Episode 8: MarTech & Data: The Modern B2B

Anni Tabagua: Hello, and welcome to another episode of BizTech Forward. I'm your host, Anni. Today, we're going into the dynamic world of marketing and data. Marketing has always been key to business success, but now data and technology are really transforming the game. This is what we want to talk about today. Joining us is Scott Rayburn, VP of Marketing at DataArt.

Scott has loads of experience in B2B digital marketing as well as smart tech, SEO, and sales enablement. Hi Scott, and welcome to the show.

Scott Rayburn: Hey Anni, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Anni Tabagua: Just a brief introduction. Scott is a senior marketing leader with over 12 years of experience in B2B digital marketing and almost 10 years of experience in various marketing roles in the IT services industry. Prior to DataArt, he served as marketing director for a mid-sized IT services company, and prior to that, he served as a marketing manager for a very large services company.

Again, Scott, welcome to the show. I'm really happy you're here. We will talk about how the past, present, and future of marketing are shaped by data and technology and why it's such an exciting time right now for marketers in the B2B world. Let's get right to it. Scott, let's rewind like 15 years ago. 2010, let's say B2B marketing has evolved so much since then.

Walk us through the first a little bit. So, how was it back when you started?

Scott Rayburn: Yeah. So, indeed, now is an exciting time to be a B2B marketer. Back then, I thought it was exciting because things were changing right before my eyes. I noticed very quickly when I entered the B2B marketing space how different it was from the B2C type of marketing that I was seeing every day.

You know, ads for soft drinks, shoes, and all these other things. The commercials you see on TV, we had none of that. In B2B, when I started, it was very kind of boring. Static. Don't offend anyone. It's better to just keep a neutral, even tone. And, you know, rely on those long relationships to sell. It still works today, but it's changed a lot.

Anyway, thinking about the past, I noticed that many of those B2B websites from the 2010 era were actually a lot closer to Web 1.0 than they were to Web 2.0. And what I mean by that is that they were just very static sources of information, with tons of content and notes that you can use to make a decision, but very little in the way of customer engagement, customer interaction, what we call now a digital experience or customer experience.

B2B was lagging behind, so that's one thing I would note for sure. There was just a stark underinvestment in that customer experience.

Anni Tabagua: Right? That's really the big contrast. I actually read that, I don't know, back in the early 2000s, Martech was barely a concept. And I wonder, is there an example you could give us from that stage of your career?

Scott Rayburn: Yeah. It's interesting. If you think about what Martech was, it really comes down to your company's website, like the company's digital presence. There were some other tools involved, like, you know, thinking about the technology stack of a B2B company back then. You could consider Google as part of it, you know, "How do I get listed on Google?".

Something funny from early in my career was what's called black hat SEO techniques, which are, in other words, not the most ethically savvy way of doing things. You would just cut and paste hundreds of keywords onto some landing page. And it actually works. You could get ranked on the first page of Google just by doing something simple and kind of sketchy.

Today, you know, you might get blacklisted. Another thing we were doing back then was just buying these huge lists of people, you know, you could buy 10,000 contacts in X industry and send them email blasts. And when I first started, this was somehow legal, somehow kind of allowed, but quickly we started getting blacklisted. And I remember one of our servers, a physical server, in the office.

It got blacklisted due to this kind of activity. Anyway, I'm not sure if I should be revealing this on a podcast, but it is relevant. I think this kind of defines the state of Martech in the early 2010s, where it was almost like a Wild West situation. Anything goes, anything you can do to get results and break through the noise.

It wasn't anywhere near as formulaic as it is today.

Anni Tabagua: Yeah, I love that Wild West comparison. I actually also read in preparation for our chat. I saw that, in the early 2000s, fewer than 20% of companies had any kind of CRM system in place, which is unimaginable for right now. And I wonder, how did they even keep track of customer relationships back then?

Scott Rayburn: Yeah, I mean, it was just case by case. Oh, this person came back. That's great. It wasn't so, you know, customer lifecycle marketing was not as established as a concept, right? And I mean, still today, I think many companies are cleaning up the mess from those days when the CRM was just growing out of control.

There was no data hygiene, you know, keeping that data clean. And still, people are trying to recover from those times, even today.

Anni Tabagua: Speaking of today, so that we don't spend much time in the past, I wonder how things are going today. So, Scott, what stands out to you most about how B2B brands approach marketing now?

Scott Rayburn: So, stepping away from pure technology for a moment, I do see some really huge changes in B2B investment in branding, company image, and reputation, and probably one of the best examples of this is sponsorships that you see everywhere. Salesforce, Oracle, AWS—all these companies are sponsoring arenas, race cars, huge events, all these very consumer-focused activities.

And it's pretty interesting because, as a consumer, I'm not going to download, you know, Salesforce on my phone and create a CRM like all my friends. Like, I don't need to do that. I don't have that many friends, you know, unfortunately. It's not a thing that consumers do, but you see, these B2B companies are just dominating the airwaves.

They have commercials. And, you know, it makes you wonder, why is that? How does that work? How did those investments eventually pay off? Do you know what the ROI of those investments is going to be? And the way I think about it is kind of like a demographic shift where, you know, earlier in my career, in this kind of Wild West time, the decision-makers were not digital natives.

They were comfortable coming from a Web 1.0 world or a world dominated by print advertising. Whereas nowadays, it's a world where most decision makers in B2B are closer to digital natives, maybe not full digital natives, but, you know, the internet came about when they weren't when they were still somewhere near their formative years, I guess.

So, when it comes to all this advertising and brand building, I think it's just trying to get on the radar of people who could become customers in the future for B2B companies or people who are decision-makers today. And it's this repetition: I see the name here at the arena when I go to the sports game, and then I see it on the commercial, and then I see it in some emails and some ads on LinkedIn.

And, you know, this omnichannel approach to B2B marketing has become huge. This is in stark contrast to when I started my career in B2B and then B2B tech because these marketing investments were very few and far between. Only the biggest of the big, the top consultancies and others were making these investments.

Anni Tabagua: Right? So, in general, you would say that B2B marketing is going in the direction of B2C today.

Scott Rayburn: Absolutely. Yeah. It's very interesting to see this unfold. Frankly, I think it's a really elevated marketing position in the B2B organization. Before, it was kind of, what's the minimum we can spend on marketing and still exist as a company? Nowadays, it's a lot more marketing-led, brand-led sorts of companies.

And, going back to technology, what's changing, too, is the Martech and the data-driven approach that enables companies to understand how those investments are paying off.

Anni Tabagua: Right. This is an excellent bridge to my next question. You mentioned this magical word: data. Though technology is everywhere, data specifically seems to be everywhere these days. So, would you tell us a bit more about that? What kinds of data are marketers using today?

Scott Rayburn: Yeah. Great question. So, first of all, I think I need to mention the discipline of marketing operations. You know, it's fascinating, this part of the marketing department didn't really exist until around 2008, 2009. But these folks are committed to making the marketing department more data-driven, making it more efficient, and implementing all of the Martech that collects, ingests, and actions or creates insights from the data.

So, just thinking about data, you know, it's everywhere in modern B2B marketing. So, starting at the top of the funnel, you have awareness data, such as how many people know you exist. Is that number growing? How much does it cost to grow that number? These things can be answered with, you know, Martech and data. From there, going down the funnel, someone knows you exist; they come to your website or interact with an ad.

This could be considered experience or experiential data from someone's browsing history on your company website. What did they do? Did they run away screaming, or did they fill out that form and then fill out the form? I mean, this is kind of getting deeper into the funnel. What are the conversion rates with your conversion data?

You know, for example, if your page has a 0.3% conversion rate and the industry standard is 2%, and you have those benchmarks available, you can probably learn pretty quickly that that page isn't working. There's something wrong with the content, the design, the flow. Or there could be some technical issues, like it's not loading fast enough.

So, you know, you can get all sorts of data-driven insights on that piece of the sales funnel. And then, finally, there's data around the bottom funnel buyer journey. Going from the sales qualified leads to the opportunity to the actual sale to the customer's lifetime value. You know, this is kind of the buyer behavior, a slice of data, and marketing can look at that and start to make decisions around like, okay, at what point do we provide some sort of special retention offer for the customer or what kinds of customers are just a lost cause?

Unfortunately. Right. Like there's no reason to continue to invest. So, you know, this is all data-driven. And I think things that used to be a lot more of a gut feeling, like you just say, we know these types of buyers don't buy from us because X, Y, and Z. Well, now you can have, you know, half a decade of data that backs that up.

Then, you can also observe changes in that data with analytics. And you know, it's just fascinating. It's very interesting.

Anni Tabagua: Yeah, I just wanted to ask, like, why now? Why the data-driven boom right now? Like, what was it like before? And you say, you know, heavily reliant on the gut feeling as opposed to we don't need to rely on our gut feeling anymore?

Scott Rayburn: I mean, I think it goes right back to technology. Technology is the foundational enabler of this kind of data-driven approach. And thinking about Martech specifically, I was actually kind of blown away to read that in the 2010s, there were only a few hundred so-called Martech tools on the market, and then today, it's estimated that there are over 8,000 of them.

And it made me realize kind of like, well, I've had a career that's just been defined almost completely by the rise of data, the rise of Martech, and, you know, I think it's kind of fortunate to be growing in my career as a marketer through those times because there's so much to learn. It's never boring.

But anyway, you know, zooming out from my personal experience, looking at Martech today, I mean, it's there to help optimize every element of marketing, from creating a PowerPoint presentation faster or making the branding much more scalable to developing social media banners. These are kinds of design use cases.

And then, of course, there are content use cases and copywriting use cases. Everybody knows about ChatGPT, which is rocking the marketing world. It's not there yet, right? When I talk, we'll talk about the future in a bit. But it could be there very soon to be scalable. And then you have things like ad tech and, on the one hand, the ability to scale out an ad campaign across all these different channels very quickly, from Google to LinkedIn to other third-party ad display networks.

With that kind of ad tech, it doesn't have to be a manual setup every time. And then another big trend with Martech today is personalization. Every person and every buyer is different. We all have different interests and different kinds of profiles that we assume in the world. And there's this kind of belief that the more personalized the message, the more likely someone might convert.

Especially if it's cold outreach, like they don't know you, you don't know too much about them, but what you do know can be tuned into this personalization. And, for any marketing element, you can find a corresponding Martech stack, which is still developing rapidly. This was certainly not the case ten years ago when these Martech solutions were kind of few and far between.

Anni Tabagua: Yeah, it's really interesting, Scott. And you, I think you painted a really clear picture of that. So, it's interesting to see how Martech went from being a niche to a must-have for marketing teams. So that's fascinating. And slowly but surely, Scott, we have arrived at the future. And I love the future.
I'm excited about it. And speaking of Martech, specifically, you know, I read a prediction recently that AI could drive 95% of all customer interactions by next year. It feels huge. I don't know if marketers are ready for that shift. I wonder what you think about that. And generally, I wonder what you think about the future of marketing over the next two years.

Scott Rayburn: Yeah, it certainly is an exciting future we see in marketing. A bit scary, depending on your role, you know, thinking about the skills you've cultivated that are very much human skills, potentially being not just, like, co-piloted or augmented with AI, but rather replaced somehow. I'll say more about that in a bit, but I think we are headed toward a very AI-enabled marketing future.

One of the things about technology marketing in the future that's pretty exciting is the emerging ROI models around marketing investments. It becomes less of a gut feeling or creative pursuit discipline and more like a math problem, you know, using the easy example of $1 million.

Right? What if there was a way to know that your investment of $1 million would turn into $1.5 million in revenue? I think, increasingly, we see this potential through the benchmarking, through the intelligence of the Martech platforms where they kind of know what the price point should be for the license, in addition to the price point for the users that are on the marketing team, plus the price point of the ads. Then you add it all together, and they know Martech companies and SaaS companies need some kind of ROI.

So, these ROI models are a huge part of the future and a huge part of marketing. And, you know, gaming that out a little bit more, taking that investment in marketing, and thinking about how it will pay off. Increasingly, automation will eliminate some of the many manual steps. For example, today, building an audience in an ad platform can still be very manual.

You know, actually deploying an ad and uploading the copy and the creative and, you know, that audience fine-tuning it, checking in on it every few days, being a good steward of the company money that you're spending on the ad, all of that takes a lot of manual work. And, you know, it's something that I think, based on machine learning, based on creative-focused AI tools, could one day be a set-it-and-forget-it sort of thing much more than it is today, where you've got to check in on that every single day.

And it takes a lot of time and a lot of expertise. But, you know, this is kind of where I see it headed in terms of making marketing more intelligent in the future. Right. Yeah.

Anni Tabagua: Scott, and I wonder, are there things you think that will not change in the future?

Scott Rayburn: I think that, you know, if you think about the show “Mad Men,” where all these dudes and ladies are sitting around writing copy, just thinking about new, innovative ways to sell and position different B2C sorts of goods and services. Those brilliant folks are still going to be needed in marketing, you know, 50 years from now, just like they were 50 years before this.

That kind of breakthrough creativity will still be needed to stand out, especially in a world where, like, I can click a button and generate 25 blog posts, put them on my website, and confuse search engines, but still, it's enough noise to kind of get some organic traffic to the site. That's a huge issue that I see emerging.

Just like AI creates too much, too much noise. How are we going to stand out in this super noisy digital environment? Well, I think the answer is this breakthrough creativity. That is very much a product of the human touch.

Anni Tabagua: Right? And I love that. So shout out to all the Don Drapers of the world, right?

Scott Rayburn: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Anni Tabagua: Scott and I want to ask you, would you give us some examples of AI in marketing, some things AI related to marketing that you personally are either following or excited about?

Scott Rayburn: Yeah. I think I have a really good example from DataArt and the work that we're doing in our marketing team today. So something I've noticed over the years in IT services, B2B marketing, consulting, and, you know, the industries that I've been in is just the amount of time it takes to manage knowledge and then reformat that knowledge across different channels.

So, for example, you have a case study or some sort of customer story that is really compelling. But right now, it only really exists in the heads of those who worked on the project. Or maybe, if you're lucky, somebody wrote some rough notes about what happened. Or even it is a long-form case study that you've published on your website.

Still, from there, that case study is going to take many, many different forms. To be kind of, you know, used to its fullest potential across all these different channels. So, for example, what's the social media version of the case study? What's the email version? What's the slide deck version? And you know, what's the slide version for this type of client versus another type of client?

Because, like I was saying before, personalization is key. You know, understanding your target audience is key. And anyway, with those inputs of, you know, this is the kind of format that I want, these are the criteria for the audience. You can imagine basically, you know, 50 different rewrites of one different thing. So, with that in mind, what we're creating at DataArt is this kind of knowledge base with a gen AI-enabled search and a creative tool.

So what we've done is we've looked through the archives of all of our case studies, brochures, blog posts, and slides, and we've put them into what I'm told is called a vector database. This vector database kind of enables the generative AI search to be on top of it. It brings together all this structured and unstructured data from all these different channels, whether it's internal channels like confluence and SharePoint or an external channel like the company website, or even maybe in the future, some form of Google where you can bring in, you know, the content of stuff that they've written about our company and other websites.

That is to say, the number of sources is almost limitless here in this vector database. Anyway, bringing all that together and then putting a UI on top of it that enables a user who's in, you know, marketing or even sales, like, working on a proposal for a certain customer or trying to create some new content, like I was describing with the case study example, essentially everything that we have, everything that we've done is there.

It's at their fingertips. And it can be with the help of AI massaged into all sorts of new formats, whether that's a PowerPoint presentation or some kind of, you know, two-paragraph summary. You know, it's all possible. And I think you probably know what I mean if you've ever worked with ChatGPT. And by the way, we're exploring how to make this more multimodal and more kind of branded.

So, if you click the button to build the presentation, the presentation it spits out is on-brand. You know, all these different elements and things that in the past have been very time-consuming for teams to treat on a case-by-case basis.

Anni Tabagua: Well, that's a great example. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's very worthwhile. In the end, though, it's AI content creation automation, but still with the human touch.

Scott Rayburn: Yeah, I mean, there is a human in the loop. That's a concept in AI where, you know, AI is not 100% there, but if we can get it 90% of the way. Then the human in the technology loop can do the last 10%, it saves a lot of time, effort, and then enables, you know, people in marketing to think more about strategy and, think more about, you know, this brand element that's been emerging in B2B.

Anni Tabagua: Right? This is a marketer's dream. But, before we wrap up, I do want to ask you, it's a question I like asking our guests, which is, namely, do you have any hot takes or unpopular opinions on the topic, on the topic of marketing data or the future of B2B marketing?

Scott Rayburn: IYou know what I think? I think my unpopular opinion is probably going to be very popular with marketers and creatives but maybe not as popular with some business leaders and the board in an environment where they're trying to, you know, optimize the company. And here it is. So, as we were already talking about, I think the need, the demand for these Don Drapers of the world, these amazing creative storytellers and brand builders, is not going anywhere.

And I really don't see how this is going to be automated in the near future. Right. So I think marketers and creators will celebrate this by saying, yes, we still have a place in the professional society that we helped create, you know, good for us. But then, on the other hand, the business, you know, the boards of companies of the world, might be a little disappointed because, you know, they want to get those efficiency gains, productivity gains, whatever.

And I just don't think they're going to find them in this particular part of marketing where the human touch, connection with the human experience, and the psychology of buyers in all these different places, you know, it's going to continue to be led by humans.

Anni Tabagua: I love that, I love that note. Storytelling is definitely not something that should be completely lost in the numbers, so it's good to hear. Thank you so much, Scott, for sharing your insights today. It was really a pleasure to talk to you.

Scott Rayburn: Thank you, Anni. I really enjoyed it, and I appreciate the time and opportunity to talk about marketing, technology, and data.

Anni Tabagua: That's a wrap for today's episode of BizTech Forward. Thank you to our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, share, and subscribe. We always want to hear from you. What do you think? Tell us at biztechforward@dataart.com. Take care, and we'll see you next year.