30. Demand Generation vs Lead Generation

Shiva 00:00

Hi, you’re listening to driven e-commerce at work. The podcast where we bring in conversations with the e-commerce experts. We also put together some interesting content from different places, including our monthly E-Sessions, Speaker Series, and anything that’s related to e commerce for manufacturing and distribution. If you’re here for the first time, I would highly encourage you to go and subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, or Spotify. Our guest today is Nemanja Zivkovic , CEO and founder of Funky Marketing. After working with agencies based out of Canada and Serbia for almost 10 years, he founded this company around January 2020. He has a huge background in marketing and demand generation. When we talk about demand Gen, there is no better person than him.

Shiva 00:54

So is it a morning or afternoon for you Nemanja?

Nemanja 00:58

it’s actually 3pm. So it’s in the middle.

Shiva 01:05

Good timing.

Shiva 01:07

Yeah, exactly like the right time for for this kind of thing. So I’m not hungry, and I’m not very tired.

Shiva 01:15

Okay, okay. So how’s everything going? Your personal life professional life work towards the end of the year, entering to the q4. So tell us about your journey so far in 2020.

Nemanja 01:31

Yeah, I mean, it got interesting in this year, because like, I founded the company in January, I think 13th. And so far, like, I was actually planning not to hire anybody in in this year just to see how entrepreneurship feels. And, and think because I weren’t an entrepreneur. Before, I was like the CMO director of operation GM, I was in all decision making positions and all the starting positions before that in different agencies and startups. And this is like the first time that I’m actually running the show. And it’s been so far, it’s been cool. Like, it’s five of us now. Even even more if we count people who are just doing some, some small things around us just like growing. And I think the company that I’m creating is the one who is actually like, actionable.

Nemanja 02:37

When we don’t play defense, we’re always in offense, just trying to change things trying to change marketing. I’d like to say take it back to where it belongs, where there’s some kind of ethics when we respect each other when we don’t go over that road. Like I said, it said Gordon, who is like all the marketing’s are liars. So trying to get get away from that and involve customers and clients as much as possible into the colorization. And yeah, I mean, doing some things that, that I’ve been wanting to do for years, but for some reason, like even is environment, or is the the CEO or the owners, and I didn’t have a chance to do it. So now like unleashed and just got to get it and on the private life. It’s about time that I’m getting married, like 36 years old. So great time, and I think we’re going into the great ending of the year.

Shiva 03:38

Good, so tell us about your company, Funky Marketing. So how did you end up coming up with this name?

Nemanja 03:46

Yeah, I mean, funkin keep it funky was the the sentence that is on my phone for the last, I don’t know, 10 or even more years. It’s just something that I grew up playing basketball. So he had this listening to hip hop then comes the gangster and Motown period and all kinds of different influences connecting to the funk music, and basically, it all created not an environment but a frame in my head that Funky Marketing is marketing being done right way. So like, even I think 11 years ago, I created a Funky Marketing group on Facebook. It wasn’t called like Funky Marketing. It was called a little later like that. But I mean, I’ve been developing the community on the side and just growing it and that’s how it goes. I checked out if the domain is free, it’s free. It’s a great name. It’s every arc when I get into conversation with anybody, they just say like funky music, they compare it to funky business, also the book. And I mean, it’s a it’s a good name for branding.

Shiva 05:06

kill! So this session is all about demand Gen, but we’ll touch upon a couple of other interesting topics as well on amin in the marketing as well. So to, to understand more about marketing are for someone who’s new to you know the marketing industry. So how has the marketing been evolved over the past 10 years? I mean, you know, things like copywriting are, you know, design were not a center stage of attention in 2010. Right? So, but things have completely changed now in 2020. So how do you how do you actually see that.

Nemanja 05:41

I’m seeing it that people didn’t want to go the right way, willingly, or their own real sakurada made them in a way like 10 or 15 years ago, it was all marketing was done in communication with an agency and a company. So basically, nobody asked customers what they want, they didn’t have a voice, because it was all print media, television, radio, when there is no communication with the with the clients or the customers. And basically, we were able to see and hear anything they serve us. So that was the marketing one way communication. And now things things change. And with with internet, the customer has got all the power or the strength. And now they are the ones who are orchestrating the way the way we do the way work the way we the way we create our products, everything and basically just doing the thing and focusing on the on the wrong measurements, something that was more common not getting emotions involved, especially in B2B like nobody’s involving still emotions, or those things that are known to be to see, nobody’s been using that in in B2B, it was like a company, like a shell, nobody has been saying that, hey, there’s actually people inside the company running it working in it, like just leaving half of their day in those institutions in those companies. And finally, when Corona strikes, some some of the company realized that they can change some things, but I was predicting that things will change even more when it comes to like focusing on on MQLs or meaningless leads those kind of things, just focusing on the right metrics and strategies. But unfortunately, it still doesn’t change.

Shiva 07:49

So what is demand? Gen, actually, I mean, what is demand generation? And how does it, you know, differ from the typical lead generation activity that we’re doing currently?

Nemanja 08:01

Now, that’s, that’s, that’s an interesting question. And some of the aggression that a lot of people don’t realize the difference between those two especially I don’t know how it is over there. But in my environment in Serbia, like people don’t even know the demand generation exists. It’s all about lead generation, it’s all about leads. And, and that’s it. So let’s try to define the two of them. First one lead generation is like, usually a short term strategy that is focused to deliver contracts to sales. So they can sell them products or services, the number of leads is usually high, but the quality is very low, often with with the quality who is like even, is the same as outbound, even, maybe lower quality. An example would be is a common example, like ebook download over the Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads go with a follow up from the sale. So basically, you download the E-book, and they they start calling you come and buy from us. demand generation on the other hand is a bit different. Its strategy is focused on the buyer, with a goal to create awareness and educate them, educate the market or so as many people as possible would be educated and come to the sales team to buy So basically, we are creating demand around our products or services. number of leads is low. It’s not even close to the leads that we can get during the origination, but leads are the best quality possible with the highest percent of those who are converting and the shorter sales cycle it’s it’s shorter than the go outbound is shorter than any other things that we are doing it because we are educating people and they are come to us and they are read an example would be like, I don’t know, promoting case study of the buyer that had great success with your product without any CTA or maybe live q&a, like this one with somebody who is like professional for niche, and all with a great without intent to sell zero intent to sell via just educating and when people who are listening to this, maybe when they are ready to get your services or they may be reached out to me, they will they will reach out not until they are ready for for buy.

Shiva 10:56

So two things were actually better compared to Legion then. So one is the opportunities and one is the person so we get more better opportunities with the demand Gen because we’re focused more on the customers. And similarly, let’s say it’s not about producing hundred leads, right? It’s just about producing 20 quality leads, and then you get at least like 15 or 16 conversion from there, because that’s what the demand Gen is all about. Right? So how do you handle the inbound? And then the ABM? Like I mean, the account based marketing? Is that part of the demand Gen, or is that a completely different marketing strategy? I mean, altogether?

Nemanja 11:36

Yeah, that’s an interesting, an interesting topic. For what you said, Yes, inbound is, is great, because people are coming to us. And when it comes to campus marketing, I don’t really count it as, as the main generation strategy. Yes, it is innovative, but I see more as just targeting. And I don’t think we can talk about account based marketing, if we have less than, I don’t know, like seven or 800 accounts that we are targeting. So this is, when we look at it from that perspective, it’s only on the level of the enterprise, not on the lower level. So basically, it’s who we are targeting. And we cannot go with account based marketing if and dedicate time to each account, where if we have like a small company, we don’t have people to do that. We don’t have resources. But on the other hand, when we are doing like dimension, it doesn’t have to be account based marketing, we are still carrying a persona, we are still identifying who are we targeting, so we know the demography, the the age, the interests, all kinds of things, they are positioning the company seniority and everything else. And we know exactly who we are targeting, let’s say on LinkedIn, they are all there we can see those people inside the company. So it’s not some for the person that we are targeting, like some CEO or some SEO, it’s the exact person we know who we are targeting. And based on that we can we can adapt the strategy and everything and everything else. And it’s different, what you said, from the outbound in outbound, basically, we are going general, we are going wide. If we want to target as many as many people in accounts as possible to the inbound outbound, then we need to go general, we cannot get personal and it affects the results, you know. And if we are doing inbound, then it’s a bit a bit different. We go more personalized, we that’s why we use content. We use content, we can educate people, they can come to us, if we are going to them, then it’s account based marketing, but account based marketing connected to the content, then basically it opens the door for us. Right? If the content marketing is being done right, then account based marketing is being done more easily in that way.

Shiva 14:26

Yeah, yeah. So if there is one thing that’s been there forever between the sales team and the marketing team, that’s going to be MQL, and then you know, SQL. So traditionally, when teams focus more on lead numbers, you know, what marketing team considered, lead might not convert into an opportunity, I mean, the SQL part. So, to clarify, you know, how is this applicable in demanding I mean, like, what is an MQL. And what is SQL technically,

Nemanja 14:55

it’s, it’s easy to qualify, I mean to enter define The name itself still is marketing qualified leads is somebody who, who has been interesting in good finding more information about about the topic. So the watching the webinar, they are reading the book, they are reading the article, whatever is here, let’s see the lead magnet. And on the other hand, SQL are those who are sales qualified leads, so qualified to talk with the sales. So the mistake that’s been done very often is that all MQLs that are coming are being directly sent to the sales. So they are not being qualified for the sales, they didn’t click the button and say I want to talk with sales, I want to buy, I want to try a demo. Now they just say, Okay, I want to read that Guardian book. And that’s it. And if you were trying to, just to sell them, they will not I mean, just if they download the let’s say e book. And I like to compare it with with the first date. So you actually meet someone on Tinder. And you endmqa up on a blind date, you’ve been drinking, and you end up in bed with somebody tomorrow morning, you wake up, your head is clean. And you see who was in the bed next to you know, and compared to the to the lead generation and MQLs. Basically it It means you go to the landing page, you download the book, and when you open the mail to see what you got over there. You see, it’s like the day after, you know, and it’s it’s kind of kind of interesting, because you get the intimacy over there. In the email, it’s one on one communication, like you’re together in the bed. And if you’re just creating, I don’t know, one page, PDF with like, five things you should do to to get more people to your webinar. And it’s just like five sentences, nothing else, then they will get disappointed, because it’s not the document that you promised them. And it relationship won’t happen.

Shiva 17:30

So E-book doesn’t gonna works out. Right. So it’s just a way where marketing team is going to come up with that numbers. I mean, MQLs? Exactly.

Nemanja 17:40

Yeah. Let’s see, it’s not every e-books doesn’t work. The shitty e-books don’t work. I started, when we started, when we started Funky Marketing, like we created an E-book, which is actually a strategy with our examples, results and everything. And if somebody download it, they would get like five more emails follow up just to give them more info, like more examples, more everything, but not to get them like you must get our services. So no, basically, they have to decide. And if they decide not to go with us, they have this document which by itself is valuable. So and it was like 30 pages strategy document, not just like simple one page ebook. So you gotta get value in each step of the way.

Shiva 18:36

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the moment they they they just download your e-book, and then the sales team is going to send an email, hey, I saw you just download the e-book. Do you want a demo from for the product? And that’s where the sales literally, you know, dies, you’re not selling anything. And you’re not literally giving away the benefit as well. Right. So yeah, that too.

Nemanja 18:56

It is basically you know, that situation when you are walking the street and somebody’s trying to sell you the postcards, you want to buy you want to buy you want to buy I cannot get away from here.

Shiva 19:08

Yeah, I mean, just give, give, give whatever, you know, the customers or the prospects are looking for, just give them and then if they find it interesting, they find the benefit. Interesting, they’ll just come back and then ask you, hey, what else do you got? Right? So coming back to the demo rigor, so how to, you know, generate qualified demo requests. I mean, like, let’s say, a proper lead, that generates more opportunities.

Nemanja 19:34

Yeah, I mean, you need to educate. You need to educate people before they come to the website. And before they come to the to that request a demo. You need to go over the pain points and talk in details. What are the features of your products? What are the specifics? How are you different from the others? Let’s Let’s go just a look at the right picture. First, there are people that have no idea that they even have a problem, not even the day know that you have the solution, and that solution exists. So they don’t know that there is a problem. And I like to use the example of like, it’s not going to be to be, but it’s a good example. Like, I want to, to arrange my balcony, so I can enjoy spending time with them. And somebody is trying to sell me a vase for the flowers. So basically, I have no idea that I need it. But when I start thinking that, okay, it’s my balcony, what do I need to feel comfortable over there. So first, I need some chairs, then I need a table, then I need maybe some pictures on the walls. And then I come to the flowers at the end. So those people who are trying to sell me that they need to draw me a picture, another perspective, so I can imagine it.

Nemanja 21:05

And this discovery goes, first, we need to see that there is a problem, then we need to explain to those people that there is a solution to their problem. And when they know the solution, then they are looking to find a company that’s gonna give them the solution. So then we go into details, you know, like, we have these other no specific kind of flowers, but those other guys didn’t have it, or we deliver today, and when you if you go with them, you need to like wait three days to get, like those kind of specific things. And when you have all that, when you inform those people and they come to the website, they will, they will use the demon because the more is the better option, actually not a demo is the the option that is not the best, the best is free trials. demo is usually a sales call on which, in most cases, sales, people are talking about the product about everything and not talking about how to help them. And this is a common mistake that’s happening.

Nemanja 22:18

Something I didn’t talk about, but it is a problem, the common one. On the other hand, if we have like a free trials, then a customer can get results, even in an hour, when they start using the free trial, right, they get the value right away. And those kind of things are, are something that are small adjustment, but maybe changing changing the game. And we need to create trust. So they when they come to the website, then convert on the website, if there’s if the website is optimized for conversions, they will happen. But they will happen if we get the right people with the right mindset over there. So we need videos. So we can they can actually see who are the people behind the brand? Like how do I talk? How do I look? Was the personality, my funny guy or no, they need to see all the features in the product. So how do they solve their problems? What are the specifics, and they need to also see the wider picture that we talked about the first the first step, and it is to realize that there’s actually a problem of there, when we get them to the instep and they come to the website, then they will be able to convert.

Shiva 23:37

So the product should actually needs to talk for itself, instead of moving them to you know, like, the demo requests, right?

Nemanja 23:45

I mean, that’s that’s right. When we talking about website not before that if we just say okay, we go we don’t want to do marketing the product is good enough. That’s not gonna happen. That’s like, build it and they will come No, they want you need to show them all those specific things you need to get them inside your story. This is this is something that that familiar to be to see when like we need to get them emotionally involved with the brand with the company with the product. And like we are not the Batman in the story. We are like the Robin. We marketers are the ones who are taking the customers which customer is Batman, we are helping them get to the goal and defeat the bad guy. The bad guys are the pain points and the problems they’re having. So we need to give them emotional insight inside the story to show them like how the product is being made. How are other people satisfied with it? So the testimonials Do they have results when they use the products like what happens after they use the product, all those things are important. And they create the full the full picture.

Shiva 25:07

So he talked about the process, right? So when during the initial stages when we talk about the benefits, and then when we talk about the categories and other things, so is that more like, we just have to pull in into the category first. I mean, even before we convince them or talk about the company, the brand, just tell them about the category first, just sell them what this is all about. And then tell about your company. Is that how it works?

Nemanja 25:32

I wouldn’t say is the category, I would say it’s first the customers in let me give you like the perfect scenario when you build the company, or the or the product. So the first thing would be creating a community around the people that you’re trying to sell something. So let’s say who did the good job, their drift did an excellent job. They they gather the community of product people. And they ask them, what do you do, they have no idea how to tell it and people around them, they have even even less knowledge about what other people do. So the product, people are pissed about it. And when somebody’s pleased about something, it means that they are perfect during the group. So they gather them around the community, and they let them talk to each other. They just followed the listen. And then they come up with conversational marketing around that, and then they come up with the next product and the next product, and they keep delivering on that. But they started with the community. So you first need people who have that problem. And then you just can come up with even the multiple products, not only with one or two services, however do we call it is the perfect scenario when it comes to that.

Shiva 26:54

Yeah, that’s a great example. Yeah, I think Yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. So you just have to figure out what your audience is looking for what the customers are looking for. And from there, you just have to drive in into the category. And another thing. Yeah,

Nemanja 27:05

I mean, drift created the new category. And I don’t think many people can do that. Now, I mean, many people don’t know how to do it. I don’t know if I could do it. But so this is not for everybody. But I mean, they also did some of the things that that are not scalable. They even wrote a book, this one scale. And like I remember, I was working as director of operations in another agency, and we bought the conversational marketing book by Drift. And I think two weeks after that, we received another book from Drift. And it’s did it one scale, a little book forty pages, when they wrote, I think, four things that helped them to scale. And those are things that are not measurable in we didn’t order that book, they just send it to us as additional value. And this this is how you build the brand. And this is how you actually build the company and add additional value to anyone. I mean, from us to Serbia, they just shifting it up.

Shiva 28:12

Yeah, right. Exactly. The next time you’re looking for a chatbot I think you’ll go to Drift. Right. That’s what they will. So

Nemanja 28:18

Yeah, I mean, I shared it on my website since we started Funky Marketing. So yeah,

Shiva 28:24

Yeah, yeah. So a couple of years ago, and if you really look at it, the marketing team just won the pipeline, right. But things have changed completely. I’ve been, you know, listening to a few CMOS, where they they’ve been, you know, kept on telling one thing, that the marketing team should own their opinion. So to go one step further, you know, if the sales and accounts team is bringing in 50% of the revenue, then the marketing team should actually bring in the rest of the 50% through the new logos, right. So I actually saw one of your recent posts as well, where you said marketing is not just about the revenue, it’s something more than that. So what are your thoughts are there?

Nemanja 29:02

Yeah, my my opinion is that, in talking about this, a lot of marketing schoon have a separate goal or all its own marketing is here to help business achieve its goals. And to be able to do that it needs to respond directly to the CEO. So not to the to the sales, not to the to the revenue, it should respond directly to the CEO, because marketing is actually the closest thing to revenue. And it can be great all if like the management understand marketing. There’s so many good marketers that left the company is because the CEO or decision makers didn’t understand the marketing. And because marketing is more than sales, like people say that marketing is here to enable sales to do the better job. Okay, but there’s the side effect marketing is here, too. Allow business to achieve its goals is the revenue is the awareness is the brand is the advertising. It’s a product, so many so many things like and that’s why I have a problem with also defining dimension.

Nemanja 30:17

Because if we said like, okay, we are hiring the agency to do demand generation or we have the department is doing men generation. Basically, we are saying that they are the only one creating the demand. I mean, if that’s the case, that’s not good, the whole company should should actually create, create the demand. And I mean, market isn’t us as marketers need to go out of ourselves and just call out all the status quo and the budget decisions of people who are decision makers, people who are CEOs, owners, just because we need to get help them get to the point when they understand how things are going. Most of them. Think about marketing as like the old school way that worked 15 years ago, when they hear like HubSpot. Only SEO, you do the SEO and you wait for some times, and they will come right for the search engines, not for the people. Marketing is only advertising. I don’t know like, we know that it’s important to be on social media, but we are not getting any results out of it. So they won’t invest further in it. Or like, we have clients now. So we don’t need marketing. But when we run out of the clients will do marketing, like it’s something that you just press the button and it and it works. Or if they are measuring too many things and asking you to measure so many things.

Nemanja 31:49

It means the they don’t believe they don’t believe in in marketing. And I don’t know, like there are so many situations where like the sales cycle is too long, let’s say eight to nine months, and then the owners or the decision makers in the company they don’t have, they don’t know how to measure the marketing efforts. So they are telling them get us delete as many leads as possible. If you’re getting us more leads, it means that you’re doing the better job. And when it happens later, guys, we’re working in sales, they are like marketing team is not doing anything. Right again. So they are faced at marketing. Because they need to jump on so many sales calls with people who are not actually interesting to buy the things that we talked about before. And they need more people than in sales. And when you have more people in sales, then you have people who are not that experienced in sales or with the company. So not every customer experience is the best one because you have new people who are still learning the things. And so when that happens, you’re just going deeper and deeper into

Nemanja 33:13

As much we can swear on the on the podcast, but you get what I mean, and how can we solve it basically, we can create marketing can create the content machine which will educate people and get them to the right stage, when they are ready to buy immediately press the button, then they go to the sales, then we add them to the to the sales force or whatever we are using. And when this happens when we get people who are actually qualified for the sales call, then we don’t need to have like 10 people in sales, we can go with just two for experience if you can close all of them. When they do that, like we earn more and it goes to the revenue and can come back to I don’t know to invest more in marketing or to salespeople and sales people can actually do something else maybe to the unbound. And so this is this is the a scope code should work. And to be able to do that. We don’t need marketing and sales just to work together we need to for the management of the company, for the owners as CEO to understand actually, what are the benefits of investing in certain parts of the company because as it is right now, sales have all the budgets marketing has a little low budget on the side. Also, if a lot of companies are trying to grow from the start just by investing in the sales team, instead of investing in marketing team and then sales is there to support the growth. This is how the situation should be but it’s not and those are all I consider all those basic things. Like if you look at it from the common sense person spective this is what you would do, right? But still, we are not doing it. And I don’t get it, I had a problem with this for a long time to actually to actually start talking about it, because I consider it something that’s basic, like comedy, everybody knows it. But it seems like majority of the companies have no clue about it. Just think about something else. Because they giving marketing, some other metrics, and they’re going after it. And it doesn’t do good for anybody.

Shiva 35:35

So you don’t care who the customer is, right? So word of mouth is one of the interesting marketing channel. And so even though, you know, primarily, this is because of the product team. But still, I strongly believe that there is a huge amount of marketing effort on word of mouth. So how to actually streamline the marketing efforts. over there is what else we can actually do. To have a to build a better word of mouth pipeline, actually.

Nemanja 36:03

What do you think? What’s the answer?

Shiva 36:08

To more to do more podcasts or video steps like this to get the testimonials? Is that is that what that is?

Nemanja 36:15

Yeah, I mean, some of it. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a great question. Not that many people are asking it. So I appreciate it. And I think word of mouth is extremely important. And I was just reading today a post on LinkedIn. And they say, marketers, what will you do when you cannot look at the analytics when Google doesn’t give you the insights? When the Google changes in becomes like Question and Answer platform? What How will you measure word of mouth? So it’s a good question, something that we need to talk about. I mean, creating an environment to get the word of mouth to spread around is something that I think it’s in the core of demand Gen. And we can do it in in many different ways. How do we do it here in Funky Marketing, I can say that, basically, when we start working with a company, we actually first try to get the demand It’s over there. So basically, by by activating all the decision makers in the company, and just going over there where the demand is, so if it’s, let’s say, LinkedIn, we go to the people who are influencers, who are gathering the people around their post, who are either our target group, or are the people who are the same is as us going towards them.

Nemanja 37:44

So in those two ways, and in that way, we get also the people who are our target group to talk about us. And we get asked the people who are same as us to recommend us to somebody else. So when it comes to the actual content, it can be a lot of different ways. One of one thing that’s the must have is personal stories, adding depth to the pain points, and telling it from your personal perspective, sharing stories, sharing your journey, the other one is giving value to some form of the video content, especially today, I think it’s the most important thing, this is the first thing that we recommend to the clients that we start working with. Why? Because you can actually say, Okay, I’m going to do the interview series, it doesn’t have to be the podcast. And I can get 10 people who are inside my target group to be my guest on the podcast. So I get to do one on one with them, I get to ask them all the specific questions so we can go all the way to the buyers journey, we can then publish that video, send it to them, so they can share it also, when they share it, their team will see it we will have them just so they can they can feel those on our profiles.

Nemanja 39:06

And basically, that is the first step we get into one on one conversations with them, then we can continue continue from that. And if we keep creating podcasts just to get value to the people not to follow up with some sales proposition or to offer them something or whatever, but be there each week. Like I’m doing this with Marty Sanchez, B2B Weekly. Also, like Rhys Walker is doing it with demand Gen. Life. So weekly, we are there for the people to answer their questions, to share results to share methods, strategies, all the things that we are discovering, with with no hesitation and it’s a hard thing to do, to find topics to be there every week, and to go over there and people appreciate it. Also So another thing is to involve other people inside, inside what you do. So let’s say we creating videos, okay? But when we are distributing it, we are mentioning those people, we are mentioning the company, everything else, and it creates buzz, not only around that episode, but around our page, our profile, and it gathers the word of mouth.

Nemanja 40:25

And it’s important also, one small thing that can make a huge difference, or the, let’s say, the common selling. So if you just go and commit, it counts as, as a post on LinkedIn, like, like, comment posts are the same thing. Because they can see no, they can be seen on a profile. And if you just go and get into that, give value in each post, like great post, not that kind of, but just get into details, share some analytics, some results in for, it’s totally different. Also, if you create ads in in a way that

Nemanja 41:06

People can gather around the specific ad and get into organic conversation, you will get even more better results when it comes to performance of doors, it and you will also get the exposure, which is organic. So your reads gonna be better, you will get better results. But at the same time, people will remember you because they got into discussion on your own post. So they It doesn’t matter if they get the answer for somebody else. But it’s like you’re plenty playing in your yard. And those are small things that are important when it comes to measurement. I think this is important to say when we’re talking about the word of mouth. LinkedIn is a platform where bs is living. And it’s hard to measure over there. Yeah. Because LinkedIn doesn’t give us too many insights. So how do we measure growth amount, I like to do it in a couple of ways. First one is a matching who’s, who’s commenting on my posts. And watching if those people are tagging decision makers, from their companies, in my posts, also is somebody sharing the post who is sharing the post. And also you get a lot of messages in your inbox, because there are some decision makers who don’t want to get publicly involved in conversation, but want to give you your opinion or quantity directly. So these are all the things that are that you can measure. Also one thing, and I don’t think many people realize how important it is, is that some people are invisible to us. So especially owning the like somebody can watch my video. Usually it’s it’s the video because we cannot measure we we cannot see who is watching the video. And they just come to the website, they’re scheduled call. That’s it. We’re not gonna we’re not connected. They’re not following the page, anything. But they must have come to some from somewhere. So I’m asking them and it’s okay, we saw the video because one of the people they’re connected with liked it. So it popped up in their feed, they watched it Aha, these guy know something. They asked that that person they say okay, oh, you’re following like, let’s say Nirvana for a long time. You should go to him and talk to him. So they schedule a call. It’s that simple sometimes.

Shiva 43:39

Yeah, it’s more about getting into you know, wherever your audiences are, your customers are and build a conversation around there. So it’s not just about one marketing channel, if, if they are on Instagram, just go there, build a conversation around there. And like you said, I think the decade all year old, the testimonials are just a simple case study won’t work. Like you said, I think of just two minute three minute testimonial may not work. But let’s say we bring them on our podcast and then if we get on to a conversation and then if they get to share that within their own community or are people in their space, then that’s again more like the word of mouth like he said,

Nemanja 44:20

This is a great strategy to bring the customers on the podcast and ask them straight away What do they think about the product about the services that that’s a great a great one. Also the when it comes to this demonios what works the best in my experience is when we get to sit offline we will a customer and like doing so in the form of an interview the camera is recording a tape behind my head and I’m talking with a with a customer and they’re telling from their perspective. So how did they find us? How did actually define the problem? So how did they find us what The choose us how the converse, the whole partnership started. What happened? Did we did good heavens word results? And what are they going to do next? Are they continue working with us all we gave them enough knowledge and results or whatever it is to go further. So but from their perspective, they need to tell it. So it’s more powerful, it can be said in three minutes, it can be said in up to 10 minutes, it all depends what kind of format Are you using, but I think this is the strongest one stronger than then any written testimonials or whatever it is.

Nemanja 45:42

Also, when you do it like that, and you get the customers to actually comment on that, and to confirm it. Or even sharing just a screenshot of the written testimonial with the customer who is actually commenting and confirming it. That’s that’s a jackpot. Like last night, I shared the feedback that we got from the women that schedule a call with us for like Friday, so a sales call and she read the newsletter. And she gave us the feedback like it’s it’s one of the best newsletters that we ever read. It’s the maybe the best ever. So I shared this screenshot. I weren’t connected with her. So, okay, so I’m going to go and share it. So I tagged her, she responded, yes, of course, you should tag me, this is something that I enjoyed, I confirm it. And just out of one post, we got like, around 80 visits on the website, three scheduled calls, 29 new subscribers, and I think I got on my profile like around 80 new followers. So this is the power of the content that is relevant. And that is confirmed by the by the by the client.

Shiva 47:02

Yeah, I was about to ask you about that conversation. So you recently started the email newsletter back, right. So I also wanted to understand like, I mean, what was the content? So I actually subscribed to your newsletter just to you know, look at the content, how you’re writing and things like that. So what most of the companies are doing wrong right now, when it comes to the newsletter, so where do you want them to correct it? Or how do you want them to kind of like write it down?

Nemanja 47:29

Basically, it all depends, like I specialize in email marketing, so I can go into performance, I can go into all kinds of stuff. But right now what do I see is we just try to, to get them the value, nothing else do not ask for anything, they only hit scale this link to click on the Contact Us and maybe schedule a call with us. But we try to distribute the best thing the embossed of the Funky Marketing team through the email. So we are curating them. I even named like Martin from from Funky Marketing, he is our dimension manager. So basically, I named him master Martin. And this is the name that he is using for the newsletter. So we personalized the Funky Marketing newsletter, it’s he is now and he’s using the best post that we are putting out there on LinkedIn to curate it and send it out to the to the people so they don’t need to like go around and look for content. And when you look it like that we post a lot. Like the whole team is posting one to two times a day and posting up to three times a day. So it’s a lot of content in a week.

Nemanja 48:50

And then we try to curate the best one and to get them just for them to consume it. Then also we are recording like two podcasts so we we are not sharing them over the newsletter. This is something that will change. But so we were pretty inactive. I think I wrote that in a post when it comes to newsletter because it was only me for the first couple of months and I’ll be sharing like my stories and experience and everything else. So at one point I just stopped because I didn’t want to use the newsletter just inform people. Okay, we have the new podcast. Okay, we have the new webinar, okay, we have something the new article. So I wanted to give them the real value, if I’m writing it is just the value over there. So now when it’s like couple of us in the company, we can bring it back and give like the straight while and I’m happy that the feedback was there because those are the posts that we are already seeing people react to it. And then there are around 600 people that we have On the newsletter, so those are people who are subscribed to hear from us. And in we try to get them only only the best of, of what we are talking about. And it’s interesting because we didn’t give them any value. Like if you subscribe to our blog, like two months ago, like, last week was the first time that you will hear from us. So you probably forgot that you subscribed to the Funky Marketing blog. And I said, Okay, I’m seeing the number of subscribers going up. So let’s give people what they want. They want to hear from us, we are going to give it to them. That’s, that’s as simple as possible.

Shiva 50:43

So I’ll just come back to the demands of that. So if I wanted to begin, you know, setting up a demand Gen team, where should I start?

Nemanja 50:53

It’s a good question. I always say that you should start with distribution. Because there are many companies that have great content, great content, which is bringing them SEO, traffic traffic from Google. And those are articles written for the, for the search engines, but a good article that needs just a little more structure and a little tone of voice that can be distributed. And they can be great content. When you distribute it on LinkedIn, on Quora, on zest on Twitter or somewhere else. So basically, you need a person who can plan out the distribution strategy, and who can actually get that content in front of the right people think this is the most important thing, you can always outsource the somebody to write articles. But you need the person who knows what kind of articles Do you need, what do you want to get out of them and for whom you’re writing them. So even you know, those kind of things, then you can outsource somebody to actually write the articles, I mean, are always suggesting that the company should have their own content marketing department.

Nemanja 52:12

But basically, if you have somebody who knows how it’s done, and you don’t want to hire just writers around you, then you can, you can outsource it. And distribution, if you ask me is the most important part of the dimension, and is the part that has been on the side for too many years. And I think even now, not that many companies are figuring out distribution. So basically, the distribution isn’t, if you just share your blog post on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on the company pages, nobody sees, and actually is going to be seen, because like those 14 people from your company will see it may be, let’s say, up to 40, it can be happen. But those are not the people that you are targeting, those are actually the people from the company, because they will also like it in their family will see it and you don’t want to tie with your family on somebody else. And then it’s done. When you do that you don’t distribute the content anywhere else, you forget about it on the website. And you create more and more and more and just stays there on the website. like spiders around it. And nothing happens until somebody can come who can distribute the/. content the right way to the right people.

Shiva 53:46

So it’s just not about writing blogs or having the landing pages and then hire a SEO guy and then sit there for a while. That’s not how it’s gonna work out, right?

Nemanja 53:56

Yeah, I think SEO also needs to change because SEO should be somebody that is bringing the right people to consume the content, not just the people who are writing the content and waiting for the search engines to work. I think this time is is best. And SEO also needs to change. You cannot problem come to me as I mean, let’s say I’m the company owner, and you come to me and you try to offer me SEO services. And you say, well, maybe we’ll hear results in six months. Like I’ve been doing SEO, you You can tell me more specific things than that.

Nemanja 54:41

I know. If you don’t want to tell me I know that you don’t want to or you’re not good at what you do. So six months are enough to get to get specific results. But I mean, look, how do I see the content creation and distribution A lot of companies that I see that have great content, they have been in the SEO train. So they have keywords figured out, they have the persona, figure out, based on that they created the content. And they leave it on the website. So when a person comes who can do the distribution, you have it all over there. Still, a lot of people are trying to do it again. So coming up with the, with the new copy, writing new things, doing the research means the research and everything has been done already before, you just need to get to that content, a tone of voice to just distribute it into the into the batches, and maybe give it a new life with some visuals and go ahead and distribute it. That’s all that you need to know is that simple.

Shiva 55:57

So before we wrap this up, one last quick question. So you also launched a podcast recently, right? Tell us a little bit about that. So why do you launch? Where do you want to launch a podcast? And how that’s gonna help your company grow? And how, what kind of? I mean, how do you actually measure the podcast? So that’s one thing I wanted to address it to the B2B marketers. And then. So what’s the goal for the podcast for the next six months or 12 months?

Nemanja 56:24

Yeah, this is the second podcast that that we have. First one is B2B vehicle design doing with Marty Sanchez. And we are doing that podcast just for two reasons. One is to give value to the people because we’re doing it live with people on zoom. And the other one is to get content for our profiles. That’s it. That’s the goal to get the content. Funky Marketing, on the other hand, is the podcast when for now, only me but it’s going to be another host, when we are interviewing marketers, designers, business developers, entrepreneurs, super good people who are working, doing good things for the good people.

Nemanja 57:08

And I’m trying to get their personal stories, their view on some of the things that are specific for the industry going on right now, how do we measure it? Well, also by creating, creating content and giving value inside inside it, so basically, we’re going to use the content when other people are talking our guests and build a brand out of our company, I don’t hide it, I tell it to each one of them, we’re going to use all of you, we’re bringing you here to talk for an hour to have a chat to get your insights, knowledge results, everything else. And we are publishing that content on our page. So bringing, bringing building their brand on our page. And by doing that we are building the Funky Marketing brand.

Nemanja 58:01

And basically, that’s it out of one piece of content we can get from them to 20 more pieces of video or audio grams or something else, we get the headline and get the transcriptions and we just distribute it over there, they will talk about it, they will share it with their friends, we will get more people to listen to the podcast. So the awareness is being built. Also, we are publishing it on YouTube. So YouTube is great for branding. So we are also building funch marketing brand. And one thing that we can do is we can follow the number of people who are listening to each episode. And even if it’s like 10 people, we okay because it’s 10 specific people, they’re coming back each week, it means that it means something to them, it means that we are giving them the value and it means that the word of mouth will start working and they will start recommending us to somebody else, the podcast or us as somebody who is providing the services.

Shiva 59:09

Awesome. Awesome. So a couple quick questions before we wrap this up. And so who’s your favorite CMO?

Nemanja 59:17

CMO? Yeah. Oh, I don’t know. It was David Gerhardt when he was VP at Drift. Now, I don’t know I’m not very like, I’m not the favor of CMO position. I think it can be something that’s a little bit different. And I think we’re gonna change that in the in the future.

Shiva 59:41

So if you have to pick one company that is very good at demand Gen. What would it be other than your company? Yeah,

Nemanja 59:49

It’s so I don’t know. Refined Webs but just based on the on the Chris Walker, who is an active CEO and maybe Megan They’re so gravy. gravy is is a great example because their demand is coming out of the congregation is are happening inside the company. So let’s say LinkedIn is just a rooftop on everything that’s happening inside. And this is how they get the demand Gen. They get into simple compensation, those kind of things. Also Gong Gong because they’re going in a different direction than anybody else. Like they made a party, a zoom party, and they talked about it on their LinkedIn page company page. So we DJs with everything else is just something that’s totally different than anybody else. And not that many companies can reproduce. So I mean, they have a lot of other things that are good, but just talking about about few companies.

Shiva 1:00:53

Yeah, one interesting thing I hear from Chris a voter a fan lab says they don’t even do the cold calling. And then he hated. So that was an interesting thing. I mean, for the companies that are doing more of sales activity, more for cold calling, because they’re in definitely into more of the demands. And so that’s one metric. And so one last quick question. So one B2B brand, that does tailor marketing,

Nemanja 1:01:19

All of them that I mentioned. I mean, there there, there are a lot of B2B companies that can be used as bad examples. And

Shiva 1:01:30

Yeah, but definitely, I think Don does a very good job. So I was listening to one of his podcasts, I think 18 months ago, they had like 4000 followers on the LinkedIn. And then they’re 50,000 followers right now after 18 months. So

Nemanja 1:01:41

Yeah, you know, what was the one thing that stands out for me is all those companies didn’t exist a few years ago. Yeah. So they are hiring new people that have the awareness of the importance of the personal brand of the company’s brand, being out there being interactive, sharing their knowledge, results, their journey, companies that have been here for more years, older companies, they don’t have that luxury because people in the company are older, not maybe in yours, but in understanding and the way they do the sales, the marketing. They don’t understand why would they go out and share something with they didn’t share it for like 20 years. And this is the advantage today have over everybody else.

Shiva 1:02:30

Awesome, perfect Nemanja. I took some extra time. And thank you so much for spending your afternoon with us. And it was nice talking to you. And I had a great fan.

Nemanja 1:02:40

Yeah,thank you. It was a pleasure.

Shiva 1:02:44

Thank you so much for watching and listening to this episode of driven ecommerce network podcast. This show is brought to you by DCKAP, the company well known for its e-commerce product, so it’s for B2B distributors. Make sure you subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Catch you guys very soon, but another interesting episode. Until next time, see you.