2024 B2B Marketing Trends: Marketing in the Wild July 2024
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What is “Marketing in the Wild”?
As part of staying up to date with the latest B2B marketing trends, the glassCanopy team has a slack channel that we all contribute to as we find things related to marketing that catch our attention “out in the wild.” This can range from screenshots of cold emails we liked (or hated), relevant news articles (the non-deprecation of Google cookies has been a big one lately), or even calls to action we want to take inspiration from. We contribute to this channel whenever we see something and then have a bi-weekly discussion about the contributions.
This video is based on July 2024 B2B marketing trends – the entire transcript is below.
Marketing in the Wild July 2024 Transcript
Introduction
Amelia: All right, everyone, welcome back to marketing in the wild. This is where we go out into the world and see tidbits of agency, marketing and advertising, and we bring it back and discuss how it impacts the market as a whole, and potentially our dealings as an agency going forward. So let’s get started.
Negative Keywords on Google and Bing
Amelia: Eric, you found an interesting article about negative keywords in Google and Bing. You want to talk about that?
Eric: Yeah, just looking at what Google has been doing, you know, over the entire course of their business, but just continuing to push people towards broader and broader match on keywords has made it really difficult, if you’re looking for a niche audience, to not spend a bunch of money on things that are completely irrelevant. And obviously, that’s Google’s whole game. They’re an advertising company. You know, search is just how they get us the product on the shelf, and then they want to put as many paid results as they can in front of us. So trying to deal with that has become really difficult.
And I was just on the Reddit, the subreddit for pay per click, and just reading about a rant this guy’s trying to spend $100,000 per month on Google and Bing Ads, and he’s frustrated that he’s had to create three separate negative keyword lists to try to get the junk out of his campaigns. And you know, obviously, a lot of the comments that follow on to this are, maybe you’re just trying to spend too much on a niche, a niche industry or service. The guy does financial software. Maybe it’s more like 80k is going to get you the best bang for your buck.
And we find the same things. You know, I think one of our philosophies is we’re not necessarily trying to get the first spot, because then you tend to be overbidding for words. You’re trying to be above the fold. You’re trying to be at the top of the page, but if you’re the first keyword, you know, sometimes that’s an indication that you’re overbidding, and you need to pull back. And so that’s what a lot of the a lot of the responses to this were, but it’s just becoming worse and worse.
Another thing that has been obvious to us for a while is that even if you are only using exact match keywords, you are never going to get only those keywords to be served, to be the ones that are serving your ads, triggering your ads. So no matter what you do, you’re going to need a solution for negative keywords if you want to get the junk out.
One thing that that we’ve that we’ve found success with, is creating a script that will automatically put put keywords onto a list, so that then you can filter the ones that are negative. And I did find a cool way to approach this, which is also noted on the subreddit here called n-gram analysis, and that’s really just finding the the frequency of of the words that you’re targeting from your entire campaign. And then when you compare that to the clicks that you’re getting for each one of those individual words, you can say, Oh, if I put, you know, let’s say the word in, if in is in my keyword, I don’t get a lot of clicks on in. So that means in is associated with local searches. Oh, I shouldn’t be targeting local searches so much. I shouldn’t be, you know, selling software in Boston or, you know, so maybe that’s dragging my searches down, so I can start to eliminate those local searches by looking for in or, you know, other things that come up in the Ingram analysis that are high frequency but low clicks. So a lot of interesting stuff in here. But obviously this guy is spending way too much money on his campaign would be my my first analysis.
Amelia: Gotcha. Alright, any comments from the from the gallery on this particular subject?
Rich: I mean, I don’t know. This kind of infuriates me because it essentially eliminates Google AdWords is a good place for us to spend money in many cases. But it all goes down to, I think, you know, Google has always been really good at allowing companies to spend money very easily on their ads. And you know, unless you go to the report that shows exactly what what searches are triggering your ads. You’ll have no idea, because, you know, the fact that an exact match is no longer an exact match, I feel like is really dishonest. And you know, I recognize that in the greater scheme of things, we and our clients don’t spend a lot of media spend, but like, it’s really driving us away from from Google AdWords, which at one point was a really great place for us to spend money.
Eric: Yeah, and as you pointed out, the most simple thing that anybody can do is monitor what is spending the most money on your campaign. Just sort your search terms by by the the money spent. And typically, you’re going to have to remove a couple. You know, every week, every few days, you’ll find one that’s that’s starting to spend more. That’s just completely irrelevant.
Rich: And the important point not the keywords that are triggering the ads. It’s the actual searches that trigger the ads, because those used to like no longer do.
Jen: I was going to ask Eric. I mean, you’re the one who typically handles this. I feel like in the past, especially when we get started with new clients, you often go in and find that you kind of have to do maybe an audit of what’s going on, because people will often set it and forget it and not do those keyword adjustments, and I feel like more and more we’re getting more emails of like we made this automatic optimization. Like, how often are you feeling like those optimizations are actually valid? Or, it’s just trying to get people to spend more?
Eric: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, it’s obviously there because people want an easy button, right? They just want to be able to push the button. And it is completely a marketing tactic on Google’s part, where they can just say, “Oh, yeah, you, you said that you wanted the most possible clicks. Great. We can absolutely do that for you, because we happen to charge per click.” So if you want a quote, unquote “Performance Max Campaign“, we are going to put all the most broad possible filters. Oh, you sell shoes, you know you What about roller skates, right? That sort of thing.
Rich: People with feet. Would you want people with feet to see your ads?
Eric: Yeah, yeah. Are you into podiatry?
Rich: Well, I mean, and that is probably the most frustrating thing, right? Like a lot of our clients will, or prospects will come with very specific ads, like they’re like, this is clearly only aimed at point, oh, 1% of the population. But the reality is, people will click on anything like they click on the ad before they read it, assuming it’s going to be relevant because they of what they searched. And that’s often not the case. So if you’re trying not to talk consumers, you know, for instance, guess what? They’re definitely going to click on your ad anyway.
Eric: And now, all of those, all of those tools that are pushing you to broad match, actually, there’s a really easy way to tell if you’re if you’re being bamboozled. If it says, “Would you like AI to do this for you?” What that button does when you click it. You’d think that it was going to just as I said, set all your matches to broad. But for me, it just crashes my computer. My browser shuts down completely. So, yeah, the AI overlords have not figured figured that part out yet, but that’s a good way to tell if you’re if you’re about to be taken.
Amelia: All right, let’s move on. Shall we? All right, Rich, “Don’t apologize.” This is the one that led you to unsubscribe from this particular newsletter.
Rich: So I subscribe to a number of lists, including ones that come from various wine companies. And, you know, I just generally disregard them unless there’s something of interest to me. And I guess these guys had sent out a bunch of emails, including ones that they didn’t intend to or they didn’t realize how many they were sending in a row. So then they send another email, apologizing for all the emails that they had sent. And I didn’t read or notice the other ones they sent, but I noticed this one, and it was actually what got me to unsubscribe. So you know, if you make a mistake in email marketing, don’t apologize for it. It’s just one more thing cluttering up somebody’s email. Most people won’t have noticed, and those that do, you can complain. You can respond to them personally, but to spam your list for spamming is not a great idea. No offense to Claudine – I think they have nice wine.
Jen: Rich, I think this also plays into a lot what we’ve been talking about lately with our clients and mid-funnel nurture. You know, no reply is no reply. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, like that’s a neutral best case scenario. What you don’t want is the unsubscribe. Yeah, so I think that, like, even though this is obviously more consumer and wine, like, on our side, you know, that we’ve been talking about that a lot lately.
Rich: Yeah, absolutely, like, you know, up until by hitting the unsubscribe button, which this email prompted, I was still, you know, I was subscribed to it because I was thinking about, you know, pulling the trigger and trying some of their wine. And, you know, no answer is no answer. And very often it’s like, that’s, they’re in the consideration phase, and what that might last weeks, it might last months, it might last years, but the unsubscribe button is available to all of us, and that’s, that’s means they’re not interested.
Eric: Yeah, it feels long, doesn’t it? It’s a long one. Yeah, quite a read.
Rich: Yeah. I was trying to remind myself, like, what, what it was about it that had actually triggered me to read it.
Eric: Yeah, yeah. And she, you know, it feels like I’m getting a Christmas card, you know, an annual that I haven’t, I haven’t seen, you know, my family in a couple of years, and so, yeah, how are your kids? Let’s find out.
Rich: If you Christmas card starts off with, I’m so sorry I haven’t sent you a Christmas card the past five years.
Eric: Yeah, don’t unsubscribe you. Please call your father.
Rich: Call your parents.
Amelia: Speaking of AI, Eric, talking about customer service. Ai, is customer service? Do we like? Do we not like? How do we feel about it?
Eric: Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s a good summation of what I was, what I was, sort of thinking, there’s a there’s a couple of things on this, this particular piece of software.
First of all, I think everybody who’s in marketing or has been, you know, looking at any kind of software solutions over the past six months has gotten an AI chat support bot, you know, and it’s interesting to me to see whether they tell you that they’re a chat bot, or whether it’s got a little avatar that, you know, looks like Veronica in Santa Monica. So that’s one part of it. Just wondering, wondering if that’s effective and how it can be made effective, because it’s not going away. Obviously, you know, customer support is something that nobody wants to pay for. And if an option like this exists, I think some large percentage of companies, especially with digital offerings, are always going to be doing this. It’s only going to get more more prevalent. So what’s the most effective way to do it?
And then secondarily, I just thought that this was interesting, because it also opens up these tools and the chats that customers are having. It opens up the ability to engage with that information to the salespeople, and it puts another arrow in their quiver to parse the information. And I think that’s actually much more, much more handy and sort of useful to kind of turbocharge their ability to parse data, especially data that’s freely available from these very top of funnel leads who are just trying to engage and maybe not even necessarily talk to a person. So I was wondering what you guys thought about these, these AI customer service bots.
Jen: I personally think it really depends if I have access to a person like, I think AI chat bots, when you’re having that first engagement and they’re like, give me your name, I can look up this, I can try to answer your questions. That’s all well and good, but like, if I’m just being fed articles from the Help Center by your AI chat bot, I’m just getting annoyed. And personally, you know, by the time I’m at that point, like, I know I want to talk to somebody, and I’m somebody who never wants to talk to anybody, like, I will go far and wide to avoid talking to a person. So if I’ve gotten to the point where I want to and I can’t, I would say it makes me more frustrated and irritated. Then like, Oh, this is cool. Like, I’m just like, No, I’ve looked through the help, I’ve done this already. Like, I need to speak to an actual person.
Susan: I find them super annoying when, because I just want written documentation, if I’m using, you know, like HubSpot, or any sort of sass and that and and then immediately have this thing popping up when it’s like, I don’t know, like, give me a chance to read your documentation.
And I think also, we’ve all been so trained that you know the nightmare customer service phone tree. Actually, it just feels like, now that’s on my computer and, you know, it just like, Why do I want to spend, you know, two minutes, much less 10, training your stupid chat bot? I also think that you unfortunately reflecting the first slide of the just general and bleepification of everything that not engaging with the chat bot is going to mean that the documentation is going to get worse, because only the people willing to engage with the chat bot will be having influence on how the documentation is written.
Eric: I think you can say the word Susan, and I think it’s actually relevant here. So the term of art is the in-shittification of everything.
Jen: It’s also interesting because I forgot about this because I was so frustrated by the entire situation, I gave up. But I think really relevant to our clients and B2B in high consideration, like I had to literally try and beg to have a demo of a product. I had figured out everything I wanted to figure out from their website, and all I wanted was for a human being to walk me through the platform, which in my mind, is the ultimate goal of a lot of SaaS companies, and the fact that I they were basically just like, No, we don’t want it. It was so frustrating to me. I’m like, isn’t this what you want? I work in Marketing, this is what we want. You don’t want to have an opportunity to sell to me directly. And I ultimately just gave up even researching the solution, because I was like, if you don’t want to talk to me, then I’m not going to buy from you.
Eric: I remember the experience that actually made me find this software, and it was the most surreal customer service experience I’ve ever had. I was trying to play some advertising in sort of a syndication with blogs in a niche, and I couldn’t find information to contact them about advertising options. There was just there was no link that was obvious to me. And so I went down to the chat bot. It said it prompted me, “Hey, do you need help with something? I see you’re looking around.” And so I said, “Yeah, I’d like to talk to somebody about how to place advertising.” And they said, “Oh, you need to talk to Robert. His email address is..” and then in brackets, it said, ” [redacted].” And then it said, “Or you can call him at,” and it gave me a phone number. And I was like, I guess I’m hopping on the phone with Rob, so I called the number, and I got a customer service automated message that also used AI voice that said, “Hello, welcome to New York Hair.” I believe it was called New York hair, some kind of publication about about hair in New York and the niche that I was looking up had nothing to do with hairstyles. So I I don’t know if that was the biggest AI fail that I’ve seen so far, or if they’re just running a really wacky sort of business. It’s got many layers to it that I have not been able to peel back yet. So yeah.
Rich: I don’t know. I think I’m a little less grumpy than the rest of you guys about the AI bot. Like, as long as I get to pick right, like, I think, which is what Jen said, like, there are times I just, I know I want to talk to a human, and I actually, my ideal situation is a chat bot that says “we have humans available,” or “we don’t have humans available,” so that, like, if I know if I need to talk to a human, I can either make an appointment talk to a human, or I could talk to a human if, but there are times that I’m perfectly happy to interact with the documentation via chat bot. So, my name, and this and that and all of that, like, let me talk to a chat bot, or let me talk to a human, but Don’t make me repeat myself.
Eric: Just ask me, Are you in a hurry? Are you embarrassed about what you’re asking?
Amelia: LinkedIn CTV, this is something that we talked about based on the availability of targeting and whether it matches the supply so rich, why don’t you kick it off?
Rich: Yeah, so, you know, CTV has been around for for a long time now, and every time we’ve kind of dipped into it, we’re like the targeting is not good enough for our use case. The target is not good enough for our use case. And so now, like you know, with with LinkedIn, offering the same sort of targeting that we often utilize for a lot of our B2B advertising, it feels like the targeting may be, may be good enough. But downstream, like, will it deliver? And so, you know, we talked about doing some experiments. So any of you out there, if you get a six second advertisement from glassCanopy, let us know, because I have my doubts. Like, you know, whenever I see indications of targeting, and I don’t get that much advertising, but like, you know, it thinks I’m in Sacramento, or, in one case, you know, in Illinois, much less I I’m not at all convinced it knows what I do for a living. So we’ll see.
Jen: I think my question here is, how well is it matched? When you’re thinking about other types of devices, it’s much more like one to one. Often, you know, a cell phone belongs to an individual person, but when you’re talking connected TV and you’re talking whole households, how precise? How precise is that advertising? Yes, they have it, but is it really showing to who you think you’re showing, which is, you know, a problem that traditional TV had, you know, who’s watching the TV. You have certain demographics of, like, the prime time commercials, but like, you don’t really know.
Rich: Yeah, like, it’d be great if there was a opportunity to, like, not advertise when Blues Clues is on, for instance, for most of our customers. But, yeah, I think it’ll be interesting. You know, TV ads have dominated advertising for 60 years, so if we can get really precise around it, it’ll be interesting to see how that how that works.
Eric: Yeah, the rollout of this was fairly quiet, it felt like and I am really eager to see LinkedIn continue to develop its capabilities as a platform, and I think we’re going to see more partnerships with things like streaming companies. Spotify is another one. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more across over there, because they’re desperate to figure out how to be profitable. So really, really interesting development here. And, yeah, I’m excited to see where it goes, because I do think that this could work really well, as we’ve talked about for things like conferences. You know, targeting, coupling this with geolocation could be, could be really valuable.
Rich: I mean, Spotify is an interesting example, right? Like, in ways, I think I would rather, for most of our use cases, have a Spotify ad than an ad on Roku. You think about, like hitting if you’re targeting SMBs to be on on the office radio station, that that could be really powerful compared targeting SMBs to be on on the office radio station, that that could be really powerful compared to, say, showing somebody an ad for a SaaS product to a four year old watching Blues Clues.
Amelia: I feel like this is an interesting play, because there’s only 60 seconds, you know, in between for the ad spaces, and they can divide it in how many, how many different intervals that they can Are we just going to be outbid? Is it just going to be Google ads, but not as ubiquitous, because there’s only so much time that we can fill with advertising, like, are we always going to be outbid?
Rich: Is it just going to be more Coca Cola ads?
Eric: Well, that’s that’s an interesting point, and I did, I think I’m seeing that in another really coveted media space, which is in flight, advertising, back of seat advertising. I was looking into this, and so far been seems like I’m being completely ignored. Because I think there’s about 12 companies that say, I think that we’ll buy that. Thank you. I think that’s kind of being I think that we are being outbid in that in that particular medium. And I think it’s a good point. It very well could be the case here.
Susan: Maybe it’s a and again, reflecting the first slide that we need to think about context instead of targeting.
Rich: I still think there’s something really powerful, though, just at least for the novelty value of being hit with a well placed B to B ad, you know, while you’re streaming your evening TV shows, and you know, something 615 seconds just to reinforce the brand on another platform, and maybe it will be a very short lived phenomena, right? Like, I mean, when banner ads first existed, like, you know, they had like, 25% click through rates because we were like, ooh, someone likes, someone put a banner in front of me. “I wonder what this is?” You know, put ourselves on the targeting list and see if we ever seen an ad ourselves.
Jen: I was gonna say, I’m thinking, you know, we always talk about the benefits of geo targeting in relation to conferences, and I’m just thinking like, what if you there’s eventually some way where you can layer the CTV ads partnered with the hotels who are running the CTVs in your hotel room when you’re at the conference that’s happening at that hotel.
Amelia: Well, they have their own platforms now.
Jen: Exactly.
Rich: Depending on the TVs within the hotel rooms. Yeah, yeah. Is that inventory available?
Eric: Yeah, that’s my understanding. So, yeah, I think, I think that could be great, because, again, that’s, that’s context based, as Susan was saying. And I do think that that’s, you know, where I see a lot more of the meat on this bone, so to speak. As we run into more privacy stuff, it’s going to be less about who they are and more about what they want.
Rich: Yeah, I just for all of this, though, I kind of wonder, like, what the inventory, the appropriate inventory, is going to be like. I don’t see much in the way of advertising my connected TV life. I know that that’s changing, you know, like they’re bringing ads like the Roku home screen, for instance. But you know, when I go to a conference, I don’t ever turn on the TV in the hotel room.
Eric : And I’m on disconnected TV.
Rich: What’s that?
Eric: I only have disconnected TV. I’m living in the past.
Rich: Well, I think it’ll it’ll be interesting to see. You know what we can do with this old platform that is due again, yep, indeed.
Amelia: All right, that’s all folks. Thanks so much. Thanks everybody. Thanks. Bye.
Rich founded glassCanopy in 2001.
