Episode 13: Automating B2B Tech Marketing with Brandi Starr from Tegrita

The theme of our 13th podcast episode is Automating B2B Tech Marketing.

Joining our host Jeremy Balius to discuss all things content market automation is Brandi Starr from Tegrita.

Summary

Brandi Starr, COO of Tegrita, shares her journey in B2B marketing and the power of marketing automation.

She emphasizes the importance of personalization and the need to move away from one-size-fits-all campaigns.

Brandi discusses the common challenges organizations face with marketing automation, such as resource constraints, funnel problems, and data flow issues. She highlights the need for a strategic approach and the importance of mapping out the communication journey.

Brandi also explains the benefits of marketing automation, including scalability, targeted messaging, and brand recognition. She concludes by describing the marketing automation nirvana, where every contact receives the right message at the right time.

Key Takeaways

• Marketing automation requires a strategic approach and mapping out the communication journey.
• Common challenges with marketing automation include resource constraints, funnel problems, and data flow issues.
• Marketing automation offers benefits such as scalability, targeted messaging, and brand recognition.
• Moving towards personalization and away from one-size-fits-all campaigns is crucial for success.
• The marketing automation nirvana is when every contact receives the right message at the right time.

About Brandi Starr

Brandi Starr is a marketing powerhouse with over 20 years of experience shaking up B2B and B2B2C companies.

As COO at Tegrita, a consultancy that unlocks the power of email, she’s all about transforming processes, enhancing go-to-market strategies, and ensuring smooth customer experiences.

Named one of the Top 50 Women in MarTech, Brandi blends strategic vision with operational savvy. She’s also the co-author of “CMO to CRO” and the host of the Revenue Rehab podcast, known for turning ideas into action and inspiring others in the marketing world.

Connect with Brandi on LinkedIn.

Jeremy Balius: Hi, welcome to the B2B Tech Marketing Talks podcast, where we engage with leading marketing and channel leaders to get fresh perspectives and practical advice on the latest trends, effective strategies, and best practices for B2B tech marketing.

I’m your host, Jeremy Balius. Today’s theme is Automating B2B Tech Marketing.

I’m very excited because I’m joined by Brandi Starr from Tegrita.

Brandi is a marketing powerhouse with over 20 years of experience, shaking up B2B and B2B2C companies COO at Tegrita, a consultancy that unlocks the power of email. She’s all about transforming processes, enhancing go-to-market strategies, and ensuring smooth customer experiences.

She’s been named one of the top 50 women in MarTech, blending strategic vision with operational savvy. She’s also the co-author of the book, CMO to CRO.

She hosts the Revenue Rehab Podcast, known for turning ideas into action and inspiring others in the marketing world.

This was a really fascinating conversation for me.

We are regularly in the space of talking to business leaders about what’s possible when it comes to where their marketing can go and the way that they can use Martek to support that and scale up their endeavors.

But the way that Brandi is talking about. How we make decisions and why we make those decisions and how to build a foundation upon which to make those decisions, I think is really important one step beyond that.

She’s then building frameworks for businesses to understand how they can scale up their capacity. And their reach and the way that they are personalizing their engagement and their nurture streams more efficiently through upfront, robust planning. There’s so much value to be gained from the way that Brandi’s talking about this and articulating marketing automation.

I really hope you get as much value out of this as I did. And with that, let’s get into the conversation.

Hey, Brandi. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today.

Brandi Starr: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Jeremy Balius: I’m excited as well. Hey, Brandi we start every episode in starting with origin story.

I’d love to find out about. How you got to where you are today.

Brandi Starr: Okay. Yeah, it is interesting. I always joke and say my claim to fame is I started in designing marketing collateral that were being sent via fax machine. And I don’t know that my kids have ever really even used a fax machine. machine. I’ve been in B2B marketing now for 23 years.

And I’ve worked across most areas of marketing. So like I said, I started as your typical entry level role, a marketing coordinator. I was doing some design work for a voluntary benefits company. I’ve worked on the data side of marketing, being the person that actually managed the marketing database.

Data hygiene, segmentation, all of those things. But the majority of my career has been spent in marketing strategy specifically really around email marketing and that middle of the funnel. So that top of funnel, traditional demand lead generation, running ads and SEO. That is the like one big area that I’ve never touched in terms of a formal role.

Obviously I lead, marketing now, so I touch pretty much everything. But prior to my career has really been in that middle of the funnel. How do we orchestrate the communication journey to help drive revenue? I’ve done some, cross sell, up sell was my last role before I jumped the fence into consulting.

And really I had just gotten to a point where I was super involved in marketing operations and how we were leveraging marketing automation and technology for what we were doing in our organization.

And I wanted to do more of that. There was so much that I was curious about things that I wanted to tinker with that just didn’t necessarily make sense for our organization.

And I was like, I want to do this for more people. And so that’s where it’s been almost 10 years now. I jumped the fence from the client side. To the consulting side, and I’ve never really looked back.

Jeremy Balius: That’s amazing. In the consulting space, you must be exposed to so many different scenarios and situations and just get incredible insight in terms of the different ways that marketing automation could be deployed in different types of businesses.

Brandi Starr: Yes, it is very interesting especially to see how different organizations use the exact same tools so differently, in order to enable their business cases.

I still, although Tegrita does work with some B2C clients, I still have always leaned in primarily what our. With our B2B companies across technology, manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, all sorts of different industries.

And it is so interesting how they are so the same yet so different as well. Yeah. Yeah. I bet. I bet. Hey, before we get into all things, marketing automation wanted to take a quick step back.

Because I’ve discovered you through in part, your Revenue Rehab Podcast. And listening to that and recently seeing that you had reached episode 123, it’s just a phenomenal feat to even get to that point because of the amount of effort required.

I wanted to start being in a B2B role predominantly, as you say and with what you do. What are some of the surprising learnings you picked up from such prolific podcasting?

I’d say the number one learning that I’ve had is just how much I still have to learn. In, been in the space 20 years to a certain degree, I almost feel like I’ve seen and heard it all.

But with each guest that I talk to, I always learn something. And, there’s some episodes where I will openly joke with guests that I forgot my questions because I, my wheels start spinning and I’m thinking about what they’re saying and how to implement it either for Tegrita or for me.

And I get lost in the learnings that I have to remember that, oh, I’m the host as well. And so I think that’s been number one is as much as you think, even about topics that, really well having conversations with other people. other people who are experiencing the same or similar things is so important to really gain those learnings and perspective.

And I think that’s been the most positive. Huh. And then I think the other thing that I’ve learned is I’ve, learned how difficult it really can be to carry a conversation. And my podcast streams live, so there’s no editing. And so that is one that can be tough because you have lots of different personalities, lots of different experience levels in terms of comfort on camera and on mic.

And as the host, when something starts to go left or you can tell someone is like visibly nervous or uncomfortable, especially knowing that it airs live and there’s no, there’s no turning back.

It has been a pleasant surprise for myself at how well I have been able to handle and manage those situations to where I’ve had some episodes that have started off feeling like they were not going to be great.

And in the end, it was really good content, really good conversation. And so I’d say those are my two biggest a has, one professional, one personal.

Jeremy Balius: I think it’s also a real testament that repetition is so important and you get increasingly comfortable the more you do it. Yes. I’d love to hear a little bit about in what ways you would advise business leaders or executives who maybe listen to podcasts are considering it for their business.

Are thinking about in what ways it could benefit them don’t really understand what they could get out of it because there’s no direct linkage ROI, there’s no ability to say, if we publish this will happen. How would you talk about it from your experience in terms of these benefits?

Brandi Starr: So I’ll give you two again, one professional, one personal.

So as an individual and a business leader, I consider myself a thought leader and I have a lot of information and knowledge to share. And so I initially started off in situations like this, where I’m the guest and I get to come on and talk about something that is my area of expertise.

What I found was there just weren’t enough opportunities, there’s a lot like in terms of what my background is and finding the right podcast that really are a fit.

I’m not one to just, try to be on everything for the sake of getting my name out there. And so I recognize how challenging that is. And starting my own podcast, even though I am the interviewer, it still gives me a consistent opportunity to share my thoughts, my input, my insights, along with pulling out those thoughts, input, and insights.

And so it really does help if you have any desire, whether it’s career growth or being able to support, your business and overall brand building it’s a great opportunity to really establish who you are as a leader. What you think about your thoughts, your feelings, what you care about, and you start to become known for those things.

And that has huge impacts. I show up sometimes at business events and people will be like, Oh my God, Brandi, it’s so great to meet you. And for a second it’s I’m almost like, have we met? Have I forgotten you? And then I realized it’s because they see my face on the podcast, they listen to me, they’ll quote something from a lesson they’ve learned or an episode they loved.

And it’s really a cool. Feeling to know that you are positively impacting both the work and personal lives for other people. On the business side, I think this carries a good bit of weight, especially for your audience, because in some cases, there are audiences that we want to talk to that can be difficult to reach.

So for example, if you’re selling through a partner or distributor channel You need to talk to the end user, but you don’t have a direct connection to the end user. In my case, there’s a lot, our target audience are heads of marketing, so CMOs, VPs of marketing, CROs, and They’re overwhelmed.

Like they generally are not just trying to, here’s some consultancy pitching them on, what they may need, they’ve got, at least 10 pitches a day. And so the podcast is one way for us to get through that. No, like trust with our target audience in a way that is not salesy. Like I, I give all my guests the opportunity to do their shameless plug at the end of the episode.

I occasionally mention things we do in ways that we support things, but generally speaking, you’re not going to hear a Tegra pitch in any of the podcasts. But it allows those leaders to know and trust me as a peer, and then to also at least know a little bit about what we offer. So where there’s an opportunity, they’re like, Hey, let me take a look at those folks.

And so it is the same where if you’ve got a podcast that you are talking to your end user. This is a way that they get that brand recognition and familiarity and see your brand as an expert in the space, and they may talk to their partner or distributor and say, Hey, have you considered this? Or let me hear what this vendor has to offer.

Likewise, you could go the opposite direction and have a podcast that speaks to who is The one buying from you, your partners and distributors. So there’s a lot of ways that you can go there, especially in the technology space, where you’re not talking about what you’re set, what you sell, but you are talking about the things that your target audience actually cares about that you have some expertise in.

And so as a business, you get some of that benefit. I put it in the brand building category, because as you said, You can’t draw a direct line to revenue as a person, it helps with the career. It helps with, you as a leader, putting your thoughts and things out there for the world to hear.

Jeremy Balius: It’s incredible advice.

And I think it’s so relevant, particularly as in the B2B technology space, there is a Real challenge for businesses to differentiate themselves in a meaningful way, it’s really hard to display that without getting into the features and the technical specifications of something, which is where people switch off and so the way that you’re describing these opportunities for creating awareness in a personal and personable way to become known, to become liked and trusted, as you say. And, we talk regularly about how we’re all in the currency of trust and building trust. It becomes such an awesome vehicle.

The way you’ve articulated that is real special. Thank you for that.

Brandi Starr: Oh, thank you.

Jeremy Balius: Okay. I’m really excited about today because you live and breathe marketing automation. And I want to be abundantly clear that we’re not here to talk about tools and we’re not here to talk about which tool is best for whom.

We’re going to be talking about more broadly around how do we use marketing automation in a meaningful way. I’d like to start with your experience. As you’re engaged by organizations, what is the most common ask when it comes to marketing automation? Why are they coming to you in the first instance?

Brandi Starr: Generally, they get to me because they know something is not working and what that something is really varies organization, from one organization to another.

But I would say there are some common threads. So one is resource availability and the ability to scale. We. are all unfortunately in your typically, I won’t say all, most of us are in a resource constraint environment, whether that is budget or human resources.

And so there is a need, a lot of people say, do more with less, I believe in doing better. And so that is a common one, which is we don’t have enough resources, but our business goals are not getting any easier. In fact, they get more aggressive year over year.

So we’ve got to still hit these numbers and we’ve got to do it with less.

people. And so technology is, what you turn to and within that automation. And so as a part of that, the marketing automation tool is what sits at the center of that and helps to automate so many different things. The other challenge that I see is where people recognize they have a funnel problem.

So there’s a lot of things that happen at the top. So there’s a ton of money spent in lead generation efforts running paid search and digital and, all of the things. And then you have these really expensive resources at the bottom. i.e. sales, who are very money motivated and they don’t make a lot of money if they don’t sell anything.

And they recognize that there’s a challenge getting the efforts from the top to connect with the efforts at the bottom. And so the main tactic that supports the middle of the funnel is email.

And with email comes marketing automation. And then even where there are other channels in the middle. They generally connect through the marketing automation platform.

And so those I would say are the two biggest reasons. And the third that happens not as often, but where they recognize they have a data flow issue where there’s a company that has the vision. Like they know what they should be doing.

They’ve got the people in place to put together the strategy and the content and all of those pieces, but they recognize that the big hindrance for them is they don’t have the data to support the level of hyper hyper targeted segmentation and personalization that we recommend that actually works.

And so they’re like, Hey, how do we get the data to flow? Cause we have all the data. Yeah. But how do we put it together?

And so I’d say those are the three most consistent scenarios of how people get to us. Or there’s always some technology acquisition, or, there’s some of those that happen far less.

But those are really the three big challenges that I see.

Jeremy Balius: If we could start with that last one. I’m particularly interested in understanding a bit more about those who understand that data is a problem. What is the problem?

Brandi Starr: Generally, it’s siloed data. And that is the most common thing. So if we think about, and I’ll just use a traditional example, again, all companies are set up a little bit differently, but if you think about it, your sales team is going to live in a CRM system, that’s where they have their cop, their contacts, their opportunities, their tracking, all of the things, generally that CRM is what is also connected to accounting.

So to a certain degree, you’ve got a little bit of the financial data there. You have your marketing automation platform, which is generally the home to the marketing data.

Sometimes the contacts and accounts that exist in CRM match what’s in marketing automation. Sometimes that’s not the case.
And then you also have these other ancillary technologies that you’re using, a content experience tools. Sometimes people are using something to build like interactive assets, or you’ve got a webinar platform, or you’re running LinkedIn ads, and there’s a form there.

And so there’s all these different tools that are used for different purposes along the communication journey that are collecting data.

And in some cases, there are conflicts. Where, I put in my title as consultant. Sometimes just cause in addition to being the COO, I do play a consulting role. However, if in another system it says COO now you don’t know how to target me. Am I a C suite executive? Am I a consultant?

Those require very different messages. And so you have conflicting data. You have data that only, a lot of people, most companies integrate their CRM and their marketing automation platform.

That’s pretty common. I’d say more times than not, those are integrated. But then, I’ve seen teams where they’ve got 36 tools in their marketing technology stack, nevermind all the other stuff that sales is using.

Most of that data is all isolated. And so if it’s isolated, Or if it’s dirty, we can’t use it to really target and craft a really impactful, set of communications that are going to move the prospects and customers to the desired outcome.

And so that is where there are, usually it’s a scenario where they’ve tried, I had one client that was a Credit union, and they had a challenge with churn.

They had a lot of accounts just based on their target audience. They were local to a particular region. And there was a lot of turnover when people would leave the region that would cause them to close their accounts. They, works with them to come up with a whole strategy, how we help to prevent that, etc.

Go to start building it. And I’m like, okay, here’s the data we need. And they’re like, Oh, I’m like, I need to know who has the higher tier checking account versus just your basic, no minimum, cause the people that don’t keep more than a thousand bucks in the account, like not a big deal when you lose them, people who typically keep 50, 000 in their account.

Much bigger deal when you lose them, they couldn’t tell me that, when was the last time they had a transaction? They couldn’t tell me that there was so much data and they’re like, Oh, that list lives in that system. And that lives in that system. This whole campaign we came up with is all for not, if we can’t get the data.

And so it had to go on hold. We had to do a whole data project, figure out how to normalize it, get it where it needed to be. And so that happens a lot where you will have a system that’s Savvy leader that comes in and knows what needs to happen, knows the right strategy, the right levers to pull, and they end up at a brick wall.

And that’s the data.

Jeremy Balius: Tell me about what that conversation’s like when they’re all hyped up and excited, ready to go. And you’re saying, guys, it is so messy underneath here. We need to clean this first.

Brandi Starr: I usually, my sort of default tactic when I have to deliver bad news is to help lead them to it so that they see it for themselves.

And, in that example, I basically said, here’s the scenarios we need. Here’s the information we need to identify so that these people flow into this campaign. Show me how to get that data. And they arrived at the conclusion themselves.

We have a problem. I’ve had another conversation like that where I’ve said, okay, I’ve pulled in a segment of all the people that we’re saying we need to target.

Does this number look right? And they gasp because the number was like 3000 and they’re like, no, it should be at least 30, 000. And so I’m like, let’s peel back the layers of the onion.

Let’s look at what’s in this field. Oh, the majority of that field is blank. Let’s look what’s in this field. And so it really, for me, I like to lead people to the conclusion instead of just it goes over differently when you can see it, as opposed to me just saying, yeah, your data sucks.
It in the end it’s yes, now you see we have a problem. Let’s come up with a plan to fix it. And so yeah, when I have to be the one to deliver that I generally just show them, pull up, like the mechanic, I’m gonna lift the hood and be like, See this filter? super dirty.

This is the problem. And then they tend to get it.

Jeremy Balius: I would imagine once they get over the Shock of uncovering this, that there would be a whole range of benefits to the organization, not just for that campaign, but in terms of what’s possible in terms of not a data integrity, but also other campaign opportunities as they are able to segment or get more personable and personal with their targeting.

Brandi Starr: Yes, definitely the challenge tends to come in is that marketing and even sales will see the value, but there’s a lot of times where we have to pull in I. T. or some other teams that have to be involved in fixing the problem, and that is often where the challenge lies. in getting it to be a priority for enough people to dedicate the resources.

And we’ve had, I could tell you story upon story where we’ve built workarounds for clients that didn’t totally make sense, but they knew they couldn’t get the resources to do what did make sense. And so they’re like, we got to focus on what we can control. And so there is, it is.
It is challenging, especially the larger the organization, the, longer the timelines to get a project on the radar. But yeah, generally once people see it and they get the possibilities, it does, at least within the marketing team, become a priority to get it figured out.

Jeremy Balius: Amazing. So you centralize data.

It’s single source of truth. We’re ready to utilize that in a particular way. How do you go about talking about campaigning in the context of automation? So much is possible. How do you zero in on and consult on what.

Brandi Starr: We start with a map just, like anything, we’re trying to get to a destination.

We need a map. And so generally I will do a strategic workshop with clients where we get the right people in ideally a real room. Sometimes we do it virtually because that’s the nature of the world that we live in, but where we’ve got someone representing all aspects of the customer journey. So at minimum, someone from sales, someone from marketing, if they’ve got customer success, if they’ve got a partner channel, ideally we’d have someone that either represents the channel or the channel marketing people, but really get everybody in a room and map out what is the communication journey.

What tactics are going to be used where for what purpose and come up with a whole plan. And generally everybody has a moment of over overwhelm when we finish that plan because then they realize how much work goes into making the plan a reality.

But I look at it as we have a whole plan. It’s if you’ve ever been where they rebuild, there used to be trees and they knock it down and all of a sudden there’s a whole new city.

You Someone said, here’s the plot of land. When we knock this down, this piece is going to be the school. This is going to be that. And then somebody figures out, this is where we need to start.

And that’s exactly what we do. We build out our plan and then we figure out based on what is happening in the organization, where do we start?

And that’s not always the same. In some cases they’re in hyper growth mode and they have lots of money spent top of funnel, and we may need to just get some mid funnel initiative going that you can automate and get people, nurture them, get them ready for sales.

In some cases it may be on the customer side dealing with churn.

It may be, that it’s, nurture, but for this particular audience. So we look at the whole map and we identify based on available resources, whatever starting point.

So we may say, we’re going to start with this one. We’re going to start with these three. We’re going to start with these five, whatever it is we pick what is.

And as much as I hate the buzzword, the low hanging fruit or quick wins is another way to say it. And that’s where we start. And how do we build and automate that? And I hate the term set it and forget it because that’s not what happens, but you get it running and you still watch it and you optimize it.

But once it’s running, you move on to the next thing. So using, my analogy, we Build the school. Now after we build the school, we’re going to build the fire station and then we’re going to build the park or, whatever the right order is.

And after a period of time, there’s a whole new town and, you have neighborhoods and people start occupying that neighborhood before there’s anything built around it.

And like that really is the way that it works. We get things built, we get them running and over a period of time, and that might be. A year, that might be 18 months.

I’ve got a client that we’re in year two of a three-year plan, because everything they had running, their business had changed so much. It was time to toss it all and start over.

And so we’ve been slowly leaving some old things on as we rebuild the new, we turn off the old. And so there’s different ways, depending on your current situation of how you tackle it.

But I always start with that strategic conversation and not a shameless plug for us, but it is good to have a third party facilitate that because a good facilitator is going to pull out of the team more than you would get without someone leading that.

But that’s where we’re going to map out. Here’s all the things should exist and we’re going to prioritize it. And then from there it’s like everybody has their marching orders and we just start working through that.

Jeremy Balius: I love the analogy. I think that’s the first time I’ve heard it described in that way and It’s I think it really bespeaks the complexity that it eventually becomes in terms of a thriving, humming town with all of the different interlinking parts.

Picking up on the overwhelm component for a second. Where do you think that overwhelm comes from?

I think that as you were talking, the first thing that jumped to my mind was marketers and business leaders who are pursuing the end goal, the end state of benefiting from marketing automation. I wonder if there’s almost this expectation or maybe ignorance in thinking that achieving it could be automated or that it would be more simple than than what it is.

Where do you think that, what is the misnomer? What is the misbelief that’s there that people think actually the hard decision was already made because we’ve decided to pursue it.

When actually, no, That’s the start line of the marathon, guys. You’ve decided to run the race. You haven’t started the race yet.

What is it? What’s the inhibitor there?

Brandi Starr: So I think there’s actually two things you’re asking. So first, where does the overwhelm come from? I think that comes from the fact that most people are stretched thin.

It’s like your day-to-day is really full, and when you see a new body of work in front of you, there is this feeling of, how am I going to have the time, and then I also, the phrase is, ignorance is bliss, and when you know better, you do better.

Go together in that before you actually recognize what’s possible and what should be happening, you’re comfortable in whatever is happening now. But once you see the future and you think about you drive past that woods you don’t look at it and be like, man, I hate that there’s a woods over there you’re unbothered by it.

But then if I think about even the town where I live now, when I first moved here to Atlanta, this was trees and cows coming out here was, nobody drove out here. Now it is a thriving community that I absolutely love. And that comes from someone taking on the work. And that is the thing.

It’s once you see what it could be, you want it to happen now. But you also know that you are still stretched and have to reprioritize and figure out how to get this into your day to day work. And so that’s where I think the overwhelm comes from.

The misnomer that I think people have about automation is That automation just solves the problems and that there’s no work involved and that’s just false.

Like it’s, and I use like AI is, AI is the thing. You can’t get through a conversation without chat GPT coming up and One of the things that, and I can use that as an analogy because I do feel like, AI and chat GPT right now is what marketing automation was when, it first came out and it is this perception.

That it’s going to magically solve all of our problems. And if you’ve ever tried to prompt chat GPT without giving it the proper effort in your prompting, what comes out of it is crap.

Whatever it is you’re doing, what you get back is total crap. If what you put in is. isn’t well thought through and done in a way that it can actually receive, interpret, and process.

The same is true with marketing automation. People bought these, big robust tools and somehow thought that things were just going to magically exist. And that’s just not the way that it works.

Getting it built the first time is actually more work than when we used to just do drip marketing, where you create one email, you send it, you create the next one, you manually send it.

It is more work building out an automated campaign. The difference is you don’t have to consistently have that human intervention. Like I can remember a point when for webinars, I had to send the invite.

Then I had to go into the webinar tool, pull the list of registrations, scrub that against the original list of invites to then send the next invitation.

And I’d have to do that based on how many ever invitations. And then when the webinar was over, you pulled the list, you separated it by registrations and attendees, you manually sent each thing. In my last company, I had built a whole automated webinar program that was built once that every webinar could feed into the same program with minimal new effort.

And it took me a ton of time to build that out and to figure out how to use dynamic content and all this personalization so that if you attended two webinars, you didn’t know that you were getting the same email. Took a ton of work, but once I got that thing running. I had to monitor it.

And just like I monitored all my campaigns every month, check, make sure everything’s working, but it just did what it was supposed to do.
And if anything wasn’t performing, I tweaked it, et cetera. So there is a lot of work. You can’t assume that the technology is just going to magically solve your problems.

You have to put the work in. And if you put the work in, the technology is going to do what it’s supposed to do and give you the desired results out on the back end.

And it will scale so that, whether I was running one webinar that month or 50, my level of effort barely increased. It was minutes that it took me to set up a new webinar. And that’s just one example of the true power.

Jeremy Balius: I think that’s an awesome segue as we think about, you’ve talked about how people get started on the journey and how they’re making decisions and what they come to realize and the different activities that need to take place to build the foundation.

And you’ve talked about how to approach the strategic the strategic approach to it. What? Could you describe the nirvana? What is it that, that organizations are heading towards that all of this effort is worth? And could you describe it in a way that shows I guess commonalities across the businesses that, that you consult to or work with.

But what is the ideal state that they’re in?

Brandi Starr: I love this question and it makes me so excited to answer it because I do feel like it is marketing nirvana. And so thinking about this, if we have whatever. efforts you are running at the top of funnel. So I’ll just use two basic things. So LinkedIn ads, and let’s say you’re running content syndication.

So we’ll use those as your two things, whatever tactics you have at the top, there are some efforts that you are putting out there that will capture Contact information.

And the ideal state is no matter how many things your lead gen team runs, because there’s always new programs, things that are being retired, they have a period of time, there should be a high volume of things happening at the top of the funnel.

The ideal state is that as all those things happen that you have worked with your Demand Gen team and that you’ve got proper UTMs and source codes and all those things that tracking in place so that everything that feeds into your marketing automation system knows where to go.

It’s almost like handing each contact like a list of instructions and when you arrive Step one, this is what I’m supposed to do so that when your marketing automation platform receives those things it knows and depending on your tool, there’s different ways that it will know, like HubSpot’s got smart lists, Eloqua’s got segmentation, we get into all the different ways, but your marketing automation platform will know based on the way that you’ve programmed it.

What is the next right message for this contact and it will route it into the appropriate campaign. That campaign will have full automation looking at demographic information. So what do we know about them so that we’re sending them down the right path engagement data. How are they engaging with the content?

And we make some assumptions based on that engagement, how they should route. So you’ve got all these things that are routing in a campaign. When they finish that campaign, there should also be programming based on what happened in that campaign, what happens next. If they’ve done something that makes them lead worthy, you have your integration that pushes that and puts it in front of sales and not only puts it in front of sales, but passes along enough information that sales feels informed.

So that when they go to call on that lead that they at least know how did they get here? What have they done at this point? So that they can have an intelligent conversation with them if they aren’t sales ready. What’s the next step? Is there some other nurture they should go through? Are there some always on communications that are more thought leadership in nature?

If they’ve just been dormant, is there a lead scoring program or some sort of trigger that recognizes, Oh, look, they’re now doing something. I’m seeing activity either at the account level or the contact level. Because for some companies I had a client like this. They never saw a lot of activity on any one contact.

But when we aggregated all the activity by account, you saw spikes of engagement and that’s the right time to start communicating. So your marketing automation platform is looking for what are those triggers that they may now be showing buying behavior and when that happens, What happens next? Is there a nurture we push them into?

Is there some way we engage them? Do we flag it for sales for follow up? Like having this whole orchestration set up so that no matter where people come in, and it could be for customer marketing as well, if they’re coming up on renewal, and it’s their first year, maybe there’s a campaign for that first year renewal.

Maybe there’s a different campaign for those that have been customers for a long time. For our partners, if it’s a partner that’s, it’s been so long since they’ve registered a deal or had a deal, depending on, what your relationship is, do we need to lean in and provide them more information?

All of these things will have been thought through in advance so that all of the contacts in your database, no matter whether they’re prospects, customers, partners, distributors, that there is a clear navigation of when things happen. Your system knows where to put them and what that next right message is.

It’s a beautiful thing when it happens. And that is truly the marketing automation nirvana.

Jeremy Balius: I love it. This is the nirvana we need. The final question I’ve got for you is for those who have been deploying campaigns and it’s, Everybody gets the same thing approach. It’s, we are running campaigns and emails are the same for everyone, regardless of where they came from and regardless of who they are, where they’re at or what they might need.

Could you tell me a little bit about why should these business leaders move more towards this personalization that you’re describing and having all of these Different orchestrated. Pathways that they could go down depending on their behavior.

How would you talk to someone about moving away from one to many, the same all the time towards these personalized pathways or journeys?

Brandi Starr: I’d ask them to look at their inbox and see how many of those communications they consistently ignore. Day in and day out and how many brands that as soon as they see the from name, they hit delete eyes. Don’t even go to the subject line.

You might get an accidental open if there’s a slip of the mouse click, but ask them to look at their own inbox because all of those same brands that they are totally ignoring, don’t even make the effort to unsubscribe because it takes effort to open it, scroll to the bottom.

It’s white noise. In someone’s inbox and the same way that you completely disregard a brand is the same way that people on your list are doing the same to your organization and it hurts the organization because you start to mentally develop a ignore.

For a particular brand and I know I’ve done this I’ve had companies that consistently email me and then when I needed what they sell I went looking elsewhere because in my mind like they were essentially on do not disturb in my brain.

And so their nurtures for me were the opposite of the desired effect. On the other hand, I have other companies that sometimes I’m almost annoyed because it’s way too much about me because every email. Feels like it was just for me. And those are the places I literally just signed a contract today for a company that has been prospecting me for three years and I didn’t have a need.

Their information was really valuable. He wasn’t a pushy salesperson and he followed up with me a few months ago. And I was like, I’ll be going through budgeting in August. I may actually have a need for this. And he followed up. And today I signed a 15-month contract or 17-month contract for a higher tier product than what I was initially looking for.

Because the stuff that they have consistently sent me for the last three years was not just about their product. It was a value to me as a business leader, as a marketer. And they of course mixed in some product stuff, like not trying to sound like all they sent was thought leadership, but the brand came across valuable.

That is who you want to be for your target audience. Not the company that as soon as you got on their list, They sent you 10 emails that are all completely irrelevant.

That’s white noise. And to me, becoming white noise for your contacts is so much worse than people unsubscribing. Most people worry about, Oh, I don’t want anybody to unsubscribe.

Have at it. If you clearly don’t want my communications, unsubscribe. Because then when I’m looking at my numbers and I’m looking at my database, I know you don’t want to hear from me. I’m not going to message for you. I’m going to look at the people who actually care about what I have to say, and I’m going to message to them.

That’s who you want to be for your target audience. Not the spammers, which is how it comes across when you are sending the same message.

Jeremy Balius: This is really inspiring stuff. You’re giving me goosebumps over here, Brandi. This is amazing.

Brandi Starr: I am a big advocate. Email marketing works. If you do it right, it is spam if you don’t.

Jeremy Balius: I fully agree. I’ve got so much to reflect on off this conversation. I think the way that you’re articulating the. The process, the way that you’re thinking about what’s possible, the way that you’re reverse engineering, the nirvana is so articulate.

I really think our listeners are going to take a lot of value from this. I know I have, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Brandi Starr: You are welcome. I have enjoyed it. And I was gonna say, I definitely am feeling inspired myself talking about the nirvana of what it can be when you get it right.

It’s just, it’s so exciting to me.

Jeremy Balius: It really is. Thank you so much.

Brandi Starr: You are welcome.