as that search volume is increasing historically,
we’ve seen that then translate to an increase in pipeline and revenue.
And one thing I did want to I want to shout out, thank you to Liam Moroney.
It worth giving a follow on on LinkedIn.
He turned me on to this tool called My Telescope, which is super cheap.
It’s like $20 a month.
And it will do the, share of search thing for you.
All automated. Really great tool.
I love a quick and dirty solution. So.. Thank you.
We’ll definitely put that in the show notes.
Okay, so.
next way, you want us to help, think a little bit more like
a CFO is to run regular incremental tests to prove lift.
This feels a little bit more arduous, but. I think it would help you make a point.
Yeah, definitely.
So we’re doing more and more of this and recommending it, more and more,
to the clients that we work with.
But I think what I would say is it’s definitely not as hard as it sounds.
It sounds really, really scary.
And so the way that it works is you essentially want to remove
like one region or one segment from brand targeting.
So you might remove, say, a specific city, like I was about to say New York,
but that would be a silly city to remove.
It’s probably high traffic, but, you know, maybe
a smaller city or you could you could remove an industry as well.
And you really want to choose something
that’s big enough to get statistical significance,
but low enough that it’s not going to absolutely hammer, performance.
And when you do this, we call this a holdout group.
And so what you can do is you can then run a test for like 30 days,
and you can compare the KPIs in the test group.
That’s the holdout group.
So did, the, the segments or the industries
that received the targeting have, you know,
statistically significant higher, volume of ICP traffic
or higher volume of pipeline or higher volume of revenue in that test period.
And by creating that holdout group, you then give yourself
like a really compelling case to the CFO, because you can directly map out
exactly how this brand activity is translating to,
you know, ICP, traffic pipeline and revenue.
Wow. Okay.
That one definitely makes me a little nervous.
But it really is a good way to test if.
If what you’re doing is moving the needle.
So, Okay, let’s move on, because you’ve got another great one here
is using historical data to reverse engineer ROI from brand marketing.
So, I think I understand what you mean there, but but talk me through it.
Yeah. So this one, this one’s my favorite.
And I would say this is one that I’ve been doing for my whole career.
pretty much since, day one.
And it’s it’s my favorite because you can just book out an afternoon,
build this in a Google, so you don’t need to pay for it all.
And then you can just like any kind of insights that you find, you
then go go back and validate those with that incrementality testing.
And so really straightforward to do.
You just map out all of your different marketing metrics by channel.
So that’s things like, you know, impressions, clicks, lead volume, etc.,
plot those against your financial metrics like pipeline and revenue and do that.
You should.
I think it’s best to have a longer, span of time to do that over.
Typically, I think the recommendation is about two years.
That’s what that’s what we recommend.
And so what you can do then is once you’ve plotted that out,
I’ll tend to do this by eye, but I’ve also developed,
a ChatGPT prompt that can help, analyze this too.
You can’t not talk about AI these days.
Right?
And so when I did this last year,. I noticed
there was a very strong correlation between,
for example, display ads for us and increased pipeline ad revenue.
And that’s even though we don’t see a lot of direct attribution
just to display ads in our ad platforms or even at our attribution platforms.
And I’ve seen this play out for lots of other clients, too.
So I think another common example. I see is that, you know,
I actually read a post about this today about,
you know, some startup founder bragging about not using PR
and PR gets a really bad reputation because it’s very, very hard to attribute.
But whenever I’ve analyzed the data, like so many companies just have huge
spikes in qualified traffic and pipeline following strong PR campaigns.
It’s just not attributed to last click.
And so I feel like, you know, the best part about this exercise
is because you’re looking for correlation, not attribution.
It really fills in the blanks that the clickbait attribution misses.
And that’s kind of the point about brand marketing is you’re not, you know,
launching marketing that’s expecting a click right now.
You’re launching marketing
that’s going to bring somebody to the brand in the future.
And so I found this to just be a really, really helpful way,
to kind of be able to track, to some degree,
those channels that are a little bit more difficult to track online.
Wow. That is powerful.
Okay, let’s do one last tip.
You said you can conduct brand recall studies.
How does one do that?
Where should folks start?
Yeah.
So of all the ones, that’s the trickiest to do.
I would say this is probably the trickiest to do, and probably
also the least available, to, to most companies.
And so what I would say is I’ll actually give a precursor here,
which is something that I use a lot, which is especially in ad platforms,
if you look at two metrics, my favorite ones are engagement rate and, dwell time.
If you look at those metrics and you have both a high dwell time
and a high engagement rate, for me, that’s,
you know, if you’ve done the positioning work
and know that you have a pretty clear value proposition, that’s usually a pretty
good precursor, that you’re probably getting good brand salience as well.
That said, you know, if you do have the budget available,
I’d definitely recommend doing those recall tests.
And so two ways of doing that.
One is again, this is it’s kind of like spend prohibitive.
But depending on what ad channels you’re running on,
if you’re spending enough budget with them, your account
manager will probably naturally just offer your recall test.
Because usually you do see that there’s actually much more incremental recall
than you can really track, in the channel.
So that’s one way of doing it.
The other is one that I haven’t used personally yet,
but we are planning to do for KlientBoost, which is Wynter.
Peep Laja’s company has recently launched a brand recall tool
which essentially just takes like a small subset of your ICP.
And we’ll just, you know, do a survey with those.
And one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to do those
recall tests is one, it just validates if your marketing is actually working.
Like it’s really, really easy to optimize for reach and frequency.
It’s not so easy to optimize the, you know, reach frequency and recall.
And so what you can do is run that recall test.
And if the data shows that recall is low, for example,
and you’ve known that position that isn’t right, or you’ve known
that the brand just doesn’t feel as strong as it is, it could be,
you can then go to the CFO and say something along the lines of, hey,
ad spend right now isn’t working nearly as hard as it could be,
but if we invest in a rebrand, that should help us improve salience.
And that means that our ad dollars are going to work harder.
So then we should be able to spend the same on media
and get a lower CAC and a higher close rate.
And so what that does is that transitions you from somebody that’s just
coming into meetings and asking for more money to somebody
that’s actually thinking about the top line business metrics of, okay,
how can we not just generate revenue and
but actually like even improve profit margins for the company?
For example.
And so that’s just kind of, you know, it’s it’s not guaranteed.
They’re probably still going to be some CFOs that say,
no, but it is just going to give you like a way more compelling case.
Right.. And I would say I know this as well.
I think one thing I want to add here is
this isn’t just kind of fluff that will make it up, but this is
these are all tools that I use when, when I’m presenting stuff to our
to our own CFO, a KlientBoost.
So, yeah, shout out to Kevin.. You’re the best.
I feel like you have to do that, right.. You’ve got to butter up the CFO.
Well, yeah.
I mean, mine’s Caroline, so I’ll give her a shout out to.
Because I love her.
So what’s interesting about this is,. I think the threshold for, for instance,
Google running those recall tests for you, like that threshold is really out
of reach, that the spend threshold is out of reach for so many people.
So it really would be nice
if I and I feel like it keeps going up, but it is an extremely powerful tool.
If you’re at that spend threshold and you get that offer.
I would absolutely tell people you have to take Google up on it.
I would agree, and
maybe we can kind of petition here to get them to, to lower
that spend threshold, ‘cause it’s, it’s, it’s ludicrous.
It’s the same on LinkedIn as well.
You know. I was working with a company last year.
I don’t think to be eligible we needed to be spending
50 K per month within the region.
So that’s, you know, this this company was targeting, like,
you know, EMEA, like Latam,
etc., North America.
And it was like, no, you’ve got to spend it
within the region that we’re doing the recall test.
And I’m like, whoa, that’s huge. Yeah.
I think for Google I, I’ve heard it’s like 100,000 a month or something
like it’s, it’s up there and again out of reach for a lot of folks.
I was just struggling with this.
And it’s so timely that we did this call with you today.
Patrick.
Because I was, I was looking at, a matrix within my organization.
And when I put my brand spend into my lead
gen, measurement, my CAC was crazy.
But if I pull the brand, spend out the CAC makes sense for,
you know, the, the lower funnel things that we’re doing, and,
it I’m just. I was just struggling to say, okay, but we
we we can’t count the brand spend on the lead
generation spend that we’re looking for in the next 30, 60, 90 days.
So I think I’m going to start using your term future pipeline, future pipeline
growth to kind of separate that brand
spend out or else, you know, it just throws off everything in your funnel.
Doesn’t make sense anymore.
So really practical and timely tips for me here.
So I thank you.
If folks want to learn
more about, you know, your agency or ways they can,
get brand, spend more in control or speak more like a CFO.
Where could they find you? Yeah.
So there’s a few different places.
So I generally talk about this on a weekly basis on LinkedIn.
So if you search me on LinkedIn, give me a follow.
I share lots of tips that you can also head over to KlientBoost.com.
We have a pretty, robust, kind of articles and resources and blogs
section there.
We also run, something called the KlientBoost Kitchen Podcast, where,
you know, topics like this, do get covered
so you can find that on Spotify at the moment.
It’s also on YouTube, but we’re in the process of kind of
refining the, the, the YouTube videos that we do.
So I think we can make those a little bit better,
but those are the main places right now and that is in the pipeline,
our CEO, Jonathan is working on something called CFO’s Best Friend,
which is going to be a podcast that’s exclusively dedicated
to, ways in which,
marketers can can win over their CFOs.
I love it.
I feel like there’s a merch opportunity here.
Like I if I show up at a meeting with an “I love the CFO” hat on, it might.
It might help me out or.
But I think, like, the whole point of this episode really is about learning
to speak the CFO’s language and really bridging
that gap between, between CFO and the marketing suite.
So I think we got a lot of powerful tips here today.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
It was a lot of fun.
And thanks everybody out there for tuning in.
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We will see you next week on closing Time.
