There will now always be far too many martech tools for marketers to pick from. The onus lies on marketing leaders to applying a lean martech stack that helps drive core business and marketing revenue. Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata.io shares some thoughts in this QnA:

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Welcome to this martech chat Jason! Take us through some of your biggest marketing moments and learnings over the years…

I’ve had some amazing experiences in my 20+ year marketing career. For me, the most exciting moments come while working in high-performing teams. The trust, comradery, and feeling of working really hard on something together and seeing that work pay off is amazing. I’ve only had this experience a few times but am in the middle of one right now at Metadata.io!

My most memorable moment at this point happened just last year. When Covid-19 hit, my marketing budget got slashed by 60%, but my goals remained the same. I was able to take those real constraints and use it to get creative. I identified a new campaign tactic and used it to dramatically increase the number of demo requests I was driving. I was able to increase demand by over 200% with 60% less budget! And that campaign is still working hard for us today! 

I think the biggest learning I’ve had in my 20+ years in marketing is that simple is usually better than complicated. I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and employee time on building highly complex, multi-touch, fractional credit attribution models that didn’t even work as well as the basic first touch/last touch models do!

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What’s your marketing structure and team like at Metadata, how has that changed during Covid-19, in what ways has the team and its processes evolved?

It was just me running marketing in the beginning of 2020, supported by a few freelancers. Covid-19 hit and my brand new budgets got cut by 60%, but my goals didn’t change. I was able to hire a Director of Growth in August of 2020 and we’re just getting ready to hire our third full-time marketer at the end of April. We’re supported by several freelance and agency partners on the creative, PR, and ops side of things.

The main changes we realized due to Covid-19 were really just around fully adopting a remote work culture. We were already fairly distributed, but with Covid and the new remote work reality, we were able to expand the geographies where we looked for talent. At this point we have people all over the world, and have given up our HQ location in San Francisco (we still have an office there but no one goes!).

What have been some of your go-to marketing technologies over the years and also at Metadata, a few top martech platforms that you rely on (often!) to drive marketing goals?

I’m kind of a purest – I grew up in Marketing Operations so I have a fairly jaded view of most of the martech tools out there today. That said, there are still a ton of great tools out there.

• Drift. You can do so much on the site with the chatbots and playbooks. We don’t have forms on our site, so when we need to capture info from someone we use Drift exclusively.
• ZoomInfo. Their data is solid and the filters that they include to create robust segments is very mature.
• Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize. To analyze and optimize the website and ensure acquisition and conversion remain high.
• Gong/Chorus/Grain. Nothing opened my eyes to the actual voice of my customer more than listening to actual sales calls.

Tell us your thoughts on the evolving and growing use of AI in marketing and martech and how you see this shape up in the near-future?

Everyone uses AI in some way in their lives. Honestly, something as simple as a turn signal in a car was considered “AI” when it first came out (even though AI wasn’t really even a term then). For marketers it’s no different. As our tools became more complex, and the expectation of marketing has grown, we’ve needed tools to adopt and embed AI into their platforms. There’s still a lot of hype out there, but there’s also a lot of progress being made. 

There are platforms out there now that can actually learn from your past and existing campaign execution and then adapt to it by combining campaign ingredients in different ways and optimizing until just a few winners emerge. We happen to be building one of these types of platforms, so we definitely feel that AI has a much bigger place in the marketing department than it has today.

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What are some of the core marketing technologies that you feel marketing teams should not be doing without, today, at least in the B2B and tech marketplace?

A few standard technologies:

• Marketing automation platform. Pretty much regardless of your strategy, all B2B marketing teams require this tech – even if they only use it to track and manage leads.
• Website hosting/builder. You have to have a robust website host with a great builder on top of it. We use WordPress on WPEngine with Elementor on top of it. Making quick website updates, doing quick tests – all of this is critical to a marketer’s role.
• Demand Gen or ABM Platform. ABM platforms are on their way out as they’re currently defined; however, there are other platforms more focused on demand generation that are starting to pop up. LinkedIn, Facebook, Google all make it hard to launch and manage campaigns. These platforms take the heavy lift out of the way so you can focus on strategy.
• Analytics / Attribution. I hate attribution because it’s so fuzzy – but you still at least need a way to understand what’s working and what’s not so that you can stop wasting money.

A few predictions that you have for the future of martech?

The future of martech will be about consolidation. There are far too many tools today and it makes our job harder, not easier, when we have to wade through all of them, try them out, etc. I think you’ll see quite a bit of acquisition activity but also we’ll see companies just fold that don’t have a clear differentiator or extreme ability to execute.

A few takeaways for marketing leaders and CMOs in 2021: top factors they should keep in mind as they plan for the rest of the year, innovate and expand their teams?

Don’t overcomplicate everything. Most of the places I’ve worked had more resources and more red tape than they ever should have. And this led to spinning up projects just to keep people busy. Keep your organization lean and focus on getting really good at the simple things first.

Trust the people you hire to do the job you hired them to do. I’m tired of having to mentor young marketers who work for a leader who started off with no trust and continue to make it hard on their employees. Why did you hire them in the first place? If you just want someone to be your puppet, hire an agency or contractor.

Lastly, a few upcoming innovations at Metadata that users can look forward to?

We’ve been working hard to launch a brand new ad type in our platform, LinkedIn Conversation Ads. So many B2B orgs have had huge success with this tactic since last year when LinkedIn opened it up to beta. We’ll be one of the first LinkedIn partners to offer this ad type in our platform. We’re also adding several channels this year, including Google Adwords and Quora.

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