Episode 9: How to Establish User Intent Using Data | With Edward Ford

Full transcript:

David Bain  00:00

How to establish user intent using data - with Edward Ford.

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Hi, it’s David. You're probably hearing a lot more about user intent nowadays, but how do you establish user intent? And is it possible to establish user intent using data? That's what we're discussing today with a man who's been with his current company from its startup days. He's previously worked at a growth marketing agency, Advance B2B, and is currently Head of Demand Gen at Supermetrics. A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show: Edward Ford.

Edward Ford  00:57

David, thanks so much.

David Bain  00:58

Thanks, Edward, great to have you on. You can find Edward over at supermetrics.com. So, Edward, how do you establish user intent using data?

Edward Ford  01:08

It's a big question to unpack. The first thing is to just understand what user intent is; what is intent? Really, it's about a person who is trying to do or find something on the internet, or on your website. As a marketer, you need to kind of understand those levels of intent and what is motivating someone to do something.

You can use data and you need to use your own intuition. I think it's a combination of the two. It's about understanding levels of user intent. You can have extremely high-intent activities and actions, and you can have low-intent. When we speak about intent, we're speaking a lot about the intent to purchase, become a customer, and give money to your company so that you can grow the business and grow revenue. That's the starting point when it comes to intent.

A very simple example could be traffic to your website. If you're a B2B company, and you're looking at overall traffic coming into your website, it's quite hard to understand the intents because there are so many different people coming to your website for so many different reasons. Let's say, as a marketer, you’re looking at traffic to an on-demand demo. There, there's a higher level of intent, and we're speaking about purchase intent, and actually buying your products and services.

The starting point is that you need to understand these different levels of intent, and only then can you track and understand it. One other example I can give from Supermetrics is the following. As context, we basically help marketers move their marketing data from all your different marketing and sales platforms, into different reporting and analytics tools. So, if you need to bring together data from Facebook ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Salesforce. Then you can build out full funnel reports, and you need to bring that into, say, Microsoft Excel, as a spreadsheet to do some analysis, Data Studio, if you want to build some dashboards, or into a data warehouse or a cloud storage platform, so that your data team can centralize and orchestrate the data.

We help marketing teams move that data, and our products are based on the destinations you can bring that data to. If we take three different destinations that we have as products: let's take Google Data Studio, for building dashboards, Microsoft Excel, for spreadsheets, and Google Cloud, for Cloud Storage.

Let's say someone types ‘Data Studio’ into Google, someone types in ‘Microsoft Excel’, and someone types in ‘Google Cloud’. We know that if someone's searching for Data Studio, there is a somewhat higher level of intent to purchase our product than the other two search terms because we know Google Data Studio is a product built exclusively for marketers, primarily digital marketers, who need to bring in marketing data from all those major platforms into a dashboarding solution. Whereas Microsoft Excel - anyone could be searching for ‘Microsoft Excel’, and only a small fraction of those people might be digital marketers who are working in the relevant space, who could then potentially get value from Supermetrics. Google Cloud is an even bigger thing because what we found was that you have a bunch of consumers as well, who are just looking for how to increase storage on their Android mobile phone.

So, those three search terms are very top-of-funnel. They're not really tied to Supermetrics, but they're tied to the products in the space that we work in. Yet all three of those will indicate varying levels of intent. For us, it helps inform our strategy in terms of ‘Should we even be bidding on these keywords? ‘Data Studio’, maybe it makes more sense. ‘Google Cloud’? Absolutely not. That's just too broad.

05:37

This is another example: if someone is searching ‘Supermetrics pricing’, there's a lot of different levels of intent and motivation behind that search. They could be prospective customers deep in the buying process. Perfect. That's super important. Or it could be a market researcher from a VC company who’s potentially analyzing us as an investment opportunity. Or it could be a product marketer from one of our main competitors, who's working on a ‘Supermetrics Vs Us’ article or a comparison piece.

A lot of people will say that there's a high intent behind a ‘Supermetrics pricing’ search. Yes - in many cases - and that's something we want to look at, but you also need to understand what the levels of intent are, or motivations that people have to type that into Google and research us from that perspective. You can track and think about intent, and you can use data, but really the most important thing is: How do you interpret that?

David Bain  06:42

There are many different angles that I could take from what you've just shared there as well. You started off initially talking about purchase intent, and I think you touched upon informational intent, and I think you even almost touched upon personas and the fact that perhaps what a company could do is blend a persona with intent to produce a bespoke level of intent. Is that something that you would advise marketers to do?

Edward Ford  07:14

If you just open that up a bit more - what do you mean by that?

David Bain  07:18

So, if you have defined that your ideal target consumer is someone who works in a large organization, and is a marketer who's been there for three or four years, and uses these particular tools. From that, you've defined a particular persona that you're writing content for, then you can write content for the persona, but also for the persona at different stages of the journey. So, you've got a blend between the intent and the persona, to really personalize why you're writing what you're writing.

Edward Ford  08:00

Yeah, exactly. If you have different personas, there could be a greater likelihood that some of those would buy compared to others. Taking that persona level, really thinking about their customer journey, and the different stages in the buying journey, and then creating content that is aligned with the level of intent at each stage, is another way to think about this.

Intent comes in many different shapes and sizes and figuring it out is the starting point because, once you've understood that, it becomes much easier to do marketing, to create content, and to align what you're doing with the motivations and objectives of the different people you're trying to reach.

David Bain  08:47

If we're just being a little bit more simple in terms of how we're breaking down intent, and we're just focusing on informational and purchase-orientated intent, how can we use data to track what stage different prospects are at, and then ensure that the next interaction that they encounter with our brands is appropriate and tied to their level of intent?

Edward Ford  09:14

I think that's a good distinction to make, and maybe it makes this conversation easier to define what we mean by intent. At Supermetrics, and in our marketing team, when we speak of intent, we're basically speaking about purchase intent. Low-intent earlier on in that journey or, if certain actions are taken, then high-intent further down that journey.

It's about defining how you want to measure those different levels and stages, and then building out models, and funnels, and KPIs that will measure the effectiveness of those stages, and where people are on that journey. A lot of the things that we might look at, at the start of the journey, at Supermetrics could be trials or demo requests, for example. That's often the entry point into the funnel, even though there are a lot of things happening before that: visiting the website, listening to the podcast, reading about us on different competitive comparison pieces, or in places like GE, to get an idea of what we do.

It’s about really looking at what that user journey is, and how you can support people based on the stage they're at. That's probably the starting point in terms of looking at the performance of your marketing from an intent perspective and making sure that the journey that you build is aligned with supporting people to understand what it is you do - and to move down that journey so that eventually they can make a decision. ‘Do I want to become a customer?’ and ‘Do I see enough value in this that I want to make a purchase?’.

David Bain  11:02

I think it'd be useful to also dive into the type of content that's likely to resonate with prospective customers at different stages of intent. Perhaps ‘informational’ versus ‘almost ready to make a purchase’. Is there a particular style or structure of content that you would recommend if someone is at the ‘informational’ stage versus at the ‘almost ready to buy’ stage?

Edward Ford  11:34

Yeah, I think there are other ways you can kind of think about this to make it easier. I think marketers typically use the funnel - top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, bottom-of-funnel - to define those steps. Something that we're doing more and more now at Supermetrics is thinking about things from a demand creation and a demand capture perspective.

A lot of what we do in the demand gen team is based on the simple formula that: demand generation equals demand creation plus demand capture. This helps you understand where people are in the buying journey, what their level of intent is at that stage, and what sort of content would make sense at those stages.

If we think about the total addressable market for, not just Supermetrics, but any products – it can be your product. This line of thinking is heavily influenced by Chris Walker and Refine Labs, they've been speaking a lot about this in the last year or two. Only a small fraction of that total addressable market will be in a buying cycle or an active solution-seeking process at any given time. The vast majority of people who could get value from your product are not actively in a buying cycle. You could say that only 5% of that total addressable market is actively looking and the other 95% are not.

You need to start creating demand and reaching that 95% so that people understand what you do, they know about you, you have strong brand awareness, build some brand affinity, so that eventually, if people see the value or are in a position where now is the time to invest in this area, you're top-of-mind and your solution is already front and center. You're giving yourself a head start.

Then, you move into the demand capture phase. If you've done your job well, you should already have had that head start, but then it's really about enabling people to understand the value of your product, try out the product, and see for themselves. Have good product marketing materials and depending on if it’s self-serve or sales-assisted, you'll need to obviously have strong alignment with both of those funnels. That means working with product teams on self-serve, typically, and sales teams on sales-assisted.

What we see is that a lot of marketing teams might focus purely on demand capture. Of course, that's something that we do a lot of, as well. Things that we do in that area are blog articles and content that is written for search. Our classic SEO play is really driven around demand capture. What we mean by that is that we're targeting long-tail, high-intent, and typically low-volume keywords, where someone has a clear task that they need to do - kind of using the jobs-to-be-done formula.

We know that if people are searching for something like ‘bring performance data into spreadsheet’, for example, there is a relatively strong signal that they would get a lot of value out of our product because that's exactly what we enable performance marketers to do in that case. Another one could be ‘how to perform an SEO content audit’. Again, no direct intent to buy Supermetrics, but our product enables a marketer to do that, so if we can answer that query - that keyword - with a really helpful article, then there is hopefully a strong likelihood we could convert that person into a customer and a fan of our product. A lot of our content is quite long-form, it's ‘How To’, it's bringing the product in quite naturally without overly selling it, and that has typically worked well for us.

It's also a lot of competitor comparison pieces. Competitor alternatives are common keywords to target: ‘Supermetrics versus competitor X, competitor Y, competitor Z’, etc. Sales enablement, material pricing - a lot of website pages will fall into this category.

Then, in terms of the lower intent, it's really about building awareness for the problem you solve. It's about building awareness for the problem the industry is facing and it's building awareness for your role in that and how you enable your potential customer to basically excel, benefit, and gain value from what it is that you provide.

There are a lot of ways you can do that. SEO and organic are maybe not the best way to do that. It's a lot of content built for social, it's built for events, it's built for video and webinars, it's built for podcasts. That’s a good content mix for demand creation - lower buying intent but still really important in terms of building that future demand.

Those are a few ways to think about content for people earlier on in that journey with less intent, and content for people further down that journey with a little more buying intent. 

David Bain  16:48

I'm sure your sales cycle can be thoroughly long at Supermetrics, like many enterprise B2B brands. If a brand has a long sales cycle, and you're talking about that informational content, how do you measure the ROI of someone consuming that content - if it's going to be a long time away from them potentially making a purchase from you?

Edward Ford  17:13

What we do is focused on doing the things that we know make sense, that we know work, and that we know customers get a lot of value out of. We look at blended CAC, as a way to understand how efficient our overall commercial go-to-market is. You can, of course, break that down by channel and so forth, but I think it's also pretty difficult to get at ‘what is the ROI of this sales enablement PDF I created?’. You know that you were able to close deals before that, but it's making the lives of all your sales reps easier and it's making it much easier for customers to understand what you do and get across the line through that sales cycle. Look at the big picture and understand the efficiencies of how you're performing.

At the same time, I don't know if it's possible to get an ROI of every specific piece of content that you have for the sales-assisted piece itself. In a perfect world, it would be great to have a simple ROI of every activity and every piece of material you created, but I think getting an overview of where you stand on a higher level, and then maybe getting into it by channel, is probably a good starting point at least.

David Bain  18:38

Do you have an example of using data to inform an overarching marketing strategy? At the end of the year, or whenever you actually put together your marketing strategy for the coming year, how do you actually use data, and how does that inform that strategy?

Edward Ford  18:54

I have one really cool example I can give you that’s a great example of how data can inform, not just marketing strategy, but the whole brand strategy. What we did towards the end of last year was to basically come together as a team and say ‘Okay, Supermetrics has grown to this size. We're getting quite big now. We're in the data space. We're working with organizations of all shapes and sizes. We're gaining increasing interest from large enterprise. Deal sizes are getting bigger. Sales cycles are getting a little bit longer, even though they're not super long.’ And we asked: ‘Is the brand really where it should be?’

There were some things to consider in addition to what I just said. Yes, we're moving upmarket, deal sizes are getting bigger, there's a lot of enterprise interest, we're going more sales-assisted from self-serve, but still, our self-serve funnel is a big differentiator. We make the product really accessible to small businesses. Even one-person consultancies can just come in and buy Supermetrics straight through the website with relatively low ACV. We've always resonated or connected well with the marketing SMB space - the hands-on practitioners. 

So, we asked: ‘Do we move in that emerging startupy, approachable direction? Or do we move into this more established, more trustworthy, more corporate direction?’ I would say that the brand was somewhere in between, so everyone had an opinion. Without data, you're just another person with an opinion, as the saying goes. So, we said ‘Let's test it. Let's do a full-funnel brand test.’

What we did was, and this is where it gets super interesting, we built out two different brand identities for Supermetrics. One was super startupy, super emerging, and then the other was super corporate and super stiff. We pushed really hard in both directions, even though we knew we don't want to be that far in either direction but, for the sake of the test, we just pushed super hard.

We built two different landing pages in both those styles. We built a full set of funnel ads across Facebook, we did a YouTube video, and we did other things - we were bidding on paid search as well. We looked at nine different tests across the funnel and one of them was, far and away, the strong outperformer. It won on seven of the nine tests. One was a no result, and the other was statistically insignificant to the other variants. 

It was almost a total, clear signal from the market for which of these identities resonated most with our audience, and we kept everything as fair as possible. Everything was as similar as possible. All we did was basically change the visuals and the wording in the copy to deliver the exact same message. That defined our brand strategy. We said, ‘Okay, the data is clearly showing this. We're seeing an uplift in all these key numbers, we're seeing increased performance, increased time on site, and increased conversion. Let's just go with it.’

It was funny because people had strong opinions during the test, like ‘I really, really hope this one wins because I like it more.’ or ‘I feel like this is maybe more the Supermetrics that I see going forward.’ and some people were very much in favor of the other one. Then, at the end of the day, we just let the numbers decide.

That was a great example of how data informed our brand strategy. In addition to things like that, of course, you can look at what is really driving results for you, and where you are getting the best return for your investment. Also, look at where you see the opportunity to make some bets because, as you go into a new year, there could be new channels that you want to invest in. We've layered on things over time at Supermetrics. We started off with marketplaces, paid, and SEO as the major channels we focused on. We've layered on podcasts, video, community, CX, social, etc.

Sometimes, you’ve just got to roll the dice, make some bets, and then look at the performance. Look at the data and see. Is this making sense for us? Is it working? Is it enabling us to grow faster? There are various ways that you can assess the performance of those.

Those are some examples of how you can use data to inform what it is you do, and your strategy. I think the brand test is cool because we've really let the market decide and we let the data show us. As far as I'm aware, I've not heard of any other company doing something on that scale, so that was a really cool project to be part of.

David Bain  24:15

A superb example. Well, let's move on from talking about what you're doing with data at the moment to planning for the future. In your opinion, what is the biggest marketing trend or challenge that marketers face over the coming year?

Edward Ford  24:27

There's a lot, there’s so much happening in marketing right now - particularly around the current market situation, trying to do more with less, and cost-cutting. What I think is going to be challenging is how you make sure you're investing in both demand capture and demand creation.

When budgets get cut and times get tough, it's very easy to default to short-term investments on a lot of demand capture: paid search, bottom-of-funnel activity. But also, making sure you have budget and buy-in to still build the brand and build awareness. It's a good time to do it. That's gonna be one challenge.

Of course, tied to that is how do you then use data to your advantage, get the most out of your data, and understand how those different activities and channels are performing? The companies that are better able and better equipped to work with, and make use of, all their data are the ones that are going to succeed, particularly in the coming year - in the situation we're in.

There's so much data available, but are you really using it to your maximum potential, using it to inform your decisions, and using it to guide where you should focus? Those are going to be some of the big things that marketers, marketing teams, and particularly marketing leaders and execs, will be looking at in the next year or so.

David Bain  25:53

I've been your host, David Bain. You can find Edward Ford over at supermetrics.com. Edward, thanks so much for being on the Strategic Marketing Show.

Edward Ford  25:59

Thanks, David. My pleasure. This was a blast.

David Bain  26:02

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