To Gate or Ungate Content, That is the [Marketing] Question

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Mark Evans: Hey. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. One of the best things about LinkedIn is how people are willing to respectfully disagree disagree with you. It's a place for constructive criticism and insightful conversations. A few weeks ago, I published a post on the merits of gated versus ungated content and the benefits for b to b SaaS companies looking to drive brand awareness and leads. A comment that caught my attention came from Jonathan Bland from OmniLab Consulting. He not only offered up his thoughts about gated content, but suggested that we connect to discuss it. And so here we are. Welcome to the podcast, Jonathan.

Guest: Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: So let's dig into ungated versus gated content. From my perspective, I'm on the fence. On one hand, I see the value of gated content by companies operating in a market with a few 100 potential customers. You wanna connect with those people. You wanna know who they are. Mhmm. On the other hand, I see ungated content as having value for companies looking to drive brand awareness in highly competitive spaces. Now that's my view of the world. How do you see it? Because I think we're coming from it from different perspectives. And the reason why I wanna do on the podcast, one of the reasons is that you've got a different take on things, and I'm really curious for us to get into it.

Guest: So I think we have to back up for a second and actually talk about why people started gating in the first place and why it even exists. And and the big reason that people have started gating or weren't gating, you know, years ago, ten ten, fifteen fifteen years ago, is because there wasn't easy access to third party data where you could literally just look up with filters and firmographic criteria and say, hey. I need a couple of emails for these people, and I'm gonna go after them. There there there weren't data providers like that that were really good. So people needed to capture someone's email address in order to go after and contact them. That then fast forward a little bit, and now HubSpot's kinda become the behemoth that it is. And they've been marketing the idea of doing email nurtures and taking in emails and calling them MQLs and running them through a waterfall of sending them personalized content, etcetera. So in order to feed that beast, you need more emails. So that that sparks the reason more to have gated content running so that you can, again, run those plays, which, again, feeds more into, HubSpot's model, which, of course, is to sell you more of, the marketing contacts that are in their system. One of the variables they use for charging, charging you what they charge. So I think that those are two things to keep in mind. I think the the reality of what's happening now, though, is that people don't need to pay money, and especially the price that they're paying for an email off a gated piece of content. They don't. Because they can go out and get that same email address from a third party data provider and, frankly, with almost the same intent. Because I would argue that on LinkedIn and Facebook, most of those people that are actually downloading your top of funnel content, they don't have a lot of intent. There's a little bit, certainly. There's maybe some interest in the content you're looking at, but these are people that like reading and consuming that content. So so there's a big big issue there that I see. The other is that, you know, kinda talking about why people gate is they need attribution in the channel itself. So you look at LinkedIn and Facebook. They're low intent channels. People are generally not looking to buy right now. They're looking to be educating, looking to engage with friends, family, coworkers, whoever. Right? They're not looking necessarily to buy right now. So, again, most of the CMOs, most of the VPs of marketing, at least, that we're working with are running it because they wanna make sure that they can hit some type of an MQL number and say that, hey. We can justify the ad spend on LinkedIn and on Facebook and say, hey. The $10,000 that we spent on LinkedIn, that was worth something. Right? Because we got x amount of leads out of it, and the cost per lead was x, and that meets the unit economics that we were trying to hit earlier. But the issue with all of that that I have is that all of these you know, or really, I guess, maybe where I should go is where they should be thinking about these channels is using them instead not to capture an email address that has very low intent where they're paying an absorbent amount of money on. They should instead be opening up that content, getting maximum reach on it, trying to use as much of the content that they're trying to send that person to and get that into the actual ad itself so they consume it. Because, again, you're looking at 1%, maybe higher if you've got a really good engagement on an ad. 99 roughly of those people are not gonna click and follow through and get off the platform. So making sure that you can get as much of that content in that ad and educate them there so that, ultimately, in the longer term, as they start seeing more content, whether that's product marketing, events, webinars, content blogs, case studies, all of these things that we can distribute, ultimately, you want is have them come back into your cycle when they're actually ready to buy versus throwing them into a funnel and saying, alright. Now I have your email. Now what I'm gonna do is throw you in this linear journey where you're gonna first go here, then you're gonna go here, and then you're gonna go there, which we all know that just doesn't happen. We don't buy that way. I mean, have you ever bought a product where literally you're like, oh god. Thank god I got that number three email and got that little piece of content. Now I'm really I really wanna move forward. It's like, no. That's that's not what's happening here. So so those are, I guess, some of my initial thoughts on it. There's a lot of lot of things to say about gated. Again, not necessarily always a bad idea. And then in fact, one thing to say that's a little bit counterintuitive here to what I'm just saying is sometimes we'll actually run gated in order to get data back about what the conversion rates are after you actually collect all those emails. So for for early stage companies that are like, oh, they've read the HubSpot playbook. They wanna get into it. You know, we're looking at alright. Well, if you haven't run it before and you're really curious and you're really just motivated to do this, let's go ahead and run it, but then let's go ahead and look at what the conversion rates are after we've run that campaign. So we'll look at three, six months, and twelve months out of, hey. For the emails that we actually collected from that gated ebook or that gated piece of content, whatever it may be, how many of those actually convert? And what we see is that a very small amount convert. We're talking, you know, 1%. So one out of a thousand are converting off of that ebook. Whereas you can be much more effective when you're actually driving people to a higher intent type of conversion, which is people that are actually raising their hand, wanna talk to sales, etcetera, and then get them into a motion there. And you'll obviously see conversion rates a lot different. So, anyway, stop there. Those are some of my thoughts, I guess, initially.

Mark Evans: That's a lot of thoughts in in one in one answer, but let's unpack. There's a lot to unpack here. Yep. I guess the question that a lot of marketers are asking is whether gated content is dead, whether it no longer makes sense to secure an email because there's not a lot of value there. And as you say, a lot of it is low intent activity. And whether it's better and a friend of mine, Steve Watt, who's a very well known b two b SaaS marketer, suggests that it's better to get it out there to drive as much distribution as you can so that you get into the buyer's universe. They start thinking about you. They recognize, hey. This is really great content, and then you can hit them from different sides of the marketing equation. I mean, there are situations, of course, where you do wanna experiment with gated content. But for the most part, I think what you're suggesting is that it really isn't a viable marketing tactic anymore, particularly because there's so much ungated content out there.

Guest: Yeah. I mean, I guess there's there's two things. One, you haven't done it before, so you don't have data on how effective it is, and you're really curious to understand what those conversion rates look like. The other is you're already doing it today. You're doing a ton of gated content. And if your measure of success was generally for those that are doing a lot of gated content, a lot of times the measured success is in QLs. It's the number of conversions you're getting off of that spend. So for those, we need to be very careful. You don't just pull gated down and say, well, it's just that easy. Let's just ungate everything. I mean, if it was that easy, everyone would have already ungated everything already. The reality, though, is you just, again, have to come back to how are marketers being measured, which I talk about a lot on LinkedIn, and the measurement is very critical. And if the measurement today for a VP of marketing is a number of MQLs and an MQL for them is a download, then getting them away from gated immediately would be a bad idea. We need to first initially figure out ways to move away from that in a slower manner so they can still hit some of their short term goals and then figure out how do we find a new measurement of success for them. Because, ultimately, the CEO is gonna come back and some point say, hey. Where's the pipeline and where's the revenue that we're getting from marketing? While marketing's still saying, hey. Listen. Like, you know, we're measured on leads. That's what you told us to do. So there's constantly this back and forth. So I think there's a two little two little caveats to thinking about just going away from gated completely and when you should do it.

Mark Evans: You mentioned, you know, one of the problems in marketing right now in in modern day marketing is this friction between marketing and the CEO. And that they don't opt often operate in partnership, in collaborative partnerships. It's almost like they're opposing forces. And that's one of the reasons why marketers are under under the gun. And one of the reasons why marketers the tenure of of the CMO continues to shrink because there's so much pressure on marketers to perform. And you're right. They do depend a lot on MQLs, which, as you say, are very low intent, and they're they're simply an expression of interest more than anything else.

Guest: Well, I'll just I'll just I'll just interrupt you one for one second just to clarify what I just said there. MQL depends on how you define it, though.

Mark Evans: Right.

Guest: Depends on how you define it. Someone might define an MQL as a higher intent lead that has actually come in via demo request. So that's also possible. So just wanna clarify that for the

Mark Evans: Yeah. There were different ways to slice and dice about a lot of MQLs are just somebody who's at most curious, but marketers need attribution. They need to justify I'm spending this much money. You're paying me this much money. Exactly. So they need some tangible metrics. And I think that's part of the problem right now is that how you measure marketing is becoming increasingly difficult. Chris Walker talks about the dark web, and we're gonna get into it. And the fact that attribution is is increasingly challenging. So as a marketer, like, what do you do right now in terms of trying to quantify your success?

Guest: It comes back to looking things at an aggregate. You've gotta get away from the channel and looking at how each channel is individually performing and saying, when I go into LinkedIn or Facebook, I don't necessarily need to see a billion leads in LinkedIn and Facebook. What I need to do is I need to look at my overall aggregate marketing engine. And what I wanna see is and this is what we look at across all the b to b SaaS companies we work with. We first look at how many high intent leads are we driving to the company. High intent leads for us, meaning people that are coming in looking to talk to sales. That could be contact us. It could be a live chat. It could be demo request. Right? It's the first thing we're looking for. I don't necessarily care what channel they came from. Right? I don't care. My point is before that, I'm just saying, if I've got an audience that's on LinkedIn, if I've got an audience that's on Facebook, if I've got an audience that's on Reddit, wherever that audience is, I wanna make sure that I have messaging in front of them that's not only making them aware of my brand, but educating on them how we can help solve a problem, pain, or a want or desire, something that they are looking for. And I wanna make sure I have that message in front of them. So first of all, we're literally looking at that from the aggregate. Right? Mhmm. And then we're saying, alright. Overall, are we driving more marketing source pipeline to the business? And marketing source pipeline for me is, again, you know, you're tagging that person that came in as looking to talk to sales. Did that person ultimately convert to pipeline? And we're saying conversion rates when you look at this, you know, upwards of 30 to 65% on on lead to opportunity when you classify it as a high intent lead, someone coming into wanting to talk to sales. And then the last is, of course, marketing source revenue. So, really, those are the three, and then there's some tertiary things around it like ACV growth, sales cycle decreasing, was our CAC payback look like, things of that nature to make sure that we're obviously justifying what's going on. But that's what we're looking for. And I have these conversations all the time. And and, frankly, just the other day talking about it, everyone was panicking like, oh my god. Where are the leads out of LinkedIn? Where are the leads? And we're not gating any content. We get very little leads off of LinkedIn directly attributed. Mhmm. If you go into the channel, it would look like it's a train wreck. We're spending thousands of dollars. Where are the leads? However, we know that our audience is there. We know that the engagement is very high. Right? We can see that time on page, bounce rate's low, CTR is very high. We know there's a good engagement with the content. We know that as we continue to spend more money, we're starting to drive more high intent demos to the to the brand. So so these are the things that at least that I look at. I, again, try to keep things very simple. I think marketing's gotten so complex. We're always constantly creating new acronyms. It's none of it's necessary. We just really need to kinda bring it back to the basics and realize, like, ultimately, what are the numbers we're trying to move forward? And by the way, those numbers are the same as sales. Right? I mean, sales

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Guest: Were aligned with the same pipeline number. And, yes, I do like to split the funnel and understand, hey. What does marketing bring versus sales? Because, ultimately, marketing should bring the lion's share of the pipeline to sales. Overall, I wanna see that trend. That's another thing we look at as well. What is the percent of marketing source pipeline that we're bringing as it compares to the whole? So stop myself there, but those are a couple of things I look at and don't get too lost in looking channel by channel.

Mark Evans: I love the idea of of simplicity versus complexity and the fact that, you know, we often lose sight of the fundamentals because as marketers, we're fascinated with metrics, KPIs, and all the tools at our disposal.

Guest: Mhmm. And one

Mark Evans: of the biggest challenges for marketers these days is attribution, and we've touched upon it a little earlier and the fact that it is increasingly difficult to correlate what you do to end results. And there's this whole notion of the dark web, and it's things that we have known before. Like, we have known, for example, that a prospect is 70% down the pipeline according to Gartner before they even touch a company, before they even contact a company. So they've already done their due diligence and research. Yep. And that's a different type of relationship. There's a lot of, you know, recommendations going on, people checking out g two and Capterra, people sourcing, as you say, looking at content on LinkedIn. So there's all this marketing activity going on and consumption going on, we don't see any of it. So as a marketer trying to justify what you're doing tactically and strategically and trying to say to your boss, listen. We're doing a good job. You know, how do you deal with the dark web? Like, how do you recognize that there's a lot going on, and how do you get any kind of insight into it so you can adjust what you're doing from a strategic and tactical perspective?

Guest: Yeah. It's a great question. I think the first thing you need to do is before you start investing heavily in these dark web areas, these are communities, podcasts, you name it. I mean, all of these different things that know, all these different places that you can be. Before you do that, you need to be able to hit your short term goals before you can even get the support to actually go after some of those longer term initiatives.

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Guest: Podcast isn't something that you're just gonna start in a month later. All of a sudden, leads are reigning in. You can't set the expectations with your CEO like that. So first of all, it's meeting initial pipeline goals, and those can be done, by the way, without making large investments in the dark web before. But as you as you get past that and as you start, you know, to be able to hit some of those initial goals on the short term perspective, then it's about saying, alright. Which of those channels do we really feel like, are are worth investing more time in? And you guys, you have to pick. Right? I mean, especially for an early stage company, you can't be on all channels doing all things. But, again, with a very small team, you should be able to do a very good job of at least doing a kinda baseline podcast, getting some organic content out on LinkedIn, getting a little bit more active in some communities where your audience is hanging out. And then the on the attribution front, the way that you think about it there is you can put, number one, a form on your website that just says, how did you hear about us and make it required. That's one way. You can hear about it in the sales, sales calls when you're recording with, hopefully, Gong or Chorus or whatever tool you use to record those calls. You can hear what people are saying and how they're hearing about it and train your sales reps to ask. You can see it in the engagement and the likes and the comments and what people are saying so that you can say, hey. Is this content actually resonating? Are people actually engaged with this? In fact, I mean, it's one of the ways that, honestly, OmniLab has grown to where it is. We don't do any outbound at all. We do I I mean, literally everything that we do is just through LinkedIn. And it's just writing content and trying to be helpful, educate people, connect with the audience, etcetera, and that's it. And and the way that I judge success is I hear people talk about it. When they call me up and they say, you know, I don't even have to ask how did I hear about you. They say, oh my god. I love your content. Like, the the post that you had the other day said, blah blah blah blah. It was really interesting. It made me think about this x y z or, hey. We really align on what you just said there. And those are my signals to be able to say, I know this is working, right, because I'm getting the qualitative signals. Maybe I don't have it in a nice perfect report. LinkedIn hasn't spit out an organic report that said, you got x amount of leads and that generated this amount of pipeline and revenue. But I know and I just know because I'm hearing it. I feel it. So when it's working and it's going well, you you don't you're not gonna need data. You're not gonna need data in the form of a quantitative, like, attribution report to say it's tied to the specific account is what I mean.

Mark Evans: Businesses like ours and we're arguably boutique businesses, I think we're living and breathing the power of LinkedIn every day. Like you, I produce a lot of content. A lot of the leads that I get, and I do get a lot of leads from LinkedIn, are people who have never engaged with me. I never see their comments. I never see their likes. They're invisible. Like, they are dark. The fact of the matter is it's almost like like a test like a laboratory for what kind of marketing works these days. And the fact that people are reading content and they are looking at comments. And you after a while, it starts to resonate and you become a resource that they that they trust. And I think that's really, really interesting. One of the things that I'm curious about is when you're a fast growing company and you look at the marketing mix, as you say, you can't be all things to all people. You cannot be everywhere. Given what's happening in the dark web, given what you can and can't attribute, how do you create the right marketing mix? How do you know that you're actually doing the right things at the right time?

Guest: Within the dark web, specifically, you're talking about.

Mark Evans: Overall, including the dark web. Because some of the stuff you can see, you can see if I do this, this this happens, and some of it you can't see. So how do you know you're putting you're you're pulling the right levers?

Guest: Well, I mean, the basic mix, I mean, in terms of, like, what we see across all the different companies we work with is, you know, it's a combination of usually search, LinkedIn, Facebook, a podcast, and organic content on usually LinkedIn, sometimes other platforms. But, typically, those are that's that's the mix. Right? Initially, when we start working with a lot of these brands and even some today, honestly, a lot of them have probably 70 to 80% of their budget on search. They're all thinking about how do we capture right now and convert those those people into leads. And while search is a very important channel, I was actually just talking about this today, The point is is that you need to start leveraging more and getting ahead of the demand, being the person where they're actually figuring out and finding your brand, which is in social channels, which is in communities, which is talking to friends and doing those other things and reallocating your budget. So immediately, what I think about and and this is not a hard rule, but, you know, I'm generally looking at forty forty to 50% of the budget potentially on search, the other half across dark web channels, the other half around paid social, anything that related to social media because that's, again, where people are figuring out about your brand, where they're finding hearing about who you are, what you do, what you can offer from, whether it's a product marketing perspective, events. I mean, you name it, whatever type of content you wanna throw across it. So I think that's initially the mix that we're typically deploying in the way that I think about it. But, ultimately, it comes back to, are we hitting our initial short term goals on some of the key channels where we can potentially track things a little bit better because a lot of people are nervous at first if you're in that position? Others, you know, you're potentially a lot more calm and centered, you know that, hey. You understand marketing. You understand that these things do take time, and you're not gonna be able to attribute everything. And for those companies, some of the ones that we talk to, they're a blank slate, which is great. We can build out a whole new plan for them and get them immediately engaged where their audience is, whether that's organically on a podcast, you name it, etcetera. But, again, you know, it just comes back to, you know, figuring out how many resources do I have to pull out, you know, push out some great content. And, again, the great thing about a podcast is that you've got the video, you've got the audio, you can repurpose it, you can you can subtitle it, you can put it out into blog posts, etcetera. So it's extremely versatile in terms of what you can do with the podcast to really stretch that content. So you think about the investment in a podcast is not really massive for people if you think about just that one piece of content. So so that that's generally how we think about it.

Mark Evans: Let's talk, tactical execution, and I'm glad you mentioned the idea of a podcast because with many of my clients, I'm an advocate for podcasting. I jumped on the bandwagon just over a year ago, and the benefits have been there's so many benefits to podcasting. James Carberry of SweetFreshMedia suggests that it won't be long before every b to b SaaS company needs a podcast just like every b to b SaaS company has a blog. Is that the reality that you're seeing? Is podcasting so attractive that there's it's a no brainer to to launch one?

Guest: No. I'm not seeing that at all, actually. I'm still seeing a very, very small few that have, really dive, you know, have have dove in into building out a podcast. And and frankly, what I what I what I actually see more of is let's build a podcast to see if we can get a bunch of leads. And then say the sixth, tenth, twelfth episode, they shut the whole thing down because it didn't generate anything. Right. So typically, that's what I'm saying. I'm not saying that there's consistency in staying with it. There's people that wanna try it out, but there's so much expectation around making sure that podcast is actually delivering on leads. And the thing about it is is, again, podcasts are very, very hard to attribute. There are certainly little ways that you can do it. But at the end of the day, people are hearing your podcast. They may not be participating. They may have gotten the recorded version. They may got a repurposed thing. They didn't click. So many different holes and being able to track that. But, again, you know, no. I I'm not seeing a whole lot of p two b SaaS companies that are diving in head deep to podcasting. If they do, again, they they stop after a few months.

Mark Evans: Yeah. It is interesting because I have a client who I convinced to get into podcasting, and there have been times when the CEO says, where are the leads? How many downloads am I getting? And my argument is that there are lots of benefits to doing that. You know? It is it is conversations that people are listening to. There's lots of ways that you can repurpose podcast content and really connect with with prospects and customers. So I am obviously a big advocate. The other way that I wanted to ask you about is, is the benefits of advertising beyond clicks. Because, you know, we spend a lot of money as b two b marketers on advertising. And often, you know, there's the correlation. If I advertise this much, I'm gonna get this many clicks to lead to this many leads and sales. But Mhmm. That's not always the way it works, and maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Guest: Yeah. A 100%. Exactly. I mean, was like I said before. You've got 99% of people that are generally not clicking on your ad. So what are they doing? They're the ones that are scrolling past it, not clicking. Either the content wasn't engaging enough or some other reason that just didn't prompt them to actually click because it wasn't making a connection. But the point is is that what you need to do is make sure that you're actually and this is where I said this a little bit earlier, but make sure that what you're putting in your ad is designed so they can be consumed almost in its entirety or at least the the the bulk of the message you wanna get across in the actual ad copy itself, in the creative. Mhmm. Make sure that they can get it and consume it and stay within the platform. Most people wanna stay in the platform. They're scrolling through. They're engaging with people. They're talking to people. They're reading about who said what, So they don't wanna leave necessarily all the time to go off to a landing page and then go read more about the company and convert. So it's really important that everything at least that we do in creative is really important to make sure that, number one, we're getting most of the message out in the copy and in the creative so that it can be consumed there so that we don't have to get the click. We're getting people that are actually being impressed upon by the the content. And then over time, we're getting them coming back into, you know, coming back into our bucket and saying like, hey. Yeah. I would actually like to talk to sales when they're ready. And we're seeing that too in the forms. So for for we've implemented across a lot of different companies, but, you know, people are saying, how did you hear about us? They're saying LinkedIn. They're saying social media, things of that nature. Some variations, obviously, it's data's never perfect, but we're seeing that. And so we know that they there's definitely a whole lot going on past the clicks. So sometimes you can't put it in perfect marketing math, right, to your point where you say, okay. This many clicks, this many visits, this many current versions of the website, so on and so forth. It just it just isn't that easy.

Mark Evans: The other area that I wanna touch upon is demos. I recently had somebody on who you know, all is all is all about demos. And it is the holy grail for a lot of b to b SaaS companies. I mean, you can frame it, talk to an expert, learn more. But ultimately, what you want is conversations. You want people to ask for a demo request because as you said earlier, it's high intent. So the question is, as a b to b SaaS company, how do you drive demos? How do you get people to actually wanna talk to your salespeople? Because there's a lot of reticence out there because no one wants to be oversold, but they do wanna learn. So what are best practices when it comes to driving demos?

Guest: Honestly, you want to do so much marketing actually in the front end that they don't even really need to be sold. So when they ultimately get to talking with an AE, they've already been so educated, and and you've removed the barriers from a friction standpoint. You've got transparent pricing. You've got easy content that's not gated, that's easily accessible. You've got product little short clip product videos that speak to the story and the problem that your clients have. You've got easy to understand language on your website that isn't technical or filled with jargon and acronyms. It's outcome based. It's written very simply with the fewest words possible. And when you do all these things, right, over time, you make it so easy for the person to understand what you do that they come in and they already are pretty much sold on going with you, that the sales rep really is there to maybe just ask a few little, you know, questions, make sure that they're qualified, whatnot, and then move them through. They're already ready to go. So I think that, honestly, what I'm seeing is that there's gonna be a transition at some point where the salesperson's really honestly starting to change. I mean, for a a company that's really doing awesome marketing, the salesperson almost turns into more of, like, a customer success manager or someone that's really just there to kinda be a lending hand and kinda bring them through to the rest of the deal. So that that's honestly, like I mean, if if marketing's been really well, and I guess getting into some of the tactics around that, again, it's kind of like some of the things I was just saying there. I mean, getting getting transparent pricing, ungated content, opening up, product videos. Don't be and a lot of a lot of companies hide hide their product. They don't wanna put it out there. They think if they put out their demo video that they're not gonna they're gonna decrease leads. And a lot of times they do, but they ultimately educate people more and let them either qualify themselves out and learn more about the product. Six sense is a great a great example of this. They have great product videos that are very educational. They're not just about the product itself, but they're outcome driven, and they help you understand what it does and what it is. You know? And I think if a lot more companies took that, to heart and not worried about gating everything and putting lead forms behind everything and making it more difficult for the person to buy, you would have a whole lot more people coming through, and that sales cycle will be a lot shorter.

Mark Evans: Yeah. And, ultimately, you wanna reduce friction. I mean, the harder you make it for people to learn about your company, the more difficult you make it for people to understand what you do and the benefits and ultimately what's in it for them, the more cautious they're gonna be and the more likely is that they'll go to somebody else. And I think that's one of the things that we have to think about as marketers is we wanna make it as simple and as easy to engage with us and ultimately to buy from us.

Guest: People people will always choose the least path of resistance. Always. So if you're making it harder, then they're gonna be going to your competitor, as you said. That's just the way it's gonna work. They're gonna go wherever it's easier to buy. And if you make it hard for them and if you hide information, put put put walls up, you're only you're only shooting yourself in the foot.

Mark Evans: I think that's a great way to wrap things up, and thanks for all the great insight, Jonathan. Where can people learn more about you and Omnilab?

Guest: Yeah. So the easiest place is find me on LinkedIn, just Jonathan Bland, Omnilab. That should be able to find me. Or you can go to our website, just omnilabconsulting.com and read a little bit more about us there. But, generally, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So, yeah, shoot me a message or or reach out if you guys have questions.

Mark Evans: And in a snapshot, maybe you can tell people what OmniLab does.

Guest: Yeah. So, the core of it, we're a demand gen b to b SaaS agency. So we predominantly work with c to series b, stage companies. We run paid media for them. So we're really, first of all, kind of aligning with, number one, pipeline and revenue goals. It's a big thing that we do, make sure that we're understanding what's actually happening within their CRM and optimizing ad channels accordingly. Typically, it's Facebook, LinkedIn, search, really, the gamut from a paid social perspective. And then, obviously, we do a whole lot of creative analytics work as well to kinda wrap everything together. But, again, biggest thing for us that I can I can't harp on enough is, you know, we're not a lead gen type of agency? We're an agency that ultimately is aligned with whatever the goal is that marketing has, which typically for us people that are aligned with pipeline and revenue so that we can focus on driving high intent inbound demo request through to the company.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and, of course, share via social media. To learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@marketingspark.co or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you next time.