What you need to know

• Regional marketers in B2B operations often struggle to get more control — and money for brand activities, but they can help their own cause by providing head office with evidence of local impact says Hubspot's VP brand marketing Sunil Desai. He was speaking on a panel at Inbound, the company's international customer event in Boston last week.
• He outlined a range of metrics such as the correlation between brand activity and branded search, average selling price, aided and unaided awareness, share of voice message penetration, and the growth of social media engagements and impressions over time that will catch the attention of brand guardians in head office.
• Kat Warboys, Hubspot's APAC marketing director, revealed the results of a 2021 localisation experiment that drove stronger conversations and lead influence for for the bargain basement price of a thousand dollars. And which has informed thinking and decision making since.
• Research undertaken by Hubspot and LinkedIn late last year indicated significant frustration for Australian B2B marketers when in comes to educating their HQs about the nuances of the local market.

Australian B2B marketers working for international businesses feel they spend too much time educating their head offices about local nuances. That’s a view shared by their regional colleagues, per a panel discussion at Hubspot Inbound in Boston last week.

But Hubspot’s VP brand marketing, Sunil Desai said regional marketers need to bring receipts if they want to make the case for more control and budget.

His colleague Kat Warboys who was hosting the panel session did just that, describing the results of a simple and cheap localisation experiment that delivered double digital conversation rate improvements and provided a model for future localisation requests.

Tempting though it is to position this as a breakout internecine squabble, in fact both Desai and Warboys where singing from the same hymn book. They were addressing an issue that was clearly a sore point with many of the B2B marketers in the packed session. They were also tackling a key issue identified in joint research by LinkedIn and Hubspot late last year which found that 90 per cent of marketers sid they spend too much time educating international HQs about local peculiarities. From the reaction of the audience, it’s not an issue unique to Australia.

As Mi3 reported earlier this year, when it comes to investing in brand, Australia's B2B marketers know they are doing the wrong thing by over-investing in performance and demand generation at the expense of longer term growth. Many suggest sales voices shout them down each time and that as marketers they lack the internal clout to fight back.

Budget pressures

According to Desai, hard numbers beat shouting. Especially if they can tie brand to revenue.

“With increasing pressure on budgets these days, I think every brand leader actually has to be much more data-driven. You have to start being comfortable with measurement."

"What we're finding is that there are some leading and lagging indicators. On one side, there's a big correlation between brand marketing and brand search. The other thing we shouldn't discount, we found at HubSpot [that] when we launch a campaign, we typically see higher ASP (average selling price) rates and deals closed. And so the impact on long-term profitability is there."

So what are the metrics head office wants to see to give it the confidence for further brand investment out in the boondocks?

“There's a few different things. You can look at leading indicators like branded search, and you can partner with your demand teams to figure out the correlation."

Brand beats bland

Desai said the rise of AI and the commoditisation of things like SEO will mean that personality and point of view are going to be much more important for brands in the future.

“You need that ability to stand out from the pack and your competition.”

It’s also easier to start a business than ever before, so marketers should expect increasing competition, he said.

“I think you will find companies investing in brand as a shortcut to create trust with customers. That's effectively what brand is, right? You're creating consistency. Your customers want to know what to expect and you want to be an authority in your space.”

“When it comes to how much ownership for regional versus central the truth is, most brand people are probably like quite precious, and for good reason. The goal of the brand is you're trying to create familiarity, not sameness. And so the role of a central global team is to establish the brand foundations — perhaps in partnership with regional teams if they're already established — the brand truths, the brand colours, the logo, the type, and then attach all that up into a playbook or toolkit for international teams to run with and then adapt as needed."

But he cautioned that some things are sacrosanct when it comes to brand, “Because you don't want all these different elements out in the world, you want to retain some brand integrity.”

Pricing power shift

Speaking to Mi3 he said that oftentimes when a campaign is in market there is an increase in branded search. 

“This typically has the highest ROI, it's the most valuable traffic a brand can get – because it's more likely to convert. So you want to look at that correlation.”

Desai subscribes to the widely held view that demand marketing is really good for growth, and also in driving initial numbers, and audience whereas brand is really good for driving profitability as it improves pricing power, and ultimately, margin.

“What we're finding is that directionally higher average selling price of the product increases as brand work is in market.”

He suggests there are other activities that can provide further evidence: “If you have social are you looking at engagement? Are you looking at increasing impressions per post over time? If you're managing public relations, are you looking at share of voice message penetration or the number of placements over time? If you're managing big upper funnel campaigns, where you're doing billboard ads, for instance, aided and unaided awareness are things that you as a brand marketer need to start just paying attention to.”

And keep sharing that data up the line.

A grand well spent

That's something his colleague, Hubspot APAC marketing director Kat Warboys understands. She said that after noticing demand from the website had slipped, her team started discussing how best to 'Australia-fy' the content. But they came to the conclusion that just wouldn't work.

The reasons she said was that the blog was very 'how-to' focused with very instructional content.

“How do you do search or how to do social media? It’s the same way you search in the US versus Australia."

Instead they focussed on the potential to localise an audio ad designed for a podcast sponsorship.

"My team in Australia was really curious about how much would accent have an impact. We were running some audio ads on podcasts. And we took the script, which at that point had a US voiceover accent and we did the same script, but with an Australian accent.”

The local Hubspot team ran an experiment for two months in 2021 to test the hypothesis that they would see stronger performance with an Australian rather than American accent as listeners would connect more with someone who sounded like them.

They also opted a female voice – for the very simple reason that the show’s hosts were both male voices, so they believed the advert would cut through.  The results confirmed the theory. The Australian voice actor ads had a conversation 13 per cent higher than the American host-read ads. The localised ads also influenced just over a third more (35 per cent) leads than the host read ads.

Not a bad result for a $1,000 investment.

The lesson the team took is that localisation is about much more than just direct language translation.

“It's actually similarity, it's resonating, it's accents, it's all of those things."

It also gave the local team ammunition for greater localisation moving forward, said Warboys.

“It really helped us champion the need for that type of localisation. This has been a continuous journey where we work with our global teams to educate them on our market. So the next time we have ads, are we going to localise them? The answer is absolutely, yes. And yes, we've done more," she said.