Connecting With Your Audience: A Marketer's AMA.

Alex Brown: [00:00:00] I'm Alex Jonathan Brown, a senior copywriter here at Iron Horse. And today my job is very easy. Y'all wrote all the questions when you signed up to join us. We basically said, What do you want to know? You asked, and we pulled together a team of experts to give you some answers. First Postal’s, Director of Demand Generation and another Alex will be ordering a caramel iced coffee from a New England based coffee chain that is not sponsoring this show and will not get shouted out. Hi, Alex.

Alex Barca: [00:00:35] Hello.

Alex Brown: [00:00:37] Next Senior Global Demand Gen Manager at Drift ordering a cinnamon dolce iced coffee. Ottavio Dattolo. Hi, Tav.

Tav Dattolo: [00:00:44] Hey, guys. What's going on?

Alex Brown: [00:00:46] And batting cleanup. Director of Marketing Engagement and Intentsify caramel macchiato. Hot 2%. Hannah Swanson.

Hannah Swanson: [00:00:54] Hey, guys.

Alex Brown: [00:00:56] So I asked, and I've been told I'm not allowed to play two truths and a lie, which is a bit of a bummer for me. But we do have kind of an icebreaker to get this whole experiment started. Um, what are the most successful demand gen activities you've run? And anybody can take that. I realized I didn't.

Tav Dattolo: [00:01:16] I'll go ahead and kick it off. So some of the things that we've been running over the past about two years at Drift since I've been there have been well produced webinars that are really focused on kind of taking an introspective look of like what would be the things that I would actually want to consume as somebody in a demand gen position. So it's really important to kind of like zoom out and kind of understand like, what would I actually go to? And then secondarily, really well-produced virtual events that are extremely helpful. So leading with education as much as possible, being really unselfish. We have a strict no pitching policy here at Drift. So it's really important that we focus on educating people and having them walk away saying, Wow, I actually learned something from this. Instead of spending 30 minutes on a webinar and not actually learning anything.

Hannah Swanson: [00:02:08] Top of mind is actually a little bit opposite of yours, because I am a true, like, face to face lover. I come from a background of field marketing. That's always what my career is, as always, kind of at a cornerstone and was field marketing and finding success through face to face, 1 to 1, one to few activities. So that's always been my favorite and my sweet spot. But I have a serious appreciation for a really well produced virtual event because Covid was rough and I was actually in a customer marketing position during the the bulk of Covid, where I led a user group community and making a virtual event work in that kind of in that setting was really hard and huge appreciation for one that's well done because it's hard to do. And yeah, but what face to face is where it's always had my heart.

Alex Barca: [00:03:02] Awesome. I love both in-person and virtual events, but I'm going to talk about specifically the past couple years at Postal campaigns that we've run that have been the most successful, have been ABM campaigns and really holistic omnichannel ones where we're touching people across channels, email ads, social direct mail and targeting a really small group of accounts like 100 or 200 accounts for an extended period of time and with the goal of creating high quality opportunities at the end of the campaign. So that has definitely been my most successful tactic in recent years.

Alex Brown: [00:03:38] Perfect. Well, thanks, everybody, for sharing. And again, this is coming straight from the people who are watching slash sign up. If you have additional questions, feel free to throw them in the chat. We'll do our best to get to them if we do have time. But we're going to start hot and Alex will probably kick it back to you for this. But what's a creative gifting campaign you've seen executed? Well, it's a very important second half of that Question. Yeah.

Alex Barca: [00:04:03] And you mentioned at the beginning I work at Postal. We are an offline gifting platform, so we drink our own champagne. I run a lot of gifting campaigns here, but I think the most successful one is actually a part of that account based marketing strategy that I mentioned. So we recently ran an account based marketing campaign against a certain number of accounts, and part of that campaign included a picnic pack. So it was over the summer and we had a really high quality pack that included a blanket, a wine opener. I think they included some snacks as well, and we sent that to people that were high intent. So they visited the website. They were searching for our competitors. They were really showing that they deserved like a high quality gift like this. I think in the gifting space, a lot of people say, well, how much money should I be spending? And I think when you take the time to send these high quality, expensive gifts to people that are already showing intent or some sort of interest in you. We've seen really high conversion rates and making it seasonal, the picnic pack element always helps as well.

Tav Dattolo: [00:05:08] I can tack on with some things that we have run in the past. Those are all amazing outs. One of the things that I've done in a past role is actually taking a look at the existing pipeline that you have and setting up a trigger within your CRM. So whether that's Salesforce or dynamics and understanding, hey, when is the propensity of purchase going to exceed a certain point? So then looking at the main point of contacts at the account and then automating some sort of direct mail that can be sent out on behalf of this. I did this at a past company where we sent a really nicely branded mug as well as a custom roast of coffee beans, which was just super fun. It had some fun branding on it like we called it Boom, roasted, used, pulled out all the stops and used the office reference. But it was super fun, super well received, and saw a lot of love across social for people that had received it before, but it's a great way to engage the people that are already in the pipeline and considering purchasing from you. It's not a bribe, it's just kind of a nice gesture at that point, just thanking them for their time and effort that they're going into evaluating it. And it goes a really long way.

Alex Barca: [00:06:19] Yeah, I love that you brought up triggers, because I would say another really successful thing that we've run is on the more customer retention side. So 60 days out from a renewal will trigger a handwritten note from our CEO saying, you know, you've been a valued customer, what can I do to keep your business? So it's not just for top of funnel. It also helps a lot with renewal and upsell.

Alex Brown: [00:06:42] Awesome. Um, all right, let's move on. If nobody else has anything on that, we'll move on to the next question. And this is a version of this question I have been asked so many times personally, so I'm very excited to hear y'all's answers. Um, but it's 2023. How are you utilizing AI to enhance your marketing output or just how are you using it in general? Someone make this make sense to me? Please. What are we supposed to do?

Tav Dattolo: [00:07:11] I'll lead this one off. Just given that Drift is an AI based conversational marketing platform. Um, not to promote ourselves at this point, but we are that AI is definitely revolutionizing kind of the marketing landscape, like right before our eyes, like we're entering this intelligence revolution that is some sort of combination and convergence between humans and artificial intelligence. So utilizing it in a way where both are working together and using the strong suits of both of them. So thinking about artificial intelligence yet doesn't have empathy. So use your human nature where you can infuse empathy into it, but also use artificial intelligence to automate tasks that take a long time. Like, Yeah, you're capable of doing it, but also at the same time use it to get a head start on something. So you have ideas in your head as a marketer. Leverage artificial intelligence to generate email copy. The first first draft, it's going to get you about 70% of the way there and you're going to have to take that human element and do about 30% of the work done at that point. But that just took down the amount of time it took you to write that email from 25 minutes to 10 minutes. And it's just a huge efficiency and time saver. Then at that point, one of the tools that I'm personally using that I'm just absolutely in love with for kind of riffing with for subject lines, email, copy, webinar, abstracts, virtual event, talk tracks, different things like that is Jasper. Jasper is a generative AI tool. I will say it's awesome. You can teach it to speak in the tone of voice in which your brand talks, in which, interestingly enough, Drift has a very unique, kind of witty, punchy tone of voice.

Tav Dattolo: [00:08:53] So it really allows us to kind of be ourselves while also using that generative AI at that point. Other things that are kind of taking things by storm that have been around that are really getting the light shone on them would be machine learning. That's one of the big things that 6sense. We use 6sense a lot personally for our internal ABM campaigns to best understand like who is predictably in market at at this time and place. But when we're going to strategize like what accounts are we picking, it's able to prioritize who the people are and decision and purchase, which is a part of their predictive market stages. But also it allows us to kind of understand like, okay, if those people are in decision purchase, are they also a part of your ideal customer profile that they should be people that you should be targeting as well? But but just advice is just start small with AI. It's it's big, it's robust. It can be intimidating. I feel like it's moving faster than any of us can even imagine at this point. It can be overwhelming. So just start with something small. Start with ChatGPT. Just play with it for a little bit. Try to generate a couple subject lines just for an example, and then just continue to build up your knowledge and, and made sure that you're working in tandem with it. And I think it'll take you a long way and allow you to be a lot more efficient in your day to day job.

Alex Barca: [00:10:16] Yeah. Think of starting small. Sorry. Just one. One example I want to give is we've been using ChatGPT recently on the front, so I agree it helps you write the first draft, but it also helps you edit. Right? So if you have a blog post and you say I want to optimize this blog post to rank for X keyword, what would you change about it so that it better ranks and it will be like change the title tag to this, change the H1 to this, add more instances of this keyword and will give you reasons as to why it's it's like you said, it's really a minute task SEO is is is not really a fun thing to do. So outsourcing it a little bit of that to ChatGPT has been helpful.

Tav Dattolo: [00:10:55] Another thing I should add on is ingestion is a really cool capability of AI. So if you like a way that a brand is speaking or you really like the content that people are putting out, you're able to basically give that information to ChatGPT, to Jasper or whatever generative AI tool, and it's able to kind of siphon and then help you write like that person or individual and can take you to that 70% mark as well. That's just been a really cool, powerful way. I've seen a couple people use it and it's it's really fun to see the outputs that it's putting out as a result of it.

Alex Brown: [00:11:32] One of the things as I get to sort of answer your question, I'm very excited as a copywriter on our writing team, we basically think of ChatGPT as what if we hired like the worst writer on our team? Like there's there's a new bad writer on our team that we can throw things at and then we know somebody has somebody has to go fix. But even doing that, you do save so much time. And I'll also say from a marketing standpoint, I don't know how long this will last, but we're still very much at a period where like. Content about I. Is going to get clicks. So if you're working on your blog, like figure out what your tie in and what your excuse to have that content exist is and you're still getting like a nice little bump just because everybody's talking about I. So much. Also, everybody get really good at prompts. It's such a big thing that really makes it all work better. Um, but this is not where we did our webinar like months ago. Let's, let's talk about other stuff and Hannah will bring you in on this one. Um, what are some of the best ways to use intent data? I know we said we weren't talking about AI, but this is another very buzzy thing. People are talking about intent data pretty much constantly, at least around here for sure. So what what have you seen as far as best ways to use it?

Hannah Swanson: [00:12:59] Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think this is it's kind of a loaded question. Right. And I could definitely go on for hours because I work at Intentsify. Um, and we could talk about possible tactics, how you could get the most out of your investment. Um, there's, there's a million different ways to, to arrive at what works best for you. And also if you're like brand new to it and you have it and you don't know what to do with it. Shameless plug. We are doing a webinar next Wednesday and we're going to go through all the marketing use cases. So like go to my LinkedIn if you want to watch it. But I digress. Um, I think if you're if you're brand new, right, and I think we ran a survey last year and it said something like 92% of teams have some form of intent data. Um, but only something like I think it was 45% have a strategy that they were confident about how to use it. So I think it's fair to say that most people don't really know where to start. So I think at a high level, um, I would just start with your marketing core use cases. I'm assuming everyone on this is, is a B2B marketer. There's definitely sales and use cases too. But for the marketing, I would start at the top and say like play around with it for your target account list development at like step one and then you can take it a step further and say, look at messaging and content selection. Um, and then when you nail that, you can start deploying, you know, some, some demand gen activities against that, like display advertising campaigns or content syndication campaigns. And then as those are running, you can take a look and say, okay, this is doing really well, maybe we should pull back or, you know, you can find out about other accounts that are in market that are showing interest that you might not have previously seen. Um, you know, that you can also then take that and, and start doing account and lead scoring against that data. And I guess if you if you wanted to, I think this is kind of a level to kind of use case but like a churn reduction or a competitive Intel use case, you can you can use intent data for as well. Um, but like of course deploying all of those use cases I think is probably a lofty goal if you are just getting started. Um, my advice is just like testing in pieces. Um, you know, like I said, there's a million different ways you can use this, and there's so many ways you can arrive at success. I think it's just a matter of what's going to work best for your organization. Um, and I also think a big aspect of this is taking it a step further outside of marketing and saying like sales, do you understand this treasure trove of data that we have and use that and help and empower them to to use that data and say, okay, here's how I'm going to prioritize my outreach in tandem with what marketing is doing. Um, you know, that's I talk to so many of our customers and really there's only a handful so far and they're the ones that we pull case studies from because they're doing it right. Um, are the ones that are saying I have my sales team has access to the Intentsify platform and they're looking at the UI and they have their account list in there and they're looking at who's doing what. And you know, they're making calls and making outreach based on that. So in a nutshell, I think test, but figure out what core use cases from a marketing perspective are going to move the needle for you faster. And if you want a deep dive on that, we're doing a webinar on Wednesday.

Tav Dattolo: [00:16:33] So and I love and I love the use case around educating your sales team to be empowered with that data. It's such a such a strong use case for that intent data because then you can take those keywords or different things that people are taking a look at and personalize everything that you do. Like we're living in this account based world where we want to be extremely, extremely relevant, timely, and that intent data that's being served up on a silver platter to that sales rep, it could be the difference between converting on a cold call, converting on a cold email and not. So it's just such an incredible place to start, like.

Hannah Swanson: [00:17:12] Ensuring that your ICP is is correct, right? Or like I think a lot of people may run into this issue where it's this too broad or too narrow. You might realize if you're in a too narrow situation that something from someone from an industry you might have never thought would would fit nicely and be a good customer for you is actually, you know, researching your solution heavily. Or, you know, you might realize the opposite of we're casting way too wide of a net. Our message isn't landing. We need to reel it in and make it a lot more personalized so that way we get the right customer right now. And, you know, and we're we're giving them the tools to solve like a pain. So.

Alex Barca: [00:17:52] Yeah, I'll just add on to that and I'll say I think sometimes intent data can feel overwhelming to Hannah's point, like there's almost too much information at times. And I think what I've really done to make it more focused is use it entirely for account selection. So when we're doing these ABM campaigns, making sure that we're using intent data. But what I used to do in the past is the beginning of a quarter or beginning of a year, I would say, okay, here are all the accounts that are showing intent. Let's target them for the next 3 to 6 months. I think that was what was happening is we were missing the like real time intent. So if halfway through the quarter an account was surging and showing a ton of intent, they were not getting put into the ABM campaign. So instead I've employed this like, surging account model where every week five new accounts get added to the campaign based on how much intent they showed the week before. So I think doing something like that ensures that you're focused on the right accounts for a long enough period of time, but you're cycling in new accounts based on recent intent because like if Airbnb visits your website, you don't want to wait till next quarter to put them in your ABM campaign right? You want to make sure that they're they're getting the best of your tactics from both a sales and marketing side. So I think just using the data in real time as possible is great.

Alex Brown: [00:19:03] I think there's kind of an important thread through all of these, these answers too, which is like it's not enough to have intent data and like it's really easy to be like, Oh, we're doing this, we've got all this. It lives somewhere, I guess. And it's really true for everything that all of y'all's companies do. Like it doesn't make sense to send gifts out if that's the end of your plan for those gifts, like congrats, like you gave somebody a cool gift. But like this is we all work at businesses, right? And thinking like knowing if you're going to invest in intent data, having a plan for how you want to use it from the jump just makes everything make so much more sense. So I love that that question. Congrats to the question asker was how do we use this? Because it is like using all of this tech is so important and from surveys we've run, it's a thing a lot of companies struggle with, not just with intent data, but kind of with every shiny thing that they they bought once and then maybe leave on a shelf longer than they should. Um.

Alex Brown: [00:20:15] But let's move on to another question. Thanks. Thanks, Hannah, for guiding us through that. What is a useful hack? Or tool that you use to surface impactful insights that really change how you focus. Two personas. We just talked about how important ISPs can be. Um, but how do you again, back to that thing of okay, we've got, we've got an awesome now how do I use that and how do I really leverage that knowledge other than, again, it's a cool thing that lives in my Google Drive.

Alex Barca: [00:20:52] Yeah, I can speak to that. We actually just invested in a tool a couple of months ago that I think is really a great hack. It's called User Gems, and basically it looks through all of your data and your CRM as well as on LinkedIn and find job changes. So basically finds people that are used to be at your customers that move to your prospect. So if someone was at one of your customer accounts, they were your ICP, they were a champion and they moved to a prospect that's a great person to reach out to. Right. That's who you should be directing your outreach to from an SDR perspective. From a marketing perspective, they should be the ones getting the gifts to your point, like making sure that you're directing your spend and the resources in the right way, not just from a company perspective but also from a person perspective is huge. So we've loved using user gems. They surface those insights right into your CRM or right into even like your outreach or salesloft. And since we've already reaped a ton of benefits, got a lot of great opportunities from that.

Hannah Swanson: [00:21:48] It is so smart. Especially like right now. Um, I remember reading a while ago years ago, saying that the average lifespan of, I think of a CMO was something like 18 months. I can't even imagine what that stat looks like now, especially just in the in the climate we're in right now with the market. And there's so many layoffs happening, unfortunately, all the time. Like people are moving probably on the average, like once a year. If you have a customer champion like you hold on to them. I mean, I know I've bought I'm like a 2 to 3 x customer of certain tech because, you know, I know that it works really well and I know that I want to have it in my stack. And whenever I move jobs, I'm like, I know exactly who to call. So that's that's really interesting because you're not always going to have those people that you know are like me and your account reps. We can't you know, not everything works out like that. So that's really cool. I actually want to look into that tech for our own use case.

Alex Barca: [00:22:42] Sure.

Tav Dattolo: [00:22:55] Where you go to do that outreach to them, but you offer them a gift at that point. Usually gets the conversation going again because oftentimes it takes 30, 60, 90 days for people to ramp up. But at the same time, once you go to engage those people with that platform, it's just a really easy way in the door. Another thing I would say is just take a look at your your existing closed one deals within your CRM and understand the titles that are coming out of it. It's just seems like such an easy thing to do. But then building out like persona sheets, we actually do this internally at Drift where it's basically like the marketer or Mike, the demand gen person is this, this and this and all of their buyer points. Just super helpful from both a marketing and a sales perspective of really speaking the right language to those people. So when we model our our upcoming virtual events or whatever it be like we're speaking to those individuals that are going to be the buyers of our company, like our company eventually. So it's just a really nice hack to have in your back pocket.

Alex Brown: [00:23:57] Perfect. I think there's an interesting switch in there too. Of like there are times when you're marketing to the persona and then like user Gems is a great example of when you start marketing to that person and it's not a job title. It's like a real human being who has like a dog probably, right? And like making that connection with that person, especially in a time when turnover is so high, like become so valuable because as everybody just said, it's such a good in like it's the easiest in in the world. If somebody who loves you goes and works somewhere else like. Okay. I mean, I hope everybody stays in their job forever, as long as they love it. But if they don't, I hope they find new opportunities. Listen, the world's a complicated place. Um, speaking of complicated things, though, what a great segway. Um, this is across the board. I think for anybody who's working with content stuff, always a problem for B2B companies with longer sales cycles. How do you prove the ROI of content marketing? I wrote a blog post. I think it's great. Hopefully somebody who reads it now is going to buy something three months from now. But I have people asking, Why did you spend three hours on that blog post? Question mark. Question mark, question mark. Like, what's what's the best way to tackle that problem? Is there a good way?

Tav Dattolo: [00:25:26] Short answer is that a lot of content marketing that you're doing is for brand awareness. Then at that point, like you're building the rapport with the individuals that you're reaching with your content, and a lot of times that content is hitting them at a time where it might be top of mind for them, but it may not be the right time for them to purchase. So it's really, really hard to kind of quantify the success of that content marketing in real time because a lot of times you could read a piece of content from a company and be like, Oh, I really like that company now. They actually helped me a lot in this moment, but they're not going to come back to you in a year, maybe even two, when they're actually going to be able to afford it or purchase it or whatever it be. But really, like content is definitely a long game. I will say that if your CEO is really keen on seeing those immediate results, sorry, that is my dog. I'd recommend dating your content. Um, like from the jump and just making sure that you're putting that like campaign response in real time so that you can track the long term effects of the content and re-establish kind of the, the expectations that that is having of you. So maybe you switch, maybe not from pipeline or even revenue from that content. Maybe that's something you evaluate every six months, not on a monthly basis. That's almost too fast to even quantify something like that, because the average sales cycle for a lot of companies is way above 50 days, which is over a month. Um, but maybe align on targeting the right people with that content. So like of the people that have downloaded that content, how many of those or what percentage of those people are downloading from your ideal customer profile that you're targeting on a regular basis and really making sure that like you are getting that content in the right hands of the right people at the right time, then at that point.

Alex Brown: [00:27:18] I think so much of that, too, is expectation setting from the jump, like you said, like if you're if you need to reset, hopefully you've set in the first place and just said like, yeah, if this is what we're doing, it's going to take a minute. And like we have a million examples of how it's worked in the past, but like, don't come to me the day after something's gone up and ask how many conversions it's got. Like probably probably none yet. That's okay. That's the plan. That's how this.

Hannah Swanson: [00:27:45] Works. And setting the stage and saying have, you know, kind of reversing it. On if it's your CEO or whoever is asking and saying, Have you ever read one blog and then knocked on their door and said, I would like to buy your software, please. It's the long game. And you have to say that was just like the first piece of the puzzle. And then it's our job to create. This is part of like this, you know, very long probably buying cycle. And it's our job to create a nice one that makes them feel very educated and supported throughout to get to the purchase.

Alex Barca: [00:28:18] Yeah, I think whatever early indicator metrics you can share because I know I've given this like, you know, answer to CEOs before and they don't accept it. So whatever early indicator metrics you can share, the better, right? Like of our 200 target accounts, 10% of them viewed this content or of the decision maker above persona. We, like the majority of the downloads, were from decision makers. Whatever it can be to show that you're on the right track, I think can be helpful.

Tav Dattolo: [00:28:47] One last thing we'll say before you jump in is that there is a way to take a look at all of the campaign responses. So maybe one way that you can prove out the fact that you need content for every stage of the funnel is looked at a closed one deal. Now, don't look back at the campaign responses that happened and looked at how many things that they either downloaded. They looked at, they went to the website as a result of it before they even made that purchase decision. Because I guarantee you, I think there's some stat out there now where people that make a purchasing decision do at least 30 activities prior to making a purchase. Don't have a site for that. But I briefly remember that that was a number in my head. Um, but yeah, it's just there's such a long tail to it. And like, you also have to break it out from a top of funnel, middle funnel and bottom of funnel side of things of like it's going to require a lot of work and a lot of different pieces of content at each stage of the funnel to get somebody over the line then at that point.

Alex Brown: [00:29:45] And thanks for keeping us Honest with your answer there, Alex. Yeah, sometimes just telling the CEO it's going to take a while, isn't? It's a good way to have user gems be really relevant to you and your career. Um. One. One last thing, and then we'll get out of here. Everybody's been really coy about saying, like, I'm not here to plug my company. Like, come on. Um, but relatedly, what are some creative co-marketing projects you've done with partners?

Hannah Swanson: [00:30:15] I can take this one. Um, and, you know, I'll say this like, I could go on for so long here, but we are. It's already 231 actually, so I will keep it brief and say a the most creative you can get here, the better. And if it feels cheesy at first like it's okay, it will be okay. Um, and I say that as a caveat here because my favorite co-marketing partner campaign that we've done in my career, I've always, with the exception of a very short, not very short stint like a year and a half or so at Oracle before I came back to B2B like startup marketing and mid mid market land, which I love. Um, our budgets have always been kind of tight, so I've always, you know, had to figure out how to make this huge impact on pipeline without spending 200 hours a week on it and, you know, a millions of dollars. So I've always liked to, you know, take as many partners as I can, bring them in to divide and conquer on, you know, producing and dividing and conquering the spend. Um, my favorite one that I've done was we ran a, like, scavenger hunt kind of thing at a conference. Um, you know, one of the, my biggest goals at every single big giant industry conference I go to is how to boost up, how to boost engagement while we're there. So that way it feeds conversations and feeds pipelines for like a quarter or two after we get home. Um, so what we did, we put little like tokens that people had to collect at each partner's activation. So their booth, if they had a speaking session, if they had a meeting space or a field event or whatever that may be, they could grab a little token at each stop. And at the at the end of the week, you know, if you kind of collected them all or, you know, collected a bunch of them, there was tiers of prizes and we would give away like free trials or consulting sessions or whatever it may be. Each partner would have some some skin in the game. It was really successful. People got super excited about it. I had customers from like Fortune 100 companies being like, I got all my tokens and you're like, That's great. And it's it's exciting to see people get like this child, like excitement over a scavenger hunt at a at an industry event. So it was and it made a really big impact on pipeline because we were able to reach more of an audience there and tap into our partners networks as well. So it was hugely successful. It was a really fun one to run. Um, I'm probably going to do it again at some point. That was pre Covid era and I'm still not back in full force, but that was my favorite.

Alex Brown: [00:32:59] Anybody else real quick?

Tav Dattolo: [00:33:01] I've got something. So one of the big things that we do at Drift is one of our big top down goals this year was to have partner attachment on almost everything. Actually, the number that we had set in place was 75% of everything that we do involves a partner in some capacity just because of how important that they are to us. And strength equals numbers. Like it's really comes down to that of like you have a database, they have a database. If they're aligned with you, usually partners are aligned with you in terms of the ideal customer profile that you're going after. It just really helps you magnify your overall messaging. And this can be as simple as like including them as like a a speaker within an e-book, like doing an interview for them. It could be social campaigns that you're looking to run. It could be if you integrated with a new company and you want to do some sort of social promotion around it. It could be field marketing events like Hannah had mentioned, where you guys are doing something really fun. Maybe you want to do a chef's tasting, but it's really expensive and you want to cut the cost of it, but you're able to deliver that unique personalized touch for those accounts. Then at that point where you guys are both inviting them and it could even be just webinars as a whole, just having them on board, it allows you to diversify kind of the opinions that you have. We're all here from different companies today. We're all partners. And just overall, just having those different viewpoints and opinions is just really helpful to not dilute your content and say, Me, me, me, me. It's, hey, this is what everybody is kind of saying at this point. So.

Alex Barca: [00:34:36] I'll just echo what they said. I would think that from Postal’s perspective, we throw a lot of events like sub events of larger events. Like if we're going to a conference, we want to have a dinner, we want to have a party, and we always utilize our partners to make sure that we're all bringing in our own separate audiences and we can all share database leads, all of that. So yeah, I would just echo what both of them are saying. Partners are super important to use.

Hannah Swanson: [00:34:57] That's like field events at conferences, and teaming up with partners is by far one of my favorite things to do because it's divide and conquer. It's easier. It's it's more, it's cheaper. It's just that is the way to do it.

Tav Dattolo: [00:35:11] The last thing I'll say on that is just make sure you take care of your partners. I've seen some people mistreat partners before and take advantage of them. Just make sure that you're giving as much as they are. Always keep the work favorable to both people, and it's just a lead into a beautiful partnership that's going to help and yield dividends for quarters upon quarters.

Alex Barca: [00:35:34] And it's like setting a clear expectation about what each partner is going to bring to the table is super important. Like everyone must invite X amount of people or what have you is important.

Alex Brown: [00:35:44] Yeah. And with that in mind about being a good partner, I'm sorry I kept everybody six minutes over, but thank you so much for helping us go through these questions. Thanks to everybody watching who sent them in when you registered, if you have any additional ones, let us know. We'll we'll find a way to get them answered. And then real quick, let's just let's make it official, plug whatever you want to plug. Let's just go down the list, plug your LinkedIn, plug your website, whatever you want to do, go nuts.

Hannah Swanson: [00:36:13] Um. You can find me. I'm Hannah Swanson. You can find me on LinkedIn, Director of Marketing Engagement at Intentsify. And like I said, I would love if everyone here checked out that webinar we're hosting next week with our partner, MOI Global. Um, and we're going to talk through how to use intent data for some core marketing use cases and make sure you get your ROI on it. So, see me there.

Alex Barca: [00:36:40] Um, I'll just plug. You can find me on LinkedIn. I think it's Alexandra Barca, Director of Demand Gen at Postal. If you connect with me on LinkedIn, I will send you a gift from Postal so you'll be able to experience the recipient, the recipient firsthand.

Tav Dattolo: [00:36:56] Awesome. And then I'm happy to tell you I'm the Senior Global Demand Gen Manager at Drift. If you ever want to talk, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. I just dropped it in the chat for everybody here, and if you're interested in Drift, why don't you just hop over to the website and engage with that cool little chat bot down in the corner? It'll work wonders for what your opinions are of chat bots in the future.

Alex Brown: [00:37:19] So I just realized. So when you drop that in the chat, it came up with team next to it, and I thought that meant only the team can see it. But what it meant was that I know that you're on. So if the if Alex and Hannah, you want me to throw your LinkedIn in there, I'm not showing favoritism. I just don't know how tech works. Um, thank you again, everybody, for joining us. But it's. It's nine minutes late. If your CEO is mad, tell him. I told them marketing takes time. I apparently think that'll go over really well. Thanks for joining us. Keep an eye on ironhorse.io to see what our next coffee break is. And until then, coffee break's over. Let's get back to work. Thanks, everybody.

Alex Barca: [00:38:03] Thank you.