This episode, President and CEO of Dragon360 Andy Groller talks about how B2B marketing differs from B2C marketing, different specific B2B marketing techniques, and how to get to the decision-makers in big businesses.
Andy Groller is the President and CEO of Dragon360 and is an experienced marketing leader helping B2B and DTC brands solve their marketing challenges and reach new levels of ROI, CAC, and growth.
Andy has partnered with brands that range from mature startups to enterprise behemoths and is a firm believer in working hard, getting great results, and having fun while doing it. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:
- How to identify if something is a long-term strategy or a trend.
- The personal qualities you need to become a President of a company.
- What to look for in the hiring process.
- How to implement a good work-life balance in your culture.
- How Covid has changed marketing strategies.
- Specific B2B marketing techniques.
- How to respond to clients with low budgets.
- How to get to the decision-maker in a big business.
- Ways to promote referrals and strategic partnerships.
Resources:
Connecting with Andy Groller:
Connecting with the host:
- Josh Hoffman on LinkedIn
Quotables:
- 6:11 – “You have to have this baseline of foundational and operational marketing tactics that boil up to that strategy but you still have to take advantage of something that might come across as trendy because everybody or at least people in that market that your trying to achieve are going there even if it’s a short term fad there’s probably opportunities there, whether it plays out over the course of time or not you don’t know that but you might as well give it a trial and a test and learn and see where it takes you.”
- 9:02 – “Digital is an ever-changing thing if you’re not having that as a core component of your individual traits you’re probably going to get left behind both as an agency but also as an individual and the same goes for life you don’t know what life will throw at you, you need to be able to think on your feet, you need to be able to test and learn your way out of situations but also test and learn what is going to drive you forward so I think it’s that innate ability but also that core function and trait we look for in individuals and the brands we work with.”
- 18:40 – “All these lay-offs, all these shifts, these economic downturns Tare the same brands that grew exponentially not realizing that it was a short term thing and they then create sustainable growth for themselves and they got ahead of themselves and they expected that this is going to continue in that trajectory but when things got back to normal along with economic things, it wasn’t real growth, it was true growth in the sense that you took off but it wasn’t sustainable.”
- 19:40 – “Compared to a B2B brand you have a finite market you have different audiences different verticals things like that that are part of your ideal customer profile so its a more challenging environment than just throwing up some video ads and letting it run wild, you have to be smart with your audience segmentation, you have to be smart with your messaging, your targeting and things like that. The other thing too is in a B2B buying process there’s going to be multiple decision makers.”
- 24:09 – “You’ve got to warm up the audience, if you’re going to go in and try to sell to the CMO, the CFO, VP of finance if we’re talking an AP automation tool you’re going to be banging down a door that’s never going to open, those people are busy they have their own objectives, their own responsibilities internally so you have to warm up that audience.”
- 26:09 – “We are heavily referral based which is an indication of good work, if you get a lot of referrals it means you’re doing something right and I think we’ve seen success in outbound but a lot of our success has really been in that partnership network that we’ve created with existing clients that might leave or go somewhere else we’re typically their first call or they refer us to somebody else in their network or vice versa, it’s all about creating that partnership, it’s all about creating that relationship that maybe it doesn’t lead to something tomorrow but 3 months from now there’s probably an opportunity there.”
- 28:09 – “Don’t let data prevent you from making a decision, data should be directional, data is skewed, data is imperfect, if you’re waiting around for statistical significance of some test, guess what it’s a pipe dream it’s never going to happen, marketers need to use their guts, should they rely on data for directional decision making? Absolutely because data exists for that purpose but data is flawed at the end of the day data is not inclusive for everything out there and if you let data dictate whether you make a move or not you’re already behind.”