AMA: Second Nature VP of Marketing, Sam Clarke on Channel Mix

Here’s what I think are the first three steps in identifying the best channels to drive the right demand: 1. Audit the lead source/channel for every closed-won customer from the past quarter. While other channels might drive more demand, this report will show you the channels that are bringing in the highest quality prospects. You are going to want to invest in these channels first. 2. Compare your current channel mix to your competitor channel mixes. This might show you key channels that your company has yet to invest in. I usually find that every industry is unique in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Taking a look at where your competitors spend their time and money might lead you down the right path quicker. 3. Survey your sales reps. They have had numerous conversations with prospective customers and usually the first question they ask is “how did you find our company?” Their feedback will help you identify the offline or hard to attribute channels that drive demand for your business. For instance, you might think a lead came in through a branded search term but that branded search was actually prompted by a third party podcast listen. 

If you find that volume is sparse in digital channels like organic and paid, here are a couple suggestions: 1. Conferences Your prospects will always try to be leveling up. If they aren't using the world wide web for this, then they are attending their industry specific conferences. Experiment with trying a few different conferences in a calendar year just to determine if it's worthwhile to fish there. 2. Referrals Spin up a referral program and use the network of your existing customer base to spread the word on your behalf. Make sure you incentivize both the referrer and the referee. 3. Co-marketing webinars This is a very economical way to grow your audience. Find non-competitor companies that are also serving your prospects and ask them to do a co-marketing webinar with you. Set the precedent that you and they will promote the webinar to your own audiences and then share the registration and attendee lists afterwards. 4. Invest in building out your TAM (total addressable market) If they aren't using digital channels, chances are you are going to need to invest in ABM and sales outbound. Prior to doing this, put a lot of effort into identifying your TAM. Not only identifying the companies, but then enriching the accounts with useful information. Your going to need tools and resources like Zoominfo, Clearbit, Clay, and Virtual Assistants to get this done.

Here at Second Nature, we've been investing a lot in identifying our TAM. We've been able to identify our target accounts through a backlinking audit from a couple of softwares that our ideal customers use. But when it comes to enriching those accounts with useful information, we are using the tool Clay. Initially I thought there was no way this tool could do a better job than enrichment platforms like Zoominfo and Clearbit but I was wrong. It's been incredible and definitely worth checking out. One thing I've been extremely impressed with is it's ability to scrape copy from websites you enter. If you are finding that Zoominfo or Clearbit are coming back empty for certain fields that are critical for you to know, try asking Clay to find that information recorded somewhere on their websites.

I would prioritize paid search and co-marketing. Here's why: 1. While paid search can get very expensive, you can learn a lot from this channel that can then help you optimize other channels. I love paid because it's very easy to measure performance. I can see what prospects are clicking on, how many are converting to leads, and then what the overall CAC is (spend divided by customer sign ups). In addition to this, I can learn a lot about how to optimize my funnel. Ad copy can be optimized, landing page design can be optimized, even form fields can be optimized. Best thing is all of this CRO improvement will raise the performance of the other channels I've invested in. 2. The reason why I like co-marketing is because it's the opposite of paid advertising: it's cheap! Co-marketing is a fantastic way to generate net new leads cost effectively. Co-host a webinar with a company that serves your target customer. Then in exchange for you promoting it to your mailing list, ask them to promote it to theirs. After the event, agree to share the registration and attendee lists. You will have a lot of net new leads to nurture and work.

I incorporate online review sites into my overall organic strategy. Online review sites typically rank very well for non-branded terms in search engines like Google. So well actually that they are particularly difficult to leapfrog. What I'll do is list out the most important non-branded search terms for my company and then identify the review sites that rank in positions #1, #2, or #3 for those terms. I then pick the top two review sites that make up the most amount of this search real estate. Then because review sites typically rank the listed businesses in order of highest grading and most reviews, I will drive reviews to those two sites. I will ask all of our customers who have given us NPS scores of 9 and 10 to review us on those sites. I'll continue to invest in this strategy until I'm in position #1 on these review sites. So even if I can't get my company's branded website to rank in position #1, #2, or #3 for a certain term, I can make sure I am visible on the websites that are in those positions.