How To Use G2 To Understand and Engage Your Buyer with Robin Izsak-Tseng

Overview

In her presentation, Robin introduces G2 and how it can be used in b2b companies. Robin shares the value G2 has in intent data, integrations, and marketing solutions.

Speaker

Robin Izsak-Tseng is VP of Revenue Marketing at G2, the largest software marketplace. Robin is a growth marketing leader with demonstrated success in a range of B2B SaaS organizations

Quotes

“Buyers are relying more than ever on validation from their peers. They’re coming to peer review sites like G2.” 

“Only 38% actually consider company websites the most trustworthy source, and that’s not a surprise because obviously it’s coming from the company that’s trying to sell stuff to you.” 

Key Points

1. The value of real user reviews
2. How to use the marketing solutions G2 offers and how to apply it to your own strategy
3. The world of integrations that G2 offers

Transcript

Hey all, I’m Robin Izsak-Tseng. I’m the VP of revenue marketing with G2. And I’m really excited to be part of the demand gen summit 2022.

Today I want to talk a little bit about how to use G2 to engage and understand your buyer. I think probably most people listening to this session are tech marketers. B2b tech marketers probably have some idea of what G2 is and you’ve seen your LinkedIn feed blow up with people sharing their badges and claiming, you know, they’re a great spot on in their category as leaders in their segment in their category and we love to see it, we love to see it. But I think what a lot of people don’t know is that G2 is more than a review platform. We also have some pretty amazing marketing solutions that help b2b marketers demand gen marketers, product marketers, customer marketers, really build out a whole strategy that can fuel their funnel and fuel the whole lifecycle of a prospect and customers experience with them.

So, I kind of want to talk a little bit about how you can use G2 and how to think about G2, for similar things for your marketing team. So G2 is the world’s most influential and trusted software marketplace. We have over 16 million buyers annually stopping by they’re either coming to G2 to research solutions, maybe leave a review, or check out how their peers are using the applications that they’re thinking about buying. And it’s just a lot of traffic and activity every year. We have over 1.6 million trusted customer reviews. We have over 125,000 b2b tech products listed on G2 across so many categories. It kind of blows my mind. And we have over 1000 employees around the world and growing and here’s my favorite stat: we have 100% of fortune 500 businesses using G2. So that means either they already have their products listed on G2 and they’re using our marketing solutions, or they’re coming to G2 to research software to inform their buying decisions. And we’re really, really proud of that stat at G2. And because we have so many products across so many categories, and we have so much traffic, we have a ton of data, and so we do a lot of research and digging into that data. And we know that 90% of business buyers do their own research online, and they’ll come to you when they’re ready to buy.

This is a cliche I think we all know. You know everybody’s doing a ton of research online before they ever want to talk to sales. But here we definitely see that happen in real life, time and time again. We also know that peer experiences are super important to folks and so our product ratings and reviews, and of course I mean that’s why all of us as b2b marketers go to conferences like these. And we learn from each other. And we go to user groups and things because we really want to power our strategy with the best tools in the stack.

So not a big surprise COVID accelerated SaaS buying, not news. And we did see just a ton of traffic surging on G2 in March 2020 when everyone rushed to remote, and IT teams were in the position of quickly trying to figure out how to support fully remote workforces. And tools like webinar software, virtual classroom marketing teams were suddenly having to pivot off of in person events to the one like we’re on right now. And what’s the best software for that? I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So, the surge started with the beginning of COVID, and we really have not seen it slow down. Businesses are definitely buying more software, which again is good news for those of us that are out there marketing software solutions. So, we did see small and mid-sized companies. There are now over 120 SaaS apps deployed across these businesses. That’s 38% growth year over year. Enterprise is also going ham on SaaS with around 10% growth and then on the right, you can also see SaaS cloud in apps are totally essential to life across all teams and departments at organizations of all kinds and look not surprising at the top of that list. I think we all can’t get enough of our Martech landscape and our tech stack so yes, we’re big consumers of SaaS across the enterprise and HR collaboration CRM, finance, all of these apps, cloud apps, SaaS apps have been just exploding across organizations. Again, good for all of us. And buyers are finding more software more quickly. And they’re not making small purchases. This isn’t you know, a subscription to Canva which we also love, but these are pretty big, you know, enterprise class purchases over 100k, 150k was the average software purchase for mid and enterprise over the last 12 months. And folks plan on buying five or more tools in the coming year. And like we kind of touched down before, buyers are relying more than ever on validation from their peers. They’re coming to peer review sites like G2. And they’re really spending some time trying to figure out what people like what they don’t before they make these pretty significant investments.

One interesting thing that pops out here to me is that yes, we still go to websites. It’s the first thing we do. We’re interested in something we hit the website, there’s the demo request. But only 38% actually consider company websites the most trustworthy source, trustworthy resource, and that’s not a surprise also because obviously it’s coming from the company that’s trying to sell stuff to you. And, again, we really do like to hear from our peers. Traditional forms of trust and influence are fragmenting so only 4% of buyers trust traditional market research firms and analysts the most.

I think, you know, there’s still a place for the quadrant and important research reports that come out from these firms. I know I’ve always been in companies that have spent a big part of their marketing budget on these types of assets. And they’re, you know, they’re still used widely for lead gen. But really, what’s better than having real users of these products actually leave reviews on a site like G2 so that buyers can come and hear from real people that are actually hands on these tools every day, and not analysts that we know aren’t necessarily very hands on with the tools. And here’s a slide as I kind of transition off of like the why is kind of G2 and,and the idea of peer review is so important.

I want to kind of switch a little bit and talk about the marketing solutions that G2 offers and how to think about them for your own strategy. So, we’d like to say that we power customer led growth for b2b. And we kind of do this by helping companies. Any company can come and set up their product on G2 not any company, it has to be a legit company with a real product, but they can list it. Our research team will check it out to make sure it’s legit, figure out how to categorize the company and the product and then it’s yours to run with. You can start generating reviews and doing some cool things. Anyone can do that. Free of charge. Then when we move into how to build credibility and differentiation once you have your product listed on G2, you can log into my G2.com. You can set up your own reference landing pages that you can use in your campaigns. It’s easy to do. You don’t have to wait for your design team. You can literally put them together and get a UTM and start using it. If you want social assets to start sharing out on LinkedIn and other channels, you can download those. Again, you don’t have to wait for your design team to be awesome. And you can start driving credible differentiation from the voice of your customers. And then you can use all these tactics to start growing traffic sending traffic back to your G2 profile.

And why does this matter? Because my favorite thing that we offer marketers in G2 is intent data. G2 has buyer intent. And that means that you can start a growing pipeline and revenue by retargeting the relevant people at the companies that are researching your product on G2 or maybe they’re researching you and comparing you to your competitors. Or maybe they’re in the category that you’re in and they’re looking at the category and to me as a demand Gen marketer and a growth marketer, I want that data all day long so that actually you know my marketing strategy for a year. Give me the intent data. These people are signaling high intent by coming to G2 and researching solutions like mine and I feel like I can run campaigns to really capitalize on that. I can align with my STRS and sales.

If it’s an existing customer of ours that’s on G two comparing us to a competitor. I can align with you know my CSMs and figure out whether there’s like a churn risk there and lean in and really help reduce churn and drive growth from happy customers. And then in an ongoing way, you can always log into my G2 and just get continual insights on visits and who’s in your category and new, you know, competition that you should be keeping an eye on and things that matter so much to really everyone on the marketing team, whether you’re on the demand gen and growth side or whether you’re a product marketer or customer marketer. There’s really so much that G2 has to offer and then here’s a look at some of our integrations.

We kind of like to bucket these things into discovering target ELO’s and retain which is really mirroring your lifecycle from prospect to customer. So with our integrations like LinkedIn, Salesforce, Bombora, Google Sheets, Clearbit, lean data, Ringlead, etc. These are the integrations where we’re channeling our buyer intent data into these platforms so that we can start to enrich data and Ringlead and Clearbit and things with the companies that are on G2 to research for targeting. We talk about Marketo, HubSpot roadworks, metadata, 6sense, LinkedIn again, Terminus. These are all you know, a lot of ABM platforms or places where you can go out and target. If your target audience is IT, for example, and you use Marketo or you’re using Railworks for display advertising, you can set up the integration and push G2 intense signals into your Railworks platform. You can go right into roadworks setup in an audience that says I want to retarget IT professionals at the companies that are looking at me or comparing me or looking at my category on G2. And you can do the same on LinkedIn. And those campaigns. I promise you will convert better than anything else you’re running because you’re retargeting high intent prospects, and then close and retain more of our awesome integrations. You have, sales, loft outreach and Uber flip and some really cool integrations that you can tinker with and then for retain, we integrate nicely with Pendo, Medallia where you can serve sort of opportunities for your satisfied customers to leave reviews automatically and they get pushed in populated onto your G2 product profile so it takes some of the pain out of constantly running review campaigns and things like that which we can also help you with at G2. 

So, there’s just an absolute world of integrations that you can power your marketing campaigns with. I love this the most. And any opportunity I get to talk to b2b marketers about how they can use these. I love and we have things like office hours that everyone is welcome to whether you’re a customer, you’re not a customer, everyone can sit in on our monthly G2 office hours and learn more about how to run some of these really cool campaigns. We do like to say we have the most powerful intent data available. Because it’s true. I mean, G2 is a platform where people are coming to research solutions, and don’t you want to know as a let’s say, a demand gen marketer who those accounts are so that you can layer on your ABM strategies so that you can surface these insights to your sales team in Salesforce and align with your STRS to go after like lets you know reach out to these people together. And if you know, we say that it’s super powerful because it’s high intent. It’s not signals that are coming from all over the web. It’s really signals that are coming from G2 people coming here and researching and figuring out what do I want to invest in? I know we need a lead router. What’s it going to be, you know, I know we need some sort of security product, what’s it going to be? And it’s just such a great way to retarget those folks that are really in the market.

So, thank you all. Please feel free to reach out to me through my email. And you can always learn more about G2’s marketing solutions by coming to sell.g2.com and request a demo or just poke around and see what we have.

Have a great quarter and thanks so much.