Cato Networks Case Study: Executing A Targeted Plan To Reach The Right Stakeholders

with that all said and done i would like to introduce today's speakers dimitri lizzitsky is a co-founder and ceo of the person-based marketing solution in flute2 he's a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of hands-on experience in online marketing and advertising with focus on personalized targeting and efficient marketing spend dimitri has successfully launched managed and advanced multiple i t powered companies in the us and eu markets including bonus tech which was sold to the company global logic and thick buttons prior to in flute2 dimitri was the global head of delivery and services at get marab karen is a marketing director at ko networks the only solution with a cloud native convergence of networking and security morav has more than 10 years

of strategic digital marketing experience with a proven track record in delivering digital marketing within international b2b organizations in her current role at cato networks she is responsible for executing the global digital strategy and driving engagement with customers morab holds an mba and a ba in philosophy without further ado i am going to pass things over to you dimitri go ahead and take it away thank you brian before i jump into presentation let me quickly cover the agenda of today's session uh so we will talk about uh high resolution abm that you try you can try in 2020 and we will talk about why how different to traditionally advertising strategy and then we will discuss the execution part fundamentally we will talk about the how we define the target audience

what would be the creative strategy for person-based advertising how will you budget how you report these results and then how your life marketing self team and then we will i'll pass uh to miraflin who will speak about your experience expression-based digitizing and networks so when you think about traditional b2b advertising strategy basically many companies use the same blueprint when you you want to buy some relevant traffic you optimize your landing pages to to get as many leads as possible from from this traffic and then you you lose your nurturing campaigns and pass it to cell development teams and whether whatever traffic is not

converging you you just pass this you just write it off as brand awareness and um well this is kind of standard standard traditional b2b editing strategies to see with many of our clients today um the main challenges of this approach is uh like they're described by by two of our clients uh andrew told me one that you know what we we doubled on our uh budgets and we doubled our you know effort and then we just improved the number of fleets but we didn't see any of enterprise leagues it was just small companies and another client shared shared to this insight with us in one more you know directly saying hey would you like you know see more with toby to to fill out the lead form for you would it work in the real life and the main challenge

with uh with this approach is that you efficient with naf and this is not what you can do if you target large enterprise accounts and then like thought and then to to address this challenge many advanced marketers uh turn to accomplish marketing and we honestly believe that accomplished marketing is the right way to address the problem of you know fishing with the net and if you think about account-based marketing you you you basically the core idea is very simple uh you go after specific accounts specific companies that you want to win and when you do this you you you start from defining who is your ideal customer and then you kind of translate it into specific roles and specific functions inside this organization and and then you basically target and

launch your campaigns for this specific account which is great the main challenge here is that your sales team is working with people not accounts and and then you know the main challenge is that marketing teams operate separately from sales teams they don't pass a lot of information besides you know engagement data on the account level when you talk about person-based advertising uh the main the main idea behind it is very simple you you target specific people not just companies not just accounts and then the second very crucial element of personal advertising is is the idea of if we can track the interests of every person so in traditional advertising approach uh you just know people who

manage to fill out lead forms and you know like we you really think about like one out of ten people that are interested can actually fill out the link form and basically then you can identify them and then you can pass them to sales people in person-based advertising every interested person becomes elite for you and there are a lot of people who are coming to your website reading the content you know interested but they don't reveal themselves and basically person-based advertising helps you to reveal this kind of opportunities so so so when you think about person-based advertising applied to accomplish marketing there's great way to to connect marketing and sales people because you target specific people inside the account the real decision makers and then you track information

on the person by personal level so you know who is interested and you can pass this information to your sales team which makes marketing and self-team alignment perfect so now we will talk about the blueprint of person-based advertising strategy how you define how you create how you budget how you measure and then how you leverage this strategy in 2020 the first step is how you define target audience and basically the fundamental idea remains the same you you have your ideal customer profile which basically connected to your business strategy and you can rely on the same concept but then when you execute on this and try to transform your your customer profile into specific target audience

you you do differently when you apply different strategies so when you think about traditional b2b advertising you you try to define your target audience the way you define you know social demographic profiles of people you want to target and that's kind of very broad definition in account based marketing when you transform your ideal customer profile into specific audience you think about accounts you think about specific companies that are relevant for you and you want to target and then when you when you when you apply high resolution abm pressure-based detecting you you basically think about specific decision makers inside those accounts you still define accounts you want to target but then inside this account you ask yourself who exactly makes the decision inside this specific company that should should see your ads and where should respond to your advising effort and that's what we call a group of decision makers or we can

call them god so when you think about a target audience on the institutional level you basically start from the same idea of privatization of your accounts and then you can use you know known intend data companies as a data source for this so you can use start tech target or bamboora or any other internet data provider to help you choose the accounts you want to target or you can just ask yourself people that sometimes it's the best source of data information and when you think about specific people again there are plenty of companies that provide information about target like target people that you can connect to to the target accounts and based on the persona that you define you can you can know exactly who who

makes reseller decisions besides this that organization so this is how you define your target audience when you think about high resolution accomplished marketing speaking about creative strategy m the main learning that we basically derived from from our campaigns and from the campaigns for our clients is that it's all about engagement there's no such thing as brand awareness um in the way that you can just show ads and expect people that they will know about your company and uh you know new brand awareness without actual engagement actual response and actual involvement in your creative materials so there are a couple of things when you think about creative strategy and number one is obviously you

you want people to click your name and your advertising and you know clickbait you know like it's a bad word probably but uh there are a lot of clickbait advertising that can teach us how you can improve your ctrs how you can improve your picture rate so that people will actually you know respond to advertising and you'll get engaged second obviously you want to share fun gated content because impression-based advertising you know every person who visits your landing page so there's no need to push people to fill out lead forms again just to explain who who is who is this person you just know exactly at the moment when the person visits your landing page so and on the other side you know gated content is is what kills your engagement um i mean what you found out also is that when you you actually need to tell stories there are a lot of great content lots of

great articles but we have very little attention span and when you see people coming to the landing page you really need to capture the attention and keep it and that's where story comes in so it's not just having like long beautiful content it also should be very engaging from the from the first paragraph from the first title and finally with if you build inbound strategy your primary focus is to drag traffic to this landing page and that creates wrong habits um seo optimized landing page is not what you need when you think about person-based advertising because the only audience the only target of your person-based advertising are real decision makers still humans not just seo type of algorithms so you want to rethink the whole idea how you build your landing pages comparing to inbound

marketing packages when it comes to budgeting you can actually reverse to the final remains to be present when you think about account based marketing as well so here are the numbers that we had in like from our sales pipeline and you see that the conversion rates there is some conversion rate in every stage of the funnel and if you take like 100 percent of accounts that engaged and scored 10 plus in our definition uh then there's some percentage of accounts that converted and get to the sales calls stage there is some percentage of them that went on boarding stage and some of them that became our clients so this is our real data from from from the last year so when you think about how much to budget and what results to expect there's very

simple way to do it is you can actually reverse engineer and start from the number of clients you want to get and then obviously you need to adjust it for sale cycle and then you can go back and you know come up with this idea of how much how many accounts you want to get to 10 plus in order to convert them into real clients so basically this is a reverse engineer funnel that will help you to budget your strategic photos on trading it's like kind of here's kind of complex chart that basically the book can serve as a blueprint for budgeting and we can actually share this uh file and we'll share it with the webinar basically the idea is very simple so in order to get a specific number of mkis and mkls

uh you need to have some sizable target audience and some specific budget allocated to execute on this and it all comes together in a very predictable way so you can actually plan to have specific number of uh margin qualified accounts and multi-copied leaves across the year and then build this energy from there and we can actually help help in building this out a couple of things when you think about budgeting is obviously brand awareness builds up over time so so most of the leads will come will not come on the first month of your person-based advertising campaign and uh you know like there's like repetitive visitors engagements will give you real you know quality leads and quality account engagements so it takes takes time to build up second is

nkls we do not defer mkl as a term for accounts marketing because fundamentally margin qualifiedly means that you have somebody inside the account who is interested to talk to to yourself team or who is engaged with your content and having one person means that you can expand it and cover more people and then the whole account can become qualified so basically mkl is the leading factor to nka's and then you optimize around clicks rate and obviously this is a gate to big engagement volumes and and then cost mql becomes much slower when you think about perspective because obviously we capture interest of all people not just those who fill out lead forms so you you can expect a big much bigger volume of margin qualified leads and marketing qualified accounts versus traditional demand generation strategies

talking about marketing and self-alignment it's very simple because in in person-based sanitizing you target specific people you get information about those engagements on the personal level and then you can pass this information to salespeople directly so you know exactly it's not just the account that got some engagement score but also specific people that get a got some engagement score and then you know exactly who to talk to besides your your target organization uh who will be open to have conversation with yourself team and this is the information we can pass to to self force or to outreach to any automation software and the second element of marketing sales alignment is the fact that because you track impressions and clicks and engagement on the person by personal

level you can provide this information to your sales team and and then this is completely absolutely useful information for them because they know what what was interesting for this person what content this person engaged with and this is a very good starting point to send a meaningful email or have a conversation around this topic speaking about reporting and optimizing your campaigns obviously you monitor leaks rates and optimize around engagements and you're just messaging creatives the way you would do it in traditional advertising there's nothing unusual here and then because you monitor engagement from the person by personal level you can also adjust your target audience based on the previous engagement history and then we can optimize the target list around this as well

with this i pass the presentation to merov who will speak about her experience with pressure-based advertising and how she applies this for arcade networks merav the floor is yours thank you dmitry hi thank you so much everybody for having me here today i'm going to share our own insights from using infutu for the past uh almost a little over actually six months a little a little bit of background cato networks is a computer networking and security company we provide the only secure managed sd-wan a software-defined wide area network service natively built with a global reach self-service and agility of the cloud cata was founded by two successful innovators cramer and over the past four years we signed

up hundreds of global customers with thousands of sites we've been as you can see experiencing tremendous growth which is exciting and also means that our goals are growing as well as a marketer at cato i'm in charge of driving engagement and demand from potential customers and when we started working with influential there were a few specific challenges that stood ahead of us we were moving upstream and targeting larger companies so our audiences became smaller and a little more specific we also had limited resources which i think is always the case but for us specifically it wasn't just about the budget being limited but also about the bandwidth of the team members we're a small team and we couldn't just table everything

else that we were doing and focus all of our efforts on one new channel also as larger enterprises go there are usually more stakeholders which makes the sales cycle longer and more complex and lastly we were seeing perfectly good leads kind of dying on the vine these are leads that we identified as mqls but didn't engage with us they were either not responding to inbound marketing efforts or or even not responding to live attempts of our reps to contact them and this is how we are looking at our target audiences so in this diagram i wanted to show how we are applying a mix of account based marketing and intense marketing in our overall strategy so we are we're looking at who our target

audience is at the demographic and firmographic attributes like company size geography revenue even titles and seniority and we're also combining intent so we know when specific accounts are interested in a solution like ours and on the on the second and outer circle you can see that we are also looking at channels that we already have in place that are there in order to intercept our potential customers channels like email marketing uh content hubs recommended content like tabula display networks and social targeting campaigns and we realized that we have created a list of interested ideal customers really kind of the perfect customer list and now we need to find a way to get to them and engage with us we wanted to zero in on this specific list of people and really just get a sign of life from them

so the way we did that is by using top of funnel assets that have genuine user value so with info2 we matched about 60 or 70 percent of our target audience and since we already had all of the information on each member of the list we wanted to use frictionless content we didn't need a bottom of the funnel webinar to be an indication of interest and we also didn't need a long form with plenty of fields to fill out because the data was already there what we did use are guides comparisons analyst report for some examples here and this is the kind of information that our potential buyer would be looking at anyway with info2 we discovered that we needed to refresh the banners about every two

weeks and we also looked at the ctrs of each specific banner in order to know when it was time to remove it and start a different one and as you can see here there's some examples of the different ctrs of the banners i'll just say that the exposure factor of the creative is important so sometimes we change the color scheme and only did just a light rewording or phrasing of the same creative and we saw great results again as a benchmark what you're looking for is a ctr of above 0.20 percent that will generally produce more interactions i wanted to talk sorry i wanted to talk a little bit about the results that we saw within pluto and i'll show a couple of the journeys

that i think are interesting so in this case this is a strategic account in our abm segment it's a large manufacturing company in the us and we had an intense signal from this account back in february 2019. since it was a strategic account for us we added that account to our influential campaign on april 2019 and over the course of a month we managed to show 374 impressions to five relevant employees in that account and if you can see it the network specialist which is the bottom row of the company downloaded an asset via influence but the more senior dm was actually uh the person that came to the meeting and we also have the happy note at the end um getting the senior networking engine

engineer who we were looking for so long back on the call so what we can see in this journey is i think mostly the quick pace that things can move at we see a conversion from mql to qsl and to an opportunity within within three months so that's very quick in our industry in this journey this is a is a british services company it was a great fit for cato networks but it wasn't responding to any of our past marketing efforts we have a lead that downloaded an asset back in january 2018 we saw multiple web visits and even an attended webinar up to november of 2018 but then it went completely cold and some evidence here as you can this is uh

from salesforce uh some desperate attempts of our reps to reach the person and there's no answer no answer no answer so at april uh sorry on april 2019 the account was added to influential campaign and 317 impressions later we saw some very meaningful interactions and this successful note from our sales rep getting the prospect back and turning the account into an opportunity in this case i wanted to show a seemingly inactive prospect that can come back to you through this channel if you're looking at specific prospects within institute platform this is let me just show you

so if you're looking at specific prospects within the influence platform this is the kind of score you want to see most importantly you want to act quickly when you do see such activities and this will likely shorten the time your reps are spending trying to contact the prospects another way of looking at the performance is from an account-based marketing perspective and as i've shown before getting a few relevant people from the same company can be very valuable because even if the decision maker is not the one downloading the asset itself it could eventually create the interest and bring him to the table to discuss your solution some overall performance stats can be seen here we reached about 9 500 leads with

what i think is a staggering 400 011 impressions and i think the bottom line is really the visits so when you see 550 visits from these are our most valuable segments or most valuable leads as you can imagine that led to many new qsls and eventually opportunities in pipeline some key takeaways define and redefine your target audience invest in enriching your focus segment check for those valuable leads that you just can't get to engage with you in any different way focus your resources on the high potential audience it is a smaller audience but it will likely yield better results get engagements

use material that has outstanding user value optimize and constantly refresh your creatives to support that content align marketing and sales efforts by surfacing the type of engagement and content that the prospect engaged with and lastly respond to engagement quickly in order to speed up the sales cycle for example we have alerts set up on every engagement that just go up instantly as they occur and i think that's it i will hand it back to you thank you very much uh miraf thank you so much for for your presentation um i think it is very inspiring case of application of person-based advertising for the real-life

situation and hopefully it will inspire other companies to try it out in 2020 and we'll be happy to answer questions in the coming q a session thank you so much thank you dimitri and for that uh great presentation it's uh really interesting the lessons learned here from taking that personalized approach to account based advertising it's it's going to be essential in 2020 and beyond so there's a lot of great tips and takeaways here we have a lot of great questions coming in for the q a but before we get to them here's another friendly reminder for folks on the line to please take our short survey and share your thoughts and feedback with us um the survey is going to help us create better content in in digital events for you in the future so please share your thoughts with us with that let's jump right into these

questions here uh first the first question i have here is from stacy stacy asks how do you suggest teams start trying to create their quote-unquote god audiences with limited time resources and manpower do either of you uh dimitri or have any uh further tips to this step in the process sure so i think the easiest way to start is actually the best one and actually you can see it from from the case that miracle presented is when you when you target people that are already in your pipeline and these are the accounts or specific people that yourself team is already talking to and you know by running a campaign against those targets you will provide immediate

results and immediate help to your self team without like zero effort invested into collecting this information because it's already there it's already inside your crm software and we can just connect to pull it out from there and run the campaign targeting these people good suggestion do you have anything to add there well i really like the god list terminology i'm going to use that one um i think i think dimitri is absolutely right i was looking i would add to that that another kind of low-hanging fruit is looking at leads that seem to fit your mql criteria but are just not responding in any way take a piece of that segment and try engaging with influence sometimes people just don't respond to email marketing for example but they will respond if they see something

on social good points good points there the next question i have here is from anthony and it sounds like it's directed specifically at dimitri here he mentioned dimitri that the learn from clickbait suggestion was uh pretty unexpected to him he said clickbait has a pretty negative connotation in the consumer world so how do you believe uh b2b marketers should be looking at this type of approach to you know educating themselves about you know ad content creation that sort of thing uh ctas uh and that sort of stuff well i think making a real clickbait that has this negative feeling for b2b is almost impossible or extremely hard because the topics that our clients talking about

in their advertising are very technical very specific and that makes a very tough challenge for them because it's very hard to present your you know technical solution uh in the way that it's attractive and people want to click on it and want to actually explore each other so actually we basically with this idea i i urge marketers to step outside of their comfort zone of making you know very nice pleasing and advertising that gives you 0.0.1 percent star because what really happens with this type of advertising is that it's nice it's easy to get approved by your management no one will get annoyed but then it largely gets unnoticed by your target audience so you have to step out of your comfort zone try to make it appeal and try to make it

exciting for for a target audience and by the way it's not that hard because we serve this ads to specific people that are interested in what india topics so just make it nicer make it more exciting more engaging and you know ctr goes immediately up so i think there are lots of things to learn from clickbait excellent thank you dimitri the next question we have is from kristin and kristen's this is uh directed to uh marav it looks like it's she she asks how is your content team utilizing ad engagement to fuel future campaigns what does that process look like within your team well thank you christian that's that's a good question so as dmitry mentioned i think we just have a very close feedback loop

uh together with the content team and i think this was mentioned early on we need to emphasize that branding is not part of this package because we're talking about an audience that for us is kind of the perfect fit the only the only thing wrong is that they just they don't know who we are right so we can't start talking to them about how great cato networks is what we do start talking to them about is their uh challenges pains what they can do to be better at their job what they can do to get better results we have to do it in a very kind of micro copy sort of way because it's a very quick glance at a screen when you scroll down your facebook or instagram and i think we just since it's pretty quick the effect is seen immediately um we can just you know share

the feedback and and try out many different options so we do it kind of organically there is not a process that is kind of uh set and very rigid but i do see things that are performing better and i have to say it's not only the content team that i share the results with it's also the design team because those two together kind of make the difference excellent great good insights there the next question i have um was uh for uh morav but i think that i think dimitri might be able to weigh in a little bit on this as well um this one is from uh it's from thomas uh to uh about how your team is aligning sales through data flow between

both departments can you speak a little bit more to like what that data flow looks like how soon the teams have access to this data and how from a timing perspective how instantaneous it is that sort of thing dmitry do you want to start or should i yeah i'm sorry that's right yeah supposed to be objective to you right yep you can go first okay um so aligning the marketing and sales team is is always an ongoing challenge i have to say i kind of i always say that marketing is really working for sales right we need to to get the food on their table and for us one of the biggest challenges that our pre-sales and sales team have

is to get people to answer the phone or to answer an email and since we do get the feedback instance instantaneously from the platform from influential so at i mean the means we can speak to the exact technicalities of this but almost immediately when somebody clicks on an ad we get it through an api to marketo and salesforce and then our sales team can act on that so we use um in addition to everything else being populated in our crm and marketing automation where they can see exactly who clicked on what ad and visited which page we also have an email alert that is generated once a click is done and since we shared the strategy with sales and they know that these are people that we're just you know just waiting to get even a simple click on an ad is enough to get them um to kind of pounce on that lead and

the conversation between the person and the prospect is also a little bit different because this is not somebody who sat on in a 60-minute long webinar and knows exactly everything about the product so the conversation starts with um with the needs with how we can solve some of the challenges that we know that this prospect is dealing with and as dimitri mentioned we know exactly the topic that this person is interested in as well most times so we can start with that too i hope that answers the question made sense to me dimitri do you have anything to add yeah absolutely so so basically the mission of our company like the hidden mission of our companies is to make the life of marketers easy and so they can easily create this amazing results and help self-team and basically just to add to this is

is we we all when we make product decisions we always make a decision that it goes towards making it easy for our marketing team to share their results with sales team and in real life it really means that you can easily connect your data to crm and provide different sites directly to sales team and again for sales people it means that they don't need to go to using our software any other reports anything outside of the traditional workflow and they they get this insight inside that crm inside their dashboards on the daily basis so we basically try to and person basically tithing is exactly about this so actually marketing team works with real people and some people are working with video people and we just pass information from one team to another team in the easiest possible way excellent excellent thanks for that um

unfortunately it is all the time we have for uh questions today however if your question went unanswered we'll be sure to follow up with you via email and put you in touch with dimitri's team we put you in touch with morav as well so keep an eye out on your inbox if your question went unanswered thanks again to demetrium around for such a great presentation and thank you all for attending uh today's session a lot of great insights were shared and hope you all learned a lot be sure to check out our next session which we will be learning about you know from acquisition to advocacy how to optimize engagement across the customer journey it's definitely something you don't want to miss if you're looking to strengthen your uh funnel strategies here so with that i will say thanks again to

everyone and have a great rest of the day you