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The Episode in 60 Seconds

Golden Spiral’s own Chris Turner, Senior Director of Digital Strategy and Performance Analytics, joins us via Zoom to discuss how companies, specifically marketing leaders, can transition, think, plan, and strategize during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chris eats, sleeps, and breathes digital strategy and has a tremendous backdrop that has facilitated his deep expertise in the field.

This interview delves into:

• The three categories B2B tech companies are falling into amidst the crisis
• Why this isn’t the time for bold actions
• How and when to advance your B2B tech company
• Why it’s critical to fortify your digital marketing infrastructure
• How to avoid data paralysis during the COVID-19 pandemic

Our Guest

Chris Turner is Golden Spiral’s Senior Director of Digital Strategy and Performance Analytics and an expert in all things digital. Chris manages and monitors the online strategies for our clients related to paid media, content, social media marketing, and digital optimization.

Chris helps our teams build synergistic digital strategies that touch on everything from relationship building with partners to content creation and syndication — all to help clients make an impact through their business. He leverages his experience of 10+ years of marketing leadership to direct marketing teams to success based on addressable KPIs and data-driven tactics.

Chris has a bachelor’s degree in information technology and a master’s in information systems. He is well educated, heavily experienced, and always seeking more knowledge.

Show Notes

Before diving into data analytics, learn how to create and maintain a SaaS marketing and sales scorecard.

We created a comprehensive guide to fortifying your marketing infrastructure. Check it out.

The marketing and sales funnel is rapidly evolving.

To learn more about optimization from Chris, check out his Compete SEO Guide for B2B Tech Marketing.

How Does Your B2B Tech Company React During a Time of Crisis?

Given the current coronavirus pandemic, B2B companies are generally falling into these three categories:

1. The company’s solution meets a need that has been accelerated by the crisis (i.e. healthcare, healthtech, health IT)
2. The company’s solution remains essential regardless of the crisis
3. The company’s solution transforms a workflow — increasing efficiency and offering significant savings — but isn’t seen as essential amidst the crisis

Most B2B tech companies are falling into the third category. If your solution isn’t essential to overcoming the crisis, it will be difficult for your company to start conversations. It’s not a great time for your company to act boldly.

If your funnel has evaporated overnight, your salespeople can’t get anyone to return calls, your open rates have dropped through the floor, and you’re grasping at straws trying to figure out how to engage in the market…

“It’s not time to advance right now, but it is time to fortify.” - John Farkas

Don’t Give Up Now: Here’s How Your B2B Tech Company Can Advance

Just because the environment around you changes, it doesn’t mean you can’t still keep moving forward. The journey will just look a little different.

It’s important for B2B companies to expand focus into innovation and transformation, so when the time comes, they’ll be ready to enter the conversation.

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” - Benjamin Franklin

Your key asset is your people. Ask them what your company should do to make an impact in the future.

Why You Must Fortify Your Digital Marketing Infrastructure

If you put your soldiers in place now, when the time comes, you’ll be more than ready to win the battle.

Fortifying the essentials means understanding and optimizing the assets that you currently have while also planning for the assets you need to have.

There are three prerequisites before you are able to fortify your digital marketing infrastructure:

1. Have a clear view of your goals and make sure they’re in line with the rest of your organization. What do you want to see happen by the end of the next quarter?
2. Have a solid understanding of your buyer's needs. Then, articulate your solutions in the context of those needs.
3. Have a clear view of your competition. What are they declaring right now in the market, and how can you present your product or service in a way that’s clearly differentiated?

1. Evaluate Your Toolbox

You must understand what you have that solves the problems your buyers are really trying to figure out.

Evaluate not only your content and digital assets, but also the assets in human capital that can help you move forward.

Determine what elements of your marketing strategy align with the awareness, consideration, and decision phases of the buyer’s journey to know exactly what you need to address.

To appeal to buyers in the consideration and decision phases of the buyer’s journey, it’s essential to dissect your buyer and develop a deep understanding of their motivations.

“It's looking at demographics, it's looking at engagement with your content, it's looking at the ways that buyers want to be engaged.” - Chris Turner

2. Fill Your Toolbox

Once you’ve identified the gaps in your digital strategy, it’s all about taking your insight and understanding of the marketplace and saying “what’s the easiest route to the end goal?”

In the consideration phase, potential buyers are comparing and contrasting different solutions. Are you answering those questions? If you’re not, your competitors may be.

“It’s not about what the environment's doing, it's what your buyers doing and how you can address that buyer in a meaningful way.” - Chris Turner

3. Optimize Your Assets

The rubber meets the road when you combine the great assets that you've now crafted or developed, but you also need to make sure they’re visible in the right ways and at the right places. Not all content needs to be everywhere.

There are three keys to optimization:

• Understanding the feedback you receive. SEO, and any marketing efforts, should be executed based on the data of the people you’re targeting. Sometimes those changes will be drastic, sometimes they’ll be minimal.
• Connecting the dots between existing pieces of material that help to foster the whole journey. There’s an actual physical path that people will take through your website.
• Leading people towards the final goal, otherwise known as conversion optimization.

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How to Effectively Leverage Data During the COVID-19 Pandemic

What gives data value is your interpretation of it. Look at your company’s data, truly understand what you’re seeing, and create a narrative. That’s what real insight is.

These are tools Chris, and most SEOs, use to interpret data in meaningful ways:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Moz
• SEMrush

Are you creating material that actually matters?

“Content for content’s sake, webinars for webinars’ sake, videos, infographics, anything digital for digital’s sake has little value. You have to have a purpose behind it all.” - Chris Turner

What is Data Paralysis and Why Does it Matter?

Marketing leaders often dive into data and end up over-analyzing, resulting in a sense of coma. They put their own biases inside of the data set. It may then be difficult to identify driving factors.

You must break apart all that you are as a business, and parse it into solution sets, content, material, and resources that inform and equip your audience. Your website doesn’t rank, your pages do.

“Your people aren’t looking for you. They’re looking for a solution.” - Chris Turner

The most important thing to remember is:

“The key to success in the correlation is not causation. It's common sense.” - Chris Turner