SPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Jasmine Martirossian

Christian Klepp  00:08

Hi, and welcome to the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. I’m your host, Christian Klepp, and one of the founders of EINBLICK Consulting. Our goal is to share inspirational stories, tips and insights from B2B marketers, digital entrepreneurs, and industry experts that will help you to think differently, succeed and scale your business.

All right, welcome everyone to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast where you get your weekly dose of B2B marketing insights. I’m your host, Christian Klepp. And today, I’m delighted to have a guest on the show was not just a talented marketing leader, but it’s also a widely published author, and frequent public and keynote speaker. She’s also the host of a podcast called Innovation Nation. So Jasmine Martirossian, welcome to the show.

Jasmine Martirossian  00:54

Thank you, Christian. It’s an honor being on your show.

Christian Klepp  00:58

Yes, indeed. I really much enjoyed on our previous conversation. So I’m really looking forward to this discussion. So just to get things started Jasmine, you’ve built up a successful career and expertise around digital marketing, content marketing and execution. But for the sake of this conversation, let’s focus on the topic of digital marketing for B2B. So, talk to us about some of the key challenges that you’ve encountered when it comes to digital marketing for B2B.

Jasmine Martirossian  01:31

Great question, Christian. A lot of it is perception and expertise. So there is so much more that goes into digital marketing than meets the eye right. It’s not just posting something on Facebook, it’s not just pressing send on an email. A lot of people… because we’re all as end users tied closely to digital channels and devices. I mean, who is not, but then that creates a sense of everything being super simple in people’s minds, and not really knowing the depth of sophistication, science, data, background research that needs to go to make digital marketing effective, because not everything that claims to be digital marketing is digital marketing. And not all digital marketing is created equal. And plus, it’s very complex discipline now. You have to know how your MarTech stack integrates, you have to know what works off of which, you have to adhere to legal issues, to be compliant with privacy legislation across the board in different countries. It’s… your reach is bigger than you think at any time. You can’t think just locally. And actually, the art of digital marketing and the size is to scale up and expand as much as possible. So lots more goes into effective digital marketing than meets the eye.

Christian Klepp  03:08

You brought up so many valid and extremely insightful, like points, Jasmine, and I think absolutely, that there’s so many… I would dare even say there’s so many moving parts in this ecosystem. And you’ve alluded to it. It’s not just the platforms, but it’s the legal and compliance issue. I mean, if anything, if the… look at the case with Cambridge Analytica, as an example, things like that. And then of course, I would suppose strategy is also really important, right? Because it can’t just be like a, an execution driven exercise.

Jasmine Martirossian  03:46

Oh, no question about it, you have to… it’s everything starts with strategy. And you have to have the right digital and content strategy to deliver results. But at the end of the time, the best strategy not executed is useless. So you have to have both pillars of strategy and execution. And you also in this day and age have to be agile, to you know, it’s not a, like an old fashioned waterfall approach. You have to build different elements of the campaign, you have to adjust and improve in an agile manner as you go. You have to course correct as you go, you can’t sit and wait to line up everything in perfection, especially when you don’t know how that perfection will perform in the marketplace. And then you have to go from there. And also, it’s also these days, it’s about revenue marketing, the role of marketing is changing. It has to be very closely collaborating and integrated with sales. Because if you’re, especially for B2B, and that’s a B2C as well. And ultimately it’s about B2B business to person. If marketing is not delivering results to help grow the business, then why bother?

Christian Klepp  05:06

That’s absolutely right. To your point, marketing should be responsible for a part of the revenue that’s being generated for the organization. Right? Absolutely. All right. I’d like to get your thoughts on this, Jasmine. So there was research conducted by a company called Outbrain. And they wrote an article as a result of this research. So they discovered that businesses that implemented omni channel marketing, retain their customers by up to 18.9%, compared to their industry peers. So I’d like to get your thoughts on that. And why you think it’s important for B2B companies to think more about using an omni channel as opposed to a multi-channel approach?

Jasmine Martirossian  05:51

Well, because truthfully, the reality of how people interact with your content, except for some very narrow cases where the user journey is more complicated than anybody would like to think it’s easy to go out there and simplify and say, you know, what, we can map out this user journey. Well, it works if you’re a hotel or an airline very easily, because there are very distinct steps you have to go through to book that room. But it’s… especially for a B2B environment, where people are at different stages of buying, where they’re also engaging with your content as part of their research to make a determination for the decision. Sometimes with they don’t even know what it is that they fully need. Omni channel works best, and you have to be also omnipresent. And you have to have content that really caters to people at different stages in their journey. So I refer to that as a content cluster, you have to have a cluster of content that position in such a way to make you relevant for people at the right point of their journey. I’ve been in situations where I’ve seen a consulting firm charge gigantic fees to map out a journey, and then you look at the website analytics, and that journey just does not pan out. When you go to an omni-channel approach, you start seeing that better results, it makes perfect sense.

Christian Klepp  07:25

Exactly. And I think I’m trying to look for a word to describe that. I guess you could say it’s, it’s more like it should be more harmonized rather than disjointed if we were going to compare the two, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you spoke about it a bit earlier, but I’d like to come back to it a bit. There’s so many B2B companies out there who are still getting it wrong when it comes to digital marketing. But rather than sliding down the negative slope, let’s look at this from a more constructive perspective. How do you think companies can get started on the right foot and build a strong foundation, further their digital marketing?

Jasmine Martirossian  08:05

Well, first, you have to think from outside in rather than inside out. Digital Marketing is important on so many levels. But frankly, if you’re not getting it right on your website, everything else is bound to not deliver the impact that it could. And the website positioning ultimately, you need to be found by people who don’t even know of your brand, right? Because if somebody already knows about you, then if they come directly to your website, that’s an entirely different issue. But you need to ensure that your content shows up for non-branded searches. For people who are not necessarily starting out looking for you. They’re conducting a non-branded search. And that’s how people these days find information, the absolutely overwhelming majority of people per data per research from Google and others, start their journey with search, we all do that as end users. So as a B2B company, if you have not tried to speak the language of the marketplace, try to understand the language of the customer, you’re bound to fail 100% of the time, because then you will never show up in the right search you will not have the right SEO, you will not have the right content and you will not pop up in front of the customers that would be your ideal customers and right now they are prospects. But for us to… for any B2B company to succeed in that, you have to listen to the customer, you have to understand what is it that they call it. Inevitably it’s human nature, right? We all like shortcuts. We get accustomed to something. But pretty much most organizations very often will develop an internal lingo and language that’s very different, quite a bit from that of the marketplace. Sometimes they become entrenched in that thinking, without looking at it to see, oh my goodness, now this is different. Now, if there is certain language that you want to promote in the marketplace, that’s fine. But again, you have to create a meaningful linkage to phrasing to language that people are using create the bridge, create the infrastructure in the back end, with the right content to them, start bringing people in through the other door, the other portal to your new positioning and content. And that’s again, art and science combined.

Christian Klepp  10:39

Well, that’s exactly it. And I mean you brought up so many great points and it’s really a constantly evolving process. And I think if anything last year has taught us it’s that, things are, things can change abruptly, and we have to be able to adapt and be agile, right? And address those changes accordingly. All right, I think, you posted something, I believe it was the other week, I thought. I mean, while we’re talking about growth and change, I thought this post was so appropriate for this discussion, because it’s linked to like growing and evolving and I believe you have to your post has a quote in Spanish, I think it was. So it’s “el crecimiento no es lineal y nunca termina”, which basically means growth is not linear and never ends.

Jasmine Martirossian  11:29

Yeah, exactly.

Christian Klepp  11:34

Yeah, so Jasmine, this is a topic that’s been discussed quite a bit these days. It’s learning and incorporating best practices from B2C into B2B. So talk to us about how one can include B2C components of success into B2B digital marketing.

Jasmine Martirossian  11:50

Like B2C components for success, pretty much everything. Think about this way, over the last year, if people were shopping online previously, this has been accelerated dramatically. I mean, an interesting statistic Walmart alone, hired 170,000 personal shoppers, those are the people that fulfill the orders that people place online. 170,000 new personal shopper rolls added in 2020 alone. What does it say? Gigantic shift in the marketplace. But all the B2B companies should take notice. Because these are the people who the way we behave in our personal lives, we carry that into our professional lives. So Amazon has had the stratospheric growth just because of this, shopping boom, online. Now, let’s say if you’re buying groceries from Amazon Fresh or groceries through Whole Foods, which is also owned by Amazon these days, and let’s face it, they’re not always delivered right. If you want to say something like, Oh, you did not deliver 10 of this, you delivered eight, for example, or this entire item was missing, or this one was broken or spoiled, whatever the scenario is. What’s the best way for somebody to contact Amazon? These days, it’s chat. So if you have a website that does not have chat, suddenly, you’re going to start turning away a lot of people who are now primed and looking for that channel to communicate, but seems like it’s a small thing, but it’s not. It can have such a huge behavioral impact in terms of what the user expectation is, and how you’re catering and delivering to it.

Christian Klepp  13:44

That’s exactly right. I think no instant gratification is not the right probably not the right word. But I think what you’re alluding to is like, people want to be able to still interact with the organization somehow, even if that’s online through digital means. And I think like you said, having a chat or a chatbot on your website, certainly is one way to address that issue, right.

Jasmine Martirossian  14:11

People are also more primed for catering to self-service, let’s say scheduling an inspection or certain visit. I mean, when people are doing those things for their own homes, they also develop expectations that they should be able to do that online for their business needs. So all businesses need to respond and come to it that way. Or other for instance, everybody has been… you’re in Canada and Canada has been in the forefront. Digital financial processing right ahead of us by at least 10 years. I don’t think most Americans would realize that. And but now in the US too pretty much everybody pays all their bills online. But that creates a different expectation because you can go to your portal. And you can see, oh my goodness, these are all the bills that I’ve had, or whether if it’s a credit card, these are all the charges that you’ve had for, and then that creates an expectation that you want to have a portal for B2B situations to see where all your transactions are. So in a way, businesses have to think about how they’re managing customer data, to cater with convenience to the customer. It may not have been on their radar before.

Christian Klepp  15:39

Well, that’s absolutely right. And I think you really brought up an interesting point with, you know, digital payments and what have you. And I think it’s really important on that note, for B2B organizations to have a look at what their, what they’ve been doing in the past, and I guess the word is like how that needs to change, because the dynamics have changed. And it’s not just because of the pandemic, it’s just that the behavior of the target market towards the way that they interact with brands and products and services has changed considerably. And I think digital marketing must and should play an instrumental role in that process, somehow.

Jasmine Matirossian  16:20

No question about that. I mean, quite frankly, digital is the dominant force pre pandemic as well, I think what’s happened with the pandemic is just increased everybody’s awareness and usage. So even people who kind of like the act of shopping, there was a routine to it, right? They would drive out, walk, park, there was an interaction, there is a joy to browsing the stacks. For a lot of people, it’s tactile, you can, look at the product. So it’s an experience, let’s not forget that. What the pandemic has done, it has actually even forced the people who kind of treasured that experience to be more online.

Christian Klepp  17:10

Right, exactly, exactly. So just talking a little bit further about that point, how do you feel like, and I promise you Jasmine, we’re not going to talk about COVID. We’re not going to talk about the pandemic. But how do how do you think, as a result of what’s happened last year, or in the last say, like 12 to 18 months. How should these changes influence the way that B2B companies develop and adjust on their digital market campaigns?

Jasmine Martirossian  17:39

It’s really good question. Because, as I said, this is what the pandemic has done, it’s accelerated certain trends and put it on like double triple steroids. So this is really to me from a digital perspective, kind of nothing new. But it’s the wider acceptance of the public of general business leadership, of even some marketers, it has changed.

So I think, number one, there is greater awareness. Another impact of the last 12 months at least has been that you had to adjust the messaging, I think there is more heart in the communication as well. We’ve done campaigns with tones and language that probably would not have entertained before. We also did some very unusual things like we did a feature on our professional porches, those were to feature the pads that people had at homes, working with them and helping them. In essence, in the past, we would not have necessarily, spent the energy to do that, but it was amazingly well received. And it hit the right chord in the right notes. So again, how you position… you have to be really attuned to the environment, is you can speak in the same language in the same way. As a digital marketer. I also look elsewhere, right? You’re looking to the same sources and worldviews and information, you’ll see the same stuff. So you mentioned that I had posted something in Spanish. It’s because I have been actually mining approaches and content outside the US as well to see how others are responding to it. How others are looking at it through different perspectives because to me, this diversity of thinking is not a nice to have. It’s a must-have, because otherwise we will not be challenged to evolve. We have to be continuously curious. And digital gives us the opportunity to test experiment, see if something resonates or doesn’t. How to improve like, really live the A/B testing, but sometimes be… not sometimes actually all the time be aware that it’s the premises to that you may not even know what you don’t know, hence the curiosity and experimentation and looking at sources that we might otherwise not referenced before.

Christian Klepp  20:19

No, absolutely. And I like that you brought up the fact that not just as a result of a pandemic, but also the opportunities that digital marketing provides. And that this being like different using platforms online or online channels that you test and experiment. And I think it’s also… it gives marketers and their organizations an opportunity to scale and expand it at a pace that, they weren’t able to before, right.

Jasmine Martirossian  20:53

The other thing I’d like to add to that Christian is, there are so many applications and new products, that everybody says they’re the best thing since sliced bread, right? Everybody makes claims. So one of the biggest challenges that digital marketers have today is being able to tell wheat from chaff. And also being able to prioritize, it’s you’re way better off, doing five things exceedingly well than 15 things in a very mediocre way. So that forces, sometimes very hard decisions and choices, but it’s about courage to both make that decision for yourself as a leader, and also to educate the people around you. And behind the why of that to get alignment, right? Yes, everybody knows, we’re going to rock this channel. And we’re going to be absent on this channel for whatever reason.

Christian Klepp  21:55

Absolutely, absolutely.

Hey, it’s Christian Klepp. Here. We’ll get back to the episode in a second. But first, is your brand struggling to cut through the noise? Are you trying to find more effective ways to reach your target audience and boost sales? Are you trying to pivot your business? If so, book a call with EINBLICK Consulting, our experienced consultants will work with you to help your B2B business to succeed and scale. Go to www.einblick.co for more information.

This is probably one of my favorite parts of the conversations that I have with guests like yourself. And it’s the topic of commonly held beliefs or conventional wisdom and every discipline has them. So talk to us about one commonly held belief in B2B digital marketing that you strongly disagree with and why?

Jasmine Martirossian  22:51

The first one that pops to my head is banner ads. literally billions of dollars are spent, but to be more truthful about it wasted every year on banner ads. And companies and decision makers have to have the courage to say, you know what, the Emperor is naked. And this is not delivering. First of all, lots of end users nowadays use software that links them out. And even if they don’t use software, we’re exposed to so many distractions and ads every single day that people are used to screening them out. Minded. I’m talking about banner ads not retargeting has its absolute place, especially if you can come with the right offers and positioning.

But banner ads, complete waste of time. And if somebody can prove to me like real results, show me that because I speak from experimentation, testing and data, and you never see it. But again, there was this fear of saying, we got to stop doing this. And people will reference their competitors and see everybody else is doing but it’s a collective waste of energy, time and money.

Christian Klepp  24:19

Yeah, and Exactly. And I think to your point, it becomes part of the noise or blends into the noise rather. And I think one important thing when it comes to disciplines, like digital marketing for B2B, it’s trying to distinguish the signal versus the noise, right?

Jasmine Martirossian  24:40

Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Christian Klepp  24:42

Great. Talk to us about one thing you think people should start. And one thing people should stop doing when it comes to digital marketing for B2B?

Jasmine Martirossian  24:53

That’s a great question. There are so many people, things people should be starting doing. I think we’ll see more of and there’s still not much but it’s definitely going to be ascendant is going to be Voice Search. I mean, even Microsoft suite products, now integrate voice search capabilities. Alexa, I’ve seen little kids talk to Alexa. I mean, remember, the three year olds today are going to be your B2B buyers tomorrow. So voice search is definitely going to be more extended. And relatively few B2B websites even have a remote inkling of putting it on today. But it’s definitely going to come up. So it’s something to get started on to get better on because I think for voice search, you have to do more SEO work, you have to probably position content a little differently too and because the way we speak in the way we write are sometimes two very different things. So that’s going to be a huge, ascendant thing.

And then you wanted me to ask what they should stop doing. I think when we come back… Events, who doesn’t like a great event, right? You meet people, it’s fantastic. But I think how people interact with booths, it will change. So people have to stop just going to any conference. In terms of having a booth placement, it will, that landscape will change. Don’t get me wrong, I think people should still go and get educated and network and meet people and learn. That’s an entirely different proposition. But people should stop just automatically putting up a booth somewhere at a conference or a trade show only because they have been doing it.

Christian Klepp  26:57

Yeah. No, exactly. And let’s set aside the fact that, there’s a cost factor involved there as well because especially if you’re going to like a trade show in Las Vegas and setting up a booth, I mean, those are definitely not cheap.

Jasmine Martirossian  27:13

Cost factors are huge, and most people don’t even think about it right. And on what your booth is, like how much even the shipment of that booth cost, there are sometimes union rules that you have to follow on location with certain conference and meeting centers, which means you have to absolutely use union labor to put up that booth to take them down. There’re the shipments, again, depending on whether you’re renting it, whether you’re shipping, then there is the person time. And one of the things that people should start doing in terms of that kind of events is calculating the ROI. Do you know what you’re getting out of it? Yes. And the same goes along with the line of events that they should actually stop doing. I’m sure lots of people will dislike hearing. This is like sponsorships. Because in this digital world, just getting your logo on something, what does it really buy you? Is it being screened out? Like a banner ad? Again, let’s be intentional about it. I’m not just saying blanketly stop sponsorships but really intentionally measure the ROI of that.

Christian Klepp  28:27

Exactly. And be being strategic about a tool, right? Because otherwise, back to the point that you brought up earlier that you don’t want it to just be like noise that blends into the background somehow?

Jasmine Martirossian  28:39

Well, strategy is at the foundation of everything we do and should do as digital marketers, so I kind of take it for granted, which is why I don’t repeat it all the time. If it’s not supported in strategy, don’t just do it. And I mean, what’s the word strategy? It’s from the ancient Roman plan of war in action, right? So if you have not mapped out your plan of war, figuratively speaking, but in this case for digital marketing, your plan of domination, frankly, in digital you either there and dominating or not. And then think of it this way, I mean, the first page of Google results, which is changing, who knows what it will look like in 5 to 10 years, right? It’s possible that it will all be just knowledge graphs, which means you have to have such perfectly positioned content for Google to display Knowledge Graph from your website. I mean, seriously, if you look at the first page of Google results today, it’s vastly different from what it was even 5 or 10 years ago.

So the only people that really win are those that do it right and with integrity and with the right content, thankfully, I’ve been in that space for quite a long time. And I’ve seen some major Google updates, calm and eviscerate lots of sites, we’ve never been punished with any major Google update, because we’ve never played any black hat tactics. And this is very important in digital, if somebody comes as a knight in shining armor and is promising you things, there’s like the panacea, the one thing you do. No, it’s probably not going to work. I mean, to succeed in digital is very much akin to planting a garden, you have to do high integrity work, and it bears fruits and results. But think about what’s involved in gardening, you have to have the seeds, you have to plant them at the right time, you have to keep nurturing the soil, you have to weed it out. When it starts growing, you have to be pruning, you have to be watering, you have to be on the right schedule of providing the right nutrients. It’s ongoing, you have to clear off the leaves in the fall, you have to provide cover for winter, there’s a lot of maintenance work that goes in the background, to make sure to make it look easy with the digital results. And a lot of it is not visible. So it’s incumbent upon digital marketers to be speaking about that and educating their peers and the environment who are not doing it, to realize what it means to deliver results digitally.

Christian Klepp  31:28

That’s absolutely right. And I really love the garden analogy, I’d like to just throw in one little detail that I think you left out, which is once everything starts growing, keep the rodents away.

Jasmine Martirossian  31:41

That is so true.

Christian Klepp  31:43

Especially here in Toronto.

Jasmine Martirossian  31:44

Keep the rodents away, and you know the slugs and all the other things, right. You have to, and there was panacea for that as well.

Christian Klepp  31:54

Yes. Exactly.

Jasmine Martirossian  31:55

So such a good point. Absolutely.

Christian Klepp  31:58

Not Jasmine, this has been such a fantastic session, please do us the honor of like telling us a little bit about yourself.

Jasmine Martirossian  32:05

I’m Jasmine Martirossian, I love marketing and again marketing has to have a mission to connect with people. So I’ve been in marketing leadership roles for quite a long time helping companies scale up and grow. But it’s not just the companies, it’s also building effective teams. That makes a lot of difference in people’s lives. Nobody can do it alone. But when the power of the team comes together, and people coalesce and everybody sees how they’re contributing to the mission, that collective power becomes really transformative. And people grow usually when they see that they’re making progress. And they’re part of the why behind what they’re trying to accomplish. It’s really important to have a sense of ownership. So I also try to inspire the teams and work with them and stay inspired myself, it’s important to see the positive and to keep the curiosity going. So I find being curious is really gift.

Christian Klepp  33:16

Absolutely. And I really liked that point you brought up, it’s so important to make members of the team… taking ownership and responsibility for something is certainly one important part of it. The other one I would say is like make them understand or give them that… paint that whole picture of them, for them rather, to make them understand how they play a role in the overall ecosystem or in the overall scheme of things, right?

Jasmine Martirossian  33:45

Absolutely. Because then every role there’s an interdependency right on a well-functioning team, at TÜV SÜD we have COMEs, which stands for Center of Marketing Excellence. For instance, as Vice President for Americas I lead the Americas COME. And in our markets, US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. That in the whole COME is designed… the design came up from our strategy office in Munich. It’s designed to build that effective interdependency to have the right specialists get enough cross training. And everybody coming together it becomes a humming engine right? It’s in a car engine work, or a Swiss watch, the inside mechanism, everything is interconnected. And an effective team is that kind of interconnectedness, interdependence and being driven by a shared vision of end goal that’s internalized because if you don’t understand the goal of what you’re doing and the why behind it, I don’t think people can succeed because it’s like operating in a vacuum. Without a purpose.

Christian Klepp  35:05

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. Jasmine, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. Oh, what’s the best way for people out there to connect with you?

Jasmine Martirossian  35:15

Well, I’m very active on LinkedIn, Christian. Just doing a search on my first name, last name, or by email at Jasmine.martirossian@tuvsud.com. And, I’d be happy to answer any questions. And thank you so much for having on the show Christian. It’s really important to keep educating, marketing best practices. Thank you.

Christian Klepp  35:44

Yeah, no, it was an absolute pleasure. And thanks again for your time, Jasmine. But before I let you go, if you permit me, let’s give our listeners a little language lesson so that they can pronounce your company’s name properly. (laugh)

So here we go. So it’s TÜV SÜD. So it’s the Ü is the German. That’s the Ü with the two dots on top. And the TÜV, V is the German pronunciation for V. And that’s short for Technischer Überwachungsverein SÜD, which translates as Technical Inspection Association. So just one more time it’s TÜV SÜD for all of you listening out there.

Jasmine Martirossian  36:26

And SÜD is for short for Southern right, in German.

Christian Klepp  36:29

Yes, that’s right. That’s right. South. Exactly.

Jasmine Martirossian  36:33

The origins are Bavarian and our global headquarters are in Munich. Thank you so much. I think, as an Austrian, you have kind of a cutting edge on that.

Christian Klepp  36:43

Yeah, well, I thought I’d do my part and just make sure that everybody pronounces it properly, because it could it could lead to misunderstandings and miscommunications as we’ve alluded to, in our previous conversation.

Jasmine Martirossian  36:56

Absolutely, because initially, they were more technical associations like this. So several companies have that first part of the name in their names, but they’re all very different organizations.

Christian Klepp  37:10

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So Jasmine, thank you so much for your time. Take care, be safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Jasmine Martirossian  37:18

Thank you so much, Christian.

Christian Klepp  37:22

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. To learn more about what we do here at EINBLICK, please visit our website at www.einblick.co. And be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast player.