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I spoke with Bernie Borges on why marketing professionals need to have a strong grip on data. These uncertain times have inspired modern marketers to rely less on qualitative insights and more on data-driven insights.
Why we invested in a direct sales force
How we are targeting international markets
How to focus demand generation to accelerate growth
Synopsis:
Paul says that after 15 years of operations, FreshBooks realized they were sitting on a lot of data they had not previously leveraged. For instance, they had a tremendous amount of invoice and expense data within the SMB universe ― 15 years of historical data on how small businesses have either created revenue or spent their money.
For example, looking at the data, they discovered some interesting trends and published a report on the impact that Covid had on women business owners and how it took them longer to recover than their male counterparts in many different industries.
“When we talk about the opportunity in data marketing,” Paul says, “we’re sitting on this huge resource to be able to turn that to our customers or to prospects in the industry in general and say hey, here’s how your business should be performing, here are all the historical norms that you should be expecting your business to do.”
Besides reports on specific trends, FreshBooks has created gated microsites with specific information related to particular verticals and industries.
“People can go through and see how their vertical looks, how it has changed and be able to drive insights into their business so it helps them with their planning and then eventually, we all assume that it’s going to then help drive activity back to us and convert through the funnel.”
This focus on great content marketing using data has been driving leads for FreshBooks. Furthermore, data on their engagement with the content brings even more insights on their customers that then they can use to improve their marketing efforts.
That's right, #marketers are sitting on a lot of historical data to help them understand how to drive leads. Thanks, @cowanpkc CMO at @freshbooks for this episode of the @MMEnginePodcast with host @BernieBorgesCLICK TO TWEET
“The cool thing is that it’s like this virtuous data circle where it all started with knowing something about our customer and then bringing other people in and then progressively knowing more about them because they engage with customer data. We’ll bring them all through and then at the end of it all it helps us improve our overall funnel efficacy and in our conversion rates overall.”
We also discussed the dynamics of the current marketing team and why it is important for marketers to understand data analytics and the sales process.
Listen to this episode to learn more about how FreshBooks is using customer data to improve marketing and how they incorporate the feedback from their sales teams.