Using Person Based Advertising To Drive Sales In Any Climate: Amplitude Case Study

hello everybody and welcome to our session of using person-based advertising to drive cells in any climate uh with amplitude case study my name is michele sitzke i'm ceo of info2 the first person-based advertising platform for b2b and i'm excited to have marcos arkerland with me who is senior marketing manager of performance marketing and amplitude marcus hi hey dimitri thanks for having me um all right so the topic of today's conversation is how important uses person-based advertising to make marketing and sales alignment uh well uh before we jump into this uh amazing case study let me briefly explain what person-based advertising is what we want to change with person-based advertising um [Music] there are two things that we don't like about [Music] b2b advertising now first is poor orchestration b2b advertising targets completely different set of people from those who your sales people are selling

to and second advertising remains in the blind spot advertising interactions are missing from the customer view of what you see in crm you don't see [Music] in your crm what is happening on advertising front and this is a huge blind spot the way we want to change this is first we would like to 100 focus your advertising on the same people you're having other marketing activities and sales too second we believe that um your crm should contain all the information about people who are addicting to this crucial element of your relationship with the customer and third we discovered that person-based signals are super important and amazing part of what you can get when it comes to engagement data and your further customer journey if you think about your current customer journey you will see that most of the things that happening over there are person based so you

start from the margin activities and then you try to identify specific people you're targeting and then obviously during the whole sales funnel uh your sales development and sales teams are talking to specific people and basically you know your customers and then if you think about advertising campaigns they're talking to completely different set of people it's totally different people and we don't like it if you think about the column based marketing econ-based advertising does not really solve this problem because if you think about microsoft as an example there are 156 000 in place in microsoft and you could have a buying group of 20 people and obviously there are very little chances you will be able to hit the small amount of people with your account based advertising so the way we build influential is to deliver advertising to specific people across your customer journey you can target a brand awareness to top accounts and then you know who exactly you're engaging with

you can help your demand activities uh with multi-touch strategy where your advising place is integral part of your the margin activities if you think about sales cycle you you can target people that are in your sales funnel and support uh and provide their cover to them through advertising activities um and then just a final slide before i pass to marcus what exactly you get from uh from purchase-based advertising obviously you can get this report for every person this is an example of report that you can get from person-based advertising campaigns and you know exactly what's happening for every person you target so so you can actually leverage this data to sell those as people and to provide further customer journey after the advertising engagement happened with that i pass to marcus who will speak about his experience with person-based advertising why he did this and how it helped him to

to boost results in his sales funnel thanks dimitri as dimitri mentioned my name is marcus ackerland i'm and i lead the performance marketing and abm initiatives um at amplitude a quick overview of amplitude um we're based in san francisco uh we're the category leader for product intelligence uh we were founded in 2012 so we've been around for a little bit uh back in march we raised our series e um at a 1.1 billion valuation so we joined the unit club unicorn club this year which is really exciting for us we're currently rated number one for product analytics by customers on g2 um and have recently surpassed a hundred million dollars annual recurring revenue um and we really empower product teams um to engage convert and retain their users it's the core of our product is helping product teams understand the impact of the releases that they're putting out changes to products and obviously in our the world we're currently living in that

is extremely digital you know tools like amplitude are really becoming uh you know necessary for businesses as opposed to just nice to haves um so the growth we've seen this year um you know has been really really uh rapid um and with that uh you know we're required as a marketing and go-to-market team to improve um you know the tactics and strategies we're using uh to drive business especially as we look to move uh more into the enterprise market so the current challenge um that a lot of people uh in my world face right is that we're showing people um ads and these aren't necessarily the people that our sales folks are talking to you know in my experience um on the marketing side of things we usually like to look at a target account list you know we'll layer on some persona attributes whether that's a job title or a function maybe the seniority of the type of people that we're targeting so for us at amplitude

you know this is going to be chief product officers vps of product um you know very specific roles uh who are going to be trying to buy our product um and mike dimitri mentioned you know at a company like microsoft these other enterprise companies that have 150 000 people um you know it's it's gonna be kind of like trying to find a needle in the haystack uh you know to find your actual buyer um with your campaigns if you're still using some of these legacy targeting methods so the disconnect with sales and marketing is you know sales is they understand exactly who they're talking to they've done the research they vetted the account they know who the buying committee is and you know and at a high level marketing generally understands um those people as well if we have um our target account list and we understand we're selling to these above the line product people we can set up our advertising campaigns on social media on display

leveraging this firmographic data however the issue then becomes when we report back to sales on look at how many leads we drove from microsoft the response we'll often get from our sales team is well i haven't gotten any responses from the people i know who are buying committee um you know it's it's there's definitely a misalignment with where those advertising dollars are being spent um and marketing should know exactly who these sales people are looking to engage in today's day and age in this fully digital world our sales people aren't able to have those same one one-to-one interactions and conversations that they usually are so now it's you know it's on people like us um in the performance and digital marketing realm to help them uh engage these people one-to-one to give that more personalized experience to these buying teams um that they're not able to get um in today's world and these blanket solutions um with advertising aren't gonna resonate with these people so what's the solution so with

person-based advertising we know exactly who's engaging with our ads on a name-by-name basis so now rather than going to our sales team and asking them okay which personas and which companies should we be targeting we can actually talk through with them and say okay you're trying to get in touch with jane doe from facebook um with john smith from microsoft you know these are people that they're you know emailing they're trying to connect with on linkedin you know they're doing their due diligence on and now we as marketers with these new tools and technologies such as influent 2 are able to actually engage with them and you know pull on the same rope as our sales team um so to speak in terms of going after and trying to engage the actual buying team so here's a high level look at our overall performance from last quarter with in floo 2. we were able to reach over 6 000 contacts in over 800 accounts in q3 alone this resulted in over 130

000 impressions with 171 advertising clicks and over 103 visits to our website this is this contains a 56 match rate of decision makers who we reached with those ads you know again not just impressions at a company level um or impressions at a job title level um but you know actually reaching the decision makers that we you know we said here are the people we're trying to get after we were able to reach over half of them um and at the account level we were able to match nearly 80 of the accounts that we were targeted so of the people that we put into this program we were able to actually reach and get in front of uh the majority of them which is really really encouraging for i'm sure a lot of people will see this and will be sort of amazed so here's a quick uh example on one of the accounts we were able to engage which is visa so again large enterprise company been around forever definitely

impacted by um the changing times that we're living in and the acceleration to digital um so we were able to engage 274 decision makers again these are massive companies with tons of different arms you can see here we're engaging people from the visa direct platform from the global loyalty and benefits product team you know vp levels senior product managers directors of analytics like these are our buyers who have the budget to buy our our product and these are the people who will come to our website they'll understand what amplitude is and does and see the value and it's not just burning advertising dollars and you can see here we get data such as which ad did they click on which pages were they viewing how long were they viewing these pages and this is again extremely important context to help close that loop with your sales team here's another example from walgreens again another enterprise company uh

which has been impacted by the covid uh times that we live in you can see here a number of directors from different teams whether it's the digital consumer experience team the product innovation team or the omni strategy team we're able to actually get in front of the heads of these product teams at walgreens instead of serving our ads to um you know below the line folks or our non-decision makers we're actually ensuring that the advertising dollars we're spending are all going to people who our sales team will want to reach out to and this results in highly engaged prospects so you can see here an example of the influent 2 dashboard leads from visa and from mailchimp we can look through here their history and understand their activity and as they engage with our advertising and our website their engagement score will go up so folks like me often understand that not everyone who comes to your website is going to be willing to fill out a form

um oftentimes the savvier the user the less likely they are to fill out a form you don't see a lot of vps or c-level folks filling out online forms um so understanding the engagement without a form fill is going to be really critical so for us here you can see that our transformational leader and data nerd at mailchimp here on the right who had a score of 16.3 they were checking out some of our blog posts one of our buyers tool kits um and this allowed them to to mql so to speak via this program and we're then alerted via slack that hey this lead from mailchimp is mql do we get context around what they're looking at i can then share that with our sales team and say here's a lead from mailchimp and the the best part about these leads are you don't even have to ask your sales team to follow up with these leads because they're going to be following up with them before you you're even able to alert them again these are the people that they're spending all day trying to get in contact with they're

tossing and turning at night trying to figure out how to get conversations with these people so when you're able to serve them up to them on a silver platter you know the age-old marketing sales follow-up conversations become obsolete because you're arming them with the context on what to follow up with and the incentive to follow up is already you know it's been there since the targeting stage of this when they told you who they're trying to go after so here's an example of a recent event that we promoted um on influential so we had a really large uh the world's largest gathering of product leaders actually um at amplify um last weekend uh to a couple weeks ago now in the middle of october um and we were able to engage product leaders um you know c-level folks vp level folks um from various companies that we're trying to close and get them to our keynote sessions um to see our different talks

with um you know folks from ibm peloton shopify some really strong brands and we were able to drive nearly 16 000 impressions and over 30 clicks with this campaign and that resulted in um already some conversations with decision makers i'm at some of our top accounts and that's a high situation by the way congratulations thank you yes you'll you'll definitely see with platforms like influent 2 when you can get more personalized and provide more valuable insightful advertising um if you're a pm and we're giving you tools to help you be a better pm uh you know naturally you're going to be more inclined and incentivized to click on these ads so the performance and engagement you'll see with these person-to-person ads are going to be strong compared to your traditional display and social click-through rates that you see so some results from uh the program so far so we've achieved a 5.6 x program

roi using in floo 2 uh year to date with seven engaged decision makers at enterprise companies in three months so you know as we look to move into the enterprise finding these actual decision makers at these companies is again like that's the name of the game and traditionally this can take months quarters years um so in it you know us being able to launch this program and engage seven decision makers at these enterprise companies in such a short period of time is really encouraging for us um again we mentioned the 56 contact match rate and one and this last point here is one that i think is really important it's the number of contacts that we have in this program is doubling quarter over quarter so our sales team is understanding the value of this program and they're coming to us saying we need to get more contacts in this program we have more people we're trying to reach out to this is working we need to get more people in here and if you're a performance or demand generation marketer and you have sales people coming to you saying i need more of this please

you know that's music too to our ears and we're definitely on to something there and the marriage between sales and marketing is that much better today than it was yesterday so some key takeaways at a high level you know marketers in 2020 just need to understand that the specific buying committees their sales team are reaching out to um they need to be sophisticated enough to get in touch with those people you know gone are the days where rural cages pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into google and linkedin hoping that we catch the eye of our decision maker at these enterprise companies we really need to be more tactical and targeted um and you know moving away from this blanket approach and not everyone in a buying committee will fill out a form you know like i mentioned a lot of these people that you're trying to talk to especially when you get into these enterprise companies they're going to be savvier they're not going to be as willing to fill out a form to contact sales or read your playbook so you need to be able to

engage them with you know interesting content uh whether if it's on a blog you don't have to gate it if you can measure their engagement with it um you know don't you don't have to just put gates in front of everything and drive leads to your sales team that way it's you know we're we're able to kind of advance as a as a marketing community now and find these more sophisticated ways um to engage these people um digitally and person-based abm allows you to hyper personalize your messaging so like we mentioned with the click through rates if we're able to hyper personalize what the ads we're showing you and provide you value that we know is if you're a director of product at facebook um you know this this rfp template is going to be something that um you know helps you do your job better um so that's the ad we're going to show you as opposed to this blanket approach of you know here's our here's our annual report we're going to advertise this to everyone and we're just going to kind of wait and hope that we get the decision makers in it's we can be a lot more proactive now

as marketers close that gap with our sales team and really you know attack these accounts in lockstep with them and understand you know we have tactics at our disposal now that allow us to do that much more effectively than we have in the past well thank you marcus this is really exciting case studies thank you for sharing this absolutely thanks dimitri for building such a great product and for having me thank you