The marketing movement by Refine Labs. All right, Steve, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Oh, happy to be here, Laura. We're excited to have a conversation with you.
Awesome. So I'd love to start with just a little bit about Refine Labs and your role there. Yeah, so I think a lot of people I actually first came to know Refine Labs as a demand agency, but I'd actually better define it as a demand-gen consultancy. And that's just, I think a lot of people think of the services.
If you go to the site, that's what you see first. And that's what we've started out here is actually demand-gen execution for B2B SAS companies in that growth stage. And that's a big part of what I do here, because I come to work at the company. It's so much more.
So we're actually also providing documented B2B demand-gen strategy. And then even more cool is the research arm that we also offer as part of the consultancy. That is not your typical analyst firm survey fuel, which not dogging surveys, but I think as even just a previous demand-gen practitioner, I find so much more value in the insights and research that's derived from actually doing the work. And I think that's one of the really cool things that Refine Labs is doing is that through all of the demand-gen execution that we're doing, we're pulling out those insights of what's working and what's driving results and documenting that and then sharing it out with the marketplace.
So it's sort of that three-pronged service offering, if you will, that moves us beyond, I would say, definitely your traditional demand-gen agency and puts us into this more consultancy accelerator role. But again, you asked a little bit about my role. So I am a director of demand-gen here at the company. And that is oftentimes an in-house role, or part of the growth of the marketing team, which I have traditionally always been.
But at Refine Labs, we actually pair all of our clients up with a director of demand-gen and a performance marketing team. And one of the things that's really unique that I think also sets us apart from your traditional B2B marketing agency is that we hire practitioners who have worked as an in-house marketer at the client types that we work with and then embeds them as part of the team, which just gets me super jazzed to work because you actually feel like part of the marketing team. For the two accounts that I support, I'm responsible for helping them drive strategy and execute their demand-gen plans, which puts more skin in the game for me. Because again, I feel like part of the team, and I want the strategy to succeed because I believe in it and I've worked with them to develop it.
So it's a really unique role. And I also love that it's also just kind of a force multiplier for my own role and experience because I have my job at Refine Labs, but then I also feel like I have two more jobs with the clients that I get to work with, learn more about their audiences, what they're seeing work, and it's been a great ride. Yeah, I don't know about you, but that's one of the things that I really love about working as a consultant is you really get exposure to all of these teams doing all of these new different things that really helps you be better at your job and take those learnings and build off of them. And it's a fun process.
Absolutely, no, if I can look back in my career in so many times, you have that tendency to stay safe and market to what you go and being able to say, nope, I can take my expertise and apply it to any industry. It's a great place to do that. And you do learn so much and just doing more that's outside of your comfort zone. Yup.
Awesome. Our topic today is Dark Social. I am super excited to talk to you about this because Refine Labs is amazing at Dark Social. And you guys have been having some really interesting conversations about it that I've been watching online.
So before we dive in, let's just first define Dark Social. What is it, exactly? Chris has defined it, I think, quite well. It's the place where B2B buyers are hanging out and sharing information.
So this can be a lot of different things to get more specific examples. It's the screen wraps from your phone of a really amazing ad or post that you saw that makes you think a different way, that you then text to your boss that will never get tracked by any sort of attribution software, or the Slack chat that you send your boss of, hey, I saw this really interesting article or post that we should do this. What do you think? Or the podcast that you listen to?
The LinkedIn post that you look at don't even like, but that again, either you screenshot, or you just share with your peers that say, this is something that I think we should look at buying or think more about, let's have a discussion, and follow up meeting on. And again, none of it would ever get picked up by any attribution software. Another really good example, actually, maybe it'll be helpful. So I can even just share a personal reality that I have to be about social.
I worked at my last company in-house and my director of revenue operations had attended a vendor-sponsored session for marketing software, and listen to what they had to say, like what they had to say, that attribution is 100% trackable, right? They can upload that list of attendees to whatever platform they're using. It's tracked, but what's not tracked is that he then slacked me the recording, and he said, hey, Steve, you know, you're responsible for growth. This is something I think that's interesting.
What are your thoughts? I watched that. There's no tracking of that, because it's the zone recording of it. And then subsequently then called up a few of my marketing buddies that I trusted don't work at the company I am to say, hey, I'm looking at this piece of software.
What do you think about it? And so it's all of this activity that's happening before. I'm not going to talk about the site, if I'm being honest, because I actually trust the opinion of my peers. And other people who might have used it before I even looked at their site, a competitor's site, going to that or even searching for the company, that's where sort of the dark funnel would have picked it up and run from there, and I would have maybe started to pop up on some of those attribution software.
So dark social is that whole piece before that's so meaningful, and really it's like the word of mouth marketing that every marketer is so hungry to get, but it's just a different way of thinking about it. Yeah, yeah. So we know these conversations are happening. I mean, everybody into it so that there are these people having these experiences.
I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about exactly why marketing teams should be focusing on dark social, besides just kind of letting it happen, however it happens. Yeah, I think coming back to what I said about, we've always put word of mouth, and I think that sometimes there's B2B marketers, we're like, that's impossible, like our software's not that cool. It compares documents or something. Word of mouth is hard to achieve as is dark social, but if you think about, I think a marketing team could look back in the last output of work from the last month, and if they could say, which of this work is shareable?
And then everything we had create has to be, you know, LinkedIn's shareable screenshot worthy. But if you could look back at that last month and say, would I have shared this? If I was in the target buyer, you know, if I was the buyer that we market to, the answer's no, it's a good reset for any marketing team to say we've got to change the way that we're doing things, the way that we're going about our execution strategy to make things shareable. And that doesn't mean just having like a share function, you know, it's like, it's actually as a compelling point of view, it articulates what we do differently in a way that's not always just get a demo now, talk to us immediately that it's just educating your audience and creating that compelling content, which a lot of times we're doing, but I don't think we're packaging it in a way that can get picked up by dark social.
Yeah, I think about that a lot, you know, with PDFs. PDFs are great, but they're really hard to share, you know, even when people share them on LinkedIn, it's like, if you're scrolling on your mobile, forget it, you know, it's like super tiny and you can't even like expand it properly. And like, so yeah, just thinking about those sorts of things, that's a really good point. You know, yeah, I mean, thinking back to, you know, virtual conferences are a big thing.
And there's obviously a huge emphasis on driving live attendees to it, which is, yeah, when are you? Like it's great to have that live audience to attend, but you know, so often then as marketers, we just a great world will record it, send it to those who attend it as a courtesy and then try to push them to a demo, which I mean, always send a recording for 100%. But why wouldn't you, I think we have a sphere that like, oh, if we share it more broadly than that, then no one will attend live subsequently. And I think it's just like totally false.
I think I'm totally guilty of this too. But after coming across, we're finding that in this notion of dark social, that was where I had to sort of like let go of some of my previously, like combat habits of just like, nope, that content stays safeguarded for that audience. You know, you've already given me the information and it's like, absolutely not. Like, you just have a webinar, chop that up, put it front and center for your audience to consume, you know, in the channels that they're visiting.
Yeah. So like we've talked about by definition, dark social is super difficult to measure its attribution is almost impossible. But you know, at the end of the day, leadership teams want to know what impact this is having. So what are some ways that you can determine even just, you know, what channels should receive the resources and how to divvy up those resource allocations?
Oh, yeah. And I think it starts with just going back to like marketing basics of, do you know where your customers are, which I think most people do. But I think we have to gut check ourselves sometimes on, you know, hey, like we don't think they're on Facebook, but like probably are. And so having customer conversations of, yes, where do you consume information about anything, you know, and then figuring out ways to meet them in that platform in a way that's not meant to take them out of that platform?
Because that's not, you know, we don't go to Facebook or Instagram to always learn about new technology or those kinds of things. But we do see the things that come across as we go. So I think having that conversation first about where is your audience and gut checking that with consistency so that you're, you know, because they're new platforms all the time to keeping that steady pulse. That's your best bet of one, just reinforcing what are you doing today?
And is it guided towards the correct platforms for your audience? And then two, another thing you can do is really look at what's the split of my marketing budget, you know, if we pay for promotion, you know, what's the allocation right now? And is there a balance between what we call demand creation channels? So things like a podcast or social media and paid ads include within that versus your more captured demand functions where paid search where they're coming into that are very performance driven.
Because oftentimes what we'll see is a huge allocation towards those very attributable platforms that say, yeah, I can take this back to the CFO and say, yep, here's how many conversions we got. Like it's totally, you know, we make an ROI here. It's safe. I'm not going to get in trouble as a marketer.
But if you don't have this balance, it's not always going to be the same. It's not always 50 50, it's not only 60 40, but having a balance between your creation channels and your capture channels, that's a really good level set of like if those are not in some kind of balance or we don't have things activated across both of those. That's another really good sort of gut check of, am I doing my marketing, right? Yeah, looking at the pipeline and making sure that you're, you know, allocating across.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think maybe one other thing is like the content, like so once you've identified again, the platforms that they're in and then do we have a balance of paid, then you have to look at the content and is it compelling, right? It's like one of the things we also advocated that will help you measure its effectiveness is when it's a pretty simple way to talk about this a lot is adding a form on your site. And how did you hear about us?
But I literally just did this analysis for a client that has recently implemented it. And it's just insane, the volume of inputs that people are willing to give to exactly where they saw you, which is not the same of how they came in. That's the analysis that we ran, which is again, comparing what out of the box, you know, marketing, as we should tell you how they converted, which is oftentimes going to be directed to the site or can research. But then it just sounds me as a marketer like, oh my God, these buyers are like, I saw you on Facebook.
Yeah, I listen to your podcast. I saw you, I talked to this consultant about your business, which is just gold for marketers. And again, we were taught while we go that like if we add one more field to the form, they won't convert. And I would totally just challenge that.
I mean, I had to do it for myself too, at my last company of like, it's okay to add this form. Anybody who's not willing to give me this information probably isn't worth speaking to about a demo or a meeting we want to set up. But then I think, again, I can also share that when I first turn this on at my company, we got a lot of search googled you, which is not bad. We know that's how a lot of buyers are going to come in.
But I think it was also a good gut check for me as a marketer that if I'm not doing something really cool, dark, social, shareable, worthy, they won't remember me on those platforms. So it's like, you know, it's like, it's like a chicken in the egg of like, okay, they're not going to tell me they found me on LinkedIn until I'm producing a really compelling ad or video that we posted there. So it was actually kind of a motivator to me of like, it's my job as a marketer to get some good insights in this form. So that's just a couple of ways that I think teams can start looking at like, how do we measure dark social and then sort of share that back with the org of how marketing is driving results.
Yeah, that's a really good advice. So I'm curious, you know, you mentioned repeatedly going back and, you know, talking to the customers to figure out, you know, what are they using now? What are they interested in and now where they're looking? How often do you recommend doing that?
Is that like a yearly process or how often do you go back and check in? Oh, man. I mean, as much as you can achieve it, and not that we were more marketers were busy, right? You know, I'm not saying it has to be daily part of the job.
But any opportunity that you have, you know, and I'm guilty of this too. You get in the weeds and you just kind of defriaritize it. But I think if you can't have a monthly shadow of even just listening on a demo call, but even better finding those opportunities to just say, I'd love to talk to either a customer, someone who's bought from us or even maybe perhaps Richard asking to speak to a prospect that didn't want to buy from us and then just asking him a set of core questions of, you know, what prompted you to look for a vendor at all? Why didn't you or did you choose us?
Why did you or didn't you choose a competitor? And, you know, and then again, those other questions of, you know, just kind of got checking, where are they getting information? Have they get information to either buy or not buy from us? That's as much as you can do that.
I would highly recommend. I think if you're in working for an organization where that's a little bit harder to come by or perhaps the customer facing teams are a little more protective, some of the insights can be garnered, you know, by scheduling regular monthly meetings of like a win-loss program where the salespeople actually share that qualitative feedback of why did we win a deal, why did we lose a deal? And that can also help you identify, you know, that sounds like a really interesting story. We've never lost a deal for that reason.
I would like to speak to that customer. I thought if you ask, most salespeople are really good about doing that. So yearly, probably a minimum and then if quarterly is even better, and then if you could get monthly insights, the best. Yeah.
I like that approach just more organic. Rather than making this big huge thing where we have to go and talk to 50 people, it's one here, one there as you can kind of spot the opportunities. Oh, yeah. Because if you can document some of those qualitative insights over time, that keep a document refreshed of just kind of what are we hearing?
And again, some of those nuggets are just going to be gold for restructuring the marketing program or messaging, even for the audience that you've been marketing to for a long time, which we all know, I'm kind of getting bad habits. So this is how we say this thing all the time and never deviate from that. That's true. So I'm really curious about, you know, you have already shared a lot of advice, but any other advice that you would share with SAS marketing teams who are specifically interested in doing more with DarkSocial.
I think it can kind of almost be daunting. If you're just like, I'll be have to change seismically everything that we're doing. But in reality, it's like most of the workers are probably doing some of the right fundamentals now. We hosted monthly webinar program.
That's a fantastic way to start. But as I mentioned, taking that next step of like, we're not just going to host it and only share it with them. Who cares? We want everyone to get this information.
Wouldn't have been great if everyone registered live, which we know they won't do. But making that content available instead of like a modern consumption environment, you know, we're listening to podcasts on demand. We don't, you know, again, it's great if we can listen to webinar over lunch, but the reality is we're not always going to make it. So, you know, just again, sharing that content either in its entirety, but in more impactful taking what we have is low hanging fruit, packaging it up, just placing the best clips that maybe it's three minutes, maybe it's 30 seconds, but then sharing those across, you know, the right channels and just making sure that your message is getting across not just in your organic platforms, but then also packaging those ads to get them in front of the ICP audience that we know we want to consume the audience.
And so I think there's an example of a really low friction way to get started. But then I think beyond that, I mean, a podcast or regular series where you're cultivating, you know, outside expertise, maybe it's having your customers on. There's a big thing that we sort of ran up against at my last company, which is, hey, we don't have the in-house expertise of someone who has been a B2B e-commerce like store runner or brand manager, you know, so we can speak to things as a digital marketing, you know, solidarity, but we didn't have that in-house. I think Chris calls it, you know, expert with that.
You should almost be the center point of a lot of your content. So working towards identifying someone internally, maybe they don't live on the marketing team, but having someone that you can almost put forth as like the expert in your field that has that unique opinion, the experience or, you know, has done the job of the ICP or the, the, the by person that you go after and putting them at the center of your marketing interviewing other people or just sharing their thoughts is oftentimes a really easy way to kind of turn out really compelling content that again can be repackaged and broadcast across all those channels. And I mean, I don't know, you probably also like me thinking back to, you know, I've worked at several companies. We had so many experts and we would do just traditional webinars and that's it with them.
And you know, you know, do as much opportunity I felt like wasted and motivated to do really cool and compelling stuff now. That's such a great point. There's so much you can do, you know, with repurposing and all these different formats. That's something I've been seeing more people do, which is cool, but there are still a lot of companies that it's just, like you said, I feel like you get stuck in this, this way because everybody's trying to do so much.
So the more, you know, you can streamline your processes and have kind of go on autopilot, the more you can get done, but it's very easy then to just keep doing everything the same way you've been doing it and miss these opportunities. So that's really good point. Yeah. It's a really good check to if you're just doing this, if it's easy for you as a marketing team, it's probably getting stale for your audience.
It's not to say that everything we do should be so hard. Yeah. It's, I always recommend like try to tap what you have existing and then work towards what you could achieve. If you don't have that in-house expert, mention it to your marketing leader as like, this is probably a higher we should make somewhere within the org.
Maybe there'll also be a solutions engineer, but can we tap them for a certain amount of hours in marketing to make sure that we're getting their viewpoint across, which is incredibly valuable to our audience and not just try to get them to get them to get a demo, but just to educate them on what we do so that they know what your company does when the buyer's ready to buy. Mm hmm. Great tips. So that's the last question I had for you.
Is there anything that I didn't ask that I should have asked anything else that you want to share? No, you know, I just, I think having worked out for a couple of months, I'm looking back in my career and there's so much now that I feel like I don't have like permission to go and do or you know off the MQL hamster wheel and you know, and just really do good marketing. And I think maybe, you know, advice I could pass on that I might have taken to heart now is that, you know, it's important that we as marketers take our place as a serious contributor to all, especially B2B SaaS, right? We have a huge role to play in company growth and it's up to us as marketers to tell the company what way is up when it comes to successful marketing.
But that doesn't mean that we can just say, oh, I heard this on a podcast. It seems really cool. It's up to us marketers who have traditionally been like more creative minded and just like excited about the story we can tell and absolutely all of that. But then we have to couple that with hard data in particular as we think about things with our social.
So doing those things like getting that form feel where you can take that information to a CFO or a rev leader that might challenge you on like, you know what? I like your idea of a podcast, but I really need you to do more events or I need you to make a million more sell sheets. You know, you can't just say no to those. You have to be able to say, Hey, I'm, I think we can do something more.
And here's the results that I'm seeing. So I guess advice maybe that I didn't part that I wish I had done more and earlier in my career is not just a yes to any request from the top, but come prepared with my numbers that back up the strategy that I want to get, which is not always easy, but there's just, there's tons of resources now of the state of demand, gen being one example of like concrete tips of how you can split the funnel and understand which of your channels are driving pipeline and revenue or how to calculate a cat payback, which are numbers that your leadership team needs you to come to the table with. So I think it's just, it's a great time. It's never been a better time to be a marketer, like more and more being seen as growth engines for the company and less of, you know, servants to sales, but rather partner with sales and together that mix is just so good.
But it's also up to a marketer to make that happen. We can't just say, Oh, we're marketers. Everyone's saying we're right now. Yeah, that's true.
And it's interesting you brought up the sales team. I just had a conversation with someone yesterday and they were talking about in their company, almost all the leads come from marketing. And so as part of their process, they talk to sales and say, you know, what's the quality of these leads that, and then they'll take what the sales team said about their leads and bring that to the leadership. And I'm like, that is brilliant.
You know, because a lot of times sales team isn't just necessarily out there broadcasting how great the marketing team is. So if you can kind of, you know, pull that along and that can be, you know, absolutely. You know, it's a great call out of like one, it's so much easier to be friends with. It's the enemies in the whole marketing sales thing.
It's just so boring, right? You know, like, it's been a big thing in my career. I was just like, I think actually part of it helps. I had a short career in sales and I realized I'm hard to do.
So max props to all of our sales listeners. But I think having that empathy for sales and working with them to drive, because they're the ones that get the keepers of the customers are going to help you get those good insights. But then even just, you know, another quick thing you can do is if you're not today breaking down the revenue that's coming across the teams, right? So how much of the pipeline and revenue is coming from your AEs who are, you know, cool calling themselves versus the SDR team that's doing outbound dials versus that's coming from the marketing team, right?
So that you have a baseline of where we're contributing and then absolutely like for the leads that are getting passed through the demo form from the site from an event, don't just like cost over and get mad if they don't qualify. Like that was a huge part of my success in my last company is that like I think it's done a lot of sales people. They're like, no one's ever asked us. Yeah.
The leads are. Well, yeah, that's what I thought. It should be coming since. But we're doing the right things for you guys and then we can report that we're producing inbound interest that also converts to pipeline and revenue.
Awesome. Well, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. I know this is going to be a lot of interest to people.
So this has been great. No, I'm like pleasure, Lloyd. I super enjoyed talking with you. I look forward to doing it again.