Marketers of the Universe: A digital marketing podcast

November: Using your data to tell a story, building high-performing digital marketing teams, and why MQL funnels suck

• Brew Digital • Season 1 • Episode 5

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Buckle up, folks, as this one’s spicy! The team starts by discussing how to build the best possible marketing team, and striking the balance between collegial and competent. Landing pages are dissected to assess whether they’re worth investing in, and they also share how you can use your data to engage an audience and build custom relationships. 

Finally, MQLs are put on blast as a broken, redundant metric that often completely fails to serve a company’s objectives. It’s a passionate conversation that you won’t want to miss!

[00:00] Introductions

[01:12] How to build a high-performing digital marketing team

[10:54] Do you really need to spend time making your landing pages better?

[18:11] Spotify wrapped - how brands can use their own data to sell a story

[28:13] Is the 'traditional' MQL funnel broken?

[36:35] Wrap-up

A full transcript of this podcast is available on [web link]

Further reading

  • Don't rely on quantitative metrics alone when reviewing marketing performance
  • How to make reporting more valuable
  • Should you lean into nostalgia marketing for your next campaign?

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Marketers of the Universe is brought to you by the clever folks at Brew Digital. We’re not your typical digital marketing agency; using an innovative approach to decision-making and collaboration, we help you create an impactful digital strategy that actually delivers results for your business.

See what we can do for you at brewdigital.com


Saufi Mohd Nor:

So it's like if you ask someone, oh, let's go get a coffee, don't start asking them to marry you or go to like travel. It's just like, can I overkill it? So just kind of stick to the point, let's just go get coffee and get it done.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Marketers of the Universe. My name is Hayden Woods-Williams. I'm a digital marketer here at Brew Digital. Our topics today are pretty diverse. We have a discussion around how your brand can use owned data to create your own version of Spotify Racked. We've got a little look at how best to empower your digital marketing teams and we take a quick look at whether or not the marketing qualified lead is well and truly defunct. As usual, we'll take about five minutes to discuss each topic and try and give you at least one action that you can go away and implement today. So, without further ado, let's get on with a podcast. I'm Hayden and these are the Marketers of the Universe.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Our first topic today looks at roles within digital marketing teams and how you can build your own high-performing digital marketing team. Our panel today is Mark Bandle, Debbie Gakvitanjadin, Dahlia Vera and Rich Harper. Mark has worked in email marketing for almost a decade here at Brew. He predominantly looks after our email marketing and CRM and he's your go-to guy when it comes to anything called mythology or fantasy. Hey, Mark, hey, we've also got Debbie. Debbie is a seasoned social marketer with a diverse background in the tech and education sectors. She is a creative strategist, always driving to nurture dynamic online communities, and has recently been heavily involved in spearheading advocate programs for the Adaptalist Group, one of our major clients.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Hey Debbie, hey Hayden, and finally we have Rich Harper. Rich is our head of digital marketing. He previously owned a digital agency and he's passionate about putting people first. He has over 16 years experience and is focused on helping companies realize their ambitions and try and achieve sustainable growth. Good to have you with us, Rich. Here's Hayden. So just to get things kicked off, one of the most popular ways to structure a marketing team is structuring by specialism. Obviously, here at Brew, that's how we split out the team. What do you think the benefits or negatives of structuring a team this way are? And I'm going to start with you, Rich, because you've obviously been involved in setting the team up.

Rich Harper:

Interestingly, when I came on board with the team, we were structured slightly differently in the fact that we had a paid media team, we had a social media team, we had an SEO team and to a part, we still have those teams, but operationally those teams were working fairly independently from one another. A big thing that I wanted to implement when I came on board was more collaboration. I think you can only do that together and those channel experts can provide the input we need per channel, but the kind of sum of all parts is far stronger than any individual.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Yeah, I agree, debbie. Obviously your focus is social media. Do you find that, working in the way that you do, you're able to collaborate with other specialisms in the most effective?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

way. I think this goes back to how your organization is structured. I think that here at Brew Digital, we are in an interesting period because we still are quite specialized, but at the same time, we do have pod system, wherein there are different specialists in one team working on a specific brand. There are two sides to it. I feel that as a specialist, you do have that deep knowledge and experience, which also helps you to work on a task more efficiently and faster. But at the same time, I do see the benefit of working as a team because you do see a more holistic view. For instance, rather than just working on this alone, I have a shared goal with the paid media team, with email, with SEO, and with that we can collaborate more and communicate better in terms of what's the best tactical approach for that particular brand.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

And Mark, I know that you've worked in agencies for a big part of your career. Do you see a difference working with teams who are structured around product compared to teams that are structured around brands, compared to teams that are structured around growth? Do you have a preference on what you like to work with or work within?

Mark Bundle:

Yeah, I'm going to be annoying and go for neither of those, and I think it's the way the team was originally and has developed a bit more and is kind of resetting. Now I'm going to answer brownie points and quote I'll see. The silos are actually good things. That's where you keep your valuable stuff, but it's where the crossover between those comes. So we've had our channel specialists, but we also then hired a couple of people to be generalists that could work across the different teams, and not only does that bring new insights, it can bring better communication between different channels. It also gives you some contingency as well, which I think is really important for a top team that there are people there that can fill gaps if people are out unexpectedly.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Debbie, I saw you put a face there, do you agree?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

No, I completely agree. It was an interesting thing joining Brew Digital and the Adaptivist Group because of their view of silos, because I think if you ask other marketers in the industry, everyone would be running away from a silo system. I think the key here is you can be a silo, but you would need to know how to be flexible and when is it to step out of a structure and when is it right to be in a structure. And that really depends on, as an agency, the goal that you are trying to achieve with the brand that you're working for.

Rich Harper:

I think also what we're missing there is how that team is led. Silo's work, collaboration can work when teams are given autonomy and empowerment. When silos don't work is when they're being micro-managed. You potentially have one ego that's stronger than another that is pulling in one direction and not allowing the team to work as a unit. I would even say touching there on things like egos and stuff like that. You could have one of the most high-performing people in the room If they've got an ego and having a negative impact on the rest of the team, the rest of the team are struggling for that one individual. I would say get rid of that one individual for the benefit of the rest of the team. You've got six or seven unhappy people and one high-performing person. That's a kind of toxic situation.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Being a devil's advocate a little bit. I'm a grown business who's maybe making their first or second marketing hire. How do I know whether to trust someone?

Mark Bundle:

Surely trust is earned Just keeping an eye on. Then there's micro-managing people. If you're hiring them, you've already met them, you've had that conversation, you've got the start of a relationship that you feel that you can trust someone. You can see from their experience what they've done, how they've performed and potentially you've taken their references In the day. If you're the business owner, you're probably not a marketer. Your clever idea is whatever it is and that's your specialty. Let your marketer be a marketer. It doesn't mean they shouldn't be accountable, but it means that you need to give them the trust to do the thing you've asked them to do.

Rich Harper:

I can share a negative experience. I have employed people where it hasn't gone to plan and it's a lesson learned and you can't always get it right. On the one hand, you get that one individual that has lied on their CV or has really impressed you in the interview phase, and then, when it comes down to the crux of it, they're just not capable. For every one of those, there's three or four people on the other side that are capable, that are good and they will thrive given the right environment.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

How do you cultivate that culture, especially if you're starting from nothing or you're starting from one or two people?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

The tone of your culture of the company is set by the leadership and that trickles downwards If it is a very micromanage, toxic environment. There's no other way to look where that began, like who's sitting at the leadership team, the culture and the structure of a team. What is needed? It really depends. You need to have regular assessment and regular check-ins because what can work right now may not work in five years' time. A good example for that is when the pandemic came.

Rich Harper:

Culture can't be forced in an organization. I've been in places before where the leadership come up with values and culture and it's almost like they're ticking a box Like this is what we want our business to be like, here's our values, but then they don't live their life by that cultural values. So guess what? The rest of the organization don't either. It's really crucial when we talk about culture that it has to come from the top, but it has to be a natural thing for them. It can't be forced, it cannot be constructed, because people will just not follow it.

Mark Bundle:

And the plus side of that is, if you are a small business and you're worried about culture because it sounds really scary, good news be yourself, be what you want your company to be. If you start it at the beginning, it's so much easier and it's just there and embedded, rather than having to be forced later on.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

At the end of the day, culture takes a long time to embed. Creating a new team takes time. How can a listener go away right now and improve on something today that is going to start the ball rolling?

Rich Harper:

Listen to your team. If you're a business owner or you're the marketing director or whatever position that you are in, listen to your team, speak to them, ask them how they like to be managed, how they like to be communicated to. How often do they need that kind of meeting cadence? We are kind of especially in that situation where we have to listen and communicate because we're a remote business, we're not in the office together. There's none of that kind of visual cues to know if someone's down or not. So it's kind of embedded into us as a culture to check in and make sure that everyone's okay. So the one big tip for me is listen, ask and listen.

Mark Bundle:

I didn't tell you what I'd say. If you're hiring to an area that you're not sure on yourself and you've got a choice between a candidate with the skills and a candidate you trust, hire for trust. You can teach skills, especially in the sport business. You need to make sure that someone you can work with and get within the long term Topic two touch is a little bit on CRO.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Touch is a little bit on all the different digital marketing channels and it's a really core piece of any digital marketing campaign. We're looking at landing pages and asking the question do you really need to spend time on making your landing pages better? We are bringing Mark back. We've also got Nassia joining us. Nassia has worked in B2B tech marketing for three years with clients such as SAP, plume, sunligo and the Adaptavis Group. We also have Ross Stratton. Ross has worked in digital agencies for around five years with brands such as VitaBiotics, skystiana, emirates and Adaptavis as well. Ross recently did some CRO work on one of our clients and managed to improve lead volume by, I think, around 45%, just with a few landing page changers. Good to have you with us, ross, hello. And finally we have Selfie Noor. Selfie has worked in social media marketing for around four years, starting in a B2C agency with clients in fashion, beauty, f&b and electronics and gadgets. He loves reading and traveling and has literally just got back from Korea, so I'm hoping he can get a reference in there somehow.

Saufi Mohd Nor:

Hello Selfie. Hi Edin, nice to be back.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Going to start with something that's maybe a little bit dependent on the specialism and we've obviously got two people here working in paid, one in email, one in social. Do you think we're wasting time trying to optimize web pages or do you think it's vital to what we do in digital marketing? I'm going to start with Ross on this one, if that's okay.

Ross Stratton:

Yes is the simple answer. Landing pages are such an opportunity to showcase a brand or product and it's so easy for good brands or good products to fall short when they have terrible landing pages. Yeah, I think the primary benefit of optimizing web pages or landing pages is improving the conversion rates, which is the primary goal that we're driving traffic to landing pages to convert, and I think people would be surprised at how much impact small tweaks around things like improving the UX or shortening conversion pathways can have.

Nasya Nasseira:

Whether it's Google, facebook, bing, business will definitely benefit massively from having a singular targeted page that kind of boasts the benefits of your product and service. It all comes down to the user intent. For example, when we create ads on Google, typically users clicking on a specific ad, they have a specific intent due to the keywords that we choose to target. Because of this, visitors are expecting a piece of immediate information or some kind of transaction. We definitely need messaging to be clear from the role in Dayland on those pages, ideally within the first ball of the landing page or the headline, and one common mistake that I keep seeing is that there's a disconnect between the ads and the landing page copy. So I definitely feel like landing pages for ads specifically need to maintain the same kind of messaging and offer some form of continuity from the ad.

Mark Bundle:

The landing pages. The landing page it converts and, as you said, it has to follow through nicely from the ad. It has to be a proper user journey, a proper experience for people. But at the end of the day you've gained people to your site to do something. Unless it's a pure branding base, which is relatively rare you want to be to be downloaded by a paper, submit a contact form, be to see, you want them to buy that pair of trainers or that piece of equipment. Landing page needs to make sure that it does follow all the way through from the good ad copy through that landing page which then helps it move through the funnel, offering clear, relevant CTAs to get people to then actually take the action you want them to take.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

And do you think an effective landing page for email will be the same as an effective landing page for SEO? Would be the same effective landing page for paid, as an example.

Mark Bundle:

If they're being driven from the same message, I don't see why not. If an email is trying to drive you to a place and that is trying to have the same message in the same driving to a place, I don't see why they can't share a landing page as long as it is the same thing. If they're driving different messages, you want to make sure that you're tailoring the page to the message. If you're doing things like dynamic content or interactive elements in an email, where things are tailoring to the audience depending on their past interaction with you, then yet you're probably going to need a different landing page for that, because you don't want to be able to tailor it to those needs as well.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I guess people with the attention span they have today, if something doesn't make sense, the easiest thing to do is run away.

Mark Bundle:

Yeah, last thing you want to do is make them bounce.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Do you think it's important that companies should be testing their landing page performance, and how can someone who doesn't have an Amazon or Google or Apple-sized budget do that efficiently?

Ross Stratton:

I think the important thing to understand about landing pages is that they're never finished. There's always small tweaks you can make or content you can update to improve things. Testing shouldn't really be something that's exclusive to big brands and big budgets. Templating tools these days make it so much easier, where you can just duplicate pages, pop something out and run them side by side. It's important to test because there's always something to improve. As long as the traffic volume is there, you'll be able to assess fairly easily whether you've improved things or not.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Cool, just because we are quickly approaching the end of our timer, I'm going to do a very, very quick two-stop, two-start when it comes to landing pages. Let's start with Nassia. Are you going for a start or a stop? A stop, stop, go on when it comes to landing pages right now.

Nasya Nasseira:

When it comes to the form fields, there's such a thing as too many Think about just the necessary information that you need. Stop when it gets to more than four fields.

Saufi Mohd Nor:

Selfie do you want to start or stop. I think I'll do start Cool, Go ahead. What are we starting when it comes to our landing pages? Keep in mind that when people already get to your landing page, just start reminding yourself that that means they already have the interest. So don't oversell it. So it's like if you ask someone, oh, let's go get a coffee, don't start asking them to marry you or go to travel with you. It's just overkill it. So just stick to the point let's just go get coffee and get it done.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

How many people did you ask to marry you in coffee shops in Korea?

Saufi Mohd Nor:

So far. No, I stick to it. Coffee, and that's it. I don't even drink coffee. It's hard chocolate and that's it. Yeah, Start or stop, Mark.

Mark Bundle:

I'll say start. It's something that people should already be doing, really but start considering your user journey from beginning to end, all the way through, from who you're contacting how through that landing page and making sure it's relevant, and onto a relevant CTA to make sure you get in the conversion that you're looking for.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Very, very breached, very succinct. I like it. And finally, I think you have a stock for us. What are we stopping?

Ross Stratton:

We are stopping filling web pages with mountains of text that no one will ever read.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Our third topic today, and we are two weeks from the predicted release date of Spotify Wrapped. My prediction is as we released on the 29th of November. Depending on when we release this, this could be in the past or the future, who knows but how can brands use their own data to sell a story? So we're looking at that Spotify Wrapped campaign and looking at how we can recreate that success. Spotify Wrapped is massive and with us today we have Freya Wilcox, debbie rejoining from our first panel, ross rolling over from panel two and our superstar special guest, kieran O'Neill. Kieran's worked in marketing and account management for over 10 years, specialized in taking campaign strategies and products from concept all the way through to delivery. She's also a petrolhead. Good to have you with us, kieran.

Ross Stratton:

Happy to be here.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

We also have Freya Wilcox. Freya is a recent university grad who has been the QA of every single thing that we do over the last few months, constantly picking out the mistakes that we have overlooked, which has meant she has become indispensable to the team. Sadly, she does have to leave in January to go travel the world. Good to have you with us, Freya.

Freya Willcocks:

Hi, good to be here.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Let's kick things off. Firstly, we know that Spotify Wrapped has been a massive success. So many brands Strava, monzo, tesco have all kind of followed that model of providing customers with a roundup of their usage data. Why does it work so well? Let's start with Kieran.

Ross Stratton:

I think what Spotify nails is making the end user feel part of something when they see the marketing, which just naturally increases the engagement.

Freya Willcocks:

Part of the reason that the Spotify Wrapped has done so well is that it kind of gives users an insight into what data they're collecting, but giving it back out to them in a much less daunting way. Yeah, I think Tesco's did the same sort of thing, like with their Tesco's unpacked, showing people whether other people were purchasing if they were purchasing the same Mio deals. I'm not sure how happy I'd be to see a Monzo Wrapped and see all my spending, but I'd be happy to see my Mio deals.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I guess it ultimately relies on, like us as customers and consumers, being slightly self-obsessed. Debbie, do you have anything to add there?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

I think that building that emotional connection to the brand all stems down. As a user, you feel that you've been seen and valued. If we've used Spotify as an example today, spotify has also taken it to the next level of filming different artists sending a message. Just imagine that you have been listening to this artist for most part of the year and then here you get also a message that you feel like it is directed to you. It's that total experience as a fan, as a user and somebody who enjoys the music that I think Spotify just knew like. They have the data, but they take it to the next level and they build a story out of it as well.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Nice Story is such an important word there. If you're a smaller brand, what can you learn from what these companies are doing? How can you go and implement that in your own marketing? Ross, this wants to eat.

Ross Stratton:

Yeah. So I think it kind of demonstrates that maybe an element of personalization is key. I think the future will kind of have video creative that's very much tailored to people's content. That might include a name or what they've been doing that day, which is slightly daunting thought, but I think for us now in 2023, it feeds into the creatives we can run. We can have images that tailor to your audience and that might mean drilling down into one specific pain point that customers have and having a tagline based on that. I think that's what's most likely to resonate with your audience.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I guess ultimately for B2B companies and particularly those who are working in the tech or SaaS industry. You have a lot of data on your customers. How can brands take that unique data and turn it into something that customers and prospects want to engage with?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

I want to say that this doesn't only apply to B2B, but, going back to your question with smaller brands as well, which is basic one-on-one of marketing is data. Ten years ago, we've already been using data. The only change that has happened right now is Spotify decided to give that data back to the user and actually turn the story out of it. So for everyone B2B, smaller brands, big brands like Spotify it's really like looking into those insights, tailoring messages, tailoring your offering and content around it and giving it back to your customers. I wanted to see a bit more creativity in terms of how we tell success stories or unique user journeys, for instance, One thing that you can find to big tech companies or B2B sometimes case studies can turn out very flat. You just landed a website, see who they've worked with and just see white papers. This is a chance for them to bring it to life using much more creativity, data, insights and really bring it back.

Ross Stratton:

Because we live in the age of GDPR. I think the first step that most brands need to be looking at is ensuring that your customers have signed up or there is an agreement within the data usage so that it can actually be used in a similar way to Spotify. Sometimes this is just my opinion, but it may not work for every single brand or every single industry, because it needs to be relevant from that industry perspective. I would be looking at starting at a goal and working backwards the why and then the how to see if it is relevant.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

There's only so much knowledge. I don't want to know that I've downloaded 87 eBooks this year and I've only read two of them, for example. That's just data that, frankly, I don't really care about. Right, we've obviously looked at attracting new customers using this data. One of the big data points that Spotify wrapped paused in 2020 was an increase of Spotify downloads of 21%. Is there a lesson in this on how to reignite lapsed customers or customers who were maybe less engaged than they were six to 12 months ago?

Freya Willcocks:

I think one thing Spotify does from a social media point of view is that it's a very shareable campaign, and I think it definitely instills a sense of competition between users. My sister listened to, I think, something like 66,000 minutes of music, which was insane. In my house last year, only one person didn't use Spotify and then, after Spotify RAP came out, everybody used Spotify because they were jealous of seeing other people's wrapped and seeing how people could see their own data. The sense of competition between Spotify users is a very good way of getting people to sign up, because people like to see what data is being collected on them.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

How do we make that not creepy?

Ross Stratton:

I personally think it comes down to timing. I think if Spotify RAP launched in March, what no-transcript Spotify Raptors so successful? It's a mix of the brand awareness, the product itself and the cost of entry, but it's also the time of year. It's that perfect mix of personalization, charability and seasonality.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

It just basically, you know, follows the natural stage of you know life. I would say At the end of the year it becomes more reflective. You look at your achievements, you look at what you've been able to do this year and Spotify just basically serves it up to you with like what you've achieved within Spotify. I think, going back to your question, hayden, in terms of like, you know, how does this call out to those that have fallen out of the bandwagon? For those other users, it's basically, you know, you see everybody doing it, so you feel like that sentiment of like being part of the crowd but at the same time, also give insight to like the features that they offer.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Annoyingly. I have wanted to discuss their offline campaigns as well, but we haven't got enough time, so I'm going to skip over that. Is there anything that someone who is listening could go and do right now that would help them in maybe one day creating a campaign as effective as Spotify? Raptor.

Ross Stratton:

If they ensure that the content that they would produce for this particular type of campaign. They need to make it as shareable as possible. So you build it out as part of the natural part of the website or the app or the customer portal, whatever it is, but you ensure that it's you know. Just a side note. You ensure that it's something that the customer can choose to engage with. It's not a takeover, and I think doing that ensures that you're building the structure needed to be able to then create that campaign and it also means that you can do other things with that structure as well.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Fun fact, reddit has actually been doing kind of a Reddit recap much earlier than Spotify started doing their end of year rap. So, as a brand, is there anything that you're doing right now that you can be building on? Are you being too relaxed with your campaigns because they already work? All of us are collecting data at the moment. We do know our audience, hopefully. Well, maybe you don't have to make it as big as Spotify rap, but you can start small. For instance, if you have partnerships right now, maybe you can start off by sending our badges to your partners based on like who is the best partner of the year and making sure that that partner incentivizing them to share that on social. So something as small and granular as that can help you already get that personalization, that emotional connection that you can do whether you are a B2C or B2B brand.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Onto our final topic. This topic is one that has caused a lot of interest in the digital marketing team here, but has a lot of people hesitant to get involved and discuss it. But we have three of our team who have been happy to get stuck in. We have Kieran joining us and giving us a slightly different perspective. He works in our account management team, so he does see these leads sometimes. We've got Rich, obviously from the head-off perspective, and we have Mark from an email and CRM perspective as well, so a really, really good spread of opinion here. So we're asking is the traditional MQL funnel broken? And for anyone who doesn't know what an MQL is, it's a marketing qualified need. It's something that marketing teams are often measured on. Rich, I know this is something you have a strong opinion on.

Rich Harper:

I do have a strong opinion on this because, essentially, MQLs are just and I say that laughing as a marketer that is measured on MQLs. The reason why I say that is for the past, however many years, we get told that we need to be more aligned. Sales and marketing need to be more aligned. That's the secret to success. And yet in 2023, we're still being measured on completely separate KPIs. The sales team is screaming out we need more leads, we need more leads. So the marketing team they go out, they get more leads and what happens is no one's focused on the quality of this lead. It's the marketer's team going. We asked the leads, we've got you loads of leads. So that's our job done. Rub our hands off the sales guys sitting there going, but our conversion rates are now really because we've got all of these leads and our revenue is suffering. So ultimately, it's just A really kpi of measuring success. What rich said?

Ross Stratton:

No. Just to add, if you think about it, marketing qualified leads through, one way or another, the traditional sense and that pipeline. I know it's been digitized and everything, but if you track back, I'm pretty sure it's probably now over 100 years old when you actually think about the interactions that take place between that funnel. So, yeah, it's going to be. I don't think it's broken, I think it's flawed and I think it needs to change.

Rich Harper:

Businesses just need to realign the metrics that they measure. It comes down to and every time I've consulted with a business, worked with a business their ultimate goal and objective is revenue and growth. How they get that revenue and growth is down to us, but if I work to the company and when AmyX amount of money per month, my team will go away and will give you 500 leads a month and they close none of them. They're in exactly the same position as they were six months prior to working with us.

Ross Stratton:

I think the thing that I found with an MQL funnel is how much it focuses, as Rich said, on the immediate sale rather than focusing on the long term, which is actually making the customer, the searcher, the user, the audience wherever you want to call them an advocate for the brand. So MQLs need to actually start addressing not only how to actually get a sale but how to actually engage with that customer in your brand's world so that they actually keep coming back.

Mark Bundle:

I sort of disagree with your underlying point but agree with what you're saying. I think MQLs have their place. I think there does need to be a measurement of things that go from marketing to sales independent of sales closing, because you need to be able to measure is it your sales closing can't close for toffee or is it your marketing team are providing these leads? My issue is with one letter. It's just with the queue. People don't qualify leads properly, just going oh, someone sent in something to us, okay, that's an MQL. No, it's not. Why haven't you done to qualify that? You've done nothing. It's making sure that actually if we're going to send leads on, we're going to have this activity, the work, you're doing something. Can we put it in place, things like lead scoring, to show that actually this person's engaged with us over a period of time and it has that long-lasting engagement like here and says but without just kind of throwing the baby out of the bath, or I think we need them. I think we do need to focus on the queue part of MQL.

Rich Harper:

Mark makes a valid point there. It goes back to that disconnect between the KPIs. I agree I think marketers also need to be measured on qualified leads. But where we go wrong is when we create a lead or an MQL. We pass it to sales, expecting that lead to be sales ready, and 99% of people that we regenerate are not in the buying cycle at that point in time. Just because we've acquired a name or a phone number or an email address doesn't necessarily mean that that person is now ready to be passed to a salesperson. We've got to fill in that bit in the middle and nurture and grow that prospect into a sales ready lead. Where it goes wrong is ultimately there is that disconnect. Marketers are focused on that volume, that number, and sales are focused on that end point. We often forget that middle part.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

That does bring me to a question that I'm sure a lot of marketing leaders are going to be thinking at this point. No, how do we generate first party data? How do we run email campaigns if we haven't generated data from this kind of thing? How do we survive to phase out cookies?

Mark Bundle:

For a start, don't send an email. I think we discussed this in a previous podcast. Unless you're actually providing value, don't send it. It's a waste of time. That's how we survive the death of the cookie, if Google ever get around to it. It's been postponed God knows how many times already. Make sure you're providing valuable content. If you're providing something that gives people value, it helps them solve a pain point, it helps them solve a problem they are having in their life. They're going to interact with you. Still. They're going to provide you that first party data through forms or whatever. Make sure you're collecting it directly on your site. If you've got clever things that can work so you can do dynamic forms where, if you recognize you already have data for a person, it gives you a different question, that kind of thing. So yeah, provide value and you will still get that content. You will still get that data from people.

Rich Harper:

When we're doing this activity, let's not forget we should be customer focused. I think often as marketers, we're guilty of going they're just a number and we just pass them through and we lose that essence of what the customer's pain point was their needs. All of that gets lost because we're trying to hit metrics.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

And from the point of view of someone who's following up on these leads I know that's something that falls within your remit here what do you want to see when you receive a lead from the marketing team?

Ross Stratton:

For me. I am interested in the emotions and the conversations that that person wants to have or may have already had. What kickstarted the customer journey with us? Keywords, content, pages that they use to search for us, and, obviously, budget that always helps.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

We say the MQL funnel is broken. Can you give us three things that someone can go away right now and do to improve what they're doing and make sure they're not falling into this MQL trap?

Rich Harper:

The three things I would advise is we talked about the alignment of sales and stuff like that, and that's nothing new. So we need to start thinking about what activity we're doing up front that could generate revenue. Ie marketing needs to sell stuff. At the end of the day, it's no good just creating data. Two, think about the metrics that you're measuring. As I said, you're only going to get out what you measure, so if you're measuring the wrong things, you're going to get the wrong outputs. And then three, because this is kind of fundamental in my mindset think about the customer. Think about that customer journey. When you're doing activity to generate an MQL, let's not rush to pass the MQL straight to a salesperson. That completely then destroys the experience that customer has because they don't want to buy anything at that point in time.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

That is all we have time for today. Thank you everyone for listening. We hope you found some useful snippets from our session and you're able to go and put them into your own marketing strategy. We've loved that you've made it this far through the listen. We love making this content and would love it if you recommended this show to one friend that you think would enjoy listening. Thank you also to the Blue Digital team for all the research that they've put together and all the input that they've given us in today's session. Make sure to go and check out all of our past episodes. Subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcast, and we'll see you in the next one. I've been Hayden and these are the marketers of the universe.