← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
How Workweek Is Fixing Newsletter Attribution with Adam Ryan, CEO of Workweek | Ep. 421
00:48:49
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- [00:01]
A
If your approvals, assets, context and tasks all live in different places, you need a marketing ops intervention. Get everything organized and visible with Wrike, the smart word management platform. Head to wrike.com TMM to see more. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered convers with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials Podcast. And this podcast is a special one and I'll I'll tell you why in a second, but I have Adam Ryan, CEO of Work Week and he we're going to talk about something that is just like breaking news in the marketing industry. I think because I write a newsletter. A lot of companies write a newsletter. A lot of people sponsor a newsletter. And the problem with newsletters over the years and a lot of channels like newsletters, it's just hard to get attribution from them. It's hard to know like that newsletter, that reader tied into that sale, it's hard to know that. But a lot of marketers out there know that news that has built trust over months. They know that it's a channel that they need to invest in. But like their CRM is saying one thing, but their gut is saying another thing. But now I brought in Adam to talk about what is changing in the next next week, basically, I mean this week. But it's going to be launching and it'll be in the market and it'll be exciting. So welcome to the podcast.
- [01:58]
B
Excited to be back. Always my favorite marketing podcast day in and day out. And I'm so happy that we're able to connect to talk about the partner platform and what we're trying to do to help marketers have a little bit more success internally.
- [02:12]
A
Let me just kick this off. So the scenario brand runs a newsletter sponsorship for six months. They think the ICP are reading it and the ICP is reading it. A deal closes. But the CRM or their source of truth says nothing about that newsletter in the current state. Why does that happen?
- [02:33]
B
Because there's no attribution back to the CRM unless that user clicked on the ad, which the ad is already about 150 words normally, like in your great newsletter and others. So it's not necessarily like a click intended ad. But if they do click in and then they have to fill out a form and then they fill out the form and they can get tracked back to the newsletter. And though that does happen, the, the truth is most people don't do that. That doesn't mean the ad didn't work. But for that marketer, they have no other way to prove that that newsletter worked besides if that lead gen form gets filled out. And so that's the state of things today. And there's a lot of other issues around tracking attribution in newsletters. But for, for a marketer at a B2B, you know, vendor SaaS company specifically, which is really who we're trying to solve for that is the, the way that you can typically tie back newsletter attribution back to your CRM today.
- [03:36]
A
I mean, and today the current newsletters out there are reporting really on two things, which is clicks and opens. And I wanted to go a little bit into why those are a little bit of BS metrics and every platform reports on it differently. So you can kind of tell a weird story that's not true or a story that might be like overly inflated or underlying inflated based on what you're using.
- [04:06]
B
Yeah, I mean, so you know, email's been around for all of time. And today there's these major email platforms, you know that across the board marketing platforms like there's email service providers like Beehive and Sail through and Zeta, postscript, there's so many email platforms. What most of them do is they've created their own algorithm on how opens and clicks should filter out the bots so they don't give you the raw data necessarily. And they do that. And what we've seen over time is just being at the center of kind of newsletters for the last 10 years is that bot clicks have grown exponentially more than 100% in the last couple of years. From a raw click basis, about 98% of clicks in an email now are bots. And what it's causing is if, you know now some platforms aren't exactly motivated to share with people this problem because it is actually changing the performance. And so I was just telling someone at the hustle, 10 years ago, our unique open rate was like 18, 20, 22%. Our total open rate was like 40, 45%. And all of a sudden now all these newsletters have a 50% plus open rate. And the reality is it's just not true. It's that these opens are inflated and so are the clicks. And there's really no consistent way and no regulation around how to measure those. And so if you're a B2B marketer, spending in newsletters and one of your publishers uses one ESP and another pub creator uses a different esp, though you're comparing those open rates and click through rates as apples. Apples they are not. And that is a huge issue for just baseline metrics. But also in the end, you know, if you're selling a piece of software to, you know, an E comm store with north of 10 million revenue, you don't care like about all those clicks. Like, you only have maybe 6 to 7,000 potential customers in the world. Why do you care about a thousand clicks when 900 of them weren't even in your customer profile? And so those are kind of like the two larger issues outstanding for marketers that they're dealing with. With newsletter advertising, I want to also
- [06:24]
A
go into something that you talk about a lot, but I don't think people do this in most marketing orgs, which is like verified clicks. Verified opens, like the verified metrics of what? And I know we Workweek reports on that back to sponsors. Most companies don't report the verified. But could you explain like, what verified opens and clicks are? And also like, why is it important? I know you kind of just said about like, who is actually clicking, who is actually opening matters, but how should people be thinking about measuring opens and clicks?
- [07:03]
B
So the kind of belief that we had years ago and working is, you know, folks like yourself are appealing and attracting a certain type of reader or listener that are decision makers in companies. And we care about who those people are. And the reality is it's not about I'm not trying to play necessarily a how many game, which is traditionally how media and publishers played of like, look at all this scale we have. We always thought like, hey, if you write the best content, you're actually like appealing to a certain type of person. The who matters more than how many. And none of the reporting, though ever matched that. It was always really about how many and open rates and click through rates. And so what we've done and what we're excited to announce this week is the Workweek partner platform. It's been in beta for 18 months, and this week we're rolling it out publicly. And what it's done is one, we will not count a click and show it to an advertiser unless we know who that person is. We don't necessarily give away any identification like email or first and last name, et cetera, on that. But we make sure that if this is just an unknown email subscriber that we don't know who they are. That is pretty much worthless to that marketer. And so we don't show it. And what that allowed us to do over time is to have. While this was in testing and beta, our clients started being like, hey, this is great. I wish I could get some of this information into our CRM at the account level. And then we started building that and testing it. And now today, if you advertise with Workweek and one of our many newsletters, including the Marketing Millennials, you will be able to get your clicks and opens at the account level into your CRM and really for the first time understand that attribution of, I like to call the dark sales cycle of it all, where your sales rep kind of takes credit for that sale, but that person clicked an ad maybe six months before they ever took that meeting or demo call. And that is not giving credit to marketers and we're trying to fix that.
- [09:10]
A
Could you go into a little like the mechanics of how you were able to like do this? Like I think like what I've seen with a lot of channels is there's two big channels out there that people have and it's Google and Meta. And like most people are measuring like their attribution models on like a either last click or they measuring it based on the attribution cycle of what those platforms are doing. But most people's sales cycles are way longer, especially in B2B than what Meta is doing. It's not a seven day sales cycle. Most people have a 28, a 30, a 60. If you're an enterprise it's eight months and newsletters are obviously if you send once or twice, once a week, it could be like a six months warmup of trust before someone decides to thumbs up. So could you explain a little bit about how this is happening?
- [10:10]
B
And yeah, yeah, the core piece of this is you need identity. So on average an email is a great identity tool. Typically you at least can reach that person. You relatively know if it's real, if they're opening and clicking things. But what's really challenging is when you try to attach a personal email to a work, to a company, a work profile. And we were able to do that workweek and create an identity graph. Because of our professional networking platform in our communities, we're able to identify both that email of someone signing up for a newsletter as well as through the applications that we have for the community to attach that to a company. And that allowed us to create an identity graph that today 81% of our newsletter subscribers, we can actually identify who they are and what company they Work at most companies in this space are closer to 35%. So that's at the core of what, what was enabled Then the next step of it though is the how is through our, our partner platform able to actually attach these engagement signals, whether it's a unique open, multiple unique opens and ad click, etc. Into your CRM. And so to your point, newsletter advertising has been broken, especially for B2B. And if you are any vendor that has a sales cycle longer than 30 or 45 days, and when I say sales cycle, I'm not meaning what's in your CRM that your salesperson logs. I mean when that person starts to become aware of the problem, what they're wanting, and then they reach out. And this is that part of the sales cycle that's been hidden. And newsletter advertising has not been able to support or show the impact during that time. And to your point, Meta and Google have really done a great job of taking credit on the last click or sometimes even the first click. And that has allowed those dollars and that confidence of those platforms for marketers to keep going back to them. And what we're trying to do and what we're starting to see is that as we show these signals in the CRM, it's giving marketers insights into ROI that they did not know. And so a tangible example of that is if we took the old way of measurement for one of the customers that we, we did this with, if we took the old way of measurement, which was, hey, they clicked on the ad and then they filled out a form and then that's how we get credit. Our ROI, our ROAS on that spend with that customer was about 0.3% pretty bad. Wasn't great. After looking at the additional signals in the CRM and enriching that it was an 8x roas. And this is what happens when you have great content, trusted creators that actually are engaging good advertising, that's actually 100 plus words that people actually have to read. Advertising works. And what we really set out to do is start to prove that to marketers in a way that's completely transparent.
- [13:16]
A
I also wanted to take one step back because I think I want you to tell people, like, why newsletters? Because like, obviously now there's AI. People are like using AI to like read news. There's a lot of channels out there, like why, why, why is newsletter like one of the most, like pro, like one of the best channels to market on. But now, until now, it was one of the hardest to prove. So people just like saw it as more as like I'm buying with a creator instead of buying with a network or a channel.
- [13:53]
B
There's like the fundamental aspects of it. It's an opted in channel, right? So unlike social and others where people are just getting an algorithm served to them, these people have already opted in, they've already raised their hand. Naturally that brings more engagement, more trust. The second part of it, which not everyone does, but we do, and I believe like the best creators tend to do this, is they have really good ads. Those ads look and sound like the creator. They actually tell a story. Sometimes it's a really technical explanation of a feature. Sometimes it's all about what problem are you experiencing and solutions. But it's not just a crappy banner ad that doesn't really reflect any story. And the combination of that just alone the opted in aspect and with a trusted voice and then ad that tells a real story. This is like the mecca of marketing, B2B Marketing. It's sponsored content with people that actually are where they're reading it, they trust it. And the only issue that's ever existed with that is that you don't know who is opening or clicking necessarily unless they give you that information. And so that was the last piece of the puzzle to kind of close the loop on the channel. But the success is largely due those two things. And it's been proven now, I think over the last 10 years by the growth of that. And now we're just trying to make it even easier to continue the scale of spend in the newsletter as a channel.
- [15:22]
A
And the crazy part about this, I think is that technically you're doing something that is transparent but also could be a little risky because opens and clicks, other newsletters are sharing opens and clicks. They're not going to be showing verified things. So the numbers could look way more inflated on the other side of things. So why take a risk of like just showing verified people?
- [15:50]
B
One, it's nice to be honest, I think, waking up and every day. And I believe that we are honest about what we do. We, you know, not reporting a click if we don't know who they are. Like that is a place that you know you're doing the best thing for your customers. And I think that's at the core of what we wanted to do always. And then the other part of this though is incentive alignment. Like sooner or later all bad advertising gets found, but not all good advertising gets found. And what we wanted to do is put the incentives around that. Like, I believe that the creators that Workweek. Workweek has the very best advertising because they have the most trust. And so we flip that incentive by believing that we had the best advertising, and if we didn't, then we'd have to fix it. And that's fine. That's part of the. That's part of the problem. But I more so believed that we needed to find good advertising because we had it already. And that's, I think where the industry is going as well, is really enabling creators who have great trust, who have a great audience, that controls a lot of budget, that their ads actually work. Today, they're getting treated the same way as anybody else. And that shows up in the CPMs that they can charge. This shows up in the renewal rates that they have. And ultimately it doesn't help creators capture the value that they've actually created. And that's what we wanted to go solve. And I think that's. That's what we've always wanted to do, is change the way that B2B creators work and monetize. And this is just the next step of that.
- [17:30]
A
I think on another level too, it helps you flex a muscle, which you can kind of not flex all the time when you do clicks and open, which is like the growth aspect and finding the right people, whether it's organic or pay. Growth, like Newsletters today could just pump in 20,000 correct randos into their news that are at a low cost per acquisition. They can get clicks not saying that's their buyers, or they can buy a list or they could do anything to bump those numbers up. So I think, like, that's one thing too is like, it forces at least Workweek to make sure, like, the growth is the correct growth, not the, the, the wrong growth. And that also builds more trust with the buyer or sponsor because you know that this person needs to come in and they are your customer, so you have to also serve them while the creator serves their audience.
- [18:35]
B
Yeah, I tell the story. I have been selling newsletter ads for 10 years longer, and my dad is a supportive dad and recognizes, like, back in the day, he's like, how can I help? I'm like, yeah, we're just worried about ad clicks. And that's in 2016. 15. That's what I was saying. And for years, he clicked all the ads in all the newsletters we sold. And for context, my dad is a retiree and his free time, he judges barbecue competitions. I'm not sure if he can tell you what SAS even means. Definitely is not a buyer of that, of any tools like that but he always clicked the ad to support his son. And until we launched the partner platform, we included my dad in all that click reporting. And so does everyone else in the industry. And as much as I appreciate his support, the reality is, is like that is not helping anyone. It's not, it's not making us make better decisions about who we're getting on the list, about who we're getting engaged, allow the content to be at the forefront, but it's also not helping marketers like create benchmar baselines. And this is pervasive across the entire industry. And it was just time to politely start to not count my dad in those clicks and only count the buyers that you care about. And that, that is really what this is all about. And I think the newsletters as a channel have exploded. There's platforms that are adding thousands of newsletters a day like Substack and Beehive. And to your point, people have realized that they can but you know, funneling a bunch of money from into marketing to get newsletter subscribers. And so this is a natural progression of the maturity of the channel that we need to really support marketers by giving them more transparency as the entire channel becomes a little more murky.
- [20:27]
A
And it also for for marketers, a lot of marketers out there are running account based marketing. They have account lists and one of the metrics that they're reporting for channels is like penetration of accounts. Who's been singing accounts? So could you explain a little bit of the ABM side of it like connecting to your CRM and connecting the partner platform. How would that enhance reporting back so they can defend newsletter as a channel?
- [20:59]
B
Sure. So there's ABM platforms have largely been built on probabilistic identity graphs, meaning cookies and other signals that they basically use an algorithm. And guess who those people are. Over time that's become harder and harder and harder to do because of security and privacy and Apple changes and inevitably it means that data is more inaccurate. And what we have done due to the nature of what we've been able to build over the last few years, we have our own event registration platform, we have our own community platform. We've been able to, to create a deterministic graph because we actually know who these users are from their email and then the application that they have and tie that forward. And so that's the first piece of this is like we are not guessing who they are, we know who they are. Which immediately is a difference from traditional ABM platforms that realistically the way that they've operated and worked is outdated and needs to be updated. It's more like 201516 era than 2026. And so that's the first aspect is like having a deterministic graph. The second, which is more around the CRM is most B2B marketers are generally very eager to get lead generation. And I would argue as someone who has had many of those conversations, it's not that the marketer actually wants leads for the sales team to call or email, it's that they want credit. It's that if we get a lead, I can put it in the CRM. And now that marketing person gets credit for that lead and that helps them win their budget the next time over. And what we've been able to do and see with the results is when we compare pre and post results of the partner platform, marketers are getting, you know, 5 or 10% of the credit that they they really deserve. And ultimately so is Workweek, right? We would get credit for of we would touch sometimes 40% of all closed1 accounts before they before an opportunity is opened with our ad campaigns and we get credit for like 3 or 4%. And so that made the marketer look bad. It made sales look better, which is the classic issue that we all know exists. And really today the new version of ABM is how do you not need to do this with just leads, but other signals that can tie back to the account. And the only way that you can really do that is to make sure you know who those people are.
- [23:39]
A
Nobody designs bad marking ops on purpose. You just wake up two years in and all your approvals are an email. Your assets are in three apps, your slack is amaze and your Mondays are like one long status meeting. Reich is how you dig yourself out. It's a smart work management platform with visual collaboration AI that catches deadline risks before they even happen. And the structure to let you focus on the real work integrates with everything, aligns everyone used by teams at Lyft, Ogilvy, Nvidia. Go to wrike.com TMM to see how. One thing I want to ask you is there are a group of marketers who ran newsletter ads. It failed because of the situation. You were saying like it could have touched 40% of the accounts but it didn't because there was no reporting there and it was just clicks and opens. What do you say to those marketers who need to like go back and fight for budget to go back and try newsletters again because it actually is a channel that is valuable to invest in.
- [24:49]
B
Well, one if they've ever worked with Workweek, we're happy to reconstruct that campaign for them and run that so they can have that information in their CRM and run that report. And we've started to do that more and more in beta and it's really helped a lot of marketers have a new, have a better story to be able to defend the ad dollars that they want. And I think, you know, my, the other thing that I believe is that like great marketers know what works. They don't need a report to tell them that. They have the instincts, they have the pattern recognition. And this is really where this idea came from was we were talking to our marketers and like, I know this works. Like, I believe in this channel, I believe in this creator, but my CFO has like cut my budget. Like they, I can't prove that this works at all. And I believed those marketers. And that's. If you're one of those people, you need to go back to the channel today. Most newsletters are a little bit behind of what we're doing. Our goal is to kind of like make a rising tide lifts all boats here and help the entire industry grow and give you more confidence. But if you worked with us, come back and let us run this, reconstruct that reporting for you for no cost and see how it works. And I think ultimately you'll see that those campaigns, if your gut told you they were right, they're going to work. And that's, that's, that's the only way to do that is by, by actually putting the data into your CRM.
- [26:19]
A
It's crazy because I think I'm a big component of that. Attribution destroyed a lot of great marketing. I really believe that because I think that a lot of marketers default to like Google branded search meta because they have the measurability of things and they can prove it and it's a logical thing. It's like the nobody got fired for buying IBM type thing. Like, nobody got fired for running Google because Google could measure it. But if you went with, we're in a new era where people follow people, they get recommendations from friends, creators, influencers, they talk to people. The way people research is way different. The way people consume content is way different. And B2 I think E commerce is getting a little bit better because they have incrementality testing, they have better attribution models. They're still not there. But B2B is like Google branded search is like, everybody says, we got to run Google branded Search. But everybody knows a branded search is someone hasn't heard your brand before or like something that's. So yeah, all that to say is like, how do you think that. So if someone has an attribution model, how do you recommend them? Like adding this into the attribution model to make sure that like it's not only those two big dogs that are like, let's be honest, like they, they spend a lot of money to make a wallet, walled garden and reporting. So you spend more on them. So how do you say to marketers like this is how you should add this into your attribution reporting? I know, because everybody has to have some sort of reporting, but I'm still a bet.
- [28:05]
B
Yeah. So there's different weights that you can do that. We've worked with different folks. You know, a click is obviously can be pretty heavily weighted in an attribution and then also on the incrementality side, like you can start to pattern match and recognize of what's happening through these algorithms of like, hey, there are numerous deals where we are seeing the average engagement uptick, you know, 35 days before that sales rep opened that opportunity. And we're starting to find patterns like that as well. And ultimately certainly, you know, we are not the only channel. We will not take credit for all the things that we do. I think on average we've seen, you know, if you include all the touch points that we have across opens and clicks, I mean we've seen north of like a 30x roas. That's ridiculous. We know we're not doing that. We, we are honest about that and but it is a signal, right. There's something positive there. So once you kind of can create your own weighted of like that open or that click or how many opens or you know, what we've seen is particularly like if more than three people in a company have started to engage with an ad win rate in the CRM goes up like 30 or 40%. And so there's opportunities to kind of like understand that channel and that success. It's new. This is all relatively new, but it's really taking a common sense approach of what, what should you weight those as? And then also finding way to identify how it impacts the pipeline downstream. And I have a fun story with that one. It was like we had to the point of accountability. One of the partners in our beta came back with we drove basically zero net new. We had zero impact on any net new. On net new clients and customers. And that was the first one we've ever had like that? No, none. None of the opens and none of the clicks with the weighted kind of averages that were created showed any impact of net new dollars. And I was like, this is bad. And they were spending like multiple six figures. And when we were like looking at it is like well what, what could have happened? And so we actually then looked at the ad copy and one of the creators was like, hey, this ad copy was so technical. It was nothing to do about like the problems they were having. It was like this is like a technical feature of this tool. And they just didn't really like the ad and didn't get a lot of engagement generally. And we could just kind of tell it was very, very niche and technical. And we found that of the clients that they had closed, lost and then came back as a win, as a win back. All of those clients clicked that ad. It was, it was a, it was essentially a win back ad. But no one would ever known that until you connected those dots all the way through. And I think that's what this is, you know, what we're starting to see as a, as a channel, as a newsletter and how you do attribution is also like what are you trying to do? Are you trying to do win back campaigns? Are you trying to get net new? Are you trying to accelerate a sales cycle of an existing customer? You know, expand current customer spend your copy and the way you work with creators should also adjust for that and ultimately have a way to attribute that downstream. And so with that customer, if they renewed and then we create a new copy around like net new customers versus just doing essentially a win back campaign. But it kind of shows how you can get lost in the sauce of thinking something totally failed when reality, it just, it was, it needed to be attributed to something that, that actually solved a different problem.
- [31:54]
A
Yeah, I've always said from being a marketing ops is like so many people go to blame the channel first and it's really like before you blame any channel I've seen is like you gotta look at the ad, you gotta look at the creative, you gotta look at the landing page, you gotta look at who, who you targeting, you gotta look at the messaging. You have to look at like 20 different things before you quit on a channel. And a lot of people quit because of a number and they never go back and they could be having huge success on that channel because a lot of people, what they do is they take metacopy and they put it in a newsletter or they take newsletter copy and they put it somewhere else. And every channel is, you're supposed to run it differently. And especially a creator driven channel where like if you wanted to success seed on a creator's newsletter, you had to make it sure it sounds a little bit like the creator and in their voice and in their tone and flow well in and newsletter. And if you're not, if you're just going to write it how you think it's going to be written, I'm guarantee your creator knows their audience better than you think you know your audience because I'm not going to say that a lot of some marketers know the audience more, but creators have been writing for the audience for a long time and they know the audience.
- [33:07]
B
Yeah, well, particularly in B2B. Right. Like, I mean what, what we believe is, is practitioner experience and that those folks like yourself creating content, the reason why that works is like you're a representation of their customer base. And so when they say hey, that copy is not what we want to write about, what they're really saying is hey, customer, you're wrong. Right. But they don't see it that way. And there's a lot to learn about that. And I think one of the things that, you know, we've always embraced at Workweek is is kind of people follow people, but also that there's a reason that practitioner kind of experienced operators creating content has by far the best results. And it's because they like actually know the ins and outs of the platform. They know what their own peers would and ask and that makes that ad that much better. And so hopefully now there's better ways to start to actually attribute that success of those ads that was missing before.
- [34:01]
A
I want to also go on to the other side of the coin because I know we talked about like what like advertisers get, but I also think that like there's a side of it where someone subscribing to a newsletter, someone might think that, oh, like you're giving away my data to these brands. Like you're like selling my data. Like, and some newsletters might be doing that. Some ABM platforms are definitely selling data to people. So like what is it? What like could you explain like in like I was in like what was actually happening. Like my data is not being shared with this person for sure.
- [34:37]
B
So there's nothing, nothing identifiable. Everything's at that company level. Right. So this is like what we're focused on. B2B is all around accounts, like, right. You don't have a human or an individual in your CRM at the account level. So what we're doing is doing a domain match and we're allowing those signals of that account to be put into the CRM. And so there's no first name or last name or email or anything identifiable to, like, a specific human. And their behavior, it is around making sure that they have insights around the activity of that account. And so that's where the data is shared. That data is not anything that is going to get you spammed. And I think ultimately where we think is better for the audience is we don't need to rely on lead generation. We don't really sell lead generation at Workweek in this way that traditional publishers do, where they just put up a crappy white paper and run ads against it all day. And I think that's a great thing for our audience. And really what we were able to do is find this balance of like, hey, we understand markers need attribution, but we also understand, like, our audience does not want to just be cold called and emailed constantly by sales reps just because they read something online. And so we found the balance of that, and that's really was at the core of what we wanted to solve, of prioritizing the trust of our audience, but also the trust of the advertiser.
- [36:09]
A
Yeah, I just wanted to say that because there's also the side of it that it's. The B2B brand has a software on their website, and if you click on their website, they're the one who's getting that information from you. Because there are softwares that. That have the ability to take your information, swipe it off of you, and email you right after that.
- [36:32]
B
So it's not us doing that totally. And what we've seen. So that's really common. Right. If you click an ad, I would say the vast majority of advertisers in the B2B space are now using those tools that help them identify web traffic and anonymous web traffic and be anonymizing that. And. And we actually see that all the time when we get the CRM data with the partners and have that reporting created of the lead source, because that counts as a lead source. So there's a lot of. Snowflake has a tool that's like, we see a lot. And it'll basically say, like, Snowflake Web Work Week. Right. Like, oh, they clicked on that person, clicked on a Workweek ad, and then Snowflake de anonymized them and that gets put into the CRM. And so if that person emails you, that's not us. Giving that information away, that's you clicking on that ad. But what's interesting from a marketer perspective is because we see that on average the match rate for that anonymous web Traffic is around 3 or 4%, sometimes like 5%, but it's right around there. When we do a match rate, we can essentially get to, we've been seeing it with our customers, 50, 60, 70%. And so again, this is like there's a good way of getting the right data to see how advertising performs. And then there's a way that is a little intrusive and probably over the top. And the de anonymizing data, not only does it have way worse the match rate, you're now obviously getting an email sent to the sales rep to go start to email you. And so this is a, it's a way to kind of go through both of those fronts where we can give marketers actually more data but less ways that are intrusive to their customers and ours.
- [38:25]
A
It also, I mean it helps both sides of campaigns because I think like, if you're a brand marketer running a brand awareness campaign, you want to also like prove that your brand awareness campaign is driving results. Because ultimately all marketing is performance marketing. I don't care what marketing. And all marketing is performance marketing. If you're in brand marketing, your job is to like, I just think that's just delayed sales. Like, it's like you're building for like six to 12 months down the line and performance marketing is trying to get the sales like today and capture what's. What brand has been building for a long time. Correct. So I just wanted to say like, like, if you're doing a brand campaign, this will help you as a brand marketer. Because brand marketers get a lot of
- [39:06]
B
even better for brand marketers. Right? Like with brand marketers, if we get on a call with a brand marketer, I'm like, hey, who is your core kind of companies? And they give us five or six company names of like, oh, if these companies that we're going after engaged with the campaign, that would be amazing. Well like, yeah, it would be amazing. And then that normally stops there. And what we're trying to do is for that brand marketer is like, hey, we can now put that signal that that company engaged in that campaign and that demand gen marketer on your team may not get a lead from them or may not identify who they are for another 18 months. But, but your brand campaign will be the first one to get credit. And that's what's Missing. And you and I both believe this. Like I believe so much in B2B brand marketing. I think it is how you win in the long run over these long sales cycles. But those marketers are also the highest rate of getting fired. And what you know, I think having a new way to help them to tell that story, to tell that impact is, is overly needed and, and been kind of overdue for a long time. Yeah.
- [40:13]
A
The last thing on the newsletters I'll add and I'll ask you my last question, but the last thing I knew is that I was at is I see like newsletters and as a channel you run and when you're running it, like if you're running on the market millennials or you're running on any newsletter, any time you're running advertising, you're running like attention. You're trying to get attention of the audience. But if you're running on meta, Meta doesn't have trust with their audience. They don't have trust with the audience. So there's a very different level of trusted attention versus untrusted attention. And meta Google is untrusted attention. And someone who you are following and engaging with are more trusted because they're trying to give you recommendations that they believe. Believers and especially like someone like me is like, I won't put someone in my newsletter that I don't believe in that will work. Like, it's like, it's like there's a block list of people that I wouldn't work with and they're not going in my newsletter. And we're the only people who have our reputation on the line. Every single time we send a newsletter where meta like they run a stupid ad, their reputation maybe take a slight ding, but the creator could take a huge ding in the market or they run something different. So that's why they.
- [41:30]
B
Well and also, and also the quality of, of impact also relates to the quality of ad. And so like you know, we, we have about three formats of ads roughly. We have like our primary ad which is about 150 words. We have a secondary ad that's normally like let's call it 50 words. And then we have a deep dive that is like an entire edit kind of editorial driven product where the creator does an interview with the customer and they write an entire newsletter. Well, we separate those out in terms of how we report on that in this, in our partner platform because that deep dive inevitably has much higher impact on consumption than a secondary ad. And they're, you know, they're priced that way. They're built that way. We all know that that's like an obvious thing. But ultimately like that brand marketer who buys that deep dive. Yeah. They get a couple like people forward it to them and they're like, oh look, I really think this worked. But then when the CFO pulls the report, there's like nothing to defend that product in a CRM. And so that's, you know, I think recognizing that not just, not just the trusted of the creators is at a very different level than meta and the like BS that they don't feel like they have anything to lose by kind of like spamming ads or doing bad ads, the creators do. And the difference of each of those types of ads also matters to the market.
- [42:53]
A
And I think every marketing campaign should be run like a scientific experiment and they shouldn't be run like there needs to be a hypothesis and there needs to be like a result. And then you need to be removed from the result as a marketer. Like there's something you believe that like say newsletters for something, you run it and there's some sort of results. Like you could say like I believe my audience and is in here like and blah, blah, blah, let me run it in here. And now with the network like Workweek does and hopefully other newsletter platforms do this. I hope they do this. It probably won't happen for a little bit, but you can actually validate a hypothesis which is like every marketer should have, like this is what I believe in and this is the result I should be seeing from this. And then they can go defend it to their cfo like the problem we just said. The last question I have for you, and I know you probably know this question, but is what is a marketing hill you would die on?
- [43:50]
B
Oh man. I've been on the podcast before and I'm going to mix up my answer than last time. Marketing hill I would die on is if you're. I'll keep it on theme for today. If you're a B2B marketer, you need to care about who, not how many. And when. You're working with creators, you're working with publishers. Don't fall for the trap of how many people they reach or how many clicks you can get. Remember, it's all about who you can have two decision makers buy a piece of software and make your ROI happen overnight. And so those two people matter a lot more than the 2,000 that can't buy your product. And so anytime you're having that conversation, always be focusing on the who, not the how. Many. And I think that's how you have success.
- [44:38]
A
I mean, obviously I agree upon that. I think that so many channels from social to meta to, it's like, let me show that a million people saw this like, or let me see show that like, which is for. Sometimes it's a good, good thing, a good little. But usually it's like a ego boost for a marketer. I mean, I'm guilty of it. Like, I love going viral on social. It's like a good feeling. But at the same time, like, like you, you're trying to drive results as a marketer. So you need, if a newsletter gets 100 clicks but 50% of them are your ICP, that's a good versus like a newsletter gets a thousand clicks and five of them as your ICP, it's a different than that.
- [45:25]
B
Well, I think the bigger thing is like, don't be afraid to go put money into a channel or creator that doesn't have scale. And I think I hear that a lot and I just believe that is like ultimately always the wrong choice. Where like you're like, oh well, we're going to get more kind of like bang for our buck or like, hey, I don't have a huge team, so it's easier to work with these bigger groups. And it's like, are they really bigger? Are they just like by sheer numbers are your actual customers? And I think the density of those people matters a lot more than the scale of those of that. And I've seen so many people make the wrong choice because a creator or channel isn't big enough. And if you're in B2B, that probably actually is like a complete wrong way of thinking.
- [46:10]
A
Yeah, it's depth and relevancy of that audience. And some people have so much depth with the audience that they could sell you a toothbrush and it's not even like what they do because.
- [46:25]
B
Exactly.
- [46:26]
A
Lastly, where could people work with Workweek or follow you to know what's happening at work week? I know you become like a LinkedIn influencer now, so I'm trying to learn
- [46:38]
B
from my friend Daniel of how to get on there. If you're interested in advertising with Workweek, you can go to advertising.workweek.com you can learn all about our partner platform and go talk with one of our brand partners and ideally advertise in one of our creators newsletters like Daniel. And then yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. If you ever want to read about advertising and newsletters creators and, and all things B2B, that's that's where I post it.
- [47:03]
A
And for the record, I. I'll just say this. Like, work week has like, not only marketing, they have ecom with my wife, Ari Murray. They have hr, they have healthcare, they have fintech. So they have more. Like, if you're a FinTech marketer, HR marketer, Ecom marketer, there's a place for you. Now, there will probably be a place for more people down the line and they'll happen, but right now those are the.
- [47:28]
B
We'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah. We have multiple Personas for most B2B kind of vendors. We probably have an audience that you're trying to reach and would love to. Love to have a chat.
- [47:39]
A
Cool. Well, talk soon.
- [47:40]
B
Thank you, Daniel. Thanks for having me.
- [47:45]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.