DISQO: Turning Your Clients into Advocates
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This time insights come from Stacy Perrus, marketing communications director at DISQO.
JZ: When we work with companies, we often want to help them find out how their story fits into the industry story. Your story is a lot more powerful if you can situate what you do within industry trends. For DISQO, that's an advantage because your whole purpose is helping marketers understand what actions to take and measure those actions based on this privacy-safe, first and zero-party data, which has been a major issue in digital marketing for years now. Still, how do you insert yourself into that conversation?
SP: It's all about finding opportunities where the conversations are happening: leverage your connections, and keep a pulse on the industry. It's also about mining your own company for stories and talking with your customers.
One of the efforts we’re undertaking as a marketing team is reaching out to our clients to understand their success stories first-hand and then finding the right opportunities to amplify those stories. That is taking the form of webinars with industry publications like Ad Age and Adweek, Q&As on our blog, social media posts, video testimonials, and case studies. By telling their stories, we automatically tell DISQO’s story. When you lean into what your customers are feeling, you can naturally find opportunities and then it's about finding the right way to share those insights with your audiences.
JZ: Yes. There was a story in AdExchanger recently about Connatix, the video advertising company, helping Axel Springer do contextual advertising. It's way easier to make the case for what you do as an adtech or data company if you can spotlight your customers and the way they're using your technology or data to succeed, as opposed to if you're going to AdExchanger and saying, “Look at how great our data is. We're solving these problems.”
A lot of companies really struggle with getting their customers to go on the record, though. In theory, it sounds great to spotlight the customer, but what are some of the challenges that arise there and how do you overcome them?
SP: I think in our industry, it can be more challenging than in a lot of big industries because customers may not want to share their secret sauce. We sat down as a team to determine, “What's our philosophy when it comes to working with our clients to tell their story?” We mapped that out. “This is why we're doing it, and then this is why we think you should join us in doing it.” We wrote an entire pitch deck that outlines the value that we think we can bring to them if they join us. It outlines the process and what they can expect as well, so that they come to it with a clear understanding of what DISQO is getting out of it but also what they can get out of it and how we'll work with them.
JZ: You have to sell your customer on the value of participating in this.
SP: Exactly. If you make understanding and serving the customer's needs your priority, and you show them what success looks like, you'll be much more likely to get a “yes.” You remove the mystery and risk perception from the PR or marcomms collaboration you’re asking of them.
JZ: Could you tell me a bit about your content strategy or the role that reports like the Say-Do Gap, which covers the difference between what customers say (survey data) and what they do (behavioral data), play in your comms program?
SP: Reports help us get press coverage because we tie them to timely, newsworthy topics. One of the cool things about my job is that if I have a question, I have a two million-plus-person panel whom I can ask that question. What are consumers thinking about the current UAW strike, and how is that going to affect the customer experience for automakers? We at DISQO are in an ideal position to dig into what the marketplace is talking about with insightful data.
JZ: How do the different parts of marketing at DISQO work together?
SP: We have brand and comms, product marketing, and demand gen. Brand and comms and product marketing will work on content, and demand gen will activate that content by making sure it’s optimized and captures leads when people engage. We also have what we call account development reps. That role sits within the marketing team to help nurture our leads as they come in.
JZ: The ADR role is interesting. I read Diary of a First-time CMO by the CMO of Cognism, which is a SaaS company that grew to over $50M in ARR over the last few years. They have something called MDRs, marketing development representatives. The idea was to transition from the B2B tech status quo, where marketing produces a white paper and out-of-touch SDRs cold-call everyone, to MDRs who are more plugged into marketing and can reach out to leads in an appropriate way. You don't necessarily need a different name for it, but you need to tailor outreach to the customer’s level of intent.
SP: That function is all about making sure that when we're reaching out to potential clients, we're doing it at the right time and with the right content or pitch. We make sure prospects are nurtured appropriately and that we're not just calling them out of the blue if they don't understand what DISQO is or what we do.
