Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The one that strikes me of all the things that you said is ad retargeting. One of the big trends in marketing today is content marketing. I would say, for us, that’s probably the number one kind of marketing that we do.

We have been able to build a differentiated global brand just because we do phenomenally good content. We do real journalism in the technology and entrepreneurship area. We’ve reached a large audience because of that. If you take a scenario like that and you put retargeting there, the budget just goes completely berserk.

Carol O’Kelley: You’re absolutely right. First of all, I agree with you on content marketing. Myself and the rest of the team at Salesfusion all think of content marketing as just a norm for doing business. It doesn’t even necessarily occur to me as cutting-edge anymore, which I realize is not true for a lot of companies. We do a lot of it and it’s very important. We try to do some amount of content syndication. It can get expensive. Most often, it affects the top of the funnel.

When it comes to newer organizations adopting content marketing, that’s one of the hardest things to stick with long enough so they have a good library of assets. We believe in it and see its results. As a marketing automation company, we’re looking every month at where the source was of the new opportunity that came into our funnel. What was the source of the deals that we’re closing? What things influence those deals? Content marketing is always at the top of the list. It’s just difficult to hear customers who are having a hard time making the transition and want immediate gratification that they were accustomed to back in the days of direct mail, for example.

Sramana Mitra: Content marketing actually brings a lot of audience and traffic to your site that are not necessarily leads and prospects. That’s where I think retargeting fits in. I personally don’t recommend it very much.

Carol O’Kelley: I think you have to be an organization of a certain size and in the right place in terms of your life cycle. We have the same experience. We find a lot of people coming to our website from educational institutions doing research. If you’re putting out good rich content and you’re developing a following in terms of thought leadership, those things do affect you from a brand perspective and they give you preferences.

In terms of retargeting, I think one of the things that we like to see was that LinkedIn acquired BIZO. That is allowing us to do retargeting around specific profiles so that we’re spending our retargeting dollars trying to get to the right people and not to the more random people. The hard thing there is that you have to have enough traffic. It’s not incredibly expensive. We found it pretty effective in reaching the right kind of professionals particularly in a B2B technology business like ours where you have such an active LinkedIn population.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion
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