The No-BS Buyer’s Guide From Actual Metadata Customers
We spared you the pitch slap in 6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Buy Metadata to help demand gen marketers learn why Metadata might not be the marketing OS for them.
Now, we’re flipping the script (again) with a no-BS buyer’s guide from actual Metadata customers.
The goal this time around?
To help demand gen marketers feel more confident about buying Metadata before the DocuSign email comes through.
They know Metadata can help them, but we’ve noticed a common few blockers holding up the buying decision lately.
These days, you’re nervous about betting on the wrong solution, your CFO isn’t a believer, or your tech stack is shrinking (instead of growing).
We interviewed two Metadata customers to look at things like their evaluation process, how they got leadership buy-in, and, most importantly, the good, bad, and ugly of using Metadata.
How to sell Metadata internally (and look smart in front of your boss)
Getting approval for new tech is always tough, especially in this economy.
The best way to make a case for Metadata is the first thing on your boss’s mind—tangible ROI and cost savings.
The good news is Metadata pays for itself. The bad news is you still need to spend at least $20k every month on paid ads to make the math work. It’s hard to get much value out of Metadata if you’re not spending money on paid ads.
See the real ROI
B2B marketers use Metadata to create more pipeline without increasing headcount or program spend.
Add in the economic downturn every company is dealing with, and getting internal buy-in becomes even more challenging.
That’s why Evan Dunn, Director of Growth Marketing at Syncari, focused on the potential for pipeline gains while evaluating Metadata. The same thing happened for Andrew Harder, Senior Paid Media Manager at Webex Events by Cisco.
When it came down to evaluating other vendors, they both put their money on Metadata.
Arm your execs with cold hard facts
Every good persuasive argument has some quantitative and qualitative components. Here are a few reasons demand gen marketers choose Metadata:
Budget maximization
Telling your leadership team that Metadata will drive more revenue is great, but take it a step further and explain how.
I’m talking about budget maximization based on MQLs and opportunities. You just can’t do that natively in ad channels.
Metadata is such a lethal demand generation tool because it’s designed to help you be more efficient with your ad spend.
I wonder what your boss might say when you tell them that Metadata boasts a 95% accuracy rate when targeting job titles. And how about that 75% Lead-to-MQL conversion rate after one year.
Workflow efficiency
Andrew Harder
It’s pretty hard to argue building and launching campaigns in 94% less time, thanks to automation. Time savings like this help marketing teams of every size get more done.
Metadata games native ad channels at every turn: building audiences, creating experiments, and optimizing spend are no longer painfully manual marketing tasks.
Plus, who knows what you’ll be capable of with 94% more time on your hands. Maybe you’ll get to do the things listed on your resume, like building marketing strategies and creating categories.
Long-term savings and undiscovered opportunities
When you’re looking for a new marketing technology, you want it to be affordable and low-friction. Sticker shock is a real thing, but that’s why we want you to remember the long-haul ROI.
When Evan started using Metadata, his cost per lead (CPL) dropped by 30%. Expanding to Facebook dropped it by 50%.
But that’s just the beginning. Once you onboard Metadata into your tech stack, you’ll be able to pull more value from the data you already have. Right now I’m thinking about our friends over at ThoughtSpot.
Using Metadata, ThoughtSpot could finally activate their 6Sense and G2 intent data, saving $214,880 of manual work and generating $5M worth of pipeline in the process.
How Metadata eases common implementation woes
Tech stacks? More like tech mountains. The growing technology landscape and increasing complexity makes it really hard on demand gen marketers.
We could do some research about how many tools the average demand gen marketer uses everyday, but is anyone really doubting that?
It’s pretty clear: demand gen marketers are swimming in a sea of complexity, so asking them to implement a new tool may not seem wise right now.
I’ve led my fair share of implementations, and things can get messy if you don’t have much experience. Real quick.
For those concerned about implementing Metadata, consider these words from Evan:
Evan Dunn
The average time-to-value for our customers is seven months, but it can be shorter too. We’ve had customers generate qualified opportunities in their first week.
Here are the steps:
- Install the Metadata Site Script: If you’re using a content management system like WordPress, all you need to do is add some custom HTML site script. Typically, you’ll embed our script directly into your website host. Here’s an example of what that might look like for WordPress.
- Enable admin permissions for your company’s Facebook page: Next, you’ll need to make sure the right people have Admin access to Facebook. Here’s an example of how to give Business Manager Admin Access. You’ll also need to verify landing page domains.
- Connect Metadata with your marketing automation platform: When Metadata connects to tools like HubSpot and Salesforce, you can start generating enriched leads that get routed to your sales team. When it comes to normalizing values for each lead, use our pick list found here. Next you’ll configure default UTM parameters to make sure you’re tracking campaigns and leads correctly.
- Setup custom email field creation: This step will ensure that you’re capturing a business email through your lead gen forms. Users will have to manually input their email address. Here’s a quick Loom to show you how to get started.
- Validate marketing automation leads: You’ll want to create a safeguard to make sure Metadata is talking to your marketing automation tool correctly. Do this by submitting a test lead.
- Loop in your Legal team: It’s wise to fold in your legal team to make sure everything looks right. In particular, they’ll probably want to know about site scripts and lead capture workflow.
- Create thank you pages (if you’re using lead gen forms): The last step is to send people to a Thank You page after downloading a piece of content or filling out a form. Not only is it a polite gesture, you can also track this event for retargeting opportunities.
That’s the nuts and bolts of it.
The only potential hurdle—and I use hurdle lightly—will pop up during the third step when you’ll need someone on your marketing ops team to handle field mapping between Metadata and your CRM.
After that, you’ll work with your customer success manager (CSM) to build campaigns, set up experiments, and optimize your audiences.
It’s that simple. And the best part? You never have to log into native ad channels again.
Uncovering the good, the bad, and the ugly about Metadata
We’re proud of what we do well and how we’ve built a platform that helps demand gen marketers get the most out of their budget. But we’re also realists and know there are things we can do better.
Evan’s favorite thing about Metadata
The reporting. Specifically, how it’s tied to pipeline and revenue. In other words, he can get a definitive POV of how his marketing dollars impact the company’s bottom line.
He went as far as to say that Metadata’s reporting is a “leap-frogging capability for attribution.”
While you don’t necessarily get attribution for every channel, you can see how different groups, campaigns, and experiments progress through your funnel.
Most B2B marketers are marching forward without these insights; they’re marching to revenue blind.
Andrew highlighted the operational angle and the time—or lack thereof—it takes to build and optimize campaigns. You don’t need multiple tabs open and login information for the native ad channels. You certainly don’t need to build the same campaigns more than once.
You can do it all at once in Metadata.
And once the campaigns are live, you can manage pacing and optimizations from your dashboard. No Excel sheets, 17 Chrome tabs, or headaches are required.
Our user interface and the road to perfection
Most of “the bad” was focused on our UI, but Evan said something that accurately captures Metadata’s current state: “There’s no way to scientifically execute a perfect UI for such a richly featured platform.”
We’ve packed so many features and capabilities into our platform that it can be overwhelming. Analysis paralysis is real. We know usability is the difference between adoption and getting churn notices.
While we work on UI updates (we have a TON of updates coming real soon), you might find yourself asking questions like:
- How does MetaMatch work, and what should I look for in the dashboard?
- I can dive into revenue optimization, but I don’t know where to look. How do I pull metrics in a way that my boss will understand?
- There are so many buttons. How do I know I’m actually using everything I should be?
All the information is available, but if you don’t know where to look, it’s all for nothing—and we know that. Stay tuned.
TBD on video engagement metrics
Metrics and measurement have always been important to demand gen marketers, but they’re under more scrutiny than ever.
Demand gen marketers will keep getting asked to do more with less until they can actually show they’re driving growth more efficiently.
Metrics that live in native ad channels only tell part of the ROI story, though. Most of these campaign metrics are visible in Metadata, but not all are.
Here’s the snag: Video engagement metrics aren’t quite there yet, so demand gen marketers can’t effectively and efficiently run video ads in Metadata.
Plain and simple, Andrew still goes to native channels to get video engagement insights that don’t appear in Metadata. “We are investing so much on…paid social that can’t be attributed because we’re not asking them to fill out a form, but we want to know what’s working.”
Given the ubiquity of video and increasing video ad spend—video ad spending is expected to reach $78.5 billion this year—that may be a hang-up for some.
We know that and we’re working on it. (If you’re not running video ads, this isn’t anything to worry about.)
Top-down success measurement with Metadata
While we admit there are some reporting gaps in our platform (don’t worry, we’re fixing them), we know Metadata helps demand gen marketers drive more efficient growth.
Measuring success with Metadata can come in one of two ways: opportunity and revenue.
Metadata eliminates most of the tasks that make manual marketing such a drag. You get time back to spend on higher-value functions—think strategy, creativity, and experimentation—that drive revenue.
That’s a big time win.
But the optimization and pacing built into Metadata speak for themselves—and Andrew summed it up nicely. “We used to see $200 CPLs on LinkedIn for unqualified audiences. Now we’re seeing $50 CPLs for in-market audiences that meet our ICP [with Metadata],” he said.
In a recent survey, nearly all business leaders (99%) said they’re preparing to cut costs in 2023. I get that. Times are tough, and budgets are shrinking—but expectations are higher than ever.
Remember: companies that kept their marketing engines on during the 1980s recession came out ahead.
Keep your demand gen engine—and the tools that power it—running, and you’ll come out ahead, too.
