The Art of Balancing Virtual and Physical Events with Samantha Ranieri

Ross Howard: We’ve seen in a recent buyer behavior study that the interesting data around webinars and virtual events, whether field or central, shows that they’re still going strong. It’s still 40 percent of the audience saying that they’ll watch live webinars. 49 percent saying that they prefer on demand. This engagement rate with long form detailed content across different parts of the buying cycle, especially mid funnel as a format.

And then those earlier touch points, those brand engagements, first touch pieces, like content syndication.

Intro: Welcome to Demand Bites, the podcast where B2B demand generation leaders find the strategies they need to grow. I’m your host, Ross Howard, Director of Product Marketing at Inbox Insight. And in just 15 minutes, my guests and I will uncover what’s broken in the B2B buyer journey and provide real world strategies you can put to work right away.

So whether you’re looking for innovative demand gen techniques or expert advice on accelerating sales, this podcast gives you the tools you need to succeed. Ready to identify, educate, and convert your ideal customer profile? Or at least learn how other people are doing it. Let’s dive in.

Ross Howard: And for those listeners joining us, this is Samantha Ranieri, who is the Senior Field Marketing Manager for Brandwatch and Cision and is our star guest today for Demand Bites, where we’re going to talk about all things demand generation, all things actionable insights, and helping everybody be the best they can be at work.

So do you want to take us through a little bit about who you are, what you do?

Samantha Ranieri: Oh, yeah. Thank you, first off, for having me. My name is Samantha Ranieri. I am the Field Marketing Manager for Brandwatch and Cision. And I know people are like those companies don’t normally go together.

But we are actually one company. Cision has been the parent company for Brandwatch for a few years now and we recently, I think, as of last year, I think, it’s so funny to say recently, have combined our efforts from a marketing org standpoint, and I have been doing this fully remotely for two and a half years and field marketing, obviously, is different at every company.

You ask a field marketer when you go to these events, you’re like, oh, what exactly is field marketing? And every person will have a different answer. But at Brandwatch and Cision, as field marketers, we are the liaison for our regions between our sales org and our go to market org to the rest of the marketing team.

Not only are we running the affairs of it all. Hey, this is the feedback we’re getting from lead gen, and this is, from growth team, can we do this event, or, and then running physical events, we get to be creative. It’s a unique opportunity in the marketing work.

So I’m very fortunate to be on the field marketing side.

Ross Howard: Talking of remote, field normally has an event presence, right, under its job title. There is that element of like, how do you localize in different outposts? Where do you fit in terms of demand gen with physical events versus virtual events post covid?

Samantha Ranieri: So we have, on the growth marketing team, we have an entire position slash team based off of virtual events and they affect all of the global content perspective.

So our big content pieces are really like provocative pieces that we want to really blast out globally go through that team. So they manage, as I mentioned, global campaigns. And so then regionally, we are able to run regional based webinars, as well as we run our own events, whether that’s owned or hosted or sponsored or, the whole nine yards.

And even going back to regionality, it’s, if you ask me the question of what is, who is a field marketer, right? I would tell you that about 60 percent of my job is events, physical events, in person events. 60%, I’m gonna even say even sometimes 70 to 80 percent events. Because my region really does well with events.

Now, you go look at my APAC person, or my EMEA team, they may say something different. They may say, oh, we do about 40 percent events and the rest are digital campaigns. And for me, I’m constantly running an event. I’m sometimes running 5 to 6 events at a time. I’m about 60 percent in events, give or take, depending on the quarter.

Let’s look at the quarter, right? Q3, less events than you would see in Q1 and Q2. Q4, even less events, right? It’s a little bit more digital campaigns. We run a lot more like content syndication and webinar based. And maybe do we do like a multi-channel approach? So it really depends on the quarter, is what I would tell you, with the balance of like events versus digital.

Ross Howard: That’s a really good point. We’ve seen in a recent buyer behavior study that the, interesting data around webinars, virtual events, be they field or central, has been that they’re still going strong. It’s still 40 percent of the audience saying that they’ll watch live webinars, 49 percent saying that they prefer on demand.

There’s still that engagement rate with long form detailed content across different parts of the buying cycle, especially mid funnel as a format. And then those earlier touch points, those brand engagements, first touch pieces, like the content syndication.

How do you use that to get Cision and Brandwatch’s message to market and then drive the pipeline for your region?

Samantha Ranieri: There’s so many statistics out there. I think it’s Litmus. Like people have to see something at minimum three times before recognition happens and I think it’s 11 times maybe for like full recognition initially, and then you have 30 seconds or less.

I think nowadays it’s probably like 11, 15 seconds to capture someone’s attention. So I hate to say that it’s a balance and it’s constantly having to change. I can’t say like this is the best practice because any marketer knows that you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting it to always work.

Like on the Brandwatch side, we’re seeing everything change within minutes, sometimes seconds. We’re moving at the speed of social. You and I could be talking right now and tomorrow there could be a whole new brand new trend that is completely taking the world by storm. And it’s like if you’re a marketer who thinks, “Oh, I’m just going to keep doing the same thing over and over again, and we’re just expecting it to constantly do its job.”

You’re just already falling behind. I can’t say there’s one size fits all. I can’t say it’s a definite, let’s do this perspective. But it’s definitely, it’s, a multi-channel approach has to be done. From a brand awareness play, from your top of the funnel, to the middle of the funnel, to the bottom of the funnel.

And where it fits in all depends on the person.

Ross Howard: Absolutely. I love what you said there. I think multi-channel multi touch is the way forward. Like it’s far more common in our campaigns that we work together, work with lots of other clients in the space across different verticals, different categories around how do you engage and nurture leads before they’re handed over and after, right?

You have to partner with the sales org. You’ve got to partner with the other marketers that you talked about globally. And make sure that you have consistent delivery of valuable content to that account, that individual, over time. And that’s really when the penny’s going to drop for them, and you’re going to be able to bring them closer.

I know there’s, it’s not one size fits all, you should be split testing all the time. If you’re okay to share a bit of detail, how do you go about breaking down nurture? Lead comes in, I’m a single touch MQL, what happens to me?

Samantha Ranieri: I always tell my team personalize. Take a second to go on their LinkedIn profile.

Take a second to research what they actually opted into. What was the last thing that they engaged with to MQL? So I’m constantly lending that advice. I also offer to my team like I’m a marketer. If you want to test messaging on me, by all means send it to me. I am outbounded constantly and I can tell you what’s good and what’s bad.

It’s fun when they take me up on it because it’s hey, this is how I’d pivot this or there was one guy I can’t remember what the company is, but he put in this subject line and said check out this Georgia waterfall and I should have probably introduced myself in the earlier I am based out of Atlanta, Georgia, so you can find that on my LinkedIn.

And he put it as the subject and the very first line is, Hey, Samantha, have you ever checked out the Toccoa Falls waterfall? I was looking into it and it looks so cool. I just was wondering if you’ve ever looked into it. And then a very short blurb about what his company does. And it’s like a Martech tool.

And then just said, hey let me know what your thoughts are. I immediately responded and I never respond outbound unless it’s really good. And I immediately responded. I was like, you caught my attention immediately. You taking two seconds to find out that I’m in Georgia and just looking up a waterfall near my house?

Genius! And it’s so small and it probably took him, what, two, three minutes extra in his day? I try to lend a hand as much as I can from a messaging perspective. I usually identify the content pieces with my content team of what’s important for everybody. With you guys, when I work with Chris and the team in order to make my campaigns for content syndication, and then we nurture them all the way through until MQL, and then we hope and pray that there is a bunch of personalization happening from an outbound perspective.

And again, we’re constantly having to evolve that because it’s not work, like it doesn’t work just doing the same thing over and over again. And the moment that you lose out on personalization in this saturated market. You’re just, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Ross Howard: Awesome tip. How are you deploying that?

How are you facing up to the AI generative boom that we’re going through at the moment?

Samantha Ranieri: Everybody’s saying they’re doing AI as a buzzword. They’re saying it as a buzzword but also doing it as a band aid. They’re just band aiding maybe different things just to say they’re doing it. Where I feel like we’re being really thoughtful, my personal bias, I think we’re being very thoughtful of adding that human element into the artificial.

AI does not do what you want it to do without that human component telling it what we want it to do. When you write something in ChatGPT and you put a very generic line in, is it going to give you the exact thing you’re looking for? No. You’d have to be very prescriptive with ChatGPT to get the answer that you want or the content that you want.

I think people just assuming that it’s just, there’s no more human side of it and it’s just a robot, essentially, I think it’s silly. With Brandwatch and marketing and field marketing, we have to be very cognizant of that. And we’re not just slapping AI onto every content piece we’re putting out there.

We’re not slapping AI on our event, or backgrounds. We’re still trying to invest in the human side.

Ross Howard: What’s one thing you wish, can be Cision, can be other orgs you’ve worked in, or your colleagues sound lovely, what’s one thing that you wish other people understood about the role of demand generation?

Samantha Ranieri: I think demand gen is a buzzword in a way sometimes. That like they just say we need to turn on the demand gen machine, we just need to turn it on.

And it’s okay, what lever? Because we could go ABM. Are we doing a multi touch campaign for ABM? Are we doing an event? Like, how are we owning this event? Can we do ad campaigns? Are we doing social? Are we doing SEO? Are we doing this? How are we building on this to go after this? I think you just go down this funnel of just so much that falls under demand generation.

That sometimes people are just like, turn the demand gen on. And like it’s on. What lever do we need to go? There’s just so much nuance that can go into demand gen that we need to be a little bit more targeted. Like, how do we know, say, our lead gen is down, or say, our sales revenue is down.

Knowing what levers to pull simultaneously and being very prescriptive of it. Hey, historically I know this event works or this webinar works. This general group works and use data to help us pull those levers and not just like panic pull as much as you can and get as much through the door and it’s like let’s be thoughtful, intentional, be very prescriptive when it comes to demand gen.

Ross Howard: I think that’s an awesome answer. That’s great. I think that there’s always on channels and those lower funnel channels, people who are indicating high intent or indicating need are sometimes reactive, right? Or they’re inbounding. But when you need to drive results over the norm, you need to be targeted, you need to know who that ICP is, but also I love the tactical intentionality of partnering with sales around.

What do you need? What product lines can I support? Which reps can I support? Which territories can I support? Get in the detail, right? And understanding that, okay, I can help you with that because I can drive this content into this audience this many times and that’s how many of them I’ll do. This is what we should do to follow up.

I think I love that. Like hand in hand collaboration. Really cool. I have one question, what metrics that you use, how do you bring together the picture for other teams and the sales guys to be like this type of content since working with this type of webinar programs?

Samantha Ranieri: Yeah. So we are constantly reporting out on successes.

And also failures. I’m constantly looking at Salesforce dashboards that have MQLs and influence one and closed one and sourced one and you name it, we’re looking at it. I’m looking at even sometimes like outreach metrics, like how long did it take for them to MQL till the first outbound happened? When were people successful?

When were they not successful? And I regularly meet with my sales leaders on a consistent basis, as well as my marketing leadership who also back me up. Hey, I just need a little help, pushing this along, or do you guys see the same data? We’re doing that. We’re constantly trying to evolve and based off metrics and data.

So I can sit here and say, okay, this data piece worked, this didn’t. Or, I always look at the constant lead uploads that you and I work with together, and I’m constantly reviewing oh, this piece worked really well. Like maybe we should be featuring it in a greater push. And so it’s, we’re constantly in the data.

And reporting what’s working, what’s not working. I can look to my SDR team lead and I’m like, Hey, why do you feel like it dropped like week over week? Why did the, the sales accepted leads drop? What is the feedback? And then they’ll tell me the feedback. And then I’m constantly communicating to our paid ads team, our growth marketing team, myself, obviously, about the feedback and then also ways to improve.

And then I go back to the sales leader. This is how we are improving things. And so I’m really empowered by my leadership in order to do things like that, where they let me own my region, which was fun.

Ross Howard: So useful. Thank you.

Samantha Ranieri: Yeah.

Ross Howard: Really enjoyed this conversation. I went massively off the script.

Samantha Ranieri: Yeah.

Ross Howard: And you ad-libbed it brilliantly, but I was just having loads of fun. Thank you so much for your time and all your advice.

Samantha Ranieri: Yeah, of course. Happy to come back.

Outro: And that wraps up today’s episode of Demand Bites. Thanks for listening. I hope the insight provided today are able to help you power up your own demand generation efforts.

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