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Podcast Ep. 148: How To Target High Level Decision Makers

by Natalie Moe • December 2nd, 2021 • Podcast

In this episode of the Legal Marketing 2.0 Podcast, Guy is joined by Matt Kalmans. Matt is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Applecart. Applecart is an enterprise technology platform defining the new category of “decision maker marketing.” The platform has been used by hundreds of industry-leading organizations, including 20+ members of the Fortune 500 to market to high stakes B2B decision makers (e.g. senior corporate executives, policymakers, investors, and industry influencers.) Matt joins us today to give his insight on how marketers can target senior level decision makers.

Podcast Shownotes

1. What Is Decision Maker Marketing?

Instead of reaching a broad category of people, you can get a specific decision-maker, a CEO of a big company, a major policymaker, or a big investor. When you’re trying to reach that important person, it’s not enough really to show them an ad. The most powerful way to market is to market to them, and those closest to them are those individuals who are going to inform their decision-making process, which results in not marketing to a vast audience. So it reduces your advertising costs dramatically and produces a much better result than just marketing to the decision-maker themselves.

2. Do You Target at the Individual Level, or at the Group Level?

As most marketers know, it’s not possible on most advertising platforms to market just to a specific individual and nobody else. This is because there are usually size restrictions on how large an audience has to be for most publishers to serve content. However, what most advertising platforms will allow you to do is put content in front of an audience that’s a little bit larger than just one person. Still, it’s a particular audience, so if you were to tell a platform, I want to market to a specific person, and that can be that individual’s best friends or close colleagues. So they will show ads just to that group of people, and nobody else and so, in that way you’re able to market to specific people they care about without wasting money on advertising that is going to people that might not matter.

3. Does the Technology That You Have Require You to Have That Individual in Your CRM?

We maintain individual-level data that allows us to market to each of these specific individuals, regardless of whether or not you know they’re someone that’s in your specific CRM.

4. What Kind of Content Do You Think Would Be Most Effective in an Employee Targeting Scenario Where a Law Firm is Interested in Getting Their Messaging in Front of General Counsel and Their Staff from a Fortune 1000 Company?

When you’re marketing to these types of senior decision makers, they’re not people who generally like being marketed to in a conventional sense. They don’t want to get a bland display ad with a call to action. So what we suggest people market is what we call credentialed content. So if you’re trying to raise your firm’s visibility with in-house counsel out of a prospective new client, instead of promoting a display ad or something that talks about your firm, you could take an earned media article where a recent case was written about in a publication, and you could promote that article to the audience that includes the general counsel of a prospective client and those closest to them. We find that decision makers engage with that content more because it’s more credible than the content firms generate in-house.

5. If a Firm is Interested in Working With You, What Are the Steps You Would Take, and How Would You Work With Them?

So we start by the firm coming to us with a list of specific names of decision-makers.

Here are the names of the general counsels that are the 15 top prospective clients we’re trying to do business with, then we would go into our platform and identify those specific 15 individuals. Then we’d have a conversation with the law firm, and we would map all sorts of different relationships between those clients and other people. So our second step is to have a conversation with the law firm about the clients, and they tell us what types of people are in their network. And then, from there, the law firm provides us with the account IDs for the various platforms and markets they might be in or other places where they might be interested in promoting content. So from there, once we have the account ID, we can push these audiences to those platforms.

Takeaway:

The digital advertising world was built for DTC marketers and the targeting tools reflect that, but there are new innovations that allow you not just to reach groups, but specific individuals that matter most to you.

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