2022 Growth Trends: Buyer Journey Marketing with Moni Oloyede

Today we're speaking with Moni Oloyede, the Director of Marketing Infrastructure at Fidelis Cyber Security, the industry innovator in proactive cyber defense solutions.

She's also an expert in all things digital marketing, marketing automation, and inbound marketing.

In this interview we discuss:

• Creating marketing campaigns across the buyer journey
• How to get back to the basics of marketing
• Why current marketing trends and tactics are failing

​​I started out in cybersecurity and have been in marketing technology and digital marketing. I've worked with B2B and B2C clients, doing consulting and in-house work. I've worked with small businesses, SMBs, midsize, and enterprises.

So I've seen the gamut across my 15 years in the industry.

The most innovative campaigns that I've conducted and I have seen have been across the buyer's journey. Not only identifying people where they're at but bringing them along for the entire journey, connecting campaigns to make an entire end-to-end program.

For example, doing a digital SEM campaign, doing paid advertising search or something on LinkedIn. That ad leads to a retargeting ad.

Once they get to your website, you target them with a different ad that actually has a conversion on it, a white paper download per se, and then you can nurture them and lead them to microsites that have more information about the product or solution.

Then send them direct mailers that have an offer for a meeting or a demo or something like that.

Bringing the entire campaign along through the whole journey. Those are the kind of innovative campaigns that I like to do now.

Meet people where they're at. We want to boil the ocean with one campaign. It doesn't really work like that.

You want to tell a story through the journey. I use the white paper because, with advertising, you're educating, right? It's just like who we are, what we do, what we offer, sort of a brand type of ad.

Then you want to have a conversion point where they raise their hand and say, yes, that's my pain point. That's maybe a white paper or webinar, you can have any kind of offer there.

But you want a conversion point that indicates that you have identified what their pain point actually is.

That's when nurturing comes into play, where you're trying to find where people are in their journey. Are they ready to buy? Are they just educating or are they kicking tires?

Don't bombard them with a bunch of emails that aren't relevant to what they're actually trying to solve. Not everybody's ready to buy right here.

That's part of marketing, too. You just want to stay top of mind. That’s how I like to focus the marketing.

First of all, let's not try to boil the ocean and recognize that you want to meet people where they're at and bring them along in the journey again.

It takes some time, especially if you're a B2B company.

Know your audience. You got to start to know your audience and not just buyer personas.

Marketing is the communication of value, despite what other people will tell you. And the communication part is about not only just talking to people or talking at people, but it's listening and listening with empathy.

Once you have empathy for your audience and you know what they actually care about, then you’re able to speak to them.

It's not, oh, the CEO at a Fortune 500 who reads The Wall Street Journal.

What is his actual pain? What is his actual day? Does he get up at 06:00 a.m.? Does he like to work out? Does he read his emails at 05:00 a.m.?

That's knowing your audience with empathy. What are his challenges during the day? Does he have to interact with the board? Does he have to deal with other directors?

It’s better than knowing that he's the CEO and he's 55, that doesn't really help you out a whole lot.

So listen to know your audience.

After that, you can better speak to them and craft your messaging and your assets much easier.

Back to basics and I've been preaching that for a long, long time.

I think we've gotten away far away from the core of what marketing really is, which is really my passion and what I want to teach in the future, and what my own personal business is going to be around.

We've gotten focused on social media and trying to game the algorithm and doing a bunch of tracking and data, and it's all of the nuance and none of the core.

That's why people spin their wheels a lot and feel like they go around in circles. I feel like people spend more time trying to game the algorithm than actually doing the core of marketing, which is serving your customer.

That's why the audience is so important. If you know your audience and give them what they want, this is actually really easy.

But marketers get caught up in I got to show stats and I got to prove ROI and this that and the other thing.

If you invest in your customers and serve them well and give them what they want, you won't have a problem with revenue at all. But we have the opposite mindset nowadays.

My passion is really just going back to the basics. I hammer that marketing is the communication of value, it's not getting attention.

Content marketing is important and we need content. I feel like it's a little bit of overload and people have gone too far with just creating stuff for the purposes of creating stuff that has no real meaning behind it.

It's just like I need a video because people like to watch videos. Well, what do they want to watch about? How long should it be? Where should it be in the journey? Or, I need a white paper or a webinar.

We're doing stuff to do it and not with any purpose behind it. And the goals and the metrics are arbitrary. They're just pulled out of the sky.

Let's go back to actual strategy, actual focus, and build one step at a time.

Everybody wants to have ROI in 2 seconds. Like digital marketing has made us believe that we're supposed to get results in five minutes. And it's not building relationships with customers, that takes time.

There are two companies that I've been a fan of and think do content really well. I have to give it up to HubSpot. I think they do an excellent job at content. They always have.

It's been their focus, but they also innovate. They haven't been the company that stays just doing the one thing.

SEMrush is another company that I think does really well. Now they're an SEO company, so it makes sense. But they also push it forward.

I like HubSpot's content, and I like SEMrush’s omnichannel. They do good on social, they do good with their blog, they do good on digital. Their channels all connect together and they tell a story very well.

I'm actually going to go back to SEMrush, I think it's a phenomenal tool.

It's so helpful because one of the things with SEO that people kind of get backward is they look for the ideal keyword and not the keyword or key phrases that people are actually searching for, which is always the biggest struggle.

That keyword has got low CPC on it and we can optimize for it really well. But only ten people are searching for it. So how effective is it really?

SEMrush is super helpful with identifying those things and gives you so much data and competitive data and strategy on how to actually apply the keywords where it makes sense for your business.

So I'm in that tool every day. I love it.

As you said, I am the director of Marketing Infrastructure at Fidela Cybersecurity. We do end-to-end threat detection and response.

I personally have my own website where I kind of do just this - marketing basics and teach other marketers how to do marketing effectively. It's MOmartech.com ​