The Life-Long Customer

Dark Funnel and How to Attribute Your Initiatives with Todd Kunsman, Director of Marketing, EveryoneSocial

January 06, 2022 Revenue Rhino Season 1 Episode 128
The Life-Long Customer
Dark Funnel and How to Attribute Your Initiatives with Todd Kunsman, Director of Marketing, EveryoneSocial
Show Notes Transcript

"The concept of the dark funnel (or dark social ) has been around for a decade. We're all doing these things and doing these ourselves and not understand that that's what it's called. Dark social is just about places where people are interacting and engaging, and your attribution software cannot directly correlate those results.

It's a combination of things. It's content promotion places, like podcasting. There's not always a direct correlation to your attribution software, but it's one of the top places people consume information today. 

These other social channels can also be considered dark social. Think about LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Those are influencing people to take action too. I do it all the time. I go to Google right away after I see something on social or listen to a podcast and maybe convert there. They do not see that, and they're just seeing that it's Google or direct.

There's some misalignment with the attribution software, how and where people buy or consume information. People are doing these things, but they don't think about monitoring it or figuring it out.

I have to give a shout-out to Chris Walker of Refine Labs. If you're any marketer listening, you've probably come across his content. He's put it on the map for modern marketers or people growing up in this kind of social media space and how marketing is changing. That's what it's all about, and that's where B2B buyers are now.

We all have different ways of communicating, interacting, and learning about products and services. That's the significant change, and it's a challenge that companies are facing too because marketers want to do these things, and sometimes leadership or the Board is just not understanding it either."

- Todd Kunsman, Director of Marketing, EveryoneSocial

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Introduction: 0:04
From Revenue Rhino, I'm Brad Hammond, and this is The Lifelong Customer Podcast. We're interviewing successful sales and marketing leaders in discussing ways in which they're building lifelong relationships with their customer.

Brad Hammond: 0:20
Welcome to The Lifelong Customer podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hammond. Today, I have Todd Kunsman from EveryoneSocial. Todd, it's really nice to have you on.

Todd Kunsman: 0:27
Yes. Thanks for having me on, Brad. Looking forward to the conversation.

Brad Hammond: 0:30
Me too. So tell me a bit about you and about your company.

Todd Kunsman: 0:36
Sure. So I am the Director of Marketing at EveryoneSocial. It’s an employee advocacy platform that helps keep employees creating, sharing and consuming content wherever they're working. So it's really good for remote teams, especially during all the craziness of the last 2 years of pandemic. It's been really important for brands to keep everyone connected and being a part of the company message and kind of the mission overall. I’ve been with the company for almost 5 years now. I was a solo marketer for quite a long time with the company, and now we have a much bigger team. 

And we work with some of the biggest companies in the world so companies like T-Mobile, Fidelity, Adobe. I mean, they all use us for different reasons. Employee advocacy is such an interesting space because usually you think of software, it's specific niche, for example. But we have people using us for marketing and sales initiatives, employer branding and recruiting, employee comms or a combination of all these things, right? And going enterprise-wide, we have a few organizations who have thousands of employees accessing our platform everyday, which is pretty cool.

Brad Hammond: 1:31
Very cool. So really quick, tell me briefly, what does marketing look like in your space? Who's your target market, ICP, all that kind of stuff?

Todd Kunsman: 1:40
Yes. So because we have this broad range of use cases, it does expand our ICPs quite well. We have the marketing folks, a lot of the managers, senior level, director level, on pretty much all fronts, whether that's in marketing or sales, employer brand and recruiting, comms. It's those levels of people that we tend to have a conversation with. And those are the target markets that really understand the value of not only employee advocacy, but the value that EveryoneSocial can bring to their company. 

And then we start to kind of trickle down right into the general users of everyday life of EveryoneSocial. Sometimes we get the VPs involved too. Occasionally, you even see some of the C-suite come in there because they're very intrigued by social media at work or they understand the value of social at work. It doesn't happen as often, but we're slowly seeing that come in a lot more, I think, as people are really becoming more modernized with how we do things and how work kind of has evolved over the years.

Brad Hammond: 2:31
Totally. So let's dive into today's topic, which is the dark funnel. And what is it? Why is it important? And some of the attribution around it. So tell me a bit about the dark funnel. What is it?

Todd Kunsman: 2:45
Yes. So recently, actually, we just started to -- we wrote a post about this, right, and I was doing some research on things. And it's kind of funny because the concept of dark funnel, dark social, kind of interchangeable, has been around for like a decade. I think the derma research was the first, coined around 2012. And these things that we're all kind of doing, and we were doing it ourselves and not really understanding that that's what it's called. So it's kind of funny how that happens. But yes, I mean, dark social is really just about places where people are interacting and engaging, that your attribution software just isn't able to directly correlate those results. 

It's kind of a combination of things, right? It's content promotion places. So think of like podcasting, for example, there's not always a direct correlation to your attribution software, but it's one of the top places people are consuming information today. YouTube, for example, is also another good example. Slack communities, direct messages or word-of-mouth marketing like in-person events or just a colleague is interested in some kind of software and you've had experience with it, you tell them about it, they come to your site and convert. It might show you that it was Google or direct, but the real answer was that it was word of mouth or that it was through a social channel or something like that. 

And it's kind of funny too because these other social channels can also be considered dark social. I mean, you think about like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Of course, if you're sharing the link, you convert directly off that, your attribution software certainly show, hey, they converted off that Twitter post or that LinkedIn post. But not everybody should be sharing links constantly, right? And we tell employees ourselves at our customers, don't always just share company links. You have text-based posts, you have images, videos, audio, whatever kind of different variations of content you're sharing. Those are influencing people to take action to who -- I do it all the time, right? Like I go to Google right away after I saw something on social or listen to a podcast and then maybe convert there. And they're not seeing that. They're just seeing that it's Google or direct. 

So there's some misalignment happening with the attribution software and where people are actually buying or consuming information. So it's really interesting, and it's kind of funny because, again, people are doing these things so they don't really actually think about how to kind of monitor or figure it out. And I definitely have to give a shout out to Chris Walker of Refine Labs. If you're any marketer listening, you’ve probably come across this content. But he's really put it on the map for these modern marketers or people growing up in this kind of social media space and how market is changing. And it was kind of funny because I’m listening to him. Like these are things we're doing but we don't even think about it, and how can this apply to employee advocacy too. Our customers are always looking for ways to measure the results of their advocacy program. 

We have ROI capabilities, of course. UTM tracking helps. But what if it is sharing text-based posts or videos or images? There's not always a direct correlation, and we're trying to also encourage our customers to think about these things too. And I think a good example is one of my own social posts, for example. I had posted -- I did okay, 14,000 views, had a couple of interactions and nothing to do with EveryoneSocial, nothing to do with employee advocacy. It was about marketing because that's in my field. And after all those views, I had an extra 300 people viewing my profile in those 2 days and just kind of started trending. But now people are looking at my profile. They're looking at my headline that I work at EveryoneSocial. They might go to the EveryoneSocial LinkedIn company page and either follow it or just check it out. They might even search on Google. 

Now that's one post. Extrapolate that 2 or 3 times a week, a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand views over a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand employees. You have a potential million reach that doesn't always get attributed to employee advocacy, for example, right? So somebody can be influenced by my social posts, discover EveryoneSocial and converts on an ad or something else, but that software is telling us one thing and they actually convert somewhere else. So that's really what it's all about in just where now B2B buyers are, right? We all have different ways of communicating, interacting and learning about products and services, and that's the big change. And I think a challenge that companies are facing too because marketers want to do these things and sometimes leadership or the Board is just not understanding it either.

Brad Hammond: 6:40
Yes, totally. So essentially, you're saying in your attribution software, you might have someone come in and they might be from search or from an ad or a specific campaign, but that doesn't necessarily paint that picture that they've been watching your LinkedIn content for the past few months. They've listened to 5 podcasts. They've engaged with you on social media in some capacity. It was really a combination of all those things, not just the end conversion piece like you see in your attribution software.

Todd Kunsman: 7:11
Yes. We've actually started to see that now. So we're going to talk about it then, so we won’t dive too much into it yet. But I mean, we're seeing that now with some of our demos that come through is that it’s showing maybe Google Search was one of the top channels. So we start thinking, okay, we need to really double-down on SEO and work blog content, which, of course, you should be doing anyway. But then you look at the answers of how they heard about us and then says like, oh, a podcast or a Slack community and like, okay, well, now there's a difference here and maybe we should be focusing on that. 

So when you get that source of truth, like, okay, I can go focus more on the podcast and we should double-down on that or at least distribute it more, get it on different channels. Or if it's a Slack community, okay, we need to be an active member in these communities and see like how we can be a part of that and slowly introduce some content when it's relevant and build those connections there. So it's really cool to see that because now you get a fuller picture of everything going on. And not that there's anything wrong with attribution software, you can still get some interesting data points, and there is value in understanding it too. But it's kind of combining all these things together to really understand what's going on.

Brad Hammond: 8:12
Yes, totally. I feel like definitely I've had a lot of conversations with other marketers too, and this is the kind of the future here as all these touch points and things that are so valuable but aren't necessarily, you can't track them and look at it very granularly. One of the things -- I think you mentioned Chris Walker. One of the things I heard him say once is they're doing something called self-reported attribution or it's when they finally convert. How did you find us? How did you cover the process? Are you guys doing anything like that? Or have you found anything with that to kind of start to piece together where you're getting a lot of attention from?

Todd Kunsman: 8:50
Yes. So I think it's definitely one of the steps for sure of how to kind of get started to make sure you can kind of monitor these things. So yes, we actually recently changed our demo form to have that option there. I think a while ago, we had some kind of tech field similar to that and just didn't really put 2 and 2 together, that this is important to keep. We also didn’t want to extend the form and make it too crazy, so like we had removed the phone number, which is an optional thing because most people give fake numbers or don't want to chat with you anyway. If they're ready to chat, they'll let you know. So we wanted to remove that barrier. 

And then we added that, how did you hear about us? And it's only been a couple of weeks, but it's already interesting to see the information because, of course, we're still seeing the normal like, hey, I heard you from Google or I just did a search and found you through a paid ad. But then we're seeing Slack communities. We've got one today, for example, that was a specific Slack community I never heard of before. So I like searched it, found it right away. I said, oh, this is interesting. Maybe this is something we should be a part of or see how we can be in that community because maybe there's more influence there than we realized. 

We had one the other day too, same thing. It was from a colleague. So that was word-of-mouth marketing. So we're only a piece to the word-of-mouth marketing, of course, because you need to have a great product, great support system, great client success team that's actually delivering ROI, and then there's the marketing and brand piece to it too. So that combination thing is telling us that, okay, word of mouth is working pretty nicely too because they see the value in our product and they're telling other people about it. So it's cool to see that because that one told us that it came from, I think, it was a paid search ad they converted on. But they actually say it was from a colleague. So they just went to Google, type this in, our ad popped up, and they converted there. So it's really cool to kind of see that information start to come through. 

And then the other kind of part to it too is obviously understanding who your ideal customer profile is. I think SaaS and B2B, there is some overlap. But every kind of company and group of people that are their buyers are a little bit different. So we, of course, want to know who they are, how do they like to consume, where are they engaging or where do they find product information or strategy information. And you'd be surprised that some of them you might think were one thing and it might be something else. So that kind of tells you that picture too, along with kind of the results from your demo. 

And then I think following them too, like your ideal customers. So I follow a lot of directors of marketing, a lot of social media people because it's relevant to my industry. But then I also got to see how are they engaging or what are they talking about. And sometimes, they give you insights of like, hey, we actually are in this community all the time. Here's how we learn about things. Oh now I know that you're in this community, send it to my team and see how we can be a part of that too. So you have that option too, which kind of helps you. So between all those things, you start to really understand where people are and how they're kind of consuming so that way you can tailor your content or your strategies to that kind of stuff.

Brad Hammond: 11:23
Totally. So I think there's been this obsession in marketing with measuring everything and a lot of this is determined by leadership and having to justify what programs are doing and spend and all this. How do you make the case for those programs that might be part of this dark funnel, that really make a big impact at the end of the day. But they're part of the dark funnel, so you can't exactly measure it and tie it to lead or to a revenue event or anything. So things like podcasts, this emerging awareness, marketing, social, any sort of program that falls within that dark funnel. How do you make the case for that and justify it?

Todd Kunsman: 12:01
Yes. I mean, I think there's always that challenge, right? And I think one of the things to evaluate too is, does your leadership trust what you're saying and sharing? And of course, you need to prove a little bit of that value too. But if they honestly don't get marketing, you're going to have a really hard time convincing them no matter what you do. There's always going to be pushback, and you don't want to spend all your time fighting back and forth when you could have been using that time towards these initiatives in the dark social or dark funnel. So I think that's one that you have to evaluate first is like is your executives or team members, whoever you're reporting to, understand marketing. 

And EveryoneSocial, we’re fortunate that the CEO always understood the value of marketing and kind of trusts our team to do these different things and show him like why we're doing this, kind of have a plan and say, like this is why we're doing it. Here's what we've seen. Here's how we're measuring these things. So again, like surveying our customers, asking them where they find information, how they found out about us, that kind of stuff. We're changing the form with the demo of stuff, so we can start to evaluate that over time. 

The other challenge is a lot of people want results fast and quickly, and that's just the nature of businesses. We're always trying to drive more revenue and/or better results. But these things take time. I think I've heard it can take 3, 4 months sometimes when you're transitioning this model, right, and kind of focusing more on the dark funnel. Until these results kind of trickle in, it takes time to recategorize and restrategize how you're doing things. So if they're not one to give you time, sometimes it gets really close to the point where results are about to break, right? Things compound over time just similar to like finances. It happens in marketing too. And they're on the verge of breaking into like this working but then it immediately halts because it's been 30 or 60 days, and the results haven't been what an executive or a Board might be looking for. So that's a challenge, I think, in general is that you have to evaluate who you're working for and making sure you're working for a company that understands it. 

Now some still need convincing and will be convinced if you can prove those things. So obviously you kind of come armed with what you're doing. For us, for example, we moved away from the lead gen model, really focusing on demand and creating that value. And we just started doing that a couple of weeks ago. And it comes like, hey, like our lead gen flow is going to slow down but you're going slowly over time see that demos are going to stay consistent. They're going to grow. Our sales cycle should shorten, right? They're more armed and ready to buy our software. And those are the important statistics, is the revenue, the opportunities generated, how quickly we can close a deal, things like that. So if we can show that and explain our strategy and then say, okay, after a certain amount of time, which it's again hard to pinpoint how long certain things will take, we're going to start pivoting or maybe try this instead. 

So as long as there's some kind of action plan, I think that really helps a lot of people win. But again, there could still be somebody that's always going to push back no matter what because they're stuck in these old ways. These are the traditional things we do. Our attribution software is the only source of truth. Everything needs to be measurable. You're going to fight that battle constantly and maybe need to reevaluate working for that company because there's plenty of people who understand the opposite side of that and are willing to give that creativity or new strategy a try.

Brad Hammond: 14:55
Totally. So what I'm hearing is like have some faith, trust in these programs. Don't focus on the short term, 30 days, have patience. And instead of the old model of looking at like MQLs and emails collected, look at how many sales off that opportunities are actually getting commended and all this stuff.

Todd Kunsman: 15:16
Exactly. Yes. I mean, you'll start to notice too that -- and that's the goal is that these deals close faster. And what we've seen already and even though we changed that model, especially in Q4, notoriously for us, marketing, it slows down because holidays, people are ready for the new year. They're thinking about that stuff. It might be busy for sales, but it's slower for us. It's a good time for us to try some new things and set up Q1 pretty nicely. And last month was a big experiment with a couple of different changes, not only on the site and our pricing stuff, but how we want to target people and how we want to go after things and really focus more on some of the dark social, dark funnel stuff. And it really didn't change anything. Our demos were consistent. The opportunities that came through are consistent. Our self-serve sign-ups were really good too. 

The only thing that changed is the total lead volume change, but those are people that weren't becoming paying customers anyway. So why are we focusing so much on just generating leads that really they take a really long time to convince them to finally -- it could take a year or 2. And of course, we see people that do convert sometimes from that stuff. But generally, they don't. And they either disappear or fall into the newsletter, and we don't hear forever or never. So it's interesting to see how that changes. But yes, I mean, we've had a great month from doing that already, and I think that we'll just keep improving as we stay consistent across the board. And that's what people need to do is just stay consistent. And if you see something not working, of course, you can pivot, make adjustments, but you have to realize this isn't going to happen overnight.

Brad Hammond: 16:35
And honestly, it sounds a lot better because lower volume of leads but higher quality. And then you said something really interesting of shortened sales cycles. So instead of all these leads that the sales team has the weed through and the good and the bad and all this, lower volume, higher quality, shorter sales cycles sounds great.

Todd Kunsman: 16:54
Yes. We always want to make the sales team happy, and we work closely with our team. They're one of the best that I personally worked with. But they've been so open to just our ideas of how we want to shift things and change things. And we're in a space where the sales cycles are a bit longer, right, because we work with some of these large enterprise companies. There are so many people that have touch points, legal compliance, all that kind of stuff, which can be frustrating, but it's just the nature of our business. And these things that we can do, if we're hitting multiple people in different channels that aren't always measurable, that's going to impact how ready they are, especially when they come to us before. They might be like, okay, we're interested. We don't know too much about the software. We'll see it. Oh, I like this. And they have another meeting, then another demo, then you're chasing them for weeks. 

But if we can arm them with different things from all these different channels, they're coming to sales and saying, look, we know the product, we understand it. We just want to see some more. And then hopefully, they don't need as many conversations. It's more like, okay, we get it. We're ready. Let's go. Let’s sign that deal. So it's kind of a piece of it too is like we want to help shorten those cycles to make the revenue grow a lot faster than it currently does. So I think these channels are a great way to do that. 

Brad Hammond: 17:54
Totally. So as we're wrapping up here, what advice do you have for other marketers out there when it comes to dark funnel and all the stuff for dark social.

Todd Kunsman: 18:02
Yes. I think based on our theme here, just keep in mind that attribution software is not going to be 100% the source of truth. It's certainly important. You can definitely dig into some data there. But I think you can't just let it drive your entire focus or decisions. So that's kind of where that dark funnel and reporting stuff comes into play. Again, asking your customers how they consume and engage in information because it might be different from the next company. There's sure to be some overlap. Everyone's doing podcasts these days. There is value in doing that. But others might be more Slack community-based. 

There's one group of people at SocialMedia.org. They're vendor-free, so we can't be involved in that sense. But they invite us sometimes to speak to that community about advocacy and a lot of our customers are there. And they're speaking on our behalf and telling others about it. And we had people come from that community, and they come to demos as paying customers, but we didn't really know that before. And now that we have this form in here, we can kind of learn about that. So for example, for us, that community of word of mouth is great. So we want to make sure we do all these great things to the product and provide the best customer success and support. That way, those communities are talking about us, and we know people will come to us through word of mouth, which is fantastic. 

And the customer surveys will give you a lot of information. And then that form definitely gives you some information. And I think taking that wide approach and looking at everything and just looking at the big picture, you kind of start to formulate like, okay, these are the places we need to be. Here's the kind of content that's valuable to these people or how we can get them into our funnel personally. And then just realize that not everything can be measured. I mean, you alluded to that too is that we do want to measure things and ROI is important, but there's going to be initiatives where there's just not really a great way to measure it or you should not worry about it. I think some of the best campaigns come from those things. You're more creative. You're thinking differently because you're not so worried about tying data back to it or doing things to trick the system just to grab more leads or to get certain numbers qualified there. 

We're working on a project right now, which is really cool. I'm not going to give away all the details, but our creative strategy came with its coffee book idea. We have tons of content, tons of illustrations. We work with different illustrators for just creative pieces for our things, and we're like, let's put this together in a book, share insights and data, quotes, stats, anything about our industry and then share this like either through ABM, our direct marketing stuff, our customers who want to upsell. There's not really a direct way to measure that, but it's kind of a brand play. But we know there's some impact because people could get excited about it and maybe share on social. You could help facilitate a conversation in a different department of the company that we were trying to upsell into, and it's a play that we're not going to see that in attribution software. But now that we have that demo, if they come back and say, hey, we saw your coffee book. I think it was really cool. We're interested in learning more, and now we know that information. So I think kind of doing all those combo of things and keeping that in mind is important. 

And then, of course, go to your leadership with a plan ahead of time. I mean, the ones who understand it quickly will be, go. Others might need a little more convincing. And then there's going to be those who will just never be convinced about it, and that's where you need to evaluate if it's worth your time being at that organization. Because I think it was Dave Gerhardt that said life’s too short to work for a CEO that doesn't get marketing. And I love that quote because I think it's so true. Otherwise, you're just battling these executives constantly, and you're not -- they're frustrated with you and you're frustrated with them, and it just doesn't work out. So that's kind of my advice overall. 

Brad Hammond: 21:09
Totally. Well said. Well, Todd, it's been amazing to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for joining and sharing all your wisdom and advice here. Appreciate it.

Todd Kunsman: 21:17
Of course, Brad, any time. Thanks for having me.

Brad Hammond: 21:19
Yeah.