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We feature D2C operators and CRO experts with a story worth sharing.
We feature D2C operators and CRO experts with a story worth sharing.
Nick Harley is the growth marketing lead at Auror, a retail crime intelligence platform for retailers to report, solve and prevent crime. The platform streamlines the crime reporting process and connects the dots on criminal activity, transforming how retailers, law enforcement prevent crime in real time.
I have got quite a varied background, really a very unconventional background as I started off in the construction industry before ending up in marketing and I give credit to a B2B software company where I learned a lot of lessons while building the company and eventually selling it. Overall I've been in and around startups for 10, 15 years now mainly through the marketing stack. The challenges I've kind of managed to cross is not having any kind of education in marketing. I'm purely self-taught and I Google stuff every day, to solve a new challenge and get up to speed with a new technology or tool.
Auror is like an enterprise retail platform. So there's a lot of account-based marketing that goes on. We have lots of conferences and events for lead generation among other things. However, we're starting to get a lot smarter with our digital marketing, lead scoring etc. One philosophy we have adopted, which is not very marketing specific, is that we want to work in small teams of highly capable people. So we don't have many people in the marketing team, but everyone is highly experienced and we believe we can kind of move faster that way.
Looking at data and making sure we're optimizing conversion rates. I'm starting to get a lot more involved with the SEO strategy now. We use a standard tool set as well like Google analytics, Salesforce campaigns, for marketing automation. Our datasets are getting smarter all the time, but we also have a lot of in-house built tools as well, that track usage across the product and more.
I think it really depends on your individual needs. I was a big fan of Autopilot for managing marketing automation for a while. I think the one that's most exciting that I want to look at next is 6Sense which is a lot more on account-based marketing when it comes to the marketing stack. So I think that's got some real potential, and it'll be very good for account-based marketers.
I mean, it's extremely important that with content in particular, you've got to really kind of decide on who it is and what persona you're going to market to. Who does your website speak to? Who does your content speak to? Is it a specific role? Is it a specific, or authority like a known manager or VP or CIO?
I think the metric that you target can be very different across what campaign you're doing. I would really recommend that people decide up front what metric is important to that particular campaign then track that because there's nothing worse than tracking something that isn't actually that beneficial to the marketing funnel.
It really varies on the campaign and the medium as well. If your focus is brand impressions, measure that a lot differently to other campaigns that are a lot more, further down the funnel for how many sales leads did we get, how many conversions did we get and so on.
It's hugely effective. We can see all the data, email marketing does work. With email marketing the open rates and also the click through rates are low however, you can still track the activities and measure the effectiveness of your campaign and that's still valuable.
I think you just have to make sure that you're doing best practices. Like your subject lines are enticing for people to open and click through, also CTAs are relevant to the individual and personalize it. I think if you're just going with email marketing and blasting emails not personalizing them, then that's when you won't really get much success.
I don't think there's anything that stands out in particular as one thing I've continually followed, but I feel like there's plenty of people I follow on Twitter, like Rand Fishkin. However, marketing is constantly shifting and the technologies we use are constantly changing, staying up to date with what's happening and what's working is very important.
It's, without question organic, it is the most satisfying outcome that comes from finding a keyword, building content and seeing results over time for organic. The beauty of getting a machine that works off organic traffic is hugely satisfying, because you're not continuing to pipe that traffic and it just works for you forever. Organic for me is certainly close to my heart and I do love digging into SEO tools and finding opportunities, and then seeing the organic traffic increase.
It is tricky these days because there are so many ways that people are competing for attention.
“Brand authenticity is something that I feel quite strongly about. Having your brand stand for something that people resonate with, speaks in their language. So they want to follow that brand, because it's quite close to their own way of thinking.”
You've got to make your brand connect with people, and your target persona, otherwise they just went, they will not listen to you.
It's about lead scoring and you can see on an individual level and there's probably other tools you can do this by tracking in Salesforce campaigns, the activity of the leads in the context you can then roll up the lead schools into more of an account view and then use engagement history dashboards to see which individual accounts are contributing, the most active and then which individuals on those accounts are most, engaged as well. That's really kind of given those data-driven insights into kind of getting a bit smarter around who's engaging with what and kind of putting a bit more insight into salespeople's hands, so to speak.
It really starts with research, you can probably get a bit of an idea about who you sell to, but you've really got to kind of go deeper and look at customers that you have managed to sell to in the past. What did they look like, what are the common traits about them, and then you can always interview them.
You can kind of play around with that as well with the messaging around who's resonating with what, so I guess for most markets out there where to start as you all have a fair idea already based on your current style. However, I have a look at the sales history and find out where that first interaction came from.
I used to read autobiographies of successful entrepreneurs and they weren't particularly marketing focused, but I got a lot of inspiration out of people who have, kind of come from nothing and achieve something.
People like Rand, Fishkin, Neil Patel are the kinds of people I follow now. They share some industry insight or document or link off to some other website and then, and then it is just great content. So I read content from all over the place just to kind of keep up to date with the latest marketing tactics.
I think going forward competing for attention will be more difficult. It's very easy to be kind of all over the place and be everywhere with no real strategy. It was the case a while ago that everyone was kind of spinning up podcasts and now podcasts are kind of overwhelming. I think it's similar with platforms like TechTalk and things.. like they might have a lot of people, they're not your audience most of the time.
So I would advise -
http://linkedin.com/in/nickharleynz/