• June 28, 2016
• APAC, Demand Generation, Sales and Marketing Alignment, Sales Enablement

Tech Marketer Talks: Driving Digital Growth and Actionable Marketing Opportunities across Asia-Pacific – LogRhythm

Joanne Wong is a technology marketing veteran. When she joined LogRhythm as its Singapore-based Asia Pacific marketing director, she quickly learned a lesson: a bigger marketing team doesn’t always mean better results. In this conversation, Joanne shares how she gets maximum value out of a small group of dedicated marketers and how her team is working with TechTarget to help grow LogRhythm’s digital footprint in the region.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role at LogRhythm?

I lead all marketing as well as media and analyst relations for the Asia-Pacific region. My task really is to raise the awareness of LogRhythm as a leader in our space – security intelligence and analytics – and drive opportunities for our sales team.

You have a small team. What are their roles? Is it possible to have an effective marketing strategy with a lean team to execute it?

Everyone wears a couple of hats. We effectively leverage our corporate team to maintain most of the operational aspect of marketing for us. Content marketing, as it relates to managing our social channel engines, is done centrally. However, we produce our regional-specific and localized content in region. In Asia, I’ve got a team of four, including myself. I have a marketing specialist who manages our events and a little bit of our channel marketing, and two Sales Development Reps who are key in converting all of those leads that we are bringing in – through digital, physical, and organically generated methods. Everything else falls on my plate.

Can you tell us about your most effective digital marketing campaign and what made it so effective?

My goal is to try and reach as wide an audience as I can in a short timeframe at the lowest cost possible. Digital is a huge marketing strategy for us. We utilize every tool in a marketer’s toolbox. We have great digital assets on our corporate website, but it’s hard for our potential prospects to access them because they may not even be aware of LogRhythm. So I identified the most effective platform where we were able to reach our target audience. That was TechTarget. We were able to achieve the results that we were looking for, not just raising awareness but also giving our target audience an avenue to actually reach back to us.

How do you know when a campaign has failed or succeeded?  What kind of metrics do you use to gauge the success of a digital campaign?

For a relatively lean organization like LogRhythm we do a good job with our marketing operations and systems. For every dollar that we spend, we are very mindful of how many leads and opportunities that’s going to yield and that’s how we drive our marketing, planning, and budget. Impressions are useful leading indicators, so I do review click through rates and engagement metrics. For me, those are soft metrics for awareness. At the end of the day, we are looking at effective leads and opportunities.

Is the conversion of those leads into pipeline or sales a part of your job as well?

Absolutely. As a marketing organization, we are goaled on two-key metrics: marketing leads and marketing opportunities. And we have stringent criteria around BANT to drive marketing opportunities.

How has digital marketing helped you succeed as opposed to traditional forms of marketing? 

I think we wouldn’t be where we are today in terms of getting the number of organic leads if not for digital. If you ask me, Asia is still very physical event focus as compared to the U.S. In terms of the split on the lead source, we are probably 40% digital; 60% physical. I expect that split to go in the reverse probably by the end of this year or early next year because it is easier for us to scale digital campaigns given that we’re lean.

How are you putting data to work for you?

One of the things that we do well is lead scoring – evaluating and prioritizing our leads based on the data. We use behavioral scoring, so not too different from, I guess, the logic behind TechTarget’s Activity Intelligence platform. We track users’ behavior on our website. Does this person come from a company of certain size and what role does this person have in that company? Is that a decision making role or an influencer?

Data is very important to us and we utilize insights from lead data via our own LogRhythm dashboard in our SDR function. Our dashboard helps the SDRs prioritize who to speak to first. If we’ve got 1,000 leads, our first priority will be organic leads, because we know historically from our data that they have given us the highest conversion.

How does TechTarget data play into the SDR follow-up process?

TechTarget leads are fed into SFDC and will be incorporated into our dashboard.  Since we can’t integrate the Activity Intelligence dashboard into ours, the TechTarget dashboard is used as additional tool which our SDR uses to review the lead prior to a call.

I know that the SDRs use the Activity Intelligence dashboard regularly. TechTarget marries research information from multiple users within a certain organization. We don’t do that because our lead is tied to a contact as opposed to a company. If one person from Company X is reading a LogRhythm asset that may not mean too much but if ten [from the same company] are reading it, then I’ll be very interested to find out why. The Activity Intelligence dashboard can identify that for us.

What would you say is working in the marketing campaigns that you’re currently running or have run previously with TechTarget specifically?

Prior to TechTarget we worked with another digital organization that didn’t work too well because the promise was high and the delivery wasn’t there. So when the TechTarget promise seemed similar, I was a bit skeptical. Having said that, I think TechTarget has more than over delivered what they have promised. We are working with TechTarget on a guaranteed number of leads. So as I planned with my Account Manager at TechTarget for the year, I worked backwards. From a marketing opportunity perspective, we already know based on historical data how many marketing opportunities we will need to drive our revenue target. We then look backwards on how many marketing leads we would need.

When I look at everything that I can possibly invest in and work with, whether it’s physical events or other forms of digital campaigns, I am confident that TechTarget will be delivering for me a certain percentage of my marketing opportunities. It’s comforting to have something that’s predictable.

What’s different about TechTarget? It is part technology – innovative tools to run marketing campaigns. It is part audience – content that attracts my prospects. Finally, it is part consulting. TechTarget is working with us to get the right LogRhythm assets in front of the right buyers. I don’t have an army of marketers and I can’t compete on volume of content. For us, it’s all about quality and relevance.

APAC, lead follow-up, lead generation, marketing intelligence, sales and marketing alignment, TechTarget