Disco Case Study: Why Person-Based Strategy is Essential with Difficult to Reach Audiences

hello beautiful pro people i am nina bell and i'm your moderator for this session i hope you're ready for a good afternoon session of learning i'd like to thank our gold sponsor influential who is presenting this session we really appreciate their support of b2b forum online in addition this presentation they have all kinds of materials to check out in their booth in the resource center so be sure to stop by their booth and say hello so let's meet our presenters and dive right in please welcome dmitry liszitsky and keith schroedt who are presenting why a person-based advertising strategy is essential for marketers with difficult to reach audiences sponsored by influ tube dimitri lizzitsky is co-founder and ceo of influe2 the first person-based marketing platform for b2b companies a serial entrepreneur with 20 years experience in online marketing and advertising he has successfully launched managed and advanced multiple i.t power companies in the u.s and eu markets including bonus tech which was sold to global logic

and thick buttons prior to influential dimitri was global head of delivery and services at get keith schroedt is director of marketing for disco leading the marketing direction for disco's products and solutions keith brings over 20 years of industry experience and subjects matter expertise and is a frequent guest lecturer on electronic discovery and evidence best practices at industry events and conferences before joining disco keith held marketing management roles at thomson reuters access data and wolters kluwer thank you dimitri and keith for being here with us today thank you nina thank you for hearing us all right let's get going with the presentation okay welcome everybody to our session called why person-based advertising strategy is essential for marketers is difficult to reach audiences and my name is dimitry sisk i'm ceo of info2 and i'm here with keith short who is vice president of marketing

disco hey keith hi so before we dive into our topic let me briefly tell about our company so info2 was found in 2017 and we have raised 3.4 million which turned to business largest around an ibm space and we are growing fairly quickly it's like we're growing like doubling every six months and most of our clients are based in this and most of our clients are high-tech companies most of them are enterprise companies as well [Music] so speaking about our why we built our product and um what was the mindset by about it um we built infiltu to help marketers help sales people and uh these are there are three elements uh how we think it works first they have to share the audience and work together targeting the same people uh we believe that the marketing content uh should be defined by cells stale cells stage of the funnel

and uh sales context and third we believe that every marketing engagement is super important to sell signals that we need to leverage and speaking about um the topic of our today's conversation uh um we really believe that uh marketing can only help sales people when when they speak to the right audience and sometimes it can be a very niche small audience and rebuilding foodtube is an idea that uh when you execute the accomplished marketing programs um it's not enough to target just account somebody in in the account level you want to go after specific decision maker specific buying team inside every account um and uh that's exactly how it works so we basically target people based on on their names and you can go as niche as needed by targeting specific individuals um so that info2 can can provide um you know like air cover for any

sales activity just starting from top of the funnel opportunities where you can you can build awareness targeting specific individuals speaking about dimension programs value probe stage where sales development people can have air cover for their day-to-day activities up to you know sales and uh expansion opportunities so basically our idea is that you can you can actually leverage marketing at every stage of a sales funnel so with that that's kind of brief idea i'm excited to welcome keith to share his experience and um tell us how exactly they used info to him in the in their situation well thank you dimitri i'm excited to talk to the audience today about our relationship um it's been since september that we engaged with influential and we've had some really good impact um so far in in the couple months that we've been working within fluid2 so before i get into that i'll just give you a little background on disco

we were founded in 2012 we're a legal technology company we provide technology and services to law firms and corporate legal departments we've raised about 235 million to date it puts our company valued at about 785 million on the last round that we raised we're seeing we're seeing a tremendous growth i'm about a hundred percent growth year over year we're headquarters in austin texas with an international office in london about 320 employees we're hiring uh very aggressively so we should have close to about 370 employees uh within the next six months and we have about 450 global clients 75 of the top amla 100 and then as you can kind of see by top clients we have some very large global corporations and some government agencies as well recently we were top rated on trust radius and then we won the g2 winter leader badge moving in from 2020 to spring of 2021.

so some of the challenges that we faced as a organization is number one we're extremely hyper growth technology company what i mean by that is is our growth is just so phenomenal and sometimes it just feels like you're you're riding a wave that you just can't basically get off of which is a good thing so there's a lot of people that probably listen to this are kind of going through the same growth that we are and i know influence ii is definitely going through that growth as well um with that comes a lot of different challenges um just every day that i wake up there there's just different challenges that we're facing um from a marketing perspective and then definitely from a company perspective some of the biggest challenges that i had that i've been dealing with actually for the last year really is is with our marketing technology stack and then our reporting challenges and so that's one of the things that when in fluid 2 started reaching out to me and so i'm showing examples of some of the ads the influence ii had been targeting me with and so i started noticing these ads that were coming up in instagram and facebook and some of my social media platform and they were just constantly

there and so with our marketing challenges and reporting challenges i just kind of started keeping an eye on influent 2 because i just started really noticing um the ads um how they were communicating with me the messages that they were using and so we were struggling as a marketing department because we were using a lot of different techniques um we were using like facebook ads we're using google ads we're using different types of technology they weren't really integrated and we're having a lot of problems with our integrations at the time is that you know we're using part out we're using salesforce we're using a lot of different types of technologies and things just weren't really integrated very well which really affected our reporting um so i was dealing with those problems um you know throughout 2020. hard to reach prospects and clients i think every marketer says that they have hard to reach prospects and clients i basically deal with personas lawyers very hard to reach audience number one because most attorneys are billing by the hour

some attorneys actually bill by 15 minute increments so when you're charging your clients you know hundred dollars 250 300 a thousand dollars an hour sometimes 2 000 an hour every minute of your day counts and so they don't really spend a lot of time paying attention to traditional methods that we use for marketing so we can send them emails we had a pretty robust sdr team so an inside sales team that was calling reaching out trying to set demos and that kind of stuff so we're doing a lot of the traditional stuff that everybody in the audience is doing but what happened was with our particular audience when covid happened and this was kind of around march of 2020 everybody started dealing with covid and they started moving from their traditional offices to home officing so our inside sales team had the contact numbers traditionally for for offices and so as soon as everybody started moving to home offices we didn't have their cell phones and so a lot of challenges basically came about with our with our

inside sales team uh being able to call and do outreach to our personas um and that's again kind of about the time that the influent 2 started showing up on my my instagram feed to my social media feed and i'm extremely hard to get um you know on the phone email and that as well and i was like saying if they can reach me on my time since my time is so valuable as well if they're reaching me when i'm taking a lunch break or i'm taking an evening break and i'm seeing these ads and i'm recognizing them the messaging resonates with me and i was even taking ads screen capturing them and sending them over to my cmo at the time and say hey these guys are getting my attention if they can do that to me then what can you know i think we should probably look into this technology in the solution and see if that we can you know reach our personas our audience that we're trying to get in front of um the other challenge that we had is that we were really a big event-driven marketing organization and so since attorneys are so difficult to get a hold of we had to go where they were and so

there's a lot of big conferences that attorneys attend um there's also things called cles that we go to and we speak at so they're local and regional type cles we were going to the firms doing educational sessions with them lunch and learns that kind of stuff so as soon as cove had happened then all that dried up um we tried to move our event program virtual virtual has a lot of different um challenges which we're on a virtual conference right now so everybody probably on this on this call understands the challenges with virtual but the audience basically comes in and comes out of virtual conferences so if there's a session that they want to you know basically interact with you log in you watch the session as soon as the session is over then typically you're going to go do something else and typically log back in for another session so our audience participation was was not as as as intense as it was when we were doing personal events and in-person events with virtual so that caused a lot of problems um with

our outreach and and and definitely email was affected as well because everybody immediately started doing more digital and email communication as well so we saw our numbers for a lot of our email communications start going down so those are some of the the challenges that we are facing in 2020 and then we'll start talking about some of the impact that my relationship with influence had definitely on my my marketing uh plan and techniques and stuff so from an over overall performance standpoint um like i said we started engaging with in fluid 2 in september of last year and so we had a poc within fluid 2 and so what we've been doing is we've been trying different techniques with their technology so different types of ads display ads we've been doing video ads lately so different techniques but we've been pretty keeping it pretty consistent on a monthly basis that we have typically about four thousand uh for four thousand between four thousand forty five hundred contacts um on a regular basis per month that we're targeting and so our reach has been thirty thousand two

hundred ninety nine um targets that we've reached so far account reaches is a little bit over 24 000 accounts impressions we're sitting at a little bit over um 500 000 so 548 000 clicks 794 and visits 497. and i'll tell you what that impact had here here in a second um so we basically approach it um is we have accounts that we're cert we're trying to get into um so again we work with law firms and corporate legal departments corporate legal departments has its own uh set of unique issues when we're trying to contact them and and work with them but this is just kind of an example of bank of america our contacts or personas in in corporate are typically going to be associate general counsels general counsels head of legal those types of personas very difficult to contact via email phone all those traditional techniques that we were doing but you can kind of see here this is just kind of an example of bank

of america um you know uh decision makers reach we had 40 clicks so they're actually interacting with with the ads that we're running a little bit over 1700 impressions and three direct visits to the landing pages or the website assets that we had connected to the ads so overall i mean really good account engagement and then we have um the next slide talks about a personal engagement that we have and so this was an owner of a law firm or principal um and again attorneys are extremely difficult to get a hold of their time is very limited and so we had this really fun ad campaign that we're running and this was problem 912 i think everybody saw tiger king in 2020 so we're just kind of having a little bit of fun with the ads um but you can kind of see this ad um the owner principal here clicked on it um four times went to our website we had ads doing different things so we also use drift which i know is participating in this conference as well so we're using a mixture of part-out

forms and drift as well playbooks and so we're using different techniques just to try and see what works better for our audience and so you see here the visits went right to one of our our landing pages and then from the landing page it went to our home page and then from the home page basically went to a video asset as well so like i said we're using a couple different techniques is that sometimes if you click on an ad we're sending them right to the drift playbook um other techniques we're using where we're sending them to a part-out form they're known to us like we know who they are and we have all the information so when we're engaging with them we provide the the contact information to info2 so it's very specific so my technique here isn't to gather information because i already know who they are what i'm trying to get is engagement i'm trying to get them to sign up for a demo or i'm trying to get them to do something so my ctas are a little bit different i'm utilizing influent 2 because we know who they are so the engagement is going to be a little bit different so definitely and

then through that engagement there's an engagement score and so we use that engagement score to filter through the other thing that happens within fluid2 which fix some of our issues is i mentioned that we were having reporting issues so we're building out our bi team we're building our marketing operations team and so we have direct um links between info 2 and our sales force so once somebody clicks on an ad and starts interacting with it that information goes into salesforce and there's an activity that's reported and then a salesperson is alerted so immediately the rsc on our team knows that this this person is clicking on these ads and they're interacting with ads so they're getting live updates and then at that point they can see that they're engaging with the ads and then they can schedule a call and reach out to that particular person so that real-time reporting that real-time activity reporting is extremely helpful because as soon as the rsc saw that start popping up they'd be like what's this in fluid2 activity we had several sessions to teach them

about it but you know for them to kind of recognize that it's coming in sales for us and saying oh i see this person's clicking on this ad what was the ad um so it'll really allow those sales people to have that visibility to when somebody is clicking interacting with certain content to be able to call them and do outreach and then we use the scores basically also is because every month we're rotating contacts so people with higher scores we're keeping people with lower scores than we're kind of rotating them out so it's allowing us to be very targeted to the people who are engaging with us so pretty exciting um from that that perspective and then on um results again we started in september but what's pretty exciting about these results are like i said we're keeping an average about four four thousand contacts right now um in inflow two and we're about to start really going aggressive with this so through the poc basically i wanted to keep it pretty level just to kind of see what was happening on all the impressions and the clicks

and the visit and engagements but you can see by these charts you know keeping it pretty average four thousand you can see that about october it just started basically doing a hockey stick up so our impressions are starting to go through the roof and again we rotate contacts out um we're really working on the type of content that we're using and the engagement's starting to react to that type of content so we're learning as we go with influence ii and then you can see clicks visits and engagements basically is having a hockey stick up to the right as well so internally what i'm doing is i'm tracking opportunities and revenue so right now we're tracking about 2 000 opportunities in the system some of these opportunities originated from the ads that means that this is the first engagement that they had with us they came into the system you know basically had the engagement sales person reached out started an opportunity other ways we're doing this is i'm working with the sales team and if we're in an active um matter right now that we're

trying to basically get the opportunity rolling then i'll target that list so i work with the sales team we build these target lists um so bank of bank of america is a good example of that um other corporations that we're trying to target are law firms so we build that list and it could be a list of five people it could be a list of 20 people it could be a list of 100 people then we have a specific ad to that particular account or that target list and then we load it into influence ii and then that's what they see it's very targeted so a lot of these opportunities are in work but we're using it in fluid to reinforce our message um so there's certain videos that we're showing like you know customer satisfaction type videos we're doing some more product marketing type content and then we just started actually rolling out thought leadership content so we're engaged at an awareness stage with particular contact then thought leadership becomes very important and it reinforces some of the value propositions we have so we're using the marketing funnel we're creating different types of content

at different stages so for us this result is is success i'm going to continue using influence2 very excited about the opportunities and the revenue yeah okay thank you so much keith it's a very interesting you know exciting case study thank you so much thank you appreciate your time all righty thank you dimitri and keith we will now begin the q a portion so if there's anyone out there who has not yet submitted a q a please go ahead and ask your question by clicking on the q a button in the upper right corner also be sure to fill out the online survey which is located at the top of the chat box we appreciate your feedback as it helps us plan future events now let me navigate over to my questions all right i like this one from brooke because this is something that is near and dear to my heart as a demand and marketer has this process you've described reduced the time to close [Music] yeah i mean definitely considerably

amount number one because the way that we've been kind of using the technology to target and working with the sales team so the sales team has as much influence and what we're doing in the process as as whereas a lot of times when the sales people are going out and just doing cold calling and cold marketing there's a longer lead time so what we're doing is we're working more with the warm list and so it's definitely shrunk the time that we see basically deals closing so on average let's say on average where we were normally doing anywhere from 60 to 90 day closes for typical mid-range deals now we've kind of shrunk that down to about 30 to 45 days so it's definitely had an impact nice that's awesome and this is something that i'm also curious about as a sales force nerd you mentioned that you have your sales team alerted through salesforce right as people were interacting with an ad so do they just go and contact those people right away or do they have a waiting period so it's not like super

creepy like these people feel like they're bad that's kind of funny dimitri might want to answer that one but um we do we we do tell them maybe not as soon as you get the alert to contact them right away but um you know we have a pretty active like i said sdr program um so they're always um calling and they're always doing outreach and so they might be in a current cycle at that particular minute but they'll see the alert and then they check the alerts when they come in in the morning but yeah it is kind of uh like like i said it was used on me um and i just i i saw the ads and i was getting phone calls so dimitri's group was doing the same thing to me and i was like well i know i as a marketer i know what's happening and stuff like that but yeah we've been we told the sales team it's like well maybe right when you see it you don't want to call them like within the first minute but they've kind of developed their own yeah yeah i just i just want to add that uh in general we recommend to follow up as far as soon as possible

the i think the the way you handle this creepiness factor is not about timing it's more about what you write to people so definitely we don't recommend this jr to tell you hey you clicked my app let's talk right because that's the best way to make sure they will never talk to you uh but but then because you know the context you say hey you were interested in this topic or in this article or consumption and then maybe let's continue our conversation so if you do gently people don't feel very chased it's more about that like some smart hdr provides very relevant content uses relevant context for the conversation which is great yep i've got my own bdr who's really good at that he's he's really good at going right up to the line of being creepy and then not going over you know he can like you said provide the relevant context for why i'm getting in touch with you but it's not like i was watching what you were doing um marie is asking i'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about retargeting and

how that is or if it is involved in this strategy at all no no so i think overall retargeting is like i wouldn't say dying but i think it is in decline because of multiple reasons uh as everybody knows like and i think that overuse of the retargeting uh caused the current situation when we see you know cookie duplication and you know other you know jurisdictions uh across different platforms and actually we appreciate this i think it's a very great thing to do because it creates better safer and better experience for for customers and users um so no that's not connected to your targeting at all and so so in most cases our clients go after new opportunities if it comes if you speak about top of the funnel you want to build this relationship from creation sometimes you you might use some intent data to go to target in market you know accounts sometimes

you just say okay these are my dream accounts i want to go after those accounts and they could never you know heard about you before and still you can make this connection and build this relationship uh so yeah it's it's it's a different technique makes sense uh beth is asking and this is also something interesting uh to me were there any surprises of where your ads were successful based on difficulty of reaching the professional audience for example was instagram successful or was some other place where you didn't assume these people were hanging out did that end up working out better for you yeah yeah yeah so actually we we built our product to optimize across all platforms and currently we employ facebook google instagram linkedin yahoo and then speaking about google obviously we speak about thousands of online media assets and then uh honestly we expected to see a lot of kind of you know like our our first tests uh

when we just launched our product we're focused to understand if we can deliver our messages to you know to this kind of super busy decision makers who are you know spent all that time uh you know on on very important meetings and they have very conscious you know use of that time and then we realized very quickly that this are also like you speak about vps and and topan azure they're also humans uh so they they really spend a lot of time on instagram and facebook and then if you check their profiles you might see these people like they might have like old wedding photo like 10 years ago but uh they still consume a lot of content on very traditional you know like casual social media obviously linkedin adds value and obviously online media at value but uh yeah we just try to find the best profile that fits into specific decision makers and do you just do you find that out by just uh testing a whole bunch of different places

uh yourself a b test or do you do you pick the places where it goes or is there an established network where these things show up yeah yeah we just we just buy everything we i think when you consider the scale of opportunity for our clients i mean like you go like our clients go after you know key decision american large companies so you don't want to optimize anything you want if if is there any chance any at any cost so to be able to connect to a vp of a flash company you will do this right so it's less about optimization it's more about like just finding all possible channels yeah so you touched on this a little bit obviously because this entire concept is based on this person-based marketing strategy and there are other tactics there's obviously the account based marketing strategy and these other things i wonder if you could just give us a a brief and again you did touch on this but just sort of wrap it up for us a little bit in a bow so what are the benefits of a

person-based marketing strategy versus some of these other ways that people are targeting folks yeah yeah yeah so i think this is the the easiest way to to explain person-based marketing that that's accomplished marketing that truly works so we don't we don't come saying hey guys you know abm is not working anymore uh we say hey if you want to make your ibm you know truly efficient you should go after specific decision make a specific buying teams not somebody inside the accounts you know you know who you want to know who you're talking to name by name right so this is very crucial for marketing and self-alignment because uh i mean like having some great accounts engaged is amazing and that was you know the idea behind economist marketing but then when it comes to engage account you pass this engaged account to your sales team and then the question is like okay but who to talk to who is this engaged people and then uh that's that and if you can

tell this exactly okay this is john smith from this company who recently engaged with our ads that's that's crucial because it provides a lot of context for folk to continue sales conversation yeah so i think uh i think just uh just to sum up uh i think that's kind of person-based marketing is is it account based marketing that is truly precise and provides a lot of sales insights that help help marketers to to provide true value to sales teams got it um and a minute ago you mentioned intent data which is my favorite nerd area right now i love it um where would you suggest sort of slotting that into this process is that something where if you're doing account based marketing and maybe even person-based marketing you use that at the outset to sort of determine the companies that you want to target to begin with or do you come up with your company list first and then prioritize based on which companies seem to be most in market for your current solution sort

of where in the process do you use the intent data yeah so i think it really depends on customer situations so we see very different playbooks for different companies uh so some clients they they just have you know very narrow markets where um you know like like this because they their audiences are very hard to reach and in this case i mean you just go and yeah after all you know great accounts that you want to build relationship with you just you don't want to peek i mean like this is crucial for you you want i mean we have a funny phrase like there's only 500 fortune 500 companies so there's not a lot of them so you want to go after all of them if it's your market so so so yeah in some cases you just go after dream accounts and then i mean like you want to build this relationship at any at any cost in in some other situations we see clients that they have much bigger markets so they they need to be picky they need to to choose the account that they are in market right now and and then in this case they use uh

say bon bora data or tech target data like lots of currently you see a lot of intent data coming into from for many different providers um and then uh also we we should not ignore one more important element is the fact that you know like people don't engage with advertising most of the time so like like even it doesn't matter how great you are in terms of you know building your creatives um you you you can get like one percent ctrc percent ctr that's probably so which which means that 97 of the time people don't click my ads and then if somebody clicks that's also an intense signal obviously it's an engagement but also every engagement is intense signal because that's somebody says like hey your banner was actually resonating with what what i need i am interested yeah and then that that's very important signal you want to miss so we really believe that engagement data that we get is also very important uh in 10 and 10 internal information that you want to use absolutely all right and we are

out of time thank you again to our gold sponsor influential we will see everyone shortly in about five minutes when the next sessions are set to begin thanks guys thank you everybody bye