Why Build an Insights Team?
Making the case for a new part of your marketing org
Excited to finally be sharing some of the many learnings I’ve had building the Insights team at Carta over the past 2 years!
I firmly believe Insights will become a standard function in the best B2B marketing teams over the coming years. But what is it? Why is it different from typical demand generation strategies? And how can it impact your ultimate marketing goals?
Let’s dig in.
What is the Insights function?
Insights teams work to systematize the creation of valuable content from a pool of proprietary data.
Systematize:the building of formal methods in parallel to the creation of actual content
Valuable: the audiences in question use these answers to make better decisions or guide future action
Proprietary: the content is driven by data accessible only to the company, by dint of its customers or place in the ecosystem
Note: this is not just surveying customers and reporting their responses. Surveys can augment Insights, but aren’t the main course.
Data visualization is a key part of an Insights practice. Of course statistics can be used in a variety of ways - but data presented simply and elegantly should be at the core of your content.
Why should companies invest in Insights?
Marketing is full of tired channels. There is a limit to how many outbound email nurtures can be sent to a prospect base before they all merge into a single, formless stream of ignorable shouting.
Insights gives your business a reason to be part of the conversation beyond the specifics of your product. At scale, you answer the questions of your audience with evidence and build trust before a sales conversation ever begins. Because the data underlying these insights is proprietary, only your company is in a position to give these answers.
Done well, a steady stream of insights from your company builds trust, authority, and affinity.
What are the goals of an Insights team?
An Insights team has two primary goals.
To provide data-driven value to the ecosystem at scale.
To make all internal stakeholders smarter.
Providing value at scale means interested ecosystem members, be they current clients, prospects, or interested parties, will gain from coming across Insights content.
At Carta, we call Insights successful when Carta data is mentioned in private conversation between founders or investors. This northstar leads directly to another key conclusion: most, if not all, of your Insights content should be un-gated. Encourage sharing!
The flip-side of that external value creation is the augmentation of internal intelligence. In most companies, there are lots and lots of questions. Because Insights is so deeply connected to the customer AND the core datasets, they can help improve internal answers to specific queries across the business. Making your whole team smarter is a hidden Insights flywheel.
Notice how neither of the goals above is directly tied to conversion numbers or new revenue.
Insights done correctly should prime the market rather than carrying specific targets for new clients.
You have a whole litany of marketing motions created to manage people down a funnel. Insights should make sure those people have a positive impression of your company before they even begin.
Which companies should build an Insights team?
Insights is not a function that exists at the earliest stage startups. The combination of marketing and data skills required to make Insights work is better used on other priorities.
However, once a company has achieved a certain scale, Insights can become a valuable layer across all marketing activities. Some signals that your company is ready for an Insights leader:
You occupy a leadership position in the market
You have a representative sample of a given market’s data
You play in a highly fragmented space where leadership is yet to be decided
Your customers are asking you to contextualize your market beyond the specifics of your product
Insights is more well-suited to a B2B context in most cases. However, some B2C players have made excellent use of Insights - think of the Spotify Wrapped campaign as the ur-example here.
What are some examples of Insights tactics?
Basic (low lift, great experiments)
Release data graphics on social to start conversations
Companies should be unafraid of building internal talent - social content from people outperforms content from brands
Over time, that talent becomes another channel for distribution alongside the core company channels (owned social, owned media)
Build a newsletter (weekly at least) that gives in-depth data and some context around it
Build consistent internal touchpoints with your sales AEs to have regular meetings where you share “what’s market” and make them smarter
Track relevant conversation in your industry on social, answer questions that pop up there with data, point back to your newsletter
Intermediate (medium effort, build on the basics)
Build bigger reports organized around a specific topic
Run virtual events discussing the biggest findings from the reports above
Build educational decks for your business development team to use when speaking to pools of potential customers
Hold Q&A office hours where anyone in your ecosystem ask questions
Start a podcast around proprietary data in your space
Use data as a wedge into other people’s newsletters. Influencers in your space crave information (the more private, the better)
Advanced (relationship building + distributed value)
Use data as a wedge for media coverage - build relationships with reporters through offering value rather than requesting coverage
This tactic will also drive domain authority with quality backlinks improving your overall SEO position
Build interactive data on your website that your customers can dance through and leave feeling smarter / better prepared
Co-create studies with academic or non-profit institutions to cement your place as an expert
Host intimate, in-person dinners and small events centered around a core set of interesting insights. Drive value for ecosystem partners in the same manner as actual prospects (at Carta that means lawyers and accelerator managing partners)
Become a content engine for others in your ecosystem.
Phew…how do I get started?
This is a deep topic that I’ll cover in some future posts. For now, if you’d like to begin an Insights practice at your company, shoot me a note. I’ve coached more than a dozen marketers over the past 6 months on the right way to begin - from the tech stack to the influence building internally.
Hope this was insightfull (sorry, had to)!
Would deeply appreciate if you could share this article with 1 marketer who you think would benefit from the content. Can’t wait to get into the details in next week’s post: How to Hire for an Insights Team
Really interesting - following this topic and Carta. I see the ‘seeds’ of this practice all around me right now.
Informative!