Bad Sisters: B2B Marketing Lessons from the Irish Dark Comedy with the CMO at D2L, Brian Finnerty

Hooking your audience is one thing, but keeping them emotionally invested in your content is another. 

So for this episode of Remarkable, we’re taking marketing lessons on doing just that from the Irish dark comedy, Bad Sisters.

It’s a show about four sisters who plot to kill their diabolical brother-in-law, and the season starts with his funeral.

Series creator, Sharon Horgan, says, “We had to keep an audience with us for 10 episodes and keep them wanting the same outcome." That is, the death of their brother-in-law, John Paul. 

So with the help of our special guest, D2L CMO Brian Finnerty, we’re talking about hooking your audience, knowing your target, and doing trial and error. 

About our guest, Brian Finnerty

Brian Finnerty is a B2B marketing specialist with over 25 years experience leading enterprise marketing teams. He currently serves as CMO at D2L. His expertise includes brand strategy, B2B demand generation, and global customer acquisition from mid-market to Fortune 500. He previously served as VP of Revenue Marketing for Udacity. Prior to joining Udacity, Brian served as VP of Growth Marketing at Demandbase, where he was responsible for demand generation, field marketing, and customer marketing at Demandbase. Brian has also been a marketing leader at two ad tech companies, Marin Software and Smaato. He co-founded an e-learning startup that specialized in software developer training, with a rules-based code judging engine. He is an active Customer Advisory Board member for both 6sense and Sendoso.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From Bad Sisters:

• Start with a hook. Bad Sisters grabs viewers’ attention because it’s about four sisters plotting to kill their brother-in-law, and it starts with his funeral. So the question is: “How did he die?” This is what drives viewers to keep watching. So how can you get your audience invested in your content? What question do you want to inspire them to ask?
• Know your target. This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but just like the sisters truly knew their brother-in-law and all the ways they could potentially do him in, so should marketers get to know their audience so they can appeal to them. Brian says, “The sisters do a lot of research and they really know their target audience. Like, what does JP like to eat? What does he like to drink? If you were to poison him, how would you do that? So they really do research, like, ‘What are the ways that we can do this and get away with it, and free our sister from the prison of her marriage?’ So they really do their kind of their targeting and their research, which I think any good marketer does.”
• Do trial and error. Try different marketing strategies and keep dialing it in based on data you get from the tests. Brian says, “[The sisters] do that right throughout the show. Like, they're testing ways to bump this guy off. Some of them end in sort of miserable failure and some of them have some potential of succeeding and you're never quite sure. Not unlike a lot of digital campaigns, where you're trying to find that perfect balance and the right approach.”

Quotes

*”I think for marketers, if you're not pushing the envelope, testing new messaging and testing new approaches to your website, conversion, optimization, your customer journey, your buyer's journey, then you're not trying hard enough. You're not getting enough data from the market to optimize and improve.”

*”In a B2B context, it is tough to really identify a villain. And that kind of marketing turns me off. Some companies will identify their competitors as villains and really go after them. As a marketer, I would say instead of identifying your competitors as a villain, which I think is a mistake