Anne Gotay- Importance of Attribution in Today's Marketing Landscape

Overview:

In this episode of Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders, host Kerry Guard sits down with Anne Gotay to explore the messy reality of attribution in B2B cybersecurity. Anne shares her journey from BDR to growth leader and agency founder, revealing how she navigates long sales cycles, dark funnel mysteries, and copycat competitors. Together, they dive into the power of collaboration, data-informed creativity, and why content, trust, and AI are at the heart of today’s most successful marketing strategies.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:04

Kerry, hello. I'm Kerry Guard, and welcome back to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. I have been counting down. I mean, I count down to all my shows. I'm very excited about many of the topics that I've had recently. This one in particular, we have a guest today who's going to help us make it a little less hard. We're going to unpack it all. It's going to be great, and gonna spill all the tea. I have my podcast sidekick, Elijah Drown with us. We're here for you a little bit about Anne Gotay before we get started. Anne is currently the VP of growth at Dropzone AI, a company revolutionizing cybersecurity with AI power suck and analysts that never sleep. She's also the co founder of Cubic Squared, a growth marketing firm, helping businesses scale with an AI, first human always approach. With over 13 years of experience scaling tech startups to successful exits, and has mastered the art of go-to-market strategy, demand generation and revenue growth. She's also an active member and co chair of she leads AI, as well as a member of EXIT five and the Cybersecurity Marketing Society saying at the forefront of industry trends and thoughtful leadership and welcome to the show.

Anne Gotay 1:07

Thank you for having me. Thrilled to be here.

Kerry Guard 1:11

So excited to have you before we get to the heart of our conversation around attribution. I know I'm gonna make you all wait. You'll live. It'll be okay. I promise. It's worth it. We do want to hear your story and your journey, though, right? I gave a little snippet of where you are today, but help us along of how you got there.

Anne Gotay 1:27

Unlike most marketers, I suppose, I ended up starting as a BDR in cyber security, and at the time, I entered the market with a counter terrorism and cyber security master's degree specifically focused on cyber crime and espionage, and what happened when I tried to get a job was that most people needed to have coders and hackers. At the time, no one really cared about policy and cyber security, so my foot in the door to cyber security startup was to join all these cyber security conferences, kind of vouch for myself, pitch myself, and I got hired as a BDR, and not to anyone surprised within three months, or was almost in tears of leaving the same message over and over. And obviously got the rough side of our cybersecurity audience of, why are you calling me? How did you get my number? And I feel bad for you. Click. So as soon as the startup was large enough, at the time, a pen testing company, and got a marketing team, I re-interviewed and switched, and the rest is history. I mean, I was really drawn by what interests people. You know, how do you not get hung up on because you're just a pest, and how can you provide value and be a trusted advisor to your target audience? And so started in marketing operations, which is near and dear to my heart. Everything I do is based on data and very data-driven. That I will say, when I went to school I hated math, but thankfully, that changed quickly, and worked my way up and have fled the last four companies I've led marketing and grown the team at and helped prove or disproved product market fit, and kind of took it from there, but entirely in in cybersecurity, which is always tricky, very tricky.

Kerry Guard 3:05

And I know everybody's now on their edge of their seats with tons of questions around you know how to market to our audience? Tell us more. Well, we're caught. Well, we'll dab that in, folks, when we talk about the attribution piece. But it is. It is a tough world out there. That's what makes cyber both hard but exciting, because how you reach these folks and create relationships is what it's what it's all about.

Anne Gotay 3:37

And yes, as a BDR, being on the forefront of that, yeah, not fun, but it gives me a lot of respect for my my colleagues on the sales side, and also, I think, with really learning from startup founders who are extremely technical, typically first time CEOs, first time as business folks, right, not really understanding how the business works yet, trying to get their cliques under them. One of the last companies just did not have product market fit and wouldn't really take input. And so with that, also created the our cubic squared marketing agency to kind of help, help guide those founders who are open to marketing and open to input, how to, you know, quickly, ramp and scale. So it's been, it's been a blast.

Kerry Guard 4:12

Yes, it's the age-old. It makes things so much easier when you have product market fit. So when you don't, it's kind of like, is this worth it? Is that sort of where you ended up with that other company, of like, if they didn't have product market fit, was it like this? Is it the right job for me? Then, because I can't really help you, you're not taking input. Or was it, or did you find your feet at some point? What sort of happened there?

Anne Gotay 4:38

What was interesting was, in the beginning, when you have those founders who don't understand go-to-market, sales, marketing, customer success, any of those areas, the first thing when things go wrong is they blame marketing, and I think it's indicative of the massive spend that marketing has. And even when founders are very efficient with marketing budget, the first thing they do is come running to you of Well, where's the ROI? Because a plus b must equal C. Right? Reality is, which is why we're here talking today. The buyer journey is not straightforward for any of us, regardless of what we're buying, and with that company, we received so much input from analysts and and prospects and existing customers and influencers and market leaders on you know, what we need to do to tweak the product to be a complete solution. It fell in deaf ears, and that leads to the article I read, I think, in Harvard Business Review, and the difference between a founder and an entrepreneur, a founder has their baby and their product right, and they are not willing to budge, no matter what that feedback is, because they think they know best. And to them, it's a brilliant idea. There's nothing else like it. And being a founder, myself and the marketing agency friend, it's hard. It's so much harder than you ever anticipate to be a founder. There are many ups and downs, right? It's you're always, I would say, a hot second behind the latest learning as you grow. But all that being said, if you're an entrepreneur, you have a mindset of, let me take input and understand what people really want and tweak my product, even if it means I have to stand up to the board, take a lot of heat if I'm convinced it's the right thing to do, and that gets me to product market fit. Let's do it. And so the last company could have been very similar to dig security getting acquired by Palo Alto, except we didn't listen, right? And so there's only so much at one point that I could influence and do I had an amazing team, kind of at the mercy of this founder versus entrepreneur. And you know, at some point you have to be realistic and cut your losses and move on such an important mindset.

Kerry Guard 6:32

And I love the differentiation between those two things. So if you're out there as a marketing leader, a fraction of whether you're finding a full time job or you the doing the fractional way, I think this is really key of how to find that founder who has that entrepreneurial brain, who is going to take feedback and iterate with you. It's just night and day in terms of working with those types of folks. So I couldn't agree.

Anne Gotay 7:02

Couldn't agree more, especially founders build something that's not even something they were ever in, right? For instance, if you if you ever found out working in data security, but they've never really worked in data security, they don't know what good looks like.

Kerry Guard 7:15

So you have to take input, especially if you've been, if you're if you're hiring somebody who's been in the space for a long time. Who grew up in the space for a long time? Who knows what she's talking about? You should definitely want to take that input and lean on that and so hats off to you for where you are now and for what you're doing. And it sounds like you found another a great spot that does have that product market fit and that entrepreneurial founder. So be one last question for you, and I swear we're going to talk about attribution, everybody. But in terms of where you are today, that's a wonderful challenge that you had at a previous company, and I'm glad you found a solution to it. But for where you are today at drop zone, what's a challenge you're currently having? What's feeling really hard and in your way right now?

Anne Gotay 8:02

An interesting challenge we have is we're essentially creating the category. We are seen as a leader, and have positioned the company as a leader. It day doesn't go by right now where there isn't a direct competitor popping up. The biggest challenge that we have is we that we don't know yet what their product entails. We have ideas, we can see their positioning and messaging, which, as we all know, copies our positioning and messaging. So one, we're starting to sound very similar, even though we're the category leader, right down to on social, the way we write our social posts is being mimicked, because they've caught on that social is wildly successful for us, the competitors, the colors are the same. The little graphic that comes with new hires is almost identical. It's pretty funny. And not only that, but we don't really know what the product holds yet of these competitors, because they're so nascent in the market that there are very few insights at this point. So how do we compare? How do we know what's coming out of the woodwork? We have to be very vigilant and constantly creative to try to understand, you know, how can you continue to build that brand loyalty, stay as the leader and anticipate any moves of, you know, other seed stage companies coming out of the woodwork that have much higher funding at this point, because it is the, the hottest area in the market, the AI SOC analyst space at this point. So it's a great spot to be in. But if you so much as bat and I, you can get past so we have to be very careful.

Kerry Guard 9:26

I'm so curious, I'm gonna only get to ask one question, and I swear I'll move on. How are you starting to navigate this? I mean, no, this is currently a challenge, so obviously you probably don't have a full solution to it. But are you trying to stay ahead? Are you trying to switch it up? Are you, are you trying to stay the course? What's sort of your approach to people needing at your heels?

Anne Gotay 9:44

So a few things. One, we've been very transparent with our audience. We try to not have a lot of kind of typical marketing speak in our website, to be very clear about what it is that we do and do not do. And we've gotten a lot of kudos from our network, both endless as well as prospects, saying your message is clear. We get what you're doing. We understand. What you do or don't do. So that's been great. So we want to kind of stay the course on that front right, and create that consistency as the leader. So there is so much I don't know, contention, so many questions in the AI space. Everyone says they do AI, so it's really tricky for an AI native company. The other piece that we're doing to stay ahead is we're being very careful in terms of what our competitors are putting out. We're constantly keeping an eye out, and we're talking with analysts, everyone really in our networks too, and running lots of AB tests to understand, you know, how is it that we can have a consistent positioning and messaging but also optimize it and refine it an ongoing basis to sound different from our competitors, because everything we do, right down to the form fields on our demo requests are being copied, so it takes a week and someone else is caught up. What? What can we do to be different, right? So we have a lot of creative campaigns coming out of the woodwork that I'm really excited about, that I can't share because I'm sure somebody will listen from the competitors, but but really trying to find those creative ways. And with that, I have to say, we have such an enthusiastic, loyal employee base that we're always collaborating to come up with new ideas. And I think a lot of our our secret sauce is in doing things 5% better. No matter what we do, we're aiming to do so, and that adds up. And then also, really having those, those fantastic collaborative employees who are trying to think creatively, as a team like engineering will come and say, and what do you think about this idea? Or can we do that? And I'm learning of what they're doing in a CTO hackathon, and saying, wait a minute, can we leverage that from a marketing front? So it's it's fun, it's also scary, because I know RSA is coming up. We have a massive competitor.

Kerry Guard 11:46

I'm just waiting for them to do some massive launch of some sort, so we'll see

day the course trust the process, exactly, lot of breathing, breathing. I so feel this, and I it's what makes our job both exciting and terrifying. For sure, one of the many things, one of the many things, yes, let's talk attribution. Why is this? Why are you feeling like this is a topic that is important to you right now.

Anne Gotay 12:16

It's always been important to me and for the audience listening. This is not going to clarify things for you, it'll just be controlled chaos.

Kerry Guard 12:24

It's important, exactly.

Anne Gotay 12:26

It's important to me, because we have to prove ourselves right. Technically, as CMOS, we're not just marketing officers, we're market officers. Nobody wants to give us this credit than the executive friend, which is a constant battle we're picking. It is always the everyone knows marketing. We're going to tell you what to do. We're going to know everything better. And even though we've never worked in marketing, we want to lead the marketing team and tell them what to do. Because somebody, another CISO in my network, told me what marketing should be doing. And of course, that CISO is a marketing expert, right? And this is the daily stuff we struggle with, and it's I like sorting people out. It's like trying to solve a puzzle and trying to understand what makes them tick. But when you get this day in and day out, it does nag at you, right? It is not just nagging at your your confidence or your ability to say what's working. It's also a if in next time you don't deliver, the board will switch you up. So it's a real threat to our daily existence, which is why the average tenure, I think, for marketing head is what one and a half years tops.

Kerry Guard 13:28

That's turning, I just have to say, like the ramp up time just to come on to any new client, right? Is like six to 12 months to then be it's not enough. It's just not enough time. I said this to a potential client, to a new client, I just, I have a new client that I'm working with, and I was very clear with them, of like, I know you want to move fast. I know you want leads and new business like yesterday, we got to ramp up. This is going to take time. We got to trust with your audience. We've got to do this right? We got to do this thoughtfully. And they were like, wait, what?

Anne Gotay 14:05

And it's not stop and go either, right? Everything has to fit together, just like that puzzle. And at the end of the attribution, everyone wants to know what is or isn't working. The average sales cycle in cybersecurity is a minimum of 12 months. So if you're being measured by marketing qualified leads. That's great. How do we know those will convert? We don't, and then we're at the mercy of a sales team that may or may not be good about following up. Luckily, here at drop zone, I have amazing sales people who will chomp at the bit to follow up within an hour to every single lead I give them. I'm very lucky for some of my career, I've experienced this. It does help a ton. But at the end of the day, if you're looking at MQLs, you don't know if those convert. If you're looking at sales accepted leads, you're at the mercy of the sales team following up. If you look at revenue, 12 months later, looking at revenue, you can't really adjust on the fly and have quick learnings. What are you telling the boy? Board and your CEO. In the meantime, not much indicators right for us, the sales cycle is much shorter. We're lucky. But even there, the initial question was, what are we looking at? Are we looking at first touch? Are we looking at last touch? Are we looking at what converted right before they what happened right before they asked for a demo, which, by the way, if you're using HubSpot, there's no way to track that, because the last action before requesting a demo is just that they clicked on the demo landing page. It doesn't tell me nothing. And then you have our your CEO saying, Okay, your marketing investment. Where's my ROI and, oh, by the way, we're only measuring you by in ICP completed demos, just for those people who are not as familiar with this ideal customer profile. So not just any person who comes to you with budget authority, need and timing checked off and has said, Hey, I need your product. I want to talk. That's great marketing. That doesn't count. It's not the ICP, wow, even though it could be one of those fortune 500 logos that we also need, by the way, here and there, right?

Kerry Guard 16:07

You can't just have only massive enterprises, but it's still not going to be doing it that way, because we do not want to spray and pray, which I agree with.

Anne Gotay 16:10

Yeah, we have defined our ICP, which we know we have much better odds of converting through a POC and a close one opportunity. But it's like finding a needle in a haystack, frankly, right, right? So everything that I'm using, I usually don't like to say I have superpowers, but I'm combining everything, right? I'm leveraging even our own agency, because they use AI. We can do 10 times more programs, all of those components. But it's not enough, because the majority of what's happening in cyber is in the dark funnel, so everything that you can measure with any kind of attribution tools excludes that, right? Those are the most important points of how you ended up getting that revenue. And in our last CTO, I highlighted just one customer journey from contact creation through requesting a demo. There are about 30 plus steps in this process, down to how many times they're gun shy and they look at this request a demo page, and then they shy away again. And, oh, by the way, we found that you have an on demand demo webinar. I'm going to go watch that so I don't have to talk to your sales person. Yep, 100, the list goes on. But if we're just looking at first touch, that's how we created the lead. But I'm not being measured by that at all, so I can have 500 in ICP leads created in a month. So what? Where are my completed demos? So I'm relying on content. And a couple of your other other recent guests talked all about content and storytelling. How important it is that content is not going away. But if you don't have much influence over content, there isn't much you can do to get those people to convert from from the initial interest awareness phase down to buying or requesting that demo, right? Yeah, and so trying to put all those pieces together and then understanding how the board looks at your attribution as well and whether or not you're effective.

Kerry Guard 18:00

So in terms of why this is important to you right now, it's because you have a lot of moving pieces, and you need to know how they all fit together and in that buyer journey, and you need to be able to take that back to the board to say what is and isn't working, especially when you're looking at 12 to 18 months of a buying cycle, to look at the leading indicators of saying people are moving through and things are happening. And we need to stay the course and keep iterating. Am I capturing the sort of the high level of that?

Anne Gotay 18:26

Yes, because there is no right answer. The reason why I was really looking forward to speaking with you about this is because when you do your research, there are tons of models. They're outdated. They don't consider anything with AI or the dark funnel being a real thing again. And it depends on your company stage. It depends on your goals, your KPIs. There is never a right answer. And then, not only do you have to find what makes the most sense and not inundate yourself with too much data points, you have analysis paralysis, but you do get buy in from the rest of your executives, which is a whole nother matter, right? I think Sarah heartland, in one of your recent episodes, she said, What is demand? Why do we even have a component called demand gen? So I'm the head of demand gen. Realistically, I'm running all of marketing right. Even if product marketing isn't is reporting to the CEO, it heavily impacts my demand and demand, that's great, but demand is a long term play to your point earlier, Kerry, that's not happening overnight, but my board meeting is on once a quarter. So it's really funny how people get fixated on these different areas of marketing when you need everything to be working together to drive the results well, and

Kerry Guard 19:37

then your resources are limited and you're spread very thin as a team, but you have to activate it all. It's very daunting. Let's talk about the dark funnel. Michael Moreno, nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. Says feels like the dark funnel is getting stronger right now. In terms of how you're measuring the dark funnel, we call it the dark funnel, right? Because we have no. Idea where people are coming in or where they're coming in from. It could be, if they show up on a website direct. What does that mean? Sure they typed in the URL. I find that hard to believe. But maybe direct really sort of just a catch all for Google Analytics, not really knowing where this person came from, we're going to put them in direct. And so, you know, so social is an aspect we, you know, we capture some of that. But at the end of the day, when we're out there talking about this thing I had, I mentioned this one of my I'm a Hamilton musical obsessed person, and so I did a post about this a few weeks ago where no one was in the room where it happened, because there were so many conversations happening behind the scenes about one of my shows, but it wasn't being talked about on the comments in the show. Could be happening right now. For all we know, it's those things right where we How did you find out somebody messaged me and said they took a screenshot and sent it to me and said, I'm having this conversation right now. This is what we like. This is the next steps to this thing. And I was like, why aren't you having that lie for killing me? So like, by word of mouth, right? So, yeah, there's this, there's all this back room talk that's happening that marketers can't see. How are you navigating that? From an attribution standpoint.

Anne Gotay 21:19

it's great question. It's not even that we can't see it. It's then when we do find out about it, sales will be like, That was mine, or the CEO will say, Hang on, I met someone at this dinner. I think it's for me, right? And at the end of the day, I don't care, because I want the business to do well, but, that makes it even more interesting and dynamic to me. We're so hung up on software-based, distribute, attribution, whatever we can find the old ways. And I think part of that for marketing leaders, that sentiment comes in because we have such a hard time to even explain the value in the ROI of marketing to begin with. If we're trying to vouch for a new attribution model, even if we get CEO buy in, the board isn't really going to care, because at the end of the day, the majority of board members, even though they're immensely supportive and helpful, live more in a theoretical world, very few of them have been in the day to day or have been founders and have truly understood every area of the business. So their advice may be good, but often not realistic, right? And so they don't know how to they don't know what good looks like, either. So good luck explaining to them when you have one child once a quarter. So what we need to do is we need to combine data-driven insights with the qualitative research to understand what that true buyer behavior looks like. So what we're doing at drop zone, the first thing we implemented is a How did you hear about us? Required field at the demo Request Form level. Then we put it in our top performing assets as well. We want to know where did that person hear about us? And even then, we cannot confidently say, you know, they may have downloaded two white papers, but it was really the risky business podcast that stuck in their heads, and that's what they're going to tell us, even though they had the other two white papers. But that's okay, because we need to know what is it that got them to say, yes? I want to talk to you that is more important than where the lead originally came from or the company. And it's more important than what got them to end up buying. It's what made them say yes. I want that demo, especially with how I'm being measured at drop zone. And so there a lot of the time it may say direct traffic, according to HubSpot. But recently, we had somebody say, No, it's the risky business podcast. And how did you hear about us? Or sometimes going back to, you know, what is Google sharing with us these days, versus not? What? What? What kind of searches they entered? For instance, somebody said, recently, use chat GPT and look for AI SOC analyst. And then someone then someone else added to that a while ago. If you were the first one to show up, bingo. Now we have data. Right now I can go back and say, Hey, listen, even though you may not like the formatting of those content pieces, they're showing up in AI search results, which was the exact point, and it's working. We have a demo request. If I didn't put that into the form level, I would have no idea, not only that, we're talking to constantly having the sales team ask, how did you hear about us? Sometimes that conflicts, right? So this is where, no matter what you do, there's a lot of manual analysis involved as well and trying to understand that, not necessarily single source of truth, but you get a lot closer because you're getting those data points you otherwise wouldn't hear and thanks to AI, we can now plug that into one of the AI models and run analysis, and then it will give us much better data points, instead of me having to sit and kind of scour the How did you hear about us for the last two quarters, and then trying to make sense of it, cross referencing that with a contact source that we have in HubSpot or the original source. So all of those pieces come together a lot of times too. We'll hear like my CISO told me, I have to look at your solution. So now we know, okay, who's really influencing that initial touch point. And then we also know that if a CISO said you need to. Look at the solution, we have a lot more What do I say? It's a lot more likely that this person does have budget authority, need and timing, and that they will be forced to move, whether they decide to go with us or not. We know this is a real thing, because the CISA will continue to put pressure on his or her team, right? So these are all kinds of different ways.

Kerry Guard 25:21

Yeah, that's super interesting. It's weird. Cyber marketing con. There was a CISO who actually talked to the audience, and his basic big takeaway was, Don't come to me. I'm not your person. But you're saying, actually, the data is saying that there is some relevance to marketing to the CISO. Is that because you're a is that because it's AI and it's also you're leading a brand new category? Do you think that you sort of have that in with the CISO or three things?

Anne Gotay 25:50

So the first one is we have to have somebody who's forward-thinking and the InfoSec team, somebody who really wants to move the needle think about things differently. If we're talking enterprises, to CISOs, come to us because they have an AI Initiative, or, for example, they were just acquired by a PE firm. If they're in the mid market and they have to have cost efficiency, so we're the natural go to so there's that. And occasionally, if there is a CISO community, or, for example, we engaged with a few A while ago, we were received introductions of the founder to talk to CISOs, who's not a demo with Thought Leadership discussion. Those people may not be ready to buy today, but they may come back a half year later. And so in those rare cases, it's a CISO who through his network, much like cyber marketing con, where I will go and say, Hey, have you dealt with this vendor? What are the results? And a lot of times, I've saved a lot of money. Those are my go tos, right? They get the industry. We're all in the same boat. That's great, but that's where I start. Nobody would know and all of the marketing vendors that I started there, and that's my short list, it saves me a ton of time different and in marketing, it's fascinating to me. Marketing vendors very rarely ask, how did you hear about us?

Kerry Guard 27:01

Which is interesting. First question always my first question, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I want to know. I want to know how you heard about us. I think what's interesting about what you're saying and and the way that I think about it, and I'd love your take if I'm if you agree with me or or want to, you know, take me into a different avenue on this. But the way I've been thinking about attribution is less about understanding necessarily, where you know the point of attribution back in the day was, Where can I get the most bang for my buck, right? Where are people coming in from most so I can pour more there where in the days of throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks correct, and now I feel like we to our point earlier. We have to be in so many places to meet our audience and to surround them and to see at what point our message is going to resonate with them, depending on what headspace they're in, which absolutely makes our job harder. But instead, the way I've been thinking about attribution is less about where are most of my leads coming from, and where do I need to pour more and more about the journey and the touch points. How many took? Jen, you mentioned it right. Took 30 touch points to get somebody to sign up for a demo, and that is real. And so what are those touch points? And how can I help raise those that visibility of those to get more in a sort of how I've been thinking about it is that I feel like that's what you're saying, but just wanted to.

Anne Gotay 28:31

It's much harder to get an understanding from from the other executives in the board on that front. But that's exactly how I'm thinking about it, because we need to own those conversations where the buyers hang out, right? And that's nothing we can measure. There isn't necessarily a budget or spend tied to it, either. You have to be very active on LinkedIn. Social is a huge component organic social for us of driving not just engagement, but leads, as well as demo requests, joining any kind of private Slack channels, being part of a dialog, speaking at niche events, or making sure that your your CEO is very active and has an active presence in all kinds of communities or dinners. Yes, there's a typical CISO dinner. Again, that's a long play. That's not what I'm talking about. It's really the better you understand your customer, the higher your odds are, right? So something that I ask for every case study interview is, where are you spending your time? Whose input do you value? When you look at solutions, right? Everybody has a different answer. So there's that, but it does tell us a lot more than if we went and searched with like Spark taro or any of those other platforms to understand, what are our people doing? And it's dark funnel. Isn't the trend, right? It's not going away. It's where buyers make their decisions. That's what we need to know when, when do they make the decisions, and what cost them to do? So, so, yeah, it's great. We have a steady stream of leads coming in, but that's the same as saying I have 10,000 visitors on my website per per month. And right? You'd rather have 10 who convert and become customers in quarter, if that's even a thing, not really in cyber, than to have 10,000 visitors. And we don't know what happens to those. Yeah, but, but then the question is, too, when you're a startup, a lot of times your sample size is very small for the first year. So you have indicators and constantly expectation setting and educating your CEO of this is an indicator. This is not enough for you to make that decision. Same thing goes for ICP. We had indicated as the first year. That's it. The sample size was just too small, right, right? But it becomes really tricky from a marketing budget standpoint, because the other, the other tricky thing I had in the beginning was, well, organic, direct referral traffic isn't part of your marketing investment, so it doesn't count. So if you had five in ICP demo requests from that, no, no.

Kerry Guard 30:51

Oh, but you influenced those channels, correct? I mean, everything's gonna come into organic because of all of the awareness you're building. And then people start right? So the journey that I'm starting to see unfold, and I love your input, if you're if you're capturing similar as you're building job zone up from the ground, is they go to they might see something out in the universe that triggers them to think about this solution to the problem, to this problem they're having that maybe they knew they had, or didn't know that they had. Then they go to an LLM, and they start researching with this problem. They get a few recommendations. You even mentioned this. Somebody said, Oh, I got your name from an LLM, right. Start recommending some solutions. And then they go to Google and actually look directly for your name, and they go to your website. And then branded search traffic is getting all of the glory,

Anne Gotay 31:37

which you deal with all the time, I'm sure when you run paid ads programs, right? Both, yeah, paid ads, where people see the ad but they don't click on it. Oh yeah, you guys drove that with at mkg, but it looks like organic traffic. Organic traffic.

Kerry Guard 31:55

Oh my gosh. I can't believe you're not getting so you only get credit for the programs that you have money in the beginning, that has changed.

Anne Gotay 32:01

There's been some education, right? But, but these are all the things you have to encounter, and it makes perfect sense, right? Because if you're a first-time founder, you're you take things so literally, because in every other department, especially engineering, A plus B equals C. But there isn't a way. We are not logical human beings. We created AI. That's why it's inherently flawed, and it hallucinates, and it has all these other problems too, right? We could bribe it with money. Soon, it'll tell us what to do. I mean, the other day, we were working on something really cool that we're launching soon, and it came out of the CTOs hackathon that we did in in the engineer, all of a sudden it, it didn't know what to do. It had a question, didn't know how to handle and some code, it gave us a recipe for marble layer cake, right? Yeah, whoops, I have no idea. So let me try to get you something cool. We do the same when we fumble, we get asked a question, right? Because we built it. But it's the same thing with the buyer journey. There is no, no straight path. Yes, you'll see commonalities throughout. And you know that, you know, if you're a gardener, Magic Quadrant, you're in it, that's a massive lead magnet. But still, that could just be for enterprises. It might mean, mean nothing for mid market. Who knows? Right? There are so many factors, and we don't know at all how people will go through the buyer journey if we only look at trackable attribution, because one, it doesn't reflect the true buyer journey. But two, we really need to get in the minds of our buyers and understand them inside and out. Way easier said than done. You need to have the right marketing team that's constantly listening to those calls giving you feedback. You need to meet with your sales team every single week, even if there's a mark the sales head there, and really do double duty on the marketing side to get all those different data points, but then you also need to have a really awesome marketing ops person who knows how to analyze that data, because otherwise there just isn't enough time in the day. Michael has some good thoughts here.

Kerry Guard 33:53

I'm seeing, yes, he does, which is going to lead me. So we were talking earlier about gating so that you could add the form feel of of how you found us. Now, obviously, for demos, you have, they have to fill in a form to request a demo, right? Yes, because they have to vote. They got that. They're asking for a salesperson at that point. So there's nothing you could do there. But I think what Michael is talking about is he's asking about gating content in general, and if there's a better way, he mentioned UTM codes, if there's a better way to be tracking those without gating content and Michael, feel free to chime on in and correct me if I'm wrong here. But that's what I'm taking away from your comments. What do you think is that? Is that something you're looking into, Anne in terms of UTM codes, of helping you sort of identify a little bit of this dark funnel stuff, marketing campaigns and HubSpot.

Anne Gotay 34:43

We use UTMs. We use everything. And partially beginning to try to understand, because I'm being measured by ICP, completed demos, it was a little bit different, right? So the whole like first touch is completely irrelevant. Frankly, last touch is way more tricky than. You thought, because it's a moving goal post, people can always take another action, and the last touch is updated. So when is the last touch? The last touch, right? UTMs is, is still a problem, because we're still looking at the kind of trackable components, because somebody must have clicked the link. And then we go back to, at least in HubSpot. What model are you using for attribution? Is it linear, W-shaped, U U-shaped? Are we looking at Context grade in the first touch, last touch influenced spans the gamut, right? And the more you share with your CEO. In this case, our CEO has more than 30 patents in AI and ML, so he knows his stuff inside and out. So he's fantastic with data, and can notice any kind of discrepancies in split seconds. But again, you really, we all know you open a can of worms. The more data you show, right? You have to be very intentional about how to get that buy in. So for us, it's, yes, we use UTM so we know how much traffic we're driving from, let's say newsletter at sponsorship, but it still may not tell us what's really happening. We have to do kind of spot check. We do that as well. We spot-check different people who've converted, and we take a look at their journey. We try to understand what's going on. We see where there's drop off for how we track any kind of AI search results. There is a way to do that with Google Analytics, so we can tell what LLM people searched in what they were searching for. So there are ways to go about that, but that being said, we've been very AI forward to to mirror how the buyer journey is changing, which, interestingly enough, when you have very traditional people in marketing, they don't at all think about, you know, if you if you're using chat, GPT or perplexity, you can type in a whole paragraph as your question. That's a very different keyword approach, right? Looking at intent signals is huge. Then, if you're using Google and you type in a quick phrase, so really trying to kind of stay up to speed on, how are your buyer searching? What are they doing? What are they typing in? Yeah,

Kerry Guard 36:57

it's interesting. It's fascinating data. I'm glad that people are starting to figure out how to uncover that for us, we can make more thoughtful decisions around the content we create. We talked about earlier about how important content is from an attribution standpoint. How are you measuring when you're when you're thinking about attribution? We're talking channels, right? We talked a lot about channels, and that's generally where attribution sort of comes into play. But something you mentioned earlier is around content too. How are you think? How does content fit into how you're thinking about attribution?

Anne Gotay 37:27

Yeah, that's a good one. And it's tricky as well, because I'm not in charge of content, which is my first time here in this company to to not own content. To me, it's like essentially running a car without gas. It makes things a lot more tricky. But thankfully, they're electric cars, right? So there's hope left. So So on that note, we we have multiple ways we look at which blogs are driving. For example, our content pieces are driving the most traffic to the website based on searches. It has to be focused on intent. Everything we're doing now with content is intent-based. What is the intent of the person? What are they trying to get out of something? And those are also the components where LMS will pull those specific answers out of your content pieces and put those into the answer right? Because it's no longer about clicks. And so we have dedicated AI blog posts, for example, that we bring traffic to the website with. From there, we make sure there's enough cross-linking in those blog posts to go bring people to the other areas on the website. So it's constantly assessing, you know what? What is the journey from when they enter the website, depending on what page they jump in on? How do we keep them engaged and going? Because reality is, CISO will consume content for months without really clicking at anything or on anything, right? And how do we make that meaningful? Then we look at which blog topics are creating the most kind of the least, what do I say? The least amount of bounce rate. Where are they spending the most time on what blog topics? What can we do more of how can we from there, bring people to video content. Video is huge, right? Whoever isn't looking at video today, it's a massive mess, frankly. And putting content in different mediums as well, right? Where people do consume it, depending on social AI, making sure we meet people where they are, yeah, yeah, but, but we You can't look at content with the same metrics. It depends on the content piece, right? Is it an awareness piece? What is the goal and outcome? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to drive traffic to the website? You can have the most beautiful blog posts if nobody can find them, who cares? Right? You to look at SEO. You need to look at, you know, what are the call to actions? Are they appropriate for the topic and the stage it's in? So it, I would say you start with your KPIs and you work backwards of how do you get there for every area in marketing?

Kerry Guard 39:46

So, just so that I so for channels. We're looking at sort of typical funnel conversion rate metrics right from sessions to clicks to to downloads to you. Uh, demo requests, right for content, it sounds like it's more about engagement metrics, time on site, bounce rate, I would say, for video. One of my favorites is, you know, what percentage of the video did they watch? Do they watch 10%, 50,% 100,% and what was the length of that video to start with? Was it three minutes? 10 minutes exactly. So, yeah. So I think that's really fascinating in how you're looking at, how are you able to take all of these disparate pieces, right? You're looking at these channel metrics, you're looking at the content metrics. You're trying to pull up and talk to the board from a session demo. You know, demos requested standpoint. How are you looking at all of these moving pieces and making decisions based off of what you're seeing? Because that's a lot of absorbing to them. Yeah,

Anne Gotay 40:55

it's like Tom and Jerry, when Tom sometimes gets those like, that's how you end up at the end of the day on my own as just a human it would be really taxing. I'd be spending most of my weekends on this if I want to make sure I perform well, get buy in, maintain my personal brand, because obviously my personal brand and the agency's brand is on the hook with the board in this company as well. So stakes a little bit high. But I also need to sleep at night, or I don't make any sense, right? So, so what I'm doing is I am fully leveraging my AI partners, stock partners, so I will plug everything into chat GPT. I put in my and it's the enterprise version, so nothing goes into the abyss. I put in my marketing program, plan. I put in my strategy, I put in my weekly metrics of how did these campaigns perform, right even for a newsletter ad, for example, with Daniel measler, what we do is we take all of the data from sessions to contact creative demo requests, if there were any, we put the ad copy into AI, and then we which has been trained on the tone and brand and all of the components of drop zone, and then we talk about the results and the engagement, and then we go back and forth with AI to understand, okay, based on the last three sponsorships where we thought we were going to move the needle compared to what happened, what can we improve? Is the copy not right for the audience? Were we too far down the funnel? Has the audience exhausted our kind of awareness content pieces, right? So everything is data driven, number one, because the biggest piece, I think, that I've learned in my career is, yes, you can create your campaigns if you wait until the end of the quarter, even based on indicators to assess how to move forward, it's too late. Not just that. If a competitor has a constant iterate, constantly mindset and optimize, you're done. So that's a massive, I think, a learning curve that I took me my first half of my career to really, truly understand, especially in cyber when sales cycles are so long, how do you still make sense of stuff? And then the second piece is I on a weekly basis, I take my results and I continue to use that same thread, or at this point of project and chat GPT, and I iterate back and forth with it, and I quiz it on, what are the strengths? What are the weaknesses, if my influencer marketing this quarter that I took a bet on doesn't pay off in terms of what I was expecting, what do I need to do differently? What is going to be my stop gap and backfill? When do I pull the plug? And so now, because I, even if I have a mentor or a peer, right? One my cmo friends, have the same pain points I do. They don't want to talk about this and listen to me. Anyone else, I have to be careful of what I share. But with AI, I can really plug everything in. I can riff it's it's my sounding board, and that's my thought partner. And the more you put in, the more it learns about your scenario, right? So that's been huge in being able to parse massive amounts of data. I even found a little like error in my spreadsheet at some point, and said, Hey, here's an error, here's how I want to fix it. Thoughts, let me get you a new spreadsheet like that would have taken me so much more time on my own or to task an ops person with who then has to go back and forth with me. So that's that's been a god send in a lifesaver.

Kerry Guard 44:02

Yes, to that. I need to go. I need to go do that. I'm gonna go do that. That's, that is game changing.

Anne Gotay 44:11

I mean, thinking about how to expert either, I mean, for that, it's pretty straightforward, which is great, and expert in terms of AI. So,

Kerry Guard 44:17

Yeah, I mean, I've been using AI for all sorts of things and a little bit of analysis, but I haven't really thought about creating. I created a thread recently on website development where I give it code for the website, I ask it to rewrite it for me so that I can reuse it. And then I ask, I give it the copy, and say, Okay, now write me the temp, the page template for that. And that has, like, sped my work up significantly, and the threading, I noticed that keeping everything in the same thread has made it go faster because it has remembered and I've actually trained it. And that was sort of like this beautiful aha moment this week, of like, wow, I don't have to tell you what page I'm on. You already know what page I'm on. You know what component I'm already working on, because I've. Doing the same flow for the last few pages. So you're keeping up with me. This is amazing. So to go do the same thing, from a data analysis standpoint, I'm like, chomping at the bit. I'm so excited to go do that. My last question for you, Anne, and then I'm going to honor your time is, we're in the day and age of iteration being important, and we definitely want to be left behind. But also, but also, because of the way a lot of these platforms run, from their own AI and L and and machine learning standpoint, we have to be very, very careful to not disrupt their learning processes. So how are you managing wanting to make changes based off of the data you have today, with also recognizing that you don't want to disrupt what where it already is and what flow it's already figured out. The AI, yeah, well, with, like, with paid ads, and the way Google is with SEO, with and content with the social media. Even for social I figured out that I wasn't getting from a LinkedIn perspective, I wasn't seeing any posts of people that I actually like, and so I went and rang a bunch of bells, and I switched over to most recent versus most relevant, and because I was going out of my way to find the right people and engage with their content. When I switched back over to most relevant. Now it's all the people I want to see. So even Tiktok is the same way, right? When you start a new TikTok account, it's like nobody you're interested in, but as you train it on the content you want to see, it gets better. So it's like wanting to do that, but also knowing that it has to take time and it has to learn. And so if you iterate too much, if you make too many changes, you sort of disrupt that flow. And so, yeah, are you making changes weekly? Are you waiting? Are you looking at the data, but then really making changes monthly? Like, how are you? What's that iterative process for you and balancing? So

Anne Gotay 46:57

for me, let's take that newsletter at sponsorship, I have probably six to eight newsletters throughout a quarter their primary secondary sponsorships, which means the copy is shorter. It's further down the page for secondary. So I can't just say hands. This is not working for me. I'm going to rip it out because I spent the money and I'm stuck, right? But what we can do on a weekly basis is we can say, Okay, last time we thought, for example, our buyers guide would get 10 form fills and two demo requests out of those, but it ended up getting maybe five form fills. So maybe the buyer's guide is too doesn't have enough ROI for CISOs at this point, right? Based on the audience, it's a mixed audience of CISOs and practitioners and trying to understand. Or maybe the buyer's guide was great, but maybe the ad copy was too much focused on on pain points, for example, maybe we need to focus more on, like short listing vendors or something of that sort. And so the weekly basis kind of riffing is on, on the copy of what you're and the call to action that you have, and tweaking that based on the last results, as well as, you know, trying to warm up a net new database, whether it's a newsletter or, let's say, a series of podcasts, understanding that first you have to get that awareness and build that familiarity with the audience. You know that on average, 10% is every is a net new audience, every next new newsletter. How do we accommodate that right? And if I started with get a demo, it probably wouldn't be the right call to action. So refining each net new sponsorship and then looking at it as a whole, so monthly and quarterly as well.

Kerry Guard 48:28

So it comes down to content, iteration is the name of the game. Yeah, content is huge. It is. I find people rip and replace too often, and so I love that you're saying, No, I have to do this newsletter. I'm tied into it. I'm not going to just turn it off and accept what it is. I'm going to iterate on this content to make sure that it really, truly isn't the place that I should be. So yes, yes to that. I'm here for it, and I could talk to you all day. I have a million more questions one last thing for the audience, as they think about attribution, as they think about bringing this to the board, and as they think about how to uncover that dark funnel. Is there anything we didn't capture just that last little nugget for folks? Yes.

Anne Gotay 49:11

Stand your ground. You know what you're doing. You know how the buyer journey works. Give CEOs an executive very simple example of if you walk into a car dealership, what do you do? What happens? What does your buyer journey look like? Right? Bring them back to planet Earth and explain it is not an exact science. You need to be able to test and iterate quickly. But to your point, Kerry, not so much. Throw something at a wall and rip it off before it sticks. That's another piece. I don't think we touched much on other than you did. Founders will love to tell you to pivot on the fly a week later you didn't get my demo request. It's not working. Rip it off. Do not listen to that. Figure out what that minimum time frame is. Ask AI and insist before you even start a sponsorship. This is how long it takes to see ROI. We are not changing it, and that's all you can do.

Kerry Guard 49:59

So. Goals and expectations. Yes, give you got to give things, take time, and the iteration piece is so key on that Anna, Ah, okay, we're gonna have to have Anne back on because we have a lot more to unpack. And I'm so grateful for this conversation. Where can people find you?

Anne Gotay 50:20

You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me at cubic squared.ai. Though the website is getting a refresh, so today you won't, but we'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn or one of the marketing slack groups that we're probably all a part of. Feel free to reach out. Love to meet new people.

Kerry Guard 50:36

Love it before we go. Last question outside of work, because you are more than a marketer, what is currently bringing you joy?

Anne Gotay 50:43

Nature, being outside after sitting at my desk all day, going out with the family, the dogs my son, enduring nature is really the nicest kind of Zen you can get after a work day.

Kerry Guard 50:57

True story, and is it thought enough that you can now get outside on a regular basis. Or is it still over there?

Anne Gotay 51:05

It has, though I did the whole like, you know, going on vacation somewhere tropical hasn't happened, but maybe next time around, take me with you, sure.

Kerry Guard 51:14

Oh, and I'm so grateful. Thank you so much. Thank you. Michael Moreno, it was so good to see you. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share. This episode was brought to you by mkg marketing, the marketing agency that helps complex brands like cybersecurity get found via SEO and digital ads. This episode was hosted by me, Kerry Guard, CEO and co founder of MKG Marketing, Music Mix and mastering done by my podcast psychic Elijah Drown, and if you'd like to be a guest, I'd love to have you. PM me come on the show and thank you again. You.