Lauren Taber’s Highlights from Get In Front, Milwaukee!

We recently hosted Get In Front Milwaukee! — an event that brought marketers together to discuss their successes, challenges and future outlooks. Read this guest blog from one of the moderators, Lauren Taber, cofounder of nanochomp, on points of interest from the event.

3 Takeaways from Get In Front, Milwaukee!

When Scott Tinkoff from Anteriad asked me to get involved with the Get In Front, Milwaukee! event, I was happy to help and chat with Anteriad’s event attendees. I worked with Anteriad quite a bit at my previous corporate gig. Now I run my own consulting business, nanochomp, where we help product and marketing teams make better, more informed business decisions.  

I was the co-moderator of the event, so I got to meet all the folks attending the round table and learn more about their businesses and unique marketing challenges. Everyone was really open, willing to share, and ask questions. And I got to take away some best practices for B2B marketers!  

Here are three key takeaways I’m already having conversations with my clients about: 

1. Don’t get stuck on one metric

There is a lot of focus on pay-per-click, but you may be missing the lifetime value of the rest of your customers. Stephanie Mohlmann, Director of Marketing Strategy at Anteriad, gave a great presentation about pay-per-click and the ROI you get from newly acquired customers online. 

Pay-per-click ads are great to get a lot of eyes on your product, but how are we tracking these customers over time? Do we retain them or are they one-and-done shoppers? How do we prioritize the customers that we get through pay-per-click over other marketing channels?  

I think it’s important to remember not all marketing vehicles are created equal. Your return on ad spend may show that pay-per-click is working, but you need to look at the whole picture and understand the lifetime value of the customer to see if this is helping you achieve your business goals.  

2. Have your people tell your story

Content generation can be a team effort.   

Scott Bass from Edmund Optics shared how his team rethought content creation. He shared that a lot of the content that his team was previously making was very low funnel, direct sales focused. And his team flipped their strategy on its head. They wanted to focus on telling their brand’s story and using their experts as content generators.    

They had this really cool initiative called a content contribution program where they worked with people throughout their organization and asked them to be subject matter experts and contribute to the content generation process. 

I think this is great because a lot of marketers get stuck on the content generation side, and they feel they must do it all themselves or they can’t reach out to others for help. So, this allows them to crowdsource content generation throughout the company. This makes so much sense to me because people love to express their expertise and that gives them the opportunity to do that. 

I also was very interested in the overall idea of instead of focusing on selling very specific products, let’s tell our larger brand story and explain why that’s important. Let’s create some intrigue and interest and affinity to our brand—sales will follow.  

This presentation created a ton of conversation at the event. We all struggle with creating content and being consistent with pushing out content—especially when we’re often wearing 15 different hats in our role. So, this program is something I will definitely share with my clients. 

3. Focus on design thinking

Design thinking is a process that helps get everyone on board for change.  

Greg Banks from Hubert shared that his team leveraged design thinking to get top execs and the rest of his organization to embrace organizational change. Using this strategy had major payoffs for his organization.   

I think this could potentially have implications for some of my clients, too. A really hard thing for marketers to get is buy-in– especially from some in the c-suite who may not understand marketing as well as they think they do. And if we’re asking them to rethink the way that we market or how we talk to our customers, how do we have those conversations in a way that’s going to be received well?  

His team was able to get everyone to buy into major changes in how they market their products by helping lead a mindset shift across their organization. Design thinking gave them the tools to present the changes effectively. 

Planning for 2023
Get In Front, Milwaukee! provided attendees a great opportunity to discuss these insights and more. As you plan for the next year, keep these points in mind to enhance your strategy.