How 3 companies use their customer data to create unique B2B content
Examples from Okta, Gong, & Zenput
You might have a lot of data about how customers use your products.
What if you made it public? Sounds kind of sketchy.
With the exception of a formal case study or testimonial, how your customers use your products is generally quite private. If Salesforce for example, for some reason decided to share in a LinkedIn post how many contacts you have in your database or what industries most of your clients were in – you’d probably be equally confused and upset.
But when companies analyze large groups of their customers, anonymize the data and findings, and share it publicly, things get interesting.
Some B2B companies use their customer and platform/product usage data as a proxy for broader market analysis, and package it up into valuable content for their audiences. There are two key ways that I see this done:
Industry trends: what changes in behavior have they seen in the market (on their platform) in the last six, 12, 18 months.
Industry best practices: what do the most successful companies (on your platform) do that makes them successful, compared to the average company.
Companies like Okta, Gong, and Zenput (my team) use their customer data to create content that is not only interesting and valuable for their audiences, but is also incredibly unique such that few other companies (if any) can recreate it. Here’s a closer look at how they do it.
Okta
Okta knows exactly what technology and apps your business (their customers) uses at any point in time. It’s an identity platform that businesses use for single sign-on (SSO).
Since 2016 the company has used this data about their customers to create its annual Businesses at Work report, which has made Okta the authority on trending business apps and broader technology usage trends.
The company is one of only a few in the world that has the technology and scale to make definitive data-backed statements about how apps are used by businesses, and their report shows trends and insights that people eat up year after year e.g. what was the fastest growing business app last year?
The data is super interesting and valuable for so many different reasons.
For technology buying decisions: if researching a handful of new tools or vendors to use for a specific solution, I can see which apps are most popular and trusted
For competitive research: I can benchmark my own company’s growth or stats against my competitors year over year
For VCs or investors: if I’m an investor in Notion for example I’m feeling pretty good right now, but also have perspective on direct and in-direct competitors growth and market share
Okta also knows where to draw the line in terms of which data to reveal. In the chart above for example, you see percentages but you don’t see raw data about how many customers use Notion, Airtable, etc.
Gong
Gong knows what tens of thousands of salespeople say in their sales calls.
It records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls for sales teams to make it easy for organizations to listen and learn from them e.g. how often are specific competitors mentioned, are my AEs pitching the right narrative, etc.
For its marketing purposes, Gong uses this data to provide super helpful macro insights about what “top” sales people do versus what average sales reps do.
In their Objection Handling Cheatsheet, Gong cites how it analyzed over 67,000 calls to come up with a shortlist of very useful insights – useful whether or not you’re a Gong customer.
In the example above, Gong uses data to highlight the importance of what otherwise might sound like a trivial sales tip: to pause longer when responding to a prospect’s objection. The comparison to an “average performer” underscores the significance of this tip and makes one more likely to consider it seriously.
Gong uses this data everywhere in its marketing (like the email below), which makes the company stand out because of how unique and simply valuable the material is whether or not you use the platform.
There’s an interesting distinction between how Gong and Okta use their customer data for marketing content:
While Okta creates a single, annual, long-form content piece that fuels an integrated marketing campaign, Gong opts for the more snackable approach to content creation – dripping out little handfuls of insights in a variety of topical cheatsheets and guides (like the Objection Handling Guide).
Zenput
I lead product and content marketing at Zenput, a B2B SaaS solution for restaurant chains. We help companies like Taco Bell make sure that their standard operating procedures are done really well in every store, make sure that food safety processes actually get completed, and lots of other operations related work.
In July of 2020, it still wasn’t exactly clear how businesses would cope in response to Covid-19 in the medium and long term.
We decided to take a look at our platform data to understand how quick-serve restaurants were responding in terms of the work being done in their stores. Was less work being done because of shut downs? Was more work being done because of increased sanitization procedures?
In a byline for QSR magazine, we used behavioral data of all of our QSR (fast-food) customers to share some interesting findings. We found that in response to Covid-19 there was a 280%+ increase in safety activities in restaurants; and that relative to smaller chain restaurants, the larger chains (70 stores+) relied very heavily on technology (Zenput) to coordinate their in-store responses, as seen by the jump in activity for the top/purple line below.
How can you do it?
As a marketer reading this, the question is how did they do it? How can I do it?
Maybe you’re not like Okta or Gong or Zenput with large swaths of data like this at your disposal. But you no doubt have some kind of data about your customers that you can use to pose questions like
What does the behavior of my more successful customers look like, versus the average or underperforming ones?
How does my customers’ behavior look different than it did 12 months ago?
Whether you’re a SaaS tech company, lighting manufacturer, or tennis racquet stringer, there’s some kind of unique information that you have access to with a story to be told.