Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to launch an account-based targeting platform?

I’m a software engineer turned data-driven growth marketer, I founded Metadata.io to make demand generation easy for non-technical marketers.

What do you mean by the AI Operator for Demand Gen? How does it deliver qualified leads into the sales funnel?

Metadata’s AI Operator is patented technology that connects to existing marketing technologies and executes hundreds to thousands of high-frequency campaigns in a matter of hours, optimizing them based on pipeline impact.  The AI Operator replaces the manual, error-prone human-factor in marketing operations, allowing marketers to focus on content and messaging vs. technical tasks. This affects the sales funnel by accelerating existing opportunities and generating net-new leads from target accounts.

You recently became a Marketo partner. How does it empower B2B sales tech ecosystem?

As a Marketo Accelerate Partner, Metadata has integrated its platform with the Marketo Engagement Platform™, enabling Marketo customers to execute true closed-loop account-based marketing programs at scale. The Metadata platform’s unique AI Operator greatly expands campaign execution capabilities available to marketing teams to generate pipeline and predictable lead flow.

Tell us about your recent partnership with LinkedIn. How would that help you serve your customers better?

Metadata’s integration with LinkedIn’s advertising APIs enables marketing managers to create, optimize, measure, and ingest leads directly into their CRMs.

With Metadata’s new API integration, businesses that advertise on LinkedIn can now create and optimize Account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns at scale while focusing on target decision makers at specific named accounts. Leveraging ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and automating the testing of campaigns, Metadata’s technology targets candidate leads who respond favorably to a customized advertising campaign much faster and more accurately than can be achieved manually by an in-house advertising team. Advertisers save time on manual tasks (e.g. a/b testing, manual campaign setup) and are assured that their campaigns are laser-targeted to attract demand and significantly increase numbers of qualified leads.

How should CMOs build their ABM stack to accelerate marketing growth at low customer acquisition cost?

Getting to deep insights and laser-targeted programs may seem exhausting considering the amount of data that we can collect today. Luckily, machine learning can vastly reduce the time and effort required to test, extract knowledge, grow and improve your pipeline. With an automated AI Operator, marketers can test thousands of ad offers and channels, at a scale that wouldn’t be possible with manual in-house resources alone.

What are the pain points for marketers in leveraging predictive lead scoring technologies with traditional CRMs?

Single-purpose predictive lead scoring technologies are great at identifying which leads have a higher propensity to buy, but they are only one piece of the demand generation puzzle, which will take you only a part of the way along the journey to customer acquisition. Once you have identified prospects that fit your ideal customer profile, you need to reach them and convert them. The Metadata platform closes the loop by identifying your best target prospects, targeting them with highly personalized ads, and optimizing those ads for conversions and pipeline.

How do you see ABM platforms evolving with the maturity of AI/ML technologies?

Machine Learning is the future of marketing. Here’s why:

Metadata is smart — Not to get too “meta” here, but metadata is information that provides information about other data. In other words, metadata summarizes basic information about data, which makes finding and working with particular instances of data easier. According to Smart Insights, “Metadata paints a picture about an individual’s daily routine, interactions, points of view and associations, and the reason it is so useful is that it doesn’t lie.” When you apply this info to your marketing funnel, you can compile a thorough analysis of behaviors which can then inform your targeted advertising. Smart metadata allows for precision targeting, which narrows your prospects from a whopping 10 million “maybes” to 100,000 hyper-targeted customers.

We’re in a post-advertising world – In our post-advertising world, smart business leaders can now see beyond data to know more about their best prospects. You’re probably thinking that you see ads everywhere, so how can we be post-advertising? Well, ads can’t interrupt anymore because we have too many control over the media that we consume. Ads are no longer “in your face” noise with loud commercials and billboards. Instead, the best “ads” today are compelling, personalized content with real meaning for a brand’s audience. Instead of optimizing for clicks or impressions, you can orchestrate meaningful marketing by telling authentic stories that compel your audience to share them. When you provide personalized stories, you allow your customers to become the center of your account-based marketing funnel. This technology makes the human component of marketing come alive so that you can more easily build rapport with your potential customers.

It’s the Trifecta of Predictive Marketing – The technology is now available to eliminate your hunches, so why not tee up your targeting with the winning trifecta of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Multivariate execution? Real-time feedback allows for simulation engines to engage. When you use multivariate testing, you can see the winners (and losers) engage with business to business companies in a specific and accurate way.

What startups in the martech ecosystem are you watching/keen on right now?

Conversica, Bombora, Reactful

What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

Salesforce.com, HubSpot, Reactful, Spotfire, among others. And, of course, Metadata for demand gen!

Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)

One of the benefits of being a demand gen platform provider is the ability to ‘eat our own dog food’ for our own demand generation needs. We are constantly running new campaign experiments to hone our message to B2B marketers and drive conversions and revenues.

How do you inspire your people to work with technology?

The culture at Metadata is very data- and metric-driven. From reporting to one-on-ones and monthly team huddles – everything we do is about the numbers and we continually use technology to share our data.

One word that best describes how you work.

Results-driven (does that count as one or two?)

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Gmail, Spotfire, PowerPoint, screenshot clipping tools and paintbrush

What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

I listen to a lot of TEDTalks and I enjoy reading and learning. I’m currently reading “Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams” by Matthew Walker on my Kindle.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

To make decisions based on opportunity, not fear.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Jill Rowley

Thank you, Gil! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.