Neil Shepherd
- Expert in digital marketing and analytics, including user acquisition, funnel optimization, instrumentation.
- Head of growth channels at PayPal, with focus on growing user and merchant base.
- Technologist and strategist, including several years as engagement manager at McKinsey.
- My specialties include:
- Digital marketing, demandgen (have run $3m++ / mo across Google, FB, display at various times, each at industry leading LTV/CAC yields, plus content, social.... all other meaningful channels)
- Product Marketing (customer insights, persona identification, content strategy)
- Lifecycle marketing (measuring every online or offline interaction, and designing a lifecycle management system to optimize engagement)
- Lean operations (20-30% cost savings and >50% throughput improvements using lean techniques)
- Growing and building teams of up to 30 at different times (marketing professionals, digital marketers, growth hackers, analysts, data scientists and engineers)
- All 6 Best Practices
- Pre-Meeting Discovery Process
- One-on-One Call with Expert
- Meeting Summary Report
- Post-Meeting Engagement
DemandGen: You Have Product and Market Fit; Now, You Need to Grow Fast
Key Trends
- The competition in online media for high-value customers is brutal.
This is particularly the case for SEM (mostly Google) and Facebook. It is becoming incredibly expensive to acquire high-value customers and you need to be very good at doing it or you can’t afford it. It requires a well-oiled machine.
- The market is moving, and you need to experiment with new channels to grow.
Demandgen activities typically follow waves – at various times, SEM, programmatic display, Facebook, mobile, and content marketing have been a boon for those that pursued them early (and made it a bit harder for new entrants to catch up). Many of these are starting to be played out (content marketing in B2B tech is arguably saturated; SEM is into slower incremental gains now). New channels and data sources (e.g. Linkedin, Snapchat, some new, high-precision social targeting tools and third-party data) are growing quickly and can quickly give an edge over fighting it out in the traditional categories.
- Social is booming as a channel to reach people, as are the tools and options to reach people through social.
This is generally under-explored by most companies and can be done much better. The next level is this: Engaging people on LinkedIn historically has been difficult and with limited interaction. This is starting to change, and for B2B, LinkedIn is starting to become a usable channel.
More interestingly, there are now tools that let you match targeted users across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and display. This means you can snipe off high-value targets with far more effectiveness than before. But few people are doing this. The tech is getting pretty good and, in fact, is outrunning awareness.- Facebook’s look-alike targeting is out-performing many other types of discrete targeting and cookie pools.
Facebook merges its own data with third-party data (and/or your data) to create custom lookalikes that should have a very high propensity to convert. Facebook is usually thought of as more of a consumer-facing tool, but its targeting and lookalike algorithms are now very good, and are getting to the point where Facebook (especially on mobile) is now a highly-effective tool to reach business prospects.
- Branding is becoming increasingly important again.
Branding has always been important. However, in the last 10-15 years as digital marketing opportunities have proliferated, the pendulum of interest has swung to digital marketing execution.
However, these channels are arguably becoming saturated, and the cost of acquisition is so high that people are moving back to stronger brand efforts in order to differentiate themselves and reduce the cost of acquisition through word of mouth, easier brand recognition and so on. People are being more experimental or bold with their brands in a crowded market. Unless you are differentiated, you’re at a cost disadvantage in digital media – people click your advertisements less, and you get an algorithmic penalty versus better-branded competitors.- The pendulum is also swinging back to traditional channels like direct mail and, to a lesser extent, print, given the cost of acquisition on online channels.
Next generation financial services companies (e.g. Lending Club, Prosper…) get anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of new loan acquisitions and originations from direct mail. Boring old direct mail is doing better than online!
It’s easy to rely on “traditional” digital channels, because that’s worked very well in the last 10-15 years, but that’s following the herd, and the greener grass is always where the herd isn’t!