Interview with Masha Finkelstein

Hi this is Bob Samuels I’m founder a TechConnector, TechConnector is a
marketplace and campaign management platform a Best of Breed
account based marketing solutions we’ve partnered with the b2b marketing Expo to
bring you wisdom from leading account based marketing thought leaders to that
end I’d like to introduce you to Masha Finkelstein from Google Masha is
responsible for all aspects of digital advertisements for Chrome Enterprise
products it’s a pleasure to speak with you today Masha, Hi Bob nice to meet
you I’m doing great today I am enjoying the rain and especially my garden is
probably right now but I’m doing good excellent but the animals and the plants
are all happy today which is a nice thing so I understand that you run the
the marketing campaigns for Google for Chrome how do you run them today as far
as you have different personas different groups you want to reach out to how do
you prioritize who you want to go after and what type of messaging you want to
send yes so this is this varies based on our overall goals as an organization and
we have okay our system here at Google for our goals where we set up priorities
every quarter and all of our team priorities roll up to the larger
organizational priorities so based on what the goals are for us that
determines the campaign strategy and target personas but generally speaking
we’re trying to figure out what the best audiences are for us with an SMB and a
larger enterprise space so speaking of SMB so that’s gonna be
your title for the your presentation at the b2b marketing Expo I guess Wednesday
February 27th at 10:20 so I encourage everybody to attend your topic is on on
using ABM on small businesses in the old days that use ABM used to be for
large enterprises for big cocktail parties spending a lot of big buck
obviously it’s a different philosophy but it’s maybe ABM still smart for small
businesses yeah you’re right you know I think when I joined Google my role was
mostly focused on small and medium sized businesses and then later on an expanded
to larger enterprises as well but as I joined I realized that actually lots of
ABM principles could be applied to finding the right small businesses to
target and especially important for us for for prioritizing which SMBs to go
after so for example in ABM as a applies to large orgs account
selection is the first most important step right so you have to work closely
between marketing and sales team to figure out which are the rights the
right accounts to target and then when it comes to SMB it’s a lot easier to
spread your budget then because of how many there are right so how do you make
sure that you’re going after the right ones how do you make sure that you get
the most ROI and that people you’re talking to are actually going to convert
and that’s what I will talk about it’ll share some some use cases and case
studies that we’ve we’ve seen here work well at Google and how certain tips and
tactics actually apply to SMBs that are similar to how you would target
enterprises through account based marketing makes sense thank you so so
what what do you use to measure success what kind of metrics to use to to
understand whether you’re you’re getting the right people you’re getting by
messaging are you making the right impact we usually have campaign level
goals and campaigns aligned to where our prospects are in their buying cycles so
for example for awareness campaigns we measure awareness by service and brand
awareness studies for consideration campaigns we have marketing qualified
lead goals and pipeline influencer and then for conversion focused campaigns we
measure revenue how many of our target accounts or
segments have we actually reached through our campaigns
and and again yeah so small business this makes sense as far as its trickier
because there’s so many more businesses to hit and and lots more money to spend
and but there still needs to be a coordination with sales but I guess each
each account is not as majorly focused on as the as big companies so how does
that work with the coordination with sales on yes so an SMB it becomes not
necessarily about accounts but rather about groups of accounts right so you
could consider a segment of SMB accounts to be equal to one enterprise accounts
when you talk about when you’re talking about a BM so in SMB it’s important to
figure out what those groups of accounts are and what the best way to to target
them together is and that’s kind of like how I go about it so for SMBs instead of
having a list of target accounts you have a list of target segments of
accounts and then some of them will be more higher priority than other ones so
you might have Tier one segments tier two segments tier three segments of
accounts and tier one may get direct mail for sisters who may only get
invited to some field events versus Tier three just gets maybe a postcard
sometimes thank you so what are some of the best practices that an account based
marketing that you’ve either seen or done yourself that are pretty impressive
that you’d like to share so definitely in ABM it’s important to measure
everything like everywhere else I guess but in ABM the metrics are slightly
different than scaled campaigns right it’s of course a comping iteration and
engagement among your target accounts or among your target account segments for
SMBs which is a little bit more relevant but measuring and making sure you set
everything up for success from the get-go is crucial in when you when you
think of any marketing campaigns but especially ABM
because the the thing with ABM is oftentimes the organization you’re in
they want to see the results in the revenue and the pipeline and when you
say oh I’m gonna try this great innovative technique called ABM the
leaders sometimes they’re a little bit skeptical about that so when you set up
campaigns think of how you’re going to show that you’re actually making an
impact and especially we stop of the funnel campaigns it’s a little harder to
show the influence in the marketing influence there well just tell me what
the lead source was where should I invest all of my money but ABM is such a
multi-touch omni-channel methodology that you can’t really say oh well let’s
say Twitter is doing great why not invest everything in Twitter that’s not
how it works it’s one of the touches right so making sure that your
attribution is set up correctly and that you have means of reporting on the
progress you’ve made whether that’s pipeline influence or
marketing touches or an account engagement I think that’s a very
important step that people under value sometimes another thing is having a
dedicated sales partner if you’re in marketing it’s it’s essential if you
don’t have that your marketing efforts will go fruitless yes you won’t actually
see that pipeline influence right so have an advocate and a partner in the on
the sales team that you can work with and go to and talk about your campaigns
and and that will get excited with you about the ABM approach and result I
think that’s important but as you get into prioritizing SMB’s then make sure
that you actually research what you’re about to test before you start testing
and I know it sounds a little bit complicated but if you work with
research agencies or third parties that can give you the data to show some
minimal amount of trends for the spaces you’re interested in that will give you
a head start then if you just go blind into testing your new ABM creative
approach ideas make sense thank you so as far as small business goes is it
typically less touches than enterprise how many touches do you plan on when you
do an ABM campaign to the SMB group the difference is the buying committee in
the larger organizations it’s usually I think 16 people on average for a b2b
product and I don’t remember where I’m getting that number from but I’m sure
it’s in some article that I get a little later but for SMBs because the company
size is so much smaller than an enterprise the buying committee is
smaller so you don’t need to get buy-in from 16 people need to get buy-in from
maybe 2 or 3 and that’s where the variable is and the amount of touches
it’s not really amount of touches per person that will be different it’s more
per account right because you’re trying to reach fewer people per account but
then as you think about SMB target accounts as target segments rather then
the amount of touch first segment grows exponentially and very quickly so if
you’re measuring on your account engagement or SMB segment engagement
then it will be comparable to enterprise ABM it makes sense thank you so
somewhere you mentioned Twitter just in passing better what are some of the
channels that you you have found nice success when reaching out again for SMB
well I can’t exactly tell you where these channels are but I have found
great success with LinkedIn because of the targeting and how granular we can
get with targeting there whether it’s here or somewhere I was before can’t say
that but that’s one I have to say that people underestimate the power of
customer targeting on Adwords yeah and I will talk more about that with some
examples during my presentation Twitter sometimes worse sometimes it’s less
efficient depending on what your product is and if your target audience actually
spent time on Twitter and then you can get more specific with the types of
people you engage through content syndication programs and some content
syndication vendors and publishers are more ABM friendly than than others for
example I can say at some point in my career I’ve worked with ZifDavis Pure
b2b those tend to be more friendly towards ABM audiences and targeted
campaigns yeah and then there are creative ways to do offline media buys
when you do ABM as well for example if you know that it’s more I guess it’s
more relevant for enterprise ABM but if you know that your target account is
let’s say Walmart you can put a billboard in front of the health waters
just one just one location across the rock from the entrance to Walmart
headquarters and that will be your out of home
ABM campaign there but that’s kind of a stretch example I guess thank you so
this is really helpful so is there anything else that I haven’t asked you
yet about some tips and and cool things about ABM otherwise I’ll look forward to
to watching your presentation at the at the event that’d be great hold on I
think we as marketers tend to get ripped up sometimes in the newest and greatest
tactics and methodologies but what I keep finding throughout my career is
that I always have to remember to bring myself back to the user and the story
that we’re trying to tell whether through ABM or other scale campaigns and
staying authentic I think it’s super important staying authentic thinking
about the user being relevant people like to talk about things that are
happening now and if you do that whether your message do is deliver through an
ABM campaign or a scale campaign tactic chances are your user will notice you
and respond great great feedback thank you very much
look forward to seeing you at the event and look forward to seeing everybody
else too thank you