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How to Effectively Promote Productized B2B Services for Maximum Impact
For professional B2B service firms to grow and scale, they need to shift from using a customized to a more “productized” approach for their services. This requires a significant change in mindset and potentially new skills, team members, and even investment in technology.
That’s why we’re talking to leading expert and business leader Eisha Armstrong (Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Vecteris) about how to effectively promote productized B2B services for maximum impact. During our conversation, Eisha explained why the successful commercialization of productized offerings are much more than marketing campaign and training sellers. She also highlighted the main pitfalls to avoid, what the biggest obstacles are when companies productize, and how they can get to revenue faster and more efficiently. She also provided some actionable tips on how B2B marketers can build a marketing engine that generates enough leads to achieve targets for productized offerings.
https://youtu.be/8VuPJSmQuJA
Topics discussed in episode
[3:56] Challenges in commercializing productized offerings for B2B professional services
[9:46] The benefits and obstacles of productization
[12:39] The differences between marketing and selling standardized services/products vs. traditional professional services
[14:11] Major pitfalls to avoid when selling and marketing productized offerings:
[27:11] Actionable tips for B2B Marketers:
[30:25] Eisha’s view on productization and AI
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
Eisha Armstrong, Christian Klepp
Christian Klepp 00:00
Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Eisha Armstrong. She is the executive chairman and co-founder of Vecteris, and a business leader with expertise in product innovation as well as product portfolio management. She has extensive experience launching new data and information service businesses, building Executive Education products, advising C level executives and overseeing data analysis and qualitative research in a recurring revenue model. She’s also a published author, and has recently released her new book, “Commercialize” -how to monetize, sell and market productized offerings in B to B professional services. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketer’s mission is. Eisha Armstrong, I’m gonna say, welcome back to the show. So good to have you here.
Eisha Armstrong 00:52
Thank you, Christian. It’s great to be here.
Christian Klepp 00:55
Wow. I mean, where do I even begin? I think I’m gonna begin by saying that, you know, I’ve been interviewing a couple of folks like yourself on the show for quite a while, and one of the guests that I recently interviewed, and we’re pushing that episode live this Thursday, he actually told me that one of the reasons why he wanted to come on the show was because he listened to my interview with you, right the past one. And I’m interviewing another gentleman in two day’s time who said he’s read your book product ties twice, right?
Eisha Armstrong 01:28
Wow, two times!
Christian Klepp 01:30
yes. But I’m gonna, like, just push you into the spotlight here, because, you know, before I hit record, you did tell me this one anecdote, and I thought it was just absolutely awesome. So please over to you.
Eisha Armstrong 01:41
Yeah. No, it’s um, yeah. So Productize has been out now for three and a half years, and earlier this year, during the summer, I was at the swimming pool, and I walked by a person who was standing in the water in the pool, but they had a book like out on the ledge, and they were marking it up with a pen. And as I walked by, I noticed it was my book Productize.
Christian Klepp 02:06
No…
Eisha Armstrong 02:07
I know. And then, you know, people are like, oh, did you offer decide I was like, No, my bathing suit. I didn’t want to, but to see it at the swimming pool and somebody marking it up was pretty amazing. And I’m just so thankful for all the people who bought it and read it and said good things about it, and I’m glad it’s, I’m glad it’s helping entrepreneurs and business leaders.
Christian Klepp 02:29
Wow. I mean, I shot, like, first of all, I’m happy for you, but you can’t make this stuff up, right? Like…
Eisha Armstrong 02:34
No, I know the pool of all places, yeah.
Christian Klepp 02:37
I mean, hopefully there weren’t, you know, there weren’t too many people around them, like splashing and whatnot, because, you know, if the book got wet, then, you know…
Eisha Armstrong 02:45
Yeah, it was in the adult section of the swimming pool, so there were no kids around. Pretty tame, but yeah, he was, there was a person at the swimming pool reading my book.
Christian Klepp 02:54
Fantastic, fantastic. I mean, I gotta, I have to say, I mean, like, I must admit, that’s a first for me,
Eisha Armstrong 03:03
Yeah, especially because it’s a business non fiction book.
Christian Klepp 03:06
Right, right. I mean, if you see somebody at the airport, you know, while they’re waiting for their flight, and then they they’re reading your book. I mean, that’s one thing. Like, okay, fantastic. But this guy’s, like, in the pool, all right, yeah, he’s not even…
Eisha Armstrong 03:17
Productize. It’s a great pool read, yeah. I knew (laugh).
Christian Klepp 03:23
Yeah, forget the horror novels. Just chuck that out the window, right? Like….
Eisha Armstrong 03:27
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Christian Klepp 03:30
Fantastic. Eisha, I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because we are going to be talking about something that is very close to your heart, something that you’re extremely passionate about, and it’s something that you bring up in your new book, Commercialize, right? So for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that is related to your new book, Commercialize, and that’s how to monetize, sell and market productized offerings in B2B professional services. So I’m going to kick off the conversation with this question, why do you think the successful commercialization of productized offerings is much more than just marketing campaigns and training your sellers?
Eisha Armstrong 04:08
Oh, yeah, good question. So this was kind of what was at the root of why I decided to write this book. So what we were seeing with the companies that we work with, B to B services firms who are trying to standardize and scale what we call productization, is that they were really stumbling in the go to market phase or commercialization phase of that. And, you know, they could have a great product idea, you know, developed it very well, but just were struggling to get the traction that they thought they would, and they would immediately go to, how do I change my marketing, or how do I better train my sellers to sell it, and while that is certainly part of the successful go to market equation, or successful commercialization. It’s, it’s missing a lot of very important components, and those include having a really good understanding of who your target market is and what their buying journey looks like, the pricing and the packaging of the product, so that you’re appropriately monetizing it, selecting the best sales channel. So before you jump in and start training your current sellers on how to sell your new product, is that the right sales channel? So kind of making that decision, making sure that you’re set up, well, if it’s a renewable product, to renew it, that you’ve got customer success, you’ve designed the product for renewal. And then, honestly, like reorienting your entire organization around this idea of “customer lifetime value”. So there are a lot of things beyond marketing campaigns, beyond training the sales team that go into successful commercialization. We try to unpack those in the book and it’s really everything we wrote about is rooted in experiences that we saw. So I start the book by telling the story of a company which we’ve pseudonymed as talent tether. They wouldn’t let us use their real name, but they’re a global provider of outplacement services, and they were productizing both in creating products that could be sold down market. So outplacement services that could be sold to a more price sensitive market segment, as well as creating products that would augment their outplacement services. And they were very candid with us in our research about how much they struggled with trying to get their traditional sales team to sell it, trying to set up an E commerce channel, getting the incentives right for the sales team, figuring out how to do lead generation. So a lot of different things that kind of illustrate all the different components that go into successful commercialization of a new product. And I thought it was such a great example about again, why this is so much more than marketing or just training your sales team.
Christian Klepp 07:05
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. You just made me think of a question, and I might have asked this in the previous conversation, but I think it’s worth repeating, and you’ve probably seen this. You probably talk about it in your books. I’m going to say plural, right. How do you change this mindset of these companies, right? That are at this stage where they want to scale, but they keep coming back to you with Eisha, we can’t do this. We can’t productize because each customer is different. It has to be customized. They all have different needs and requirements. You know, scaling by productizing this offerings is just not something that we can do. How do you, I won’t say, like, push back against that, but how do you get them to… how do you convince them that that mindset is not in their interest?
Eisha Armstrong 07:57
Yeah, so that’s, that’s a really good question. I think most companies, they have to see it to believe it. So the first thing we’ll do is we’ll say, Well, can we run some experiments and maybe identify a couple of different market segments where a more scalable approach, more standardized approach, might be sufficient for them. So certainly, there are definitely market segments that are very price insensitive and are willing to pay for highly customized, bespoke offerings. But there are also usually segments of the market that are willing to maybe sacrifice a little bit of customization in return for perhaps something that’s easier to use, perhaps less expensive to use, and let’s go out and test that and see if that’s indeed true. We also find that if an organization is really serious about the strategy of productization, there’s certainly things that they can do, from a change management perspective, to win the hearts and minds of the people that are already there, but to be successful, they will probably also need to bring in people who have a different skill set, and are, you know, from organizations where they’ve sold products before, developed products before, because it’s a very different way of going to market, and a very different way about thinking about, how do you meet market segment needs.
Christian Klepp 09:27
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And it’s going back to your point, right? It requires a different skill set. It requires a different approach. And, you know, just short of stating the obvious, it is in their long term interest, right? If they want to grow because I think the customization, correct me. If I’m wrong, the customization approach might hinder that growth to a certain extent.
Eisha Armstrong 09:48
Yeah, it’s certainly so. Productization has a lot of different benefits, and being able to grow more scalably so not have to add costs at the same rate that you’re growing is one of those benefits. Not having to add headcount or very specialized professional talent at the same rate is one of those benefits. But also being able to assure standard quality across many different customers is another benefit of a more standardized approach, because you’re not kind of subject to the whims of the you know, quality of one professional over another, being less key person dependent is a benefit. You know, I talked about, usually, products are sold kind of on a more renewable basis. So having that revenue visibility is another benefit, kind of getting, you know, services firms, out of that feast or famine that sometimes happen. Yeah, you smile and nod, yeah. So, I mean, there are many different benefits, and I think it’s important to be clear on why are you productizing before you start running down this path and making sure that everyone in the organization understands the larger why. That also helps with the change management.
Christian Klepp 11:12
You just made me think of another follow up question, and whether this is true or not, I pass that over to you. But do you feel that companies that don’t productize and don’t scale through productizing their offerings. Do you feel that a bottlenecks at some point?
Eisha Armstrong 11:29
Yeah, it’s certainly harder to grow. Yeah, because again, you’re dependent on adding people, usually, if it’s professional services, highly skilled, perhaps hard to find people in order to grow and so that makes it more difficult. It makes it more expensive to grow as well. It’s not to say it’s not impossible. I mean, there are, there are many examples of professional services firms that are only offering bespoke custom services. But I would argue, especially in this era now of generative AI, if you’re not thinking about, where can we standardize, perhaps tech-enable how we’re delivering our existing services, you might risk being left behind.
Christian Klepp 12:19
Absolutely, absolutely. All right, I’m gonna move us on to the next question, and I’m gonna see if I can get this right. So from your professional experience, okay, what do you think are the main differences between marketing and selling standardized services, or products from marketing and selling traditional professional services?
Eisha Armstrong 12:39
Yeah. So when you’re selling traditional professional services, let’s take legal services as an example. You’re usually buying the expertise of a person, right? So I, I am asking, you know, my attorney kind of what is her background in similar companies with similar issues? And it’s really about her and her expertise. So it’s focused on the person. With the product, it’s focused on what is my need, and does this product address that need more efficiently, more effectively, than other ways that I could address that need. So it’s not dependent on a person, and it’s really focused more on what is the problem that I’m trying to solve? So when you’re marketing and selling that, you need a very different approach. When you’re selling a professional service, you’re talking about the credentials of your professionals. You’re talking about their ability to really understand your specific situation and tailor to your need. Versus when you’re marketing and selling a product, you’re talking about, hey, we understand the problem of this market segment, and we have something that is a value that’s better than what’s currently out there. So it’s just a very different approach.
Christian Klepp 13:55
Right, right. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So staying on this topic of monetizing, selling and marketing productized offerings. What are some of the major pitfalls that you think B to B marketers should avoid, and what should they be doing instead?
Eisha Armstrong 14:11
Good one. Yeah, so let’s start with kind of the first step of successful commercialization, and that’s really understanding your target market. And so one of the mistakes that we often see is organizations, for lack of a better term, being lazy about market segmentation and then not being choosy enough about which segments are their highest priorities. So too often we see organizations trying to target a very broad market segment, and that dilutes their efforts, and it prevents kind of B to B marketers from building deep expertise in their segments, buying journeys and needs. And what we advocate is going, you know, it’s called uncomfortably narrow, and focus on a very specific niche or niches, and tailor your go to market strategy to the individual needs of those niches. So again, lazy, too broad of market segmentation is a common pitfall that we see. Another one is not and I alluded to this earlier, not investing in new capabilities. So how you market professional services is usually focused on things like brand building, right? So you’re trying to get your firm’s brand out there. You’re perhaps focused on thought leadership and positioning your professionals as experts. Okay, product marketing is a very different skill set, and it’s, it’s, in my experience, hard to ask someone who only knows how to do kind of brand marketing, maybe content creation, to also do product marketing. So even if you bring in someone on a fractional basis. I think that that’s, you know, important if you’re going to take a more productized approach to bring in that investment in product marketing. So that’s another kind of piece of advice and common pitfall that we see. The last one Christian is probably not iterating on the go to market plan. So again, you know, when you’re when you’re bringing something new to market, especially if it’s tech enabled, you’re going to have to run a lot of experiments, use that kind of, you know, lean startup test and learn philosophy. And that means that you need to be flexible in what your go to market looks like. You might have you know a hypothesis that you can sell this with your existing sellers, and you quickly find out that that’s not true. Or you may think you know your buyer is the CFO, and it really turns out your buyer is the Chief Information Officer. So that’s going to require a completely different marketing plan. So being flexible and knowing that this marketing plan, this go to market plan, is going to iterate and change over time and not, you know, CEOs should not be asking their chief marketing officers for a two year marketing plan for a brand new product, because it’s going to change. So that would just be a waste of time to think, you know, two years out.
Christian Klepp 17:21
No, absolutely. Those are really great. I mean, going back to your last point, these plans aren’t set in stone, right?
Eisha Armstrong 17:28
Right.
Christian Klepp 17:28
This isn’t like a one and done affair, like we, you know, we, we submitted it towards the end of the year for the next year, and then that’s it, and we don’t look at it ever again, right?
Eisha Armstrong 17:36
Yeah, exactly.
Christian Klepp 17:38
Fantastic. So understanding your target audience and getting uncomfortably narrow. I like that phrase because it’s so true. It’s so true, right? Not investing in new capabilities. I mean, it’s about constantly improving, right? You got to constantly come up with, not necessarily constantly come up with something new, but continuously iterate, right? And not iterating on the go to market plan. Yeah. Absolutely.
Eisha Armstrong 18:01
Yeah. So, you know, I mentioned that story I tell in the book about the company Talent Tether. So they had this hypothesis that they could sell their down market product via e commerce, which turned out ultimately to be true, but they didn’t have any experience selling a professional services product, or productized offering over E commerce. So they had to bring in new capabilities in order to be successful with that as a sales channel for them. And I think they were, you know, and they admitted they were a little naive in kind of underestimating the investment that was going to be involved in using that sales channel.
Christian Klepp 18:43
Absolutely, absolutely. What do you think are the biggest obstacles? Yeah, in terms of like, when B to B services organizations productize, and how can they overcome these obstacles?
Eisha Armstrong 18:57
Yeah, good question. So one common one I see is this fear of cannibalization, and I’ve been talking about this for years, but it’s the idea that if we offer what tends to be a lower priced, productized offering, it’s going to cannibalize our higher priced, bespoke, custom services. And that may be true if you are selling it to a market segment who prefers, is willing to take that trade off, is willing to pay less for something that is less customized. But there are a lot of ways to mitigate that risk of cannibalization. So the first one is to think of your more productized offerings is something that serves a different market segment, perhaps one that’s more price sensitive, more interested in DIY, for example, or one that has more internal, internal capabilities. So can DIY something that you would, you would normally do for them, the other way. And this is what we see with a lot of companies that are successful with productization as a strategy is to develop productized offerings that complement your services, not replace your services. So what is something that could be a maintenance product that can maintain the changes that perhaps your professional services team have implemented within an organization, or what’s a step on product that might be the first thing that a company tries before they then consume your higher priced services. So thinking about productized offerings as complementing your services and perhaps even being bundled with them, is a way to mitigate that risk of cannibalization. So that’s a that’s a very big obstacle. Common objection I get when we talk about go to market is, how do we make sure this doesn’t cannibalize our services revenue? That’s a big one. And then I think the other one is, is you talked about this earlier kind of the mindset shift that has to take place. So you know what makes a B2B professional services firm great, the cultural attributes that makes them great may make them a terrible product company. And I’m thinking of things like, our deliverables always have to be perfect, or we always have to know the answer. Because if you’re taking an iterative test and learn kind of, you know, lean product approach, you have to be okay with making mistakes and learning from failure. You have to be okay with putting out things that are not quite yet perfect so that you can get market feedback and decide whether or not you want to further develop them. You have to be okay with not knowing the answer and looking to your market to give you feedback. So pretty putting on that that learner’s hat, instead of always being the expert. And those are big cultural shifts that, again, can take years to make if you’re going to pursue this strategy of productization.
Christian Klepp 22:09
Yeah. I mean, not to put those folks down, but it is scary, right? Making this kind of shift. Like, as you said, it’s scary because there’s that constant fear of like, well, what if we fail, right? What if this doesn’t work? What would we have spent all this time, effort and investment on and then it’s not working? So, I mean, you know, going back to your point, the fears are legitimate…
Eisha Armstrong 22:36
Of course.
Christian Klepp 22:37
And they are grounded, I suppose they’re grounded in well, but we’ve always been doing it this way for the past. How many decades like, Why does it need to change now? Right? So you have, you have to address that, right?
Eisha Armstrong 22:49
Yeah. And also you have to look at their, how these firms are capitalized. I mean, they’re not going out and raising money from venture investors, so they’re, they’re having to either reduce distributions from partners or take money out of, you know, free cash flow, and, you know, not invest in other areas of growth or capabilities. And so for them, like the risks are very real and that’s why we work very hard. And this is what I talk all about in my first book is, how do you de-risk investment in productization? And the way that you de-risk investment in productization is doing that test and learn, rapid iteration, getting market feedback, putting out prototypes and concepts before you invest in development, getting beta customers to help fund product development, things like that, versus, you know what a typical startup might do, which is, yeah, spend other people’s money. Yeah.
Christian Klepp 23:54
Yep, absolutely, absolutely, okay. This next question is a little bit more top level, because I know there are no instant miracles here, right, but let’s just say, for the sake of conversation, right? How can B to B companies successfully commercialize packaged services and new products, and how can they get to revenue, I’m going to say faster and more efficiently.
Eisha Armstrong 24:20
Yeah, so it goes back to kind of what I call the five levers, and I alluded to them at the beginning. The first one is really choosing your target market segment or segments carefully and understanding their needs very, very well in their buyer journey. So it’s all about customer understanding, market segmentation. First lever. Second is the monetization strategy. So how are you going to price and package so that you are not under pricing? What you’re putting out in the marketplace, you’re pricing based on value. You’re increasing the likelihood of renewal. Things like that third lever, is the marketing so squarely speaking to your audience, Christian, do you have a multi channel marketing plan that’s ready to generate the volume of leads that a more productized approach, which usually is a lower price point, is going to need, especially if you’re targeting a different market segment that you’ve targeted in the past? And do you have a product marketing capabilities? So marketing is the third lever. Fourth lover is that sales channel. So making sure that your sales channel is equipped to sell products. People who’ve spent their entire career selling bespoke services usually don’t have the skill set needed to do value based selling that product sales require. And then the last one is renewability. So are you investing, if it’s a renewable product, has the product been designed to be renewable? Are you investing in customer success? Are you orienting the firm around lifetime value? So those five levers are really kind of the keys, based on our research, to successfully commercializing productized offerings.
Christian Klepp 26:08
Definitely all great points, I would say, like with point number five, that’s one where I see a lot of companies faltering, even the big ones right now, I won’t name names, but I feel like a lot of them will only reach out to you once you threaten to leave and terminate the contract, and then they’ll have their team on you and like, Okay, well, what can we do to help? Right? But the customer support experience itself is an absolute exercise and futility. And what I mean by that is like they’re just these processes and systems in place that completely frustrate the customer, yeah, to the point where they’re like, Okay, you know what I’m done. I’ve got option B over here, right? And it’s just unfortunate that not all, but many companies, wait till it gets to that point, and it doesn’t have to be that way, right?
Eisha Armstrong 26:57
Right. Yeah. And I think you know your use of the term customer support versus customer success is interesting because that’s a different way of thinking about it. Customer Support is usually reactive, so I’m waiting until a customer reaches out and says they have a problem. Versus customer success is proactive. Looking at usage of the product, how do we get the customer to use more of it. What additional features can we be adding or subtracting or changing in order to make the product more successful? So it’s a much more proactive posture than a reactive customer support.
Christian Klepp 27:34
Absolutely, absolutely okay. You know the drill, actionable tips, right? So not that you want to give everything away here, right? But just imagine that there is a B to B marketer listening to this interview. And we’ve seen from the past that there are people paying attention, right? But what are like say three to five things? Let’s just say, for instance, the company has already decided to, you know, launch these productized offerings. What are some things that B to B marketers can do to build this marketing engine that helps to generate enough leads to achieve these targets for productized offerings?
Eisha Armstrong 28:10
Yeah, well, I’m probably not telling them anything new, but again, you’d be surprised. But if they’re at a traditional B to B services company that is now trying to offer products, the first thing I say to the marketer is, what changes are you’re making to your website? Because most product buyers are doing a lot of pre buying research online before they even talk to a sales person. So you want to make sure that your website is structured in a way that people can tell that you also have products in addition to your services, and it’s got enough information about those products that they can do their own research so that they become leads for you. So that’s the first one, and again, you would be shocked at how many B to B services firms who are trying to productize that we work with their websites still look like all they do is bespoke, custom services. So that’s why I mentioned that as kind of a good piece of low hanging fruit. The second one, because so much product buying happens before talking to a salesperson, is to make sure that there’s good product marketing content that’s publicly available on your website, through other channels, so that you you’ve got a lot of information out there that can be found by buyers who are doing product research. And then so you asked for three to five, probably third one is think really hard about do you, do you really have product marketing skills, or do you need to bring in somebody from the outside, either a new FTE or, you know, a fractional person, to do that for you, because it’s a different skill set than marketing Services.
Christian Klepp 29:52
Absolutely, absolutely. It sounds to me like you’re saying producing enough content out there that helps to. It helps to give the so called, like potential prospect, potential customer, enough information to help move them along in that buying journey, right, to help them make a more informed decision. To give your company that that credibility and help build that trust, that yes, you are probably the right person to work with, or right company rather, yeah.
Eisha Armstrong 30:22
Exactly, yeah.
Christian Klepp 30:23
Absolutely, absolutely. You brought this up earlier in the conversation, and a light bulb just went on in my head. I mean, this is a, this is a podcast interview in 2024 and you know, I do need to ask you this question about productization and AI, how do you see those working together, and what’s your advice?
Eisha Armstrong 30:45
So, you know what generative AI certainly has gotten a lot of headlines in how it’s going to replace especially professional services. So you know, different firms like Goldman Sachs did a big study about a year, year and a half ago, looking at different job categories and which ones were most likely to be disrupted by AI and things like legal services, engineering services, graphic design, obviously, coding, things like that, are all things where AI is making rapid improvements in being able to do that. Now it doesn’t mean that you don’t need a human need a human to oversee it and contextualize and make sure the quality is there and to train the models, but that that is certainly an area that we see a lot of companies we work with bringing them to productization, because they’re realizing they can use AI to automate, perhaps lower value tasks that they’ve been doing, and it now frees their professionals up to solve new problems. And they would like to think about, how can they solve these new problems in a different way, perhaps in a more scalable way, leveraging this new technology, and they don’t have the kind of product mindset internally to do it themselves. So that’s where we’re seeing demand. And again, I think it’s, it’s less about, oh, AI is going to take away all these jobs and professional services, and now you can slash your head count by 50% or whatever at your law firm. It’s more about, you can now think differently about the problems you solve for customers, and use this technology to go to market in a different way, and hopefully a more scalable way than you have in the past.
Christian Klepp 32:31
Yeah, you really touched on some great points there, and I do agree with that. It’s using AI in a way that it helps your organization to become more efficient and faster and remove… or it helps you to do these mundane tasks, yeah, so that it frees up your actual bandwidth, so that you can focus on solving something that’s well, that does require human intervention. Let’s put it that way, right? I can’t remember which company it was the other day. It was either Walmart or Amazon, one of those two that they they put up. The headline basically said that they’re hiring, like, 1000s of AI sellers, right?
Eisha Armstrong 33:10
Interesting. I miss that. Yeah.
Christian Klepp 33:11
Case in point. I’ll have to find the link and send it to you after this. But, um, and that was interesting. But, you know, again, we’re looking at it from that perspective. Are they replacing humans? I mean, to a certain extent they are. But are those jobs, I think is the better question. Are those jobs that humans want to do? Right. Would be doing?
Eisha Armstrong 33:31
Exactly, yeah.
Christian Klepp 33:33
Right? Okay, so here comes the soapbox question. So on the topic of commercializing product offerings. Okay, this topic specifically, what is a status quo that you passionately disagree with and why?
Eisha Armstrong 33:49
Yeah, so I think one is that B to B services firms can rely solely on their existing clients and network for growth and certainly, there are lots of examples of B to B services, firms that can rely on existing clients and network for maintaining the, you know, the revenue that they have. But if they really want to grow, they should think about, you know, are there different market segments that they can move into or completely different problems that they can solve for clients. And that’s just one where I think marketing in particular, speaking back to your audience, Christian, is so important, because they can reveal new market segments and new needs that are out there that might be logical next steps to take if you do want to grow your organization, and if you’re targeting a new market segment, you’re going to need marketing in order to build brand recognition, to build those relationships with them. Uh, so there’s a big demand there, if in for marketing, if you’re going to grow using new market segments.
Christian Klepp 35:08
100% agree with that. It’s also because we work with clients who have come to us and said, like, Okay, this is the reason why we need help. Because we we’ve built this business up for many years, decades, so on and so forth. And it was through word of mouth and through our network and through referrals, etc, etc. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I certainly built my business that way. But at some point that’ll dry up, right? That’ll dry up, and especially if you want to scale to your point, Eisha, is you have to, you might well have to venture into these new, new industry segments, these new verticals where you don’t have contacts, where you don’t know anybody, right? A lot of these folks that come to your website, this website traffic, this is all cold outreach, right? So, yeah, what do you do then?
Eisha Armstrong 36:04
And especially since more and more, again, when we see this, obviously with products, but also with services, more and more of the purchase decisions are being professionalized, yeah, so not just going with the services provider, because so and so went to, you know, university with them, or used to work with them. But actually, you know, taking it through a professional procurement process, and that professionalism of buying services demands a more productized marketing approach.
Christian Klepp 36:38
Correct. And you know, if you’re working in my space, which is like marketing and branding. You know, I’ve been in situations before where we don’t always, necessarily get to talk to the said customer directly or the said prospect. It’s done through in through an agency that vets the vendors, right.
Eisha Armstrong 36:56
Right. Oh yeah.
Christian Klepp 36:56
So there is, there is no existing relationship there, right? You’ve been, you’ve been selected. And, you know, these are people that you’ve never had any business dealings with, right?
Eisha Armstrong 37:04
That’s a great example of professionalizing the buying process.
Christian Klepp 37:06
Absolutely, absolutely okay. Now, here comes the bonus question. Now, if memory serves me well, I have it on good authority, right? I have it on good authority that you like climbing mountains, right? Literally and figuratively I’m gonna say, but we’re talking about climbing an actual mountain here, right? So, which mountain Have you always dreamt of climbing and why?
Eisha Armstrong 37:33
Yeah, so Mount Rainier I’m going to attempt in July of 2025, yes, and it’ll be my second glacial climb. So I did a glacial climb this past summer on Mount Baker too, which is lower altitude. It’s in the Cascades north of Seattle. Lower altitude, the crevasses are not as large, just to kind of warm up large enough, right? Yeah. And so, so that went very well. So Rainier will be the next one. And then, honestly, Christian, I’m just going to take it, kind of one mountain at a time and see how that one goes, and then decide where to go from there. But it’s… had the good fortune of turning 50 earlier this year.
Christian Klepp 38:22
Oh, well, congratulations.
Eisha Armstrong 38:24
Thank you. It’s, you know, for those people have turned 50, it’s, you know, it’s a pretty obviously big milestone, but it starts to make you realize that your body won’t be able to do the things it can currently do forever. So I’m trying to be a little bit more thoughtful about planning ahead and choosing my next adventure. Yeah, Mount Rainier. That’s the next one on my list. Yeah.
Christian Klepp 38:50
what a great goal to have. And maybe, maybe your goal in the next 10 years is to is to climb Everest. Who knows?
Eisha Armstrong 38:56
Don’t think so. Again, every time I saw people, tell people I’ve taken up mountaineering. They’re like, Oh, you’re gonna climb Mount Everest. I’m like, you know, I just… the ROI just is not seen there.
Christian Klepp 39:07
It’s a different league, isn’t it?
Eisha Armstrong 39:09
Yeah, you know, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Never say never, but…
Christian Klepp 39:14
Never say never. But that’s a great one to have.
Eisha Armstrong 39:17
I’m actively working towards, yeah,
Christian Klepp 39:18
That’s a great one. It’s a great goal to have. And, you know what, Aisha, if I would just hazard a guess that if you actually, like, you know, you finish this climb and you get, you get to the summit, you might just have an idea for another book. I don’t know.
Eisha Armstrong 39:34
I actually do, yeah, I yeah, I do. I always have a couple, but, you know, I need, I need a couple months to kind of, of course, recoup and recover. I’ll see what happens.
Christian Klepp 39:45
Absolutely well. Eisha, once again, as I expected, this conversation was dynamite. So thanks again for coming on and you know, for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. Congratulations on turning 50, and congratulations on your new book. So just, you know, quick introduction to yourself, how folks can get in touch with you and where they can get your book.
Eisha Armstrong 40:05
Yeah, so the company I co found is called Vecteris.com, and as you can imagine, we’ve been working with B to B professional services firms for almost seven years now, helping them do these things. In my spare time. I like to… I’m a certified yoga teacher. Like to, obviously, climb mountains. I’m a mom to two teenagers, yeah. So staying busy. I love to connect with people on LinkedIn. So if they just mentioned they heard me on podcast, would love to connect. And yeah, Commercialize is… here it is. Wherever books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble target, Apple books, Audible, all the good things.
Christian Klepp 40:53
Fantastic, fantastic. And I forgot to tell you this Eish, I got a little surprise over the weekend. (Showing the Commercialize book)
Eisha Armstrong 41:04
Oh, it came! I’m so glad.
Christian Klepp 41:05
Sorry. I’m holding up the commercialized book with.
Eisha Armstrong 41:10
It’s a great, it’s a great orange color. I love the way the orange turned out on the cover. So definitely, yeah, definitely. Check it out. Lots of good stories and,
Christian Klepp 41:19
Fantastic
Eisha Armstrong 41:20
Tips and tricks.
Christian Klepp 41:21
Fantastic. Thanks so much for sending that. I would ask you for your autograph, a virtual one we’ll have to do for now.
Eisha Armstrong 41:28
Absolutely.
Christian Klepp 41:29
Fantastic. Eisha, once again, thank you so much for coming to the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Eisha Armstrong 41:36
Sounds good Christian. Thanks so much for having me.
Christian Klepp 41:39
Bye for now.
Eisha Armstrong 41:40
Bye. Bye.
How to Implement Better B2B Email Marketing Campaigns
We open our inboxes daily and are subjected to massive amounts of content and information. In a race to get more attention in an attention-driven landscape, B2B marketers must create content and email marketing campaigns that are interesting, relevant, and stand out in a sea of digital noise.
That’s why we’re talking to B2B content expert Jamie Woodbridge (Co-Founder, TheInboxClub) about how to implement better B2B email marketing campaigns. During our conversation, Jamie discussed the untapped potential of email marketing and the importance of first-party data and high-quality subscribers. He also highlighted the pitfalls to avoid, key metrics to focus on, and how data privacy and AI impact email marketing.
https://youtu.be/bbFhG4WjRMw
Topics discussed in episode
[1:29] Jamie talks about where most email marketing campaigns fall flat and why
[7:11] The untapped potential in email marketing for B2B
[9:40] Pitfalls to avoid in email marketing
[11:54] How to set the right email sequences and cadence
Jamie elaborates on the key elements of effective email marketing:
[15:02] Have a deeper understanding of the target audience
[16:13] Create the right strategy and approach
[17:52] Develop the right messaging and call to action
[20:38] The impact of data privacy and AI on email marketing
[25:55] AI tools that Jamie recommends for email marketing
[30:25] Actionable tips for better email marketing:
• Create a profile of your ideal subscriber
• Writing a one-sentence proposition of what your newsletter will be about
• Make your sign-up forms really good, ideally in 3 formats
• Clean your email list
• Reduce the number of CTAs
[40:23] Top metrics to track in email marketing:
• Open rate
• Click rate
• Replies and forwards
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
Jamie Woodbridge, Christian Klepp
Christian Klepp 00:01
Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Jamie Woodbridge. He is one of the co-founders of The Inbox Club, an email marketing agency with one mission: Get real results for brands with email marketing without all the boring stuff. Jamie has over 13 years of sales and marketing experience. Who can turn your newsletter from a box-ticking exercise into a truly engaging piece of content that nurtures and converts your contacts. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketer’s mission is. Mr. Jamie Woodbridge, welcome to the show.
Jamie Woodbridge 00:41
Thanks Christian, thanks for having me on.
Christian Klepp 00:43
I’m really looking forward to this conversation, Jamie, but before we jump in, I’d like to give a shout out to Mr. Anthony Leung for the introduction. Thank you, sir. It’s all on you. Okay, fantastic. Let’s, let’s dive into this conversation, because I think the audience is going to get a lot of value out of this. So you know, you, you’re on a mission. I’m gonna just quote what you said on your LinkedIn profile to help B to B companies develop and implement content that is interesting, relevant and generates the right results. And for this conversation, I’d like to focus on a topic that I think is going to be very useful to B2B marketers, and that’s how to implement better email marketing campaigns for B2B. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with this question, where do most email marketing campaigns fall flat, and why?
Jamie Woodbridge 01:28
It’s a great question. Christian. And we at The Inbox Club, we’re very passionate about this subject, and actually this question was something that we asked ourselves when we created our email marketing agency, because we saw it happen so often. And so when we talk about how, why do email marketing campaigns fall flat, it’s usually because of one of two things. Firstly, they’re boring, right? And so this was something that we saw a lot of… in newsletters that were going out, particularly from B to B companies, they were just too boring, and that’s sometimes about the kind of content that was in them, but also the way that they were written. So that was one thing. And the second thing is about the audience, and about gathering the right audience, and then once you’ve gathered that right audience, talking to them in a way that’s relevant. So those are two ways in which we see B2B email marketing campaigns fall flat. And hopefully we can explore both of those areas a little bit more today. And as I said, you’ll have to catch me if I’m waffling, because it’s something I’m really passionate about, so we’ll continue to talk about but, yeah, excited to be here. Thanks again.
Christian Klepp 02:44
Yeah, absolutely. And waffle away. Well, those are the fantastic way to kick off this conversation. Good points, and I’m gonna play the devil’s advocate now, because I’ve seen this a lot on LinkedIn. I actually got into it, and I would say, a very polite argument (laugh), for lack of a better description, with someone on LinkedIn on the topic of boring, on the topic of boring content, right? And basically this individual was arguing that boring wins at the end of the day in B to B something that I passionately disagree with. But over to you, define boring for us?
Jamie Woodbridge 03:23
Absolutely, I think boring is more nuanced than you would originally assume. I think what we mean, or what I mean certainly by boring, is that it’s not relevant. Because ultimately, if it’s not relevant, then it’s boring for you, because it’s not resonating with you. It’s not the right content. So when we talk about boring, we talk about it in a sense of, okay, maybe, how are you writing? So, you know, are you writing in an entertaining way? And that’s something that we like to do at the inbox club and for our clients. But also, what are you writing about? And you know, it’s got to be the right fit for the audience. Because if I was to pick out an example, someone who subscribes to a newsletter about Napoleonic military strategy, some people find that incredibly interesting. Some people find it boring, right? So when we talk about boring, we talk about it not matching the audience. The content isn’t matching the audience. But I would love to have a conversation with a guy that you had a polite disagreement about with, because I would like to hear what his definition of boring is. Because, in a way, I can kind of see his point right, in terms of, you know, getting a content strategy nailed down, sticking to it and doing it consistently. You know, maybe that’s what he meant as boring. But I just, I still think that there’s a place for us to be entertaining and for us to write passionately and in a very conversational and authentic way, as well as getting the content strategy right as well.
Christian Klepp 05:01
Absolutely, absolutely. That’s great point. And, oh yes, by the way, I’m one of those people that finds a Napoleonic military strategy interesting. (laugh) But you brought up something that I’d like to dig into a little bit deeper, Jamie, if you don’t mind, on the topic of entertainment or entertaining content in B to B, right? What’s your take on injecting humor into B to B content?
Jamie Woodbridge 05:27
I love it. I do it so I’m quite active on LinkedIn, and all of my posts, I’ll try and be funny. You know, sometimes I’m funnier than I am. Other times, in all of our own marketing, we try and inject humor. Humor is a great tool for a load of different types of content. I think B to C is obviously really good at it, right? You know, they, if you see a lot of the B to C or D to C brands, they will use humor as a ballast in their content. And this is something that’s not an original thought from me, but when we talk about B to B audience, you know, we are still talking to people, and it’s just humor is a great way to connect with people, to resonate with people, but we’ve got to balance it out with the brand as well, right? So if your brand, if you’re running a pediatric surgery, humor might not always be well placed, or if you’re running a funeral home or something, you know, so we have to balance it out with branding as well, and even some of the more professional services, maybe say lawyers, accountants, I would say there is still a place for humor, but we’ve got to balance it out with the brand guidelines. So I’m a big advocate of using humor. It shouldn’t be something that is your differentiator, and it shouldn’t be the main pivot of your of your content strategy, for sure. I think it’s an embellishment, but it’s a very valuable one.
Christian Klepp 06:53
As you said, I suppose it depends on the situation, it depends on the vertical and depends on the target audience, right?
Jamie Woodbridge 06:59
For sure, absolutely, yeah.
Christian Klepp 07:00
I’m gonna move us on to the next question, and I’m sure you’ll have an opinion about this. But where do you see the untapped potential in email marketing?
Jamie Woodbridge 07:11
So I talked about a little bit earlier about how one of our passions is in entertaining, exciting, relevant content, right? That’s kind of one of the cornerstones of what we do at our agency. The other cornerstone. So we’re founded on these two cornerstones. The other one is about first party data. And I think gathering high quality first party data in the form of an email list is an incredibly untapped opportunity for most B to B businesses. I heard a chat, I can’t remember his name, on another podcast talking about how an email list is probably a business’s most valuable asset, or at least one of their most valuable assets. So if we talk about it in those times, we start to understand the importance of gathering an email list. There’s a couple of reasons why it is so important. One, it’s the data that you own as a business. So it doesn’t matter if Elon Musk buys a platform and you lose a following overnight, or your following is impacted. It doesn’t matter if the platform gets banned in the US because it’s owned by China. You know, these things could be fragile, and you could lose audiences overnight. So if you own first party data, you own the email list, it’s yours to control within the confines of data privacy laws, etc. The other thing is that you could speak to your whole list at any time or at any point, and this was something that you’re battling with on social media platforms, for instance, where you’re battling with an algorithm, and your content might be shown to you know, 5% 10% whatever it is, of your following. With an email list, you can contact all of them at any point, and you just have to make sure that your content is relevant enough, entertaining enough to be able to inspire opens, and then the only thing. The only other thing you’re battling with is perhaps spam restrictions, where you end up in the junk folder, etc. But those things are much easily or much easier to remedy than battling with an algorithm on social media.
Christian Klepp 09:19
Absolutely, absolutely. And I’m glad that you brought up the topic of first party data, and we’re gonna talk about that later on in the conversation, right? So moving on to the next question, and it’s again regarding email marketing for B to B, what are the pitfalls that B to B marketers should avoid, and what should they be doing instead?
Jamie Woodbridge 09:40
Yeah, I think one of the pitfalls for me is having this element of vanity around your subscriber count, and so chasing a high number of subscribers so that you can almost boast about the fact that you’ve got X amount of subscribers, where I actually think it’s much more important to focus on a smaller number of subscribers that are really high quality. And what do I mean by high quality? One they should be, they should match your ICP or your ideal customer profile. So be really clear on that, and gather those people on your list. And then the second thing is, is that they should be engaged. So what we want to do is keep everyone on your list engaged through great content and through creating content that is relevant for them. Because you’ve created this persona, this ideal subscriber. So for me, that’s a pitfall. And when people come to us and they need help with list growth and building their email list, we’re very clear to make sure that we are getting high quality subscribers, not a high number of subscribers. You know, there is a key difference there. So yeah, I would say that that’s that’s one of them. And again, that goes back to one of our cornerstones about building first party data, which you mentioned we’re going to talk about a little bit later on.
Christian Klepp 11:06
Absolutely, absolutely. You know what, Jamie, you just made me think of another question now as you were talking, and I think it’s very, very relevant to email marketing, and it’s because we all experience it, I certainly do, but it’s this, the email sequences and the cadence, yeah, at which these emails go out. I’m not asking you for the the secret recipe here, but I’m asking you for what, in your experience, tends to be the right number of emails, the right cadence, right? Because sometimes you get, you get these spammy emails and you get a follow up, like within a day and then two days later. So it’s almost like you get five or six emails until they finally break up with you, right?
Jamie Woodbridge 11:52
I don’t mind giving you the secret recipe, because it’s it’s not that easy to put in action. The secret recipe is testing, so we want to make sure that whatever we choose or whatever we decide upon is our cadence, that it’s something that’s decided upon through testing. And that’s one of the beautiful things about email marketing as well, right? Is that the presentation of the engagement metrics are so transparent. You know who’s is, who is opening, who is clicking. And so you can test this, this send schedule. And some topics can get away with emailing, perhaps even multiple times a day. Some topics once a month. And I would say once a month is usually a minimum for us. We usually don’t. We usually advise clients that they should be sending at least once a month. My co-founder, he runs a fantasy football newsletter, and the idea of that newsletter is that they send tips on what you should be doing your with your fantasy football team. And so it’s a hobbyist newsletter. It means, and it’s very deadline-specific, and that newsletter goes out three times a week, but for some B to B businesses, three times a week will be overkill. So again, we’re going back to that, thinking about the audience, thinking about the purpose that you’re serving with your newsletter, and how often communicating with that audience kind of ticks the box of the content strategy that you’ve chosen. So I don’t know if it’s Napoleonic military strategy. I’ll have to ask people who enjoy that kind of content how often they’ll want to read about it. But like I said, start sending emails and the data will tell you the story.
Christian Klepp 13:40
Absolutely yeah. To answer your question, I would say every 30 minutes. No, I’m just kidding. All right, moving us on to the next question, right? So talk to us about the importance of the following as it relates to email marketing. And I’m happy to repeat because there are three points, yeah, so having a deep understanding of your target audience, and you’ve kind of brought that up already, having the right strategy and approach. So obviously, we’re talking about the content plan here, and having the right messaging and call to action, right it’s not always just book a demo call.
Jamie Woodbridge 14:15
Yes, I’m going to try and remember all three of these Christian so we’ve got, we’ve got number one, which is understanding your audience. Hopefully, by the time someone decides to start sending email campaigns, they already have identified their audience and will know their audience very well, because that audience are the people they serve as customers. So hopefully they have done that work prior to to deciding, okay, we’re going to send a newsletter. And if they haven’t, then they’ve got a more fundamental issue, you know, as to, other than, are my email marketing campaigns going to fall flat? They’ve got a more fundamental issue is, does my business really understand who it serves? When it comes to email marketing, specifically understanding the audience is really key. You need to know who they are. You need to know what problems they have. You need to know what opportunities they have, and you need to understand your relationship with each of those points as a business, and how you can help them, how you can offer value. Because the newsletter needs to do that thing. Do that for those people, understanding an audience also helps with how you communicate with them as well, not just what you’re saying, but when and how you’re saying it. For instance, if you’re targeting if your ideal client or your ideal subscriber is someone in a C-suite role, you can assume that they are incredibly busy. It’s the reason why executive summaries exist, so that you want to keep your newsletter short and snappy, perhaps in the morning before their before their morning starts at maybe 8am 8:30 or something. And, you know, make it really easy and keep it short, sweet and snappy, and offer the value up front without burying the lead, you know? So it’s understanding your audience is key to not just what you’re saying, but how you you’re communicating it as well.
Christian Klepp 16:09
Fantastic. The second point is strategy and approach.
Jamie Woodbridge 16:13
So I touched on it a little bit there. But once you’ve understood who your audience is and your ideal subscriber, then we start to think, okay, what are we going to send these people? So if we know what their problems are, if we know what opportunities they have as a person in their in their job, then we can start to understand how my business can serve them, help solve those problems or help capture those opportunities. And then what we want to do is, in our email marketing campaigns, we want to talk about that, and we don’t want to give everything away, right? Because we’ve got to sell something at the end of the day. But your newsletter should have a proposition of its own. It’s almost like a gateway drug to your service, right is it’s the foot in the door. It’s how you demonstrate expertise in your field and you develop familiarity and trust. So your newsletter should have this proposition. Now, if we go back to the C suite idea, we talked about how they might be incredibly busy individuals, and we talked a little bit how we might target them. Okay, well, maybe I run a project management tool and what I’m going to send them each day or each week in the morning. Here’s your time saving tip for today. You know. Here’s how you can save an hour today. You know. So something that’s helping them something that’s welcome in the inbox every time it lands. So think about once you understand your audience. Okay, now let’s develop a content strategy. What are we going to send that’s going to resonate with them.
Christian Klepp 17:49
And then it’s the right messaging and call to action?
Jamie Woodbridge 17:52
Yeah, perfect. So I guess this ties in nicely with, you know, putting with what we’ve just spoken about with those other two points. Once we have the audience down in the content strategy, then it’s about how we write to these people. And I talked a little bit there about how your newsletter should have a proposition, you know, you’ve got to, you’ve got to sell the idea of being subscribed to your newsletter or your email campaigns, because it’s… you know, it’s a privilege to be in someone’s inbox. It’s a privilege to own their data and to have permission to email them. So we want to make sure that we aren’t that… that we are extolling the virtues of being subscribed to this newsletter. What’s the value you’re going to offer? And then call to actions is a great point, because when we talk about a call to action, we want to make sure that whatever we do, whatever we ask people to do, is moving them meaningfully through the funnel. Okay, so at this point, they’re already in your funnel, to a certain degree, in your marketing funnel, because they’ve chosen to subscribe, which is a meaningful step forward. They’re not just a stranger anymore. So when we put in a CTA, we want to make sure that we move them along the funnel in some way. And sometimes that might be book a demo, and sometimes that’s too big a step. So we might want to think about, how can we get them to be engaged even further with our business? You know, maybe we’re running a webinar series, maybe we have a podcast that we want them to listen to, whatever it is. We want to move them into the next piece of the puzzle when it comes to the marketing funnel, I’m not a massive fan of moving people backwards in the funnel, and so when I talk about moving people backwards, directing them to a social media post or directing them to a blog post, can be bit of a move backwards. We want a meaningful step forward. So when we ask people to take action.
Christian Klepp 19:44
Absolutely, absolutely no, I agree with you. You know, moving them a step back, well, that not only prolongs the journey for them, it might also hopefully not, but it might also like frustrate them, like it will lead to a bad user experience, so to speak, a bad journey, in a sense, right?
Jamie Woodbridge 20:04
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Christian Klepp 20:06
Moving on to the next question. So you touched a little bit earlier, but like talk to us about how the following impact email marketing, so data privacy, so for example, GDPR, and we can throw in the topic of first party data as well. And the second point AI, because, you know, it’s 2024, and if I didn’t ask you a question about AI, then where would we be.
Jamie Woodbridge 20:31
Of course, yeah, you got to expect the AI to rear its head at some point. And for good reason as well. Let’s talk about data privacy first. It’s one of those things that had marketers rolling their eyes a little bit, especially here in Europe when GDPR came in, and it was this kind of panic stations approach, and was seen as perhaps a little bit frustrating for some people as well. What I will say about data privacy is that it is a good thing for marketing, because we have people who come to us where they might have, I won’t name any names, but where they have might scraped some data, or maybe even purchase some data, which is a big, big gray area. We usually turn those people away, because what we aren’t doing is we aren’t gathering an audience that wants to hear from us. And when you’ve got these data privacy rules coming in, say, GDPR, what that’s actually doing is it’s curating people’s inboxes. It’s getting rid of the noise a little bit, and it’s kind of making sure that whatever is coming through is welcome. So you know, it’s not in a perfect place at the moment, but it actually is helpful from my point of view. And it goes back to gathering an email list where I said earlier about people chasing the high number, as opposed to focusing on making sure that their subscribers are of high quality. It kind of puts the responsibility on the business to think about how they’re gathering their email list a little bit more. You know, instead of just scraping, you know, 1000s of email addresses and kind of spraying and praying and, you know, quoting and hoping and just hoping, you know that something comes in, we are thinking now about building almost a community in some sense. You know, if we’re gathering this first party data we’re gathering this email audience, you know, we’re only a couple of steps away then from building a community. And community, community marketing is something that’s, that’s kind of big right now as well. So that’s why I like data privacy and why I don’t roll my eyes when people talk about it, or, you know, I think it’s a good thing. And, yes.
Jamie Woodbridge 22:45
The other thing you asked was AI, right?
Christian Klepp 22:46
I did, yeah.
Jamie Woodbridge 22:48
So AI, look, I’m a non techie person, right? So I’m a marketer and I’m a sales person, but I do have kind of two perspectives, which people will have heard of these from other people. So they’re not kind of groundbreaking things. But firstly, uh, content generation is the first and most obvious thing that that will be impacted by AI and is being impacted by AI. So writing the emails, I actually, I’m not against it. If you can make these AI tools do it in a way that sounds like you and sounds like your brand. And it is on point when it comes to being authentic and personable. My feeling, having experimented with these things and seeing people experiment with these tools at the moment, is that it’s a little bit off. It’s too far off to be there yet. So in terms of using AI for email marketing campaigns, it’s great for ideation, it’s great for brainstorming, it’s great for research, as long as you’re checking the sources and make sure it’s quoting accurately, because sometimes it doesn’t. When it comes to writing the content, I think you’re much better off writing it yourself at the moment. It’s, you can make it sound like you, you can… I heard a great guy talk about AI and how it’s not very good at coming up with the unexpected. And that’s something that humans are really good at doing. It’s coming up with the unexpected and coming up with this great storytelling. And I do think that if you aren’t able to write, which I would challenge, because I think most people can write how they talk. And if you run a business or you run a marketing department, you’re able to talk in an engaging way, in some way, shape or form. So writing how you talk is the first step. But if you aren’t able to do that, engaging a copywriter to help you do it. You’re far better off than using AI tools right now. The other way in which AI will impact email marketing is around the more technical back end. So we’re talking about algorithms that will help you target people better. You know, if we have these AI tools that will start to paint this picture of how people are engaging with your emails to a better degree, in terms of what time they’re opening, how long they’re spending and then to help you manage your send schedule, I think that’s one thing that might come in and we are seeing kind of this the beginnings that at the moment as well. So that assistance, because that is a big area for people. It’s like, well, how often should I send, and what time of day should I send? And what, you know, what day should I send? And all of those are probably some of the most Googled questions when it comes to email marketing. And so AI tools that will help you do that, I think will be something that’s that we’ll see and more and more of.
Christian Klepp 25:37
Great answer. And you kind of set yourself up for a follow up question there, if we’re, if we’ve been talking at length now about AI tools, if you can just what are some of these AI tools that you’ve you’ve tested out or you’re working with, and which ones would you recommend for email marketing?
Jamie Woodbridge 25:55
Yeah, for sure that we aren’t using that full a suite of AI tools, if I’m honest. We in with regards to running our agency, there are a few tools that we use that are incredibly helpful. ChatGPT is the most obvious one. We use it fairly often when it comes to researching, when it comes to ideation. Not very often. We don’t use it for image generation that much openAI, but we are using it for ideation. We’re not using it for content generation. I wouldn’t be against it if it makes some leaps and bounds eventually, but right now, it’s nowhere near where it used to be. And you know, as copywriters, we need to be at the top of our game in that respect. Another AI tool where we use quite often, which isn’t necessarily email marketing specific, but around, you know, note-taking apps in meetings, etc. And actually, for a long time, I didn’t adopt one of those tools, but now that I do the analysis that it gives me in the background after each call and the summary, huge time saving for us there. And I would encourage anyone that’s not using a note taker in their meetings, especially for those ones, but that have action points and minutes that get written up afterwards, I would definitely think about bringing one of those in. We use Firefly for that. We There are obviously native AI tools that we’re seeing on a lot of these platforms as well. So MailChimp is one that’s a platform that’s using at the moment, they have tools. I’m not on commission, by the way, but MailChimp has tools within their platform that will you put your website in for your business, and it will start to automatically generate, using AI, some design templates for you for your emails. Those are a little bit off at the moment from a finished product, but it gives you a starting point, which is great. And then there, you know, a lot of these platforms also have these kind of AI tools and tips that they’re kind of operating in the background. We have to be really careful with what we’re using there, though, because at the moment these, a lot of these tools are too early on to rely on, is what I would say. And you can see that with a platform like LinkedIn. You know what I hear, what I see, people being frustrated at how primitive the AI tools are on LinkedIn at the moment. You know, so you’ve got these suggested replies or suggested comments on people’s posts. So you’ve got these. Even suggested rewrite this in AI, you know, and it’s it… I think that’s a bad thing for for that platform. So we have to be careful that we aren’t just using it because it’s something that’s trendy and in right now, but it’s actually serving us a purpose, and it means that whoever’s receiving our emails. Gets a better quality email at the end of the day, because that’s the only thing from us.
Christian Klepp 28:45
That’s the key phrase right there, serving us a purpose, right? You don’t want to just use it because it’s the next shiny object. Or, you know, like a lot of people, they just want to chase the next hack, the newest hack. You know, throw in whatever analogy you want, the easy way out, the shortcut, right? It needs to have something that will make your work, that will complement your work, or make it more efficient, right? And help improve the quality, help save you some time, but not completely replace the work that you do.
Jamie Woodbridge 29:20
Yeah, absolutely. I think, actually, you know, if I was to sum that up, I think someone… a talk that I listened to, I must get better at remembering the names of people who taught me these wise things. But someone mentioned, you know, write down the business problem that you have first and then find a tool that solves it, as opposed to, you know, coming across these tools and then finding problems for it to serve, you know, so that’s a great example of why I started using an AI note taker app, right? Because I had a problem that needed solving. And so eventually I got one in, and it serves a great purpose now, so and that, I think that could go down for any, any piece of software beyond AI, you know, write down the business problem first and then find a solution for it.
Christian Klepp 30:06
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so we get to the part where we talk about actionable tips. So provide us with something actionable here. If somebody were listening to this conversation, what are three to five things that they could do to implement email marketing campaigns that generate better results.
Jamie Woodbridge 30:25
I’m going to go for five here Christian because we want to deliver as much value as we can to the listeners as possible. First and foremost, we’ve got to think about the subscribers and we, you know, I’ve talked about this a lot already, but what I would do is as an actionable tip here, get a piece of paper and a pen, open a Google Doc or Microsoft Word, whatever you use, and start to write down the key elements of your ideal clients or your ideal subscriber. You know, who are they? What do they do? What job do they do? What do you understand about them? What problems do they have, what pain points, you know, so that would be my first actual tip. Start to write out a profile for your ideal subscriber. The second one is now that we understand that is writing a one sentence proposition for what your newsletter will be, or what your email campaigns, marketing campaigns will be. And I can give you the example of hour one. Here is that at the inbox club, so it’s once a week, you’ll get email marketing tips that will help you send better emails, and it will take three to five minutes to read. So that’s our proposition. You know, it could be better. We probably need to work on it a little bit. But what we want to get to is that one sentence, and once we understand the audience, in our audience is email marketing managers and founders of small businesses and medium businesses. Once we understand that, then we start to build this one sentence proposition out. The next thing so number three is to make your sign up forms really, really good. So like I said, we’ve understood the audience. We understand the subscribers we want. We now have a proposition for what our newsletter will do in terms of delivering value. So let’s make our forms really good. And I would encourage anyone who is sending email marketing campaigns to have three different forms, at least an embedded form at the footer, or, even better, at the header, on the header of your website. You know, make it a really high priority call to action on your website. Secondly, a pop up. I’m a big fan of pop ups. Some people don’t put them on or put them in action because they think they’re annoying. Yes, they can be annoying. And Christians hand is up. You think you’re there. They are annoying. They are annoying, especially if you get on your mobile you’re opening a website. You get the cookies pop up, and then you get the email pop up, and you’ve not even had a chance to to even visit the website yet. So what we want to do is we want to think about, okay, let’s be more clever here with the pop up so we can put time delays on them, you know. We can say, well, they only pop up as you with once you’ve scrolled, you know, a certain way down the page. We can make sure that they only appear on certain pages. We can make sure that they only appear on exit intent. You know, there are lots of ways that you can configure a pop up to make it so that it’s not annoying. And what we want to do is we want to make sure it’s popping up at a point in which the person on a website has had enough time for the website to resonate with them before the pop up gets served. And then whatever the pop up says needs to be super relevant to get them to move. Because what we’re doing there is we’re moving them along funnel, right? We’re moving them from website visitor to email subscriber. Yes, two forms embedded pop up, and then the third form is having a landing page of its own that is just for your newsletter. And we have that, and what we use that for is we send it to people, we display that on social media, and that’s where people go to sign up. You don’t want to say, go to my website and find the sign up form. You know, make it easier for people and create a landing page for your newsletter. So make your forms really good. That was point number three. Point number four is about the your email list, going back to your email list again, and it’s about audience management first. To sum up number four succinctly here, I would say you should be cleaning your list. And this is something actually that we wrestle with our clients and people that we’re talking to quite often, because the action of reducing your subscriber count seems counter intuitive, but there’s a very good reason why you should be archiving or suppressing email subscribers. What we want to do is we want to make sure that our email list is engaged. An engaged email list is a better email list so those that have stopped engaging and you can set the parameter. Is for this yourself, you could say, Okay, someone hasn’t opened an email in the past 90 days, which is three months, and that’s a long time, especially if you’re sending, if you’re sending weekly, for example, or more than weekly. So we set that pro app so no one’s they’ve not opened the email in the past 90 days. So what we want to do is perhaps then target them with an automation and say, okay, for anyone who hasn’t opened an email in 90 days, send them this to email automation that is aimed at specifically to get them to re engage with your emails so they then become engaged again. If they go through that automation and still don’t engage, then let’s archival, suppress them. And there’s two reasons why you should do that. One is because poor engagement metrics, so low open rates, low click rates, etc, high bounce rates, small scan place, those affect your sender reputation and can harm your deliverability, ie, you’re more likely to land into the spam folder. And the second reason why we want to archive these people, if they become unengaged, is because it might reduce the bill that you’re paying your email platform. You know, because a lot of these platforms will you’ll pay per subscriber or by subscribe account, and if you archive them, I would stress, archive them. Don’t delete them. They quite often come off your bill. So you know, you’re, you’re you’re curating this list, then you’re keeping people that on there that want to be there, and so you’re not paying for people that aren’t don’t want to be there and aren’t engaging with your emails. So that’s not before, that’s clean your list, and I would do that today. Number five is about your CTAs. So the call to action, we don’t want to give to people too many options. And this is something that you know. Marketers should know at this point, if you give people too many options, they end up doing nothing. So what we want to do is we want to reduce the amount of links and calls to action in our emails. You know, I once worked with a client very briefly, who had an amazing click rate on their emails. You know, we’re talking like 40% click rate, which is huge. But when I, when I looked at their emails, they had between 50 and 75 links in their email, and what we said, what we’re thinking about, then, okay, if we’re getting the clicks, that’s fine, but what are they going because if you’ve got that many links in your email, people are probably accidentally clicking links at that point, you know, because they you your farm will land on something. So we want to make sure that whatever we’re getting people to click, that it’s something that’s really intentional, something that’s that’s really meaningful and demonstrates an affirmative action, not just, you know, an accidental click or a low quality click. So reducing the amount of actions in an email when it comes to clicking on things is great, and actually sticking to one main CTA and then repeating that through the email is probably the best practice here, I would say. And what that does it just keeps the email focused centered, and any tips that you do get are very intentional.
Christian Klepp 38:23
No, those are some fantastic tips. And you know, I’ve been scribbling furiously away here, but let me just recap for the benefit of the audience, right? That’s all these tips. So the first one you said was thinking about the subscribers. The second one was, write a one sentence proposition for what your email marketing campaign is going to be about. The third one is make your sign up forms really good, and you have three different forms, right? So you had embedded, you had pop up, and you had landing page. Number four is clean your list, and number five is regarding your CTAs. Don’t give people too many options. That’s fantastic. You know, on the topic of pop up pop up forms, I’m not entirely opposed to them. And I’ll actually give you an example of a website where I think they’ve they’ve been very clever about it, and use this time delay. HubSpot, the pop up form does not appear until about you’re about halfway down the page, on a page with an article that that is about a seven minute read. So you’re looking at about maybe after, after four minutes have elapsed, then the pop up form appears. The one I’m opposed to is you haven’t even finished reading the headline, and bam, pop up. And you keep scrolling, and the pop up follows you.
Jamie Woodbridge 39:41
Yeah, those are super annoying. I completely agree. And if anyone’s going to get pop up forms, right, it’s going to be HubSpot, you know, you know, those guys know what they’re doing. So, yeah, I completely agree. And that’s, you know, it’s got to serve. We go back to that serving a purpose, right? So if you’re using a pop up, it’s got to serve. Purpose.
Christian Klepp 40:01
Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. So for this next question, love it or hate it, metrics, right? I mean, you can’t do email marketing and not look at the metrics, and you did bring it up earlier. But short of giving us this exhaustive list of metrics, just give us maybe the top three to five metrics that B to B marketers should be paying attention to if they’re implementing email marketing campaigns.
Jamie Woodbridge 40:23
Yeah, for sure. I think this is one of the beautiful things about email marketing. It’s that you can, you can really track how well they’re performing, and there’s no second guessing, you know, with with the small caveat that, you know, there’s a apple privacy thing which inflates open rates or affects open rates, sometimes, but this is one of the, one of the huge plus points for using email marketing as a channel. So there are the really obvious ones right as open rate and click rate that we could talk about a little bit here. And those are super important, right? They are. They are two of the main pillars when it comes to understanding how well that your email writing campaigns perform. I think the mistake that people often take is try is looking at those metrics in isolation. What we want to do is, we want to tell a story with these metrics. You know, if we’re talking about open rates, you know, what is it that affects open rates? It’s many things. People often attribute subject lines to open rates. But actually, subject lines is something that, you know, is only one small part of what affects whether people, if someone’s going to open your email or not. You know, the from name is also super important. You know, I will open emails that come from my mom every single time, because I can see the from name that it’s from my mom. So, you know, getting the from name right and choosing the from name that that’s that resonates more with the audience is key. Preview text is another one, and something that gets massively overlooked. By the way, preview text is that small snippet of text that you see next to the subject line as you’re in the inbox view, right? So it’s the it’s the quite often it will default to text that’s in the email, but you can edit that and put what you want, and that should support your subject line. It should be a continuation of your subject line. And then, when we talk about subject lines from names and preview text, one thing that gets massively overlooked when it comes to open rates is the reputation that you have for sending good emails, right? So if someone has received, you know, a ton of emails from you, and they’ve start to paint this image of you, of someone who sends emails that just aren’t very good, that’s obviously, no matter how good your subject line is they just won’t open your emails. They’ll fall out with you. And it happens the other way around as well. If you have this reputation for sending good emails, that will have a much bigger impact on open rates than being trying to be clever with the subject line click rates. And so we’re telling a story here with the metrics. So we want to go from open rates then to click rates. So if once people are opening them, then, is the content good enough to get them to click on, you know, is it resonating with them enough? Is it ticking enough boxes? Is it valuable enough to then for them to take a affirmative action into click? And we want to take those two into, you know, in tandem, opens and click should be working together, and that’s why we quite often get the reported metric of click through rates, which is the percentage of people that have clicked that have opened your email. So the reason why that’s so good is it’s quite easy sometimes to get a high open rate, because you can resort to cheap methods like click baiting and all of these kind of things. But what we want to do is we want to get a healthy mix of open rates and click rates. To give people an idea of what they should aim for. Look these things could be Googled, Google, whatever your industry is, and benchmark over rates, something like MailChimp, HubSpot or whatever will tell you these things. I think we should be aiming for at least 40% aspirationally, getting over 50. And if you’re an email marketing agency like we are, there’s additional pressure on you to send really good emails. Ours can vary somewhere between, you know, high 50s up to into the 70s for really good ones. So we want to be in the 40s, at least, is what I would say. Click rates. I would say you want to be somewhere, you know, 2% up to 6% again, if you get it right, like, you know, sometimes we do, and we do for our clients, it can be as high as 13 to 15% you know. So those are the kind of figures that we’re talking about here. If I was going to touch on to on one more metric Christian that doesn’t quite get talked about as a as often as click rates and open rates, is replies and forwards, and some platforms will track replies, some won’t, and almost no platforms are able to or will report on forwards, but that we should be aiming for these things, right? And I talked about metrics being one of the. The things that makes email marketing beautiful in a way, if you know, and that sounds cheesy and a bit corny, but another thing that makes email marketing beautiful is that it’s, it’s, it should be this personable communication, one to one, with your subscribers. And so when you’re writing email campaigns, it should be from one person to another, and again, someone clever, who I don’t remember the name of, said that newsletters should be less news and more letter. And so we want to make sure that we, when we when we’re sending things, that we’re writing in that way, and when we do that, and we are engaging and we provide enough value. What will people do if you’re writing conversation and you’re treating it well, you’re treating it in the right way, people will reply, and you could even ask for replies. You know, because people aren’t conditioned to reply to newsletters. They just aren’t. It’s something people are so used to getting emails from these no reply addresses, right? So asking it encouraging conversation is great. And similarly, for forwards, right? That’s the Holy Grail, because then you’ve provided enough value that someone wants to share it with someone that they know. So let’s aim for those things. And those, those two metrics, are something you probably have to track on your own. And forwards, good luck tracking forwards. You know, you’re just not gonna be able to track that, but you know you could. You one way to do it, perhaps, is you. We’ve experimented this before, is to put a link for people who have received your email from someone who’s forwarded to them to subscribe, and then you can track those subscriptions through that link. So yeah, I would, I would target those two things replies and forwards as well.
Christian Klepp 46:46
Fantastic, fantastic. That’s a that’s quite a great list of metrics. And I hope the audience is taking notes and paying attention to these things. But Jamie, thank you so much for coming on the show today and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Please. Quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.
Jamie Woodbridge 47:04
Yeah, for sure. So I’m Jamie. I run a email marketing agency that specialize in B to B marketing. Our agency called is called the inbox club. We fundamentally do a couple of things. One, newsletters, if that’s not already obvious, so we help B to B companies send great newsletters. So fully managed newsletter service, we build automation, something that I didn’t talk about today, but it’s incredibly powerful in B to B email marketing, helping helping people build these automated nurture sequences. And then we also have list growth services to help people grow their email lists in a very meaningful way that brings in high quality subscribers. And the beautiful thing about that I’ve said that b word again, because I do think email marketing is beautiful, or it should be, is that a lot of these B to B firms that are listening today will be selling high ticket items, and that means the value of one subscriber is quite high, you know. So these the one subscriber is incredibly valuable. So when we talk about building an email list, we’re not talking about hundreds of 1000s here. Perhaps just hundreds will do when we when we want to target these people. So, so yeah, that’s us. That was that’s what we do.
Christian Klepp 48:13
And how can they get in touch with you? Through LinkedIn, through email, or …
Jamie Woodbridge 48:16
Catch me on LinkedIn. So Jamie Woodbridge on LinkedIn at the inbox club, or you can send us an email. Our email address is [email protected].
Christian Klepp 48:28
Fantastic, fantastic. Jamie once again, thank you for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Jamie Woodbridge 48:34
Thanks, Christian. It’s great to be on.
Christian Klepp 48:36
All right. Bye for now.
How Video Uplevels Every Part of the Customer Journey
In the complex B2B ecosystem where sales cycles can be long, video can effectively tell a company’s story and differentiate its offerings from the competition. With new technology and AI, video production doesn’t have to be a daunting or gargantuan task and should be leveraged by more B2B companies.
That’s why we’re chatting with B2B marketing expert and senior executive Jessica Deckinger (Operating Partner, Clearhaven Partners) about how B2B companies can use videos to improve every part of the customer journey. During our conversation, Jessica dispels the common misconception that video production is a huge endeavor that requires specialized skills and expensive resources. She also highlights which pitfalls to avoid, how to get internal buy-in, and how videos can impact the customer journey across different stages.
https://youtu.be/PAaYdydOd5g
Topics discussed in episode
[1:22] What is holding B2B SaaS companies back from producing videos?
[5:04] Some of the pitfalls that B2B marketers should avoid
[8:47] How to avoid cramming too much information into one video
[12:35] How to address internal push back for leveraging videos
How videos positively impact the different stages of the consumer journey:
[16:43] Purchasing
[18:05] Onboarding and usage
[20:12] Renewal and growth
[26:32] Jessica’s point of view on the role of AI in video production
[33:15] Actionable tips for leveraging video in B2B marketing:
• Compartmentalize information into digestible chunks
• Map your communication barriers and address the most painful points first
• Understand the video readiness of your teams
• Leverage existing assets and content
• Assess your technology and determine which AI is the right one for you to use
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
Jessica Deckinger, Christian Klepp
Christian Klepp 00:00
Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Jessica Deckinger. She’s a senior executive with diverse and extensive experience across integrated brand marketing, product, digital strategy, insights and analytics, finance and operations. She’s valued as a strategic thinker with proven ability to lead cross functional teams, develop talent and influence team members at all levels of the organization. She’s also known for performing with a balance of financially based business thinking, exceptional creative vision and ability to adapt quickly to any team in a fast paced working environment. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketer’s mission is. Jessica Deckinger, welcome to the show. I’m so excited to have you here.
Jessica Deckinger 00:49
Thanks, Christian. I really appreciate you having me on as a guest.
Christian Klepp 00:52
Fantastic, fantastic. So let’s just hop right into it, because this is a topic I think that is not only pertinent to B to B marketers, specifically in the SaaS space, but to their sales counterparts as well. And so what am I talking about here, Folks? I’m talking about how video up levels every part of the customer journey. So Jessica, why don’t we kick off the conversation with this question, what do you think is still holding a lot of B to B SaaS companies back from producing videos?
Jessica Deckinger 01:22
Thank you so much. I mean, great place to start. Look. I think video is this feels like this really big, scary thing to a lot of folks. You feel like you have to be specialized and be you know Steven Spielberg and be able to do incredible, powerful things you know yourself as a creator, to be able to tackle video. I think many people feel that acutely. They kind of feel intimidated by the source of like, how am I going to do something that that really breaks through, feels brand worthy, feels beautiful, and how can I make a good video? So that’s definitely something holding people back. I think the other part is really just that it’s always been very painful to produce video. And I know that anyone who’s a B to B marketer, sales person, commercial person in this area is going to resonate with that. It has always been super painful. You know, you had to produce and hire a crew, and it was expensive. It took too long, and then, honestly, by time you got everyone’s opinions, everyone wanted to comment on the blue back screen, and the way someone tilted their head and whatever you did in the video itself, it always winds up being that, once you put it out there, it’s already outdated, right? Like it just feels unwieldy, or felt unwieldy to this point, and that, I think those are the two biggest pain points that have kept people back from really taking advantage of what’s one of the most powerful ways to communicate.
Christian Klepp 02:41
Absolutely, absolutely, you know, having produced a couple of like videos myself in my career, I can truly relate to that and how, yeah, it can be a painful logistics exercise. I’m not gonna lie,
Jessica Deckinger 02:54
and expensive
Christian Klepp 02:55
And expensive. And to your point, it’s this constant pressure that it has to be this Hollywood style produced video, right? Like you said, Steven Spielberg or James Cameron is going to show up and direct it, right? But, um, that that probably like, begs another question, like, does it have to be that style of video?
Christian Klepp 03:15
Yeah, absolutely. The technology aspect of it is really an important or a key component, right? And we’re going to touch on that later on in the conversation, but I’m going to segue us on to the next point, which is again, on this topic of producing videos for the different stages of the customer journey. What are some of the pitfalls that you think B to B marketers should avoid, and what should they be doing instead?
Jessica Deckinger 03:15
I mean, I think one of the wonderful things about the time we’re in now technologically, is that it doesn’t have to be that now, it really doesn’t. I think there’s so many creator tools. You know, I’m a board member of a company called SundaySky. I think they do a spectacular job of enabling not just static creation process, but also personalization at scale, like really taking video, making it easy to produce, easy to make it look really high quality, easy to customize and personalize, and then spread and scale effectively in real time, so that you can take advantage of this incredible medium and not feel restrained by that creative process, the production process. There is so much out there now that enables that to happen. You know, I think there’s also value in thinking about the personalization side, right? Like, really, nobody wants a… unless they’re going to, you know, logging on to Netflix and watching a film that was produced for mass audience. They’re not expecting something that’s mass when you’re marketing, right? No one wants mass that way. I mean, in essence, also, even when you get onto something like Netflix, it’s personalized in a way, because you’re getting content, hopefully that’s more towards your liking. But the level of expectation around personalization has ramped up so dramatically, and so I think the software, the capabilities we have now to do that, to execute on that, have made it much more accessible for everybody.
Jessica Deckinger 05:04
I mean, I think one of the biggest pitfalls is thinking about, you know, like trying to make video solve all the problems. I think you have to think about where you add the most value with video. Thinking about onboarding, acquisition, where are the most painful parts of your journey, customer experience, you know, where are the parts that you’re feeling the most pain, and then laser focusing on those so that it becomes a really pragmatic, you know, exercise, and you’re not kind of like just trying to blanket, do everything for everyone all the time. You can, with the technology that’s available now, but really thinking about where is the biggest pain in your acquisition, onboarding experience journey, and then using video as a tool to enable better experience there. Because, frankly, I think, you know, I mean, there’s a ton of data around this. Like, one of the things I think is really interesting is that, if you think about kind of how our human brain works, video is processed. There’s a study that showed that it was processed 64,000 times faster and had a 90% plus recall when you see something in video versus read something in text or hear something in audio. And you know, I think that is a really powerful stat. And when you think about your most painful pain point, bringing something up the curve that quickly, with both the processing and capability of the end user and the retention of the end user, there’s a potential to make really big leaps and bounds and have really big ROI on fixing that process first. And so I think that’s a pitfall that people do fall into, is they try to fix everything at once, but the potential to really fix the most painful thing and bring it so far up the curve is pretty, pretty phenomenal.
Christian Klepp 06:41
Absolutely, absolutely. You just reminded me of a project that was involved with a couple of years ago where, well, let’s just for lack of a better description, the client tried to cram every piece of information into two minutes, right? And at the end…
Jessica Deckinger 06:58
I think that’s a common problem. I don’t think that’s a pain point just for you.
Christian Klepp 07:02
No, no, no, it’s I think it’s a recurring trend. And I think the objective, to your point, the objective of the exercise, is people, this is not meant to be an instruction manual, right? Try to think of this and, there might be a different analogy. This is just the one I like to use. Just think of this like a teaser trailer. Have you ever watched a teaser trailer that was five minutes long?
Jessica Deckinger 07:23
I mean, there’s a reason for that, right? Because you can hook people very quickly. And I think the to get back to our first point about what’s holding people back. You know, there’s something about the capacity to create bite size pieces of information. And frankly, I think it’s important now Millennials are the biggest buyers of everything, coming up next in the queue, you know, whether it’s software or services or products, and they’re in the prime of their careers, right? And they’re thinking about bite sized content because they are more digitally native. You know, they are… They have been fed bite sized content, and know the value of it and appreciate the value of their time, and want to be, you know, respected and not kind of like expected. To your point, read an entire brochure of content, or watch an entire brochure of content in one video. And I think the platforms that are available now enable us to create as marketers, as commercial people, you know, those bite sized chunks, because we can do it more efficiently, and it’s not going to be this huge production that we talked about in the beginning of the conversation.
Christian Klepp 08:24
Absolutely, absolutely. You just made me think of another question, and it’s really on this topic of having a teaser trailer rather than a five minute short film. How do you deal with that kind of pushback? Because I’m sure you’ve dealt with this before, where folks want to produce a video and they just want to cram everything under the sky into that two or three minutes. How do you go to these people and say, Hey, listen, let’s not do that.
Christian Klepp 08:47
yeah, yeah, we used to…
Jessica Deckinger 08:47
I mean, it’s hard. You tapped on a good point, which is that everybody has opinions about creative. I always joke, as a marketer that the two most painful things are people have comments on words and colors, right? Like, I don’t like the blue, it reminds me my childhood bathroom. Or that word evokes, you know, a bad feeling for me. And it’s always interesting as a marketer to navigate that, and I joke about that, but it does. It is representative of a larger thing, which is that when you’re creating a piece of creative content, there are going to be lots of opinions. One of the ways to combat that is this kind of thinking about empowering your team with operational efficiency tools that allow you to create things at scale, because you can kind of make everybody happy that way, right? You can create multiple pieces of content rapidly. AI enables that more than ever, you know, being able to rapidly iterate so that, like, even if you do wind up having a hard time pushing back on the massive content, you know, direction, you can both create a large piece of content and slice it and dice it and make everybody happy. And so I think the software that’s enabling video creation at scale and personalization at scale, like SundaySky that I mentioned earlier, I think it’s… those are the kinds of things that will create empowerment with marketers that we’ve never had before. I mean, it is doing it now I use that tool. I think there are many tools out there, but it’s great to have that level of empowerment yourself as a decision maker in that role, because it is really hard when you feel at the mercy of someone’s, you know, opinion, weighing in on a piece of creative content that’s going to hold you back from getting your job done. That feels frustrating, I think, to a lot of folks,
Jessica Deckinger 09:06
Smiling. I hope it’s not that frustrating to you.
Christian Klepp 09:46
No, no, no. Well, it’s just, it’s just evoking these memories of like, you know, everybody’s, everybody’s a copywriter, everyone, the creative director, and then the old decision by committee and opinion is cases, right? So, but, yeah, no, you brought up such a good point, and I totally agree with that, I think, to a certain extent. And we can jam on this a little bit further later on in the conversation, that technology might help to to break the tie so called right to give people like what they want, but also in a way that’s relevant, first and foremost to the customer at the different stages of the journey, right? Because I’ve learned this the hard way, that getting internal consensus is one thing, but then if you put it out into the market and it flops, then that internal consensus means nothing.
Jessica Deckinger 11:22
Right. And you lose trust if that happens too sometimes, yeah, and I think having the analytics around the performance of the assets is critical and the capability to test and fast fail is critical. And that, like trying to do it old school, where you’re producing with a large you know that Spielberg style production, I think actually hinders your ability to build trust and credibility in your own organization. Because if you do produce something and it’s really expensive and time consuming, and you put it out there and it flops, where do you go from there? So you’re kind of like shooting the moon every time you want to make something, versus being able to kind of fast fail and iterate and AB test. Hey, let’s test this with this audience and this with that audience and see how it performs. And having analytics around it, which is another critical reason, you have to have a tool that will give you analytics, like I think you have to have a metric way to measure now, I’m sure you’re seeing this too. Everyone wants to measure everything. And for people in brand awareness building, this is like the most agonizing thing, because some brand awareness things are hard to measure, but not less valuable. And I think, but I think being able to kind of, as technology evolves and allows us to measure more things, the easier it will be for us to navigate when we’re talking with folks and stakeholders who want to measure everything.
Christian Klepp 12:35
Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely right. You brought up some of this already in the past couple of minutes. But how do you deal with internal pushback, like, say, from senior management who doesn’t know much about producing a video, and because they don’t know much about it, they don’t think that this should be done.
Jessica Deckinger 12:53
Yeah, I mean, I think, look. We call it, I call it video readiness, like I think there is, there’s a level, a degree to which people are video ready or not. I think there are kind of three ways to address that. When folks are not video ready yet, they’re like, I don’t really believe it. I don’t know how you’re going to do it. I don’t understand it. I think you have to start with data. In fact. I mean the fact that that 90% retention was a neuroscience research piece, like, there is data to show how powerful video can be. I think there’s some data to show how powerful video has been for other companies. And I think, you know, that’s a great starting point. I think the second part is thinking about presenting the how you’re going to get it done efficiently is a great barrier breaker. You know, one of the biggest fears, I think was that first thing we touched on, which is, oh, my god, is this gonna cost me a million dollars? And even if you told me it’s gonna work, how is it gonna get done? I think creating a believer is about having the data, showing the process, and then talking about the potential result is the third part, which is, you know, when you think about the part of the journey you’re trying to influence, looking at what’s out there in the market, and showing how you can rise above the noise, perform above competitors, show up with more personalization, create stickier customers. All of that is, is just, is in support of the why it matters, how you’re going to do it right then it’s what it’s going to deliver. And I don’t think you have to be wild and say, Oh, we’re going to acquire at a 50% higher rate or whatever, you know, I think. But I do think setting the bar for what we should expect to see and measure and be able to show out of this is pretty important, and that has worked really well for me with pushback. That kind of three pillar approach, I mean, frankly, helps with almost anything. Because I think, like, that’s how many minds work is they want to understand the why, the how and the what. And I think those three questions, if you can answer them, it tends to push people towards being a believer, or at least suspension of disbelief, which is part of the what you need to get moving forward. And I think if someone is like dead set, that it’s not going to work, that. It’s a much harder nut to crack obviously.
Christian Klepp 15:03
Just judging from the answer you’ve been giving in the past couple of minutes, you’ve clearly had this conversation with someone before. (laugh)
Jessica Deckinger 15:11
I mean, I think we all have, not just about video, but about anything. And I think as you grow in your career, learning about managing, up, managing, you know, horizontally, managing down, are all parts of that growth. And if you’re lucky, and I’ve been fortunate to have very talented, qualified, thoughtful leaders that I’ve worked under, you know, you see that, and you can echo it, because those behaviors and thinking about being calm, logical, you know, in your approach to getting buy in, hopefully we’re all lucky enough to see that, you know, do as I do, not as I say, but I’ve been fortunate, so I practice what I preach in that area as well, just trying to, kind of like, not get defensive when someone’s coming at me, pushing back hard on something. I think video is one of those things I’ve been pushed back on many times. So I’ve learned,
Christian Klepp 16:05
Yeah, absolutely.
Jessica Deckinger 16:06
But, you know…
Christian Klepp 16:08
Let me just quickly recap that, because I think it’s worth repeating for the benefit of the audience. So you were talking about having the data showing the process, and if you don’t have the results already, show how you are going to get the results and what the results are going to be.
Jessica Deckinger 16:21
Right.
Christian Klepp 16:22
I’m going to move us on to the next question. So basically, from your professional experience, how can video directly and positively impact the customer journey? And if you can provide examples where relevant, that’d be great. So for three parts, right? So for purchasing, onboarding and usage, and renewal and growth, and I’m happy to repeat.
Jessica Deckinger 16:43
Yeah, I mean, I think, look, the biggest things are thinking about purchase, right? You have to tell a story that’s going to differentiate and share more about your whatever it is you’re trying to influence purchase for. And if you think about static content, right, not just what I said earlier around, like video being more engaging, but I think it gives you the capacity to tell a really meaningful portion of your story really effectively through multiple mediums. So you can kind of incorporate all different kinds of learning styles in that purchase decision. When I go out there, I don’t love static ads. I don’t learn by reading. I learn by human interaction, like I’m that kind of learner. And look, I think one of the great things about the world we live in now is that we recognize there are many different learning styles. There are people who are auditory learners, visual learners, people who are human interaction learners. There are people who learn when they say it. And I think, you know, having all of the mediums you can incorporate into video enable that decision to be much more effective, because you can really get the message across to multiple audiences or multiple types of learners in your audience, really effectively. That’s the first thing. And then the second one, can you repeat the second parts of the question?
Christian Klepp 18:01
Yeah, absolutely. The second part of the question is about onboarding and usage.
Jessica Deckinger 18:05
Oh, yeah, big one, big one, which is, I think that, look, technology is accelerating. The amount of things we have to know in a day is accelerating. Think about how many passwords you have to know in a day. I know there are tools to keep these things, but really, the amount of process, the amount of technical savvy, the amount of information we have to process, enable and put into use in a day, is more so when you’re getting someone to onboard onto your service, software, technology, physical product, consumer product, name,your thing, financial services instrument, you as the owner and seller of that good service, whatever it is, have more burden, because you have to enable learning in a deeper, more sticky way. Well, we just talked about 90 plus percent retention using video. I think the fact that you can… and we talked about the learning styles, the fact that you can teach people in a way they can understand and help them retain better is really powerful, and I think it’s a miss. It’s a miss not to be leveraging video in an onboarding so I just had this happen, actually. I just… was, I bought a new phone, and I got sent I got, like, you know, think about the IKEA version of this, right? I got a five page instruction manual with the phone. I was like, I’m not reading this. It feels like IKEA, I’m not gonna put this together. I’m not gonna go to do this. That’s not how I learned, right? So I went on YouTube and watched a video, and it was very powerful for me, because I was able to kind of like, Oh, I get it now, I see where the thing is, and I get them set up in the button and the thing, and that was a user created video. But I think if companies can harness that power, we’re all teaching ourselves more this way. Now, right? Like, look at younger generations. This is how they learn. This is how they evolve and grow. And I think, you know, it’s a really, potentially impactful platform to be able to personalize a video to the person, using data, explaining the thing in a way that they can understand their own learning style, and it’ll be sticky and create retention. So to me, it’s a really powerful customer onboarding tool, video.
Christian Klepp 18:06
Yeah, absolutely okay. And then the third part was renewal and growth.
Jessica Deckinger 20:12
I mean, nowadays, if you’re not talking to me as your customer and letting me know how valuable I am, me Jessica, I really don’t… I’m not going to be loyal to you. I’m going to be loyal to the next best thing. I think you… customers have to feel valued, and have to feel individually valued now in order to give you the right to keep them, you know like it is a right to be kept by a customer these days, because there are many, many options in every single category you can think of, and it’s not just about the quality of your product, it’s about the experience of the customer. And again, to that teaching thing, when you’re onboarding someone, the keeping them tied in is about recognizing how valuable they are, making them feel seen. I’m seeing this more with smaller startup brands where they’re doing this, where you, kind of, like, you buy something, they send you a note from the CEO to you, like, I think it’s really nice. It’s it’s hard to scale unless you have a software solution if you’re a larger organization. When you have like, five people and you’re a startup, it’s easier to do when you’re a Kickstarter or something. But I think that’s where the software part comes into play, is that you can scale personalization. Can scale that retention capability. It’s just so critical now to retaining your customers.
Christian Klepp 21:24
Absolutely, absolutely. I wanted to go back to something you said with… it was talking about, you were talking about learning on YouTube, right? Like, rather than reading this very long instruction manual for your new phone, you went on YouTube to look something up. And I mean that one in itself, I think, is living proof of the power of leveraging video as opposed to the written word. And I’m not saying, and I shouldn’t be saying this as a copywriter, but, like, but I’m not saying that the written word is not useful, right? Because all videos had started as a script at some point, right? But the point here is the attention span, the time and the speed with which to convey and dispense that information, right? I mean, it’s another great example is, I think couple of months ago, I had problem with my garage door, like it just wouldn’t close right. All those remote controls, you know, where you push the button, it comes down, and you’re like, and it’s not working, and it keeps bouncing back up. And that’s not a great problem to have in the middle of winter, right? And as you said, I went through the instruction manual, and that thing is like, 50 pages, 50, 70 pages, and I’m like, Oh, boy. So we looked it up on, we looked it up on YouTube, right? So there’s a two minute video how to fix it. Knows something about, like, loosening a screw and the in the mechanism that sits, sits on the roof the garage, and before you know it, it was fixed, right? So…
Jessica Deckinger 21:25
I mean, it’s amazing, it’s amazing and life changing.
Christian Klepp 22:57
Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, it was, yeah, that was something that you brought up in the onboarding and usage stage. So I thought, yeah, absolutely agree that that’s one of many benefits of video.
Jessica Deckinger 23:08
And ultimately, I think, like there is something also about the fact that you just said something very real, which is that we all have human experience, and even in B to B world, this is true now, which is recognizing that it’s not just that a user, be they B to C or B to B, is a human. At the end of the day, everything is B to H, right? So even if it’s business to committee, it’s business to human, right? There, there are a bunch of humans there, and nobody wants dehumanized unilateral one per one size fits all experience in any part of the journey anymore, because we’re all humans, and we recognize that. And so I think there’s also like, something about you as a customer of this company, like not wanting to call and get like, press one for blah de blah, press two for like, that is a dehumanizing experience. You have been taken and fed to a machine, and it feels dehumanizing. And I think that is a larger sign of you wanted to feel like a person, have someone tell you how to do it, figure it out, feel good, resolve your problem, right? And that’s all true in the way that customers in any setting, in any kind of type of customer, is expecting to be addressed and written word like you said, is valuable. It’s not not valuable. Websites still convert people, emails still convert buyers. You know, there’s lots of different tools in the arsenal. I just think that there is a power and a special value in video, in the part of engaging the human part of the experience, the emotional response you have to something when it feels like it’s for you, when it feels like it solves a pain point, even if it’s a pain point about a garage door, right? There’s a there’s something that feels really good about solving your pain, like it feels a relief.
Christian Klepp 24:50
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, as opposed to, like, what you just said, just calling up the customer support hotline and waiting in the queue for half an hour, or 45 minutes.
Jessica Deckinger 25:02
It’s horrible. Everyone knows. Everyone’s been there. Your wait time will be 22 minutes. You’re like, Oh my God, that’s 22 minutes. I can’t get back of my life. (laugh)
Christian Klepp 25:10
And then when you finally get to talk to an actual person, they don’t know how to solve the problem, and they refer you to somebody else. So you end up like, having an hour of your life wasted. Let me get back right?
Jessica Deckinger 25:19
You bring up a really good point also, which is that as a customer experience, as a Customer Success tool, when you are a company, you should prove that you know your customers better by a certain point of the journey.
Christian Klepp 25:30
Absolutely
Jessica Deckinger 25:31
And know their pain better by a certain point of the journey. So I’m sure that you are not the first person to experience this pain point. And there’s something great about being able to gather those data points, and then use video to solve those data points about pain in a way that’s scalable, which like if you call that… for that person may not have answered that question before, but if you have the content in your repository about that problem and can push it forward, that’s really powerful, too, right? Because then you can basically operationalize and streamline the efficiency of your customer service experience and your customer success experience. You know, because there’s shared, there’s shared problems and shared solutions out there.
Christian Klepp 26:12
Exactly, exactly you brought up such a good point earlier on the topic of technology. And I mean, this is a podcast in 2024 so I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t ask you this question. But AI and video, right? Do these two go together? And why?
Jessica Deckinger 26:32
I think sometimes yes, sometimes no, and I’ll give you a couple examples. So I think AI as an enabler of the creation process, meaning, like AI as an enabler of editing, suggesting new ideas, bringing creative thinking, kind of being like a co pilot person with you, doing the thing is great, updating and editing imagery that might take you hours to edit, you know, suggesting new creative executions that you could add into the process. Like, I think as a partner in crime, AI is amazing. That’s great. As a replacement for humans, I don’t think it’s so great. Like, I think it’s a support lift mechanism, not a replacement mechanism. But it’s funny. The other day, I watched a segment about Eric Yuan, who’s the CEO of zoom, saying that AI is going to replace us in meetings. Humans like you just have an avatar replacing your meetings. I know they’re like, making this so immediately I was like, Well, that sounds like great, not to have to go to meetings anymore. But also I’m like, do I want to replace the myself in meetings, I actually do find meetings sometimes they’re not valuable if I’m just sitting on a screen, but if I’m actually engaging with another human, I find that really valuable, and I think the other place. So when I think about AI avatars, like companies that have gone that direction, where you replace a person with a machine, to me, it feels a little bit not helpful and counter intuitive because of what we just talked about, right? Like, you call that phone number and you get press one for a bloody blah like, taking away the humanity, the personalization in video, to me, feels counter to what I’d want, because I don’t want a machine telling me something in a different medium that doesn’t help me, like I don’t need I don’t… just as much as I don’t want the machine telling you what to do when I pick up the phone. I don’t want them telling you that on the screen. And I think it’s not sophisticated enough yet to be able to not tell the difference like I think it’s hard to replace the people element, but to scale the people element is amazing. So to me, the scale part, the thinking about the response, the data analysis off of the video performance, the creation, co piloting, of the creation of the process like those are all tools we should be leveraging now and are really productive in getting us to do more, better, faster, more personalized. All the right things?
Christian Klepp 28:55
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think the description you used is really, really appropriate. You said co pilot. So it’s somebody like, you’re a wing man or wing woman. Make it a bit more balanced. And I totally agree with that. I think there’s a time and place for AI, but this notion of, like, completely replacing what we’re doing now with artificial intelligence or machine learning. Yeah. I mean, not even far-fetched. But like, to your point, do we really want that? I mean, like, I can share an experience with you that I’ve had here. Any you call any bank in Canada, right? And they will put you into this, into this loop where you know you have to press one for this and press two for that. But now they’ve introduced AI, and they will introduce themselves as, Hello, I am this bank’s AI. What are you looking for today? Oh, I want to check my account. I’m sorry I didn’t hear that. Please repeat. And it just creates, I think, even more frustration in a situation where the customer is already calling under, yes, exactly.
Jessica Deckinger 29:05
Like you’re under duress, and it’s aggravating you more,
Christian Klepp 30:02
And it’s aggravating you more. So by the time you actually talk to a human you’re just pissed off.
Jessica Deckinger 30:07
And I think that the thing is, I think we will get, I actually think it will get there to the point where it’s that sophisticated that you could if it’s large language model based things, but the big but is what you just said, I think, like some chat bots now, AI chat bots have gotten really pretty refined. If the large language learning model, language model is like sophisticated enough, and it’s closed loop and it’s interesting, but it’s not, I think a lot of that’s not there yet. And so a lot of hallucinations you get AI that does weird things, you know, you get AI that tells you something nothing to do with what you said, and you make the problem worse. So I think, look, I said this the other day that we were talking about this with someone else, and I was saying this, like, being leading edge is great. Being bleeding edge is a little dangerous, especially when you’re talking about, you know, you’re addressing customers pain, and there’s risk there that you’ll… like what we just talked about earlier. With retaining your customers, they have to feel valued. If you make them more upset when they’re under duress, you’re not going to solve that problem, right? You’re going to make a bigger problem. So to me, it’s really thinking about ways to co pilot and create more better, but with the end goal of being, scaling the humans to create better experience, scaling personalization to create better experience. That’s the way you use AI right now, I don’t know where it’s going to land. No one can predict.
Christian Klepp 31:31
Nobody knows,
Jessica Deckinger 31:32
But I think right now, that’s where it is, and I think we’re going to be there for a while, because it’s going to, you know, the AI is only as good as what we put in.
Christian Klepp 31:39
It’s constantly evolving. It’s constantly learning, right? So they’re always talking about, you have to train the AI, and it’s still learning. It’s still learning your behaviors, your patterns and…
Jessica Deckinger 31:49
Exactly. But I think what you experienced is very common, and actually people are getting irritated by it because they just don’t want to, like, stop with AI. It’s too much,
Christian Klepp 31:59
Absolutely, and some of them, and I’ve seen this, like, live and unplugged, they just resort to going to the branch in person, right?
Jessica Deckinger 32:05
Yeah,
Christian Klepp 32:06
Because they just can’t solve it online. I know that the banks try to, like, push you to like, oh, just, just go online. You can do this all online, and you can do it on your app, but if the app and the artificial intelligence just creates this extremely frustrating experience for the customer they’re gonna default to, well, the old way of doing things.
Jessica Deckinger 32:25
100%. This is where I do think, like proactive engagement across known challenges and training and the onboarding process. Like, again, having that really good onboarding process is pretty critical and and then I think having a really strong infrastructure to support that with humans. It’s that balance, right? So I 100% agree. I think that’s really an interesting dynamic. We’ll see how it changes over time.
Christian Klepp 32:47
Well, only time will tell. Only time will tell. Okay, Jessica, we get to the point in the conversation where we are talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty already, but if there’s somebody out there that’s listening to this, this conversation you and I are having and saying, You know what, we’ve got to, like, start leveraging video, right? So what are these three to five things that B to B marketers can do to leverage video for every part of the customer journey?
Jessica Deckinger 33:15
Yeah. I mean, I think there are many, but I’ll pick a few just so we don’t run out of time. One is, I think, compartmentalizing information to digestible chunks, like thinking about how you’re going to communicate in those small format chunks we talked about, which I think is critical today more than ever, makes you more relevant, helps you get more ROI on the information you’re delivering through video. I think, you know, that’s a critical piece of this success. A video is being that, being digest… thinking about the digestibility of it.
The second is thinking about mapping your communication barriers out, like actually thinking before you tackle stuff. First of all, will help with the stakeholder issue. Because if you’re sensing a massive communication pain point, they probably are too. And I think tackling the most painful things first is critical. Really being on top of those priorities of what’s most painful in what priority rank order.
I think understanding the video readiness of your teams pretty important, and also encouraging folks that anyone can really do it, and then having that kind of three pillar approach we talked about to getting any people who are not video ready on board with it, right like making sure that they get on board so that you’re… if you’re gonna get into the video game, you need people to be believers, even if it’s just suspension of disbelief right now, because what you don’t want to do is jump in and like, and everyone’s too scared and doesn’t necessarily want to do it, or they’re actually not engaged.
And then I think that’s the fourth thing is really probably one of the most important, which is thinking about where you can leverage what you already have, like, if you’re going to go out and start investing in software to produce video content at scale, you need to make sure that you are not wasting the things you have, and that the tool you buy doesn’t waste the things you have, like you shouldn’t have to create from scratch, everything new. If you are a marketer, if you’re a salesperson, you probably have built out, at least in your head, if not out in the world, some kind of content, some kind of imagery, some kind of branding, some kind of positioning, some kind of messaging around what your value proposition, what your differentiators are, and you need a tool that’s going to help you co pilot those things into content that can be scaled. And I think that’s important to know where you can leverage those things, what things you have, understanding what’s in your arsenal already. And then when you get a tool, you can then, like, plug and play those things.
Christian Klepp 35:42
Those are, those are some dynamite tips. Some dynamite tips. And, you know, going back to your point, um, folks don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I think it’s a part of it is also resourcefulness, like check your existing assets, your existing content, and see what can be leveraged there or even repurposed. There is some merit to repurposing content in different formats.
Jessica Deckinger 35:42
And I think the last thing I say, just like, you need to make sure, as you’re assessing a tool, if you’re thinking about bringing in a tool, that the AI is, is the right formula. We just talked about, right, that the AI is, if there’s AI, that it’s real, it’s a real thing that’s actually going to help you, and that it’s going to be co piloting. Because I do think there is that first topic we brought up, which is, what’s keeping people from video, if the copilot can actually help you get over the hurdle of feeling like it’s too hard, it takes too long, it’s too expensive, all those things, takes too much genius, as Steven Spielberg, right? Like, I think if it can help you tackle those things, then you know it’s a legitimate co pilot and a legitimate AI functionality. And I think those are going to be important things to consider. Those are my five. I could go on, but I’m not going to do that.
Jessica Deckinger 36:30
100%
Christian Klepp 36:32
But again, just for the benefit of the listeners, I’m just going to repeat what you said in terms of the actionable tips. So compartmentalization of information into digestible chunks, I think, was the first point. The second point was mapping your communications barriers out and tap into the most painful things first. Couldn’t agree with that more, because I’ve done it. Understanding the video readiness of your teams. Absolutely important. Leveraging what you already have in terms of existing assets and content, and finally, the assessment of technology per se, or determining whether AI is the right fit or the right formula for you to use.
Jessica Deckinger 37:32
100% that’s right. Yeah.
Christian Klepp 37:33
Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, so we’re gonna get to the, I call this the soapbox question, so I’m gonna ask you to, like, get up there, right? And on this topic of leveraging video, right? What is a status quo that you passionately disagree with, and why.
Jessica Deckinger 37:54
A status quo? Oh, I have, I have one. I have one. This is very highly personal.
Christian Klepp 38:00
Let’s hear it. Let’s hear it.
Jessica Deckinger 38:01
It’s okay?
Christian Klepp 38:01
Yes.
Jessica Deckinger 38:02
So I started my career in marketing in B to C, business to consumer marketing. And I kind of referenced this earlier, but I’m going to go deep. I think it’s important. And I transitioned into B to B, business to business marketing mid-career. And I think there is a deeply held perspective by a lot of folks, that they are separate animals, like completely different animals. You cannot transfer those skills. You do not have shared insights between those two. That they’re basically different career paths, and that transitioning between both doesn’t hold a lot of value, and that the implications of the learnings from both wouldn’t apply across either field. I deeply, deeply disagree with this to my heart and soul, and it’s not just because of my own personal experience. I think there is a ton of insight from B to C, the transferable to B to B and the other way around. I think the differences that most people sense are foundationally in language barriers, right, different terminology used in B to C and B to B, but ultimately it’s all B to H really. It really is at the end of the day. And so look, I think B to B marketing tends to focus on because you’re selling to committees, because you’re selling to corporate personas, thinking about data driven, data enabled, data measured tactics, and oftentimes are a little more squeamish about very above the funnel, awareness building, brand generating things. I’m making assumptions here based on my experience. But and then on the B to C side, I think B to C, you know, feel much more that emotional purchase requires a lot of or emotionally driven, charged purchase of an individual, requires a lot more consumer psychology, developed stuff at the above the funnel, awareness building. And they love to do more data driven things, but feel a lot of times that they have to focus so hard on that, like brand awareness, brand loyalty stuff, visuals, all those things. I actually think that both of those things should merge like there is an emotional factor to a B to B decision. I don’t, I don’t care who says there is not. I completely disagree. I think when you are a human making a decision about something, your relationships with the company, your feeling that the your problems are heard, your understanding of what you’re going to buy and feeling like it’s aspirational to what it’s going to deliver versus what you’re going to pay are all just as important as they are in B to C. And I think in B to C world, the need to have data driving the marketing motions, you know, understanding customer feedback in meaningful ways. Integrating that into new learnings is critical too. And I’m not saying everybody blanket is in those two categories of separation, but I think it validates how much marketers are more alike than they think B to C and B to B land. And look, I think being really sharp in all those things makes kind of great B to C marketers who operate like B to B’s and great B to B’s who operate like B to C’s, and people who do both really well. And I think that’s a really like, great unifying factor. We could all bring ourselves together more. Should we all be thinking like strategic B to H marketers. That’s my that’s my soapbox.
Christian Klepp 41:36
Yeah, yeah, you weren’t kidding. That is a soapbox moment. No, no. But, I mean, like, a lot of the things that you said, I mean, they totally resonated with me, and I do agree with that, right? I do know that there is a camp out there, and you probably know some of these people as well that completely keep these two camps separate, right? That say, like, Absolutely not B to B’s a different beast. You should stop, people should stop saying we should be influenced by B to C. Throw that playbook away. I mean, yeah, yeah, I don’t agree with that. I mean, for me, it’s similar to AI. It really depends on the situation, on the vertical, at which stage the company is at. But to completely dismiss that these two have certain aspects of, you know, characteristics that overlap. To completely dismiss that. I don’t think that that’s right, right?
Jessica Deckinger 42:30
Yeah, yeah.
Christian Klepp 42:31
And there’s, and there’s living proof of that. And I know that some of these campaigns are dated, but living proof that you can be creative in B to B. I mean, there’s a couple of campaigns that ran many years ago. I’m just gonna say, um, there was one by GE, and it was a video series called Data Landia. If you’ve never heard, I remember, do you remember that one?
Jessica Deckinger 42:50
Yeah,
Christian Klepp 42:51
Wasn’t that incredible, and that…
Jessica Deckinger 42:54
I think there are lots of these that really do think, like the end human buying the stuff. So yeah, and it’s not a blanket like it has to be true for every single thing. I agree with you. It’s all specific to the case.
Christian Klepp 43:06
For sure, for sure. I mean, that one was on, on, on big data, right? Yeah. And then Cisco came up with a series a couple of years ago focusing on CISOs, on the topic of cyber security. And they came up with a comic book series, all right, about these superheroes that were, you know, trying to like, rid the world of like cyber threats, right, right? Okay, granted that Cisco and GE also have very generous budgets. All right, okay, and that,
Jessica Deckinger 43:34
But I think, I think the micro tactic of that is just thinking about personalization as a tool to the individual buyer. And I think a lot of ABM softwires are thinking about this now as well. Like, how can I think about my unique buyer and their particular pain point? And that is a very B to C, traditionally, B to C lands to live in. Like, let me think about you individual D to C buyer, but in B to B, we’re starting to do that now, like think to the account based personalized company approach. And so that’s where I mean, it’s not… I’ve made it very dramatic for the soapbox, but I think it is ultimately about refining down what you’re doing to personalize it enough that at the end of the day the buyer feels like you’re actually doing something for them.
Christian Klepp 44:23
Yeah. I mean, you made it dramatic, but rightly so, rightly so. I think it’s something that needs to be said. But, yeah. Okay, so I’ve got two more questions for you, Jessica, and then I’m gonna let you go. All right, so here comes the bonus question, and what career advice would you give your younger self, and I’m not saying that you’re that you’re not young you are, but like your younger self, when you started…
Jessica Deckinger 44:47
I’m self-aware, yes… my younger self, I think I would give myself the advice that I should not be afraid to approach risk with a measured lens. I think I was very risk averse as a young person. I was scared to try the new thing. I was scared to not do what I was told. I was scared. You know, I was like, I was I’m a rule follower, like a hard rule follower. And I think it took me a really long time, and a lot of people pushing me, and I’m grateful for those mentors and advocates who pushed me. But to get more risky, and I don’t mean it has, I don’t mean risky, like doing crazy… I don’t have a motorcycle, but I think like being sharp about when to try something that is a little scary, and could fall flat on my face. I think I didn’t learn until I hit startup land. Really like the fast fail concept. I wish I had had that fast fail concept in my arsenal way earlier, because fast failing, if you set it up like, we’re gonna fast fail at, like, really inexpensively, at these like five things, learn a ton and be so much better for it. And failure is where you learn the most. And so if you’re not going to take risks, you’re not going to fail, you’re not going to learn and grow and do better. And as a marketer, it’s critical, like you cannot die hard on your sort of righteousness of the thing you’re going to do right and spend a gazillion dollars at it. And it’s where this rapid iteration comes into play being able to make videos on fast right, like really fast, fast fail things. But I wish I had known earlier on in my career that I could safely fast fail and I wish the technology had been there to support it more. But, I also, if I’d known it, I probably would have done a couple more courageous or shattering things than I’ve done in my career. So any advice anyone I could give is that don’t be afraid to fail.
Christian Klepp 46:45
Fantastic, fantastic. You would have taken more leaps of faith, right? Yeah.
Jessica Deckinger 46:50
I mean, yeah, definitely.
Christian Klepp 46:51
I think that’s something that resonates with a lot of us. I mean, myself included. I was exactly like that too. I was a was a Boy Scout bound to the T right? Like people pleaser and, oh, we shouldn’t do that. I might rattle a few cages. And then I and then later on in my career, I realized, well, I think you need to rattle the cages to wake the animals up, right like…
Jessica Deckinger 47:11
And look at you now. I mean, amazing what you’re up to. So, you know, we all get there. We all get there eventually.
Christian Klepp 47:16
Absolutely, absolutely. Jessica, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Quick introduce yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.
Jessica Deckinger 47:26
Sure. So I am a board member, a marketing executive. Best way to reach me is at my email. I know it’s like super old school or on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn. Jessica Deckinger, I’m also my email is [email protected]. You’re welcome to reach me there, if people want to reach out and have questions, but those two places are the best places to reach me, and I’m so grateful that you had me on today. Thank you so much, Christian. It was lovely speaking with you. I hope you enjoyed. I enjoyed a ton. So really, really grateful for the opportunity.
Christian Klepp 47:58
Oh, you’re very welcome. It was an absolute pleasure. So thanks again, Jessica, take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Jessica Deckinger 48:04
Thanks, Christian.
Christian Klepp 48:05
Bye, for now.
How B2B Sales and Marketing Can Generate Better Results
In the fast-paced world of B2B, sales and marketing do not need to be rivals. When they’re able to collaborate, they become a powerful customer-focused force that creates unparalleled value and a seamless experience. How can both sides make this happen and create a positive impact on their customers?
That’s why we’ve decided to invite renowned sales leader Hamish Knox (CEO, Sandler Calgary) to talk about how B2B sales and marketing can work together to generate better results. During our conversation, Hamish explained why this conflict persists and what pitfalls to avoid. He also provided actionable tips on how marketing can proactively work with sales and how to get them involved in upcoming marketing initiatives that will resonate with customers.
https://youtu.be/qp_LJ_rZ82U
Topics discussed in episode
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
Christian Klepp, Hamish Knox
Christian Klepp 00:01
Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp, today I’m talking to Hamish Knox. He supports entrepreneurs to sustainably scale their sales so they can eventually exit for their number instead of the number they’re told to take. He’s one of the top franchisees in the Global Sandler Network, has been a four times must-see keynote speaker at the Sandler Summit, and holds the recognition of being the first franchisee in Sandler’s history to publish more than one book. Why am I talking to a salesperson when this is a show for B2B marketers? Well, tune in to find out more about how sales and marketing can create incredible results together. All right, Mr. Hamish Knox, welcome to the show.
Hamish Knox 00:46
Thanks for having me, Christian
Christian Klepp 00:47
Man, I feel like we’ve known each other 1000 years. I really have to say, it was, it was a real pleasure to be on your podcast. And you know, I have to, of course, reciprocate in kind and welcome you to this show. I was thinking about this earlier today, and folks are going to be like, Well, hang on a second here. This is a podcast for B2B marketers. What the heck is the sales guy doing here? And to which I say, and therein lies the problem. And this is exactly why I’ve asked you to come on the show.
Hamish Knox 01:21
Perfect.
Christian Klepp 01:22
There is so much to be said, and there are so many opportunities to be had when sales and marketing work together. So if we’re gonna dive right into it, the topic for today’s discussion is how B to B sales and marketing can collaborate and generate better results. And I’m going to kick off this conversation with this question, and yeah, I bet you’ve never heard this one before. Why do you think this ancient conflict between sales and marketing persists?
Hamish Knox 01:52
I appreciate you asking, and ultimately, I coach my clients that all conflict is because of a mismatch of goals, values, beliefs, or here’s the kicker, incentives and marketing and sales from the dawn of time have been incentivized differently, and so ultimately, we have one group who is doing the things that they believe are right because it’s going to get them to their incentive plan, and the other group who is doing the things that they believe are right to get them to their incentive plan. Unfortunately, the incentive plans are mismatched, because ultimately, it’s not necessarily about sustainably driving company growth or supporting the end user. It’s ultimately about this group gets more, and this group gets more, except if one of them is going to get more, the other one feels like they have to get less. And that’s really not the case.
Christian Klepp 02:50
Absolutely, absolutely. Do you also think, I suppose it also goes back to the way that the organization is structured and the company culture. Because, I mean, I’ve worked with a lot of B to B industries, traditional B to B industries, so you’re talking heavy machinery, steel, chemicals, etc., and they were just programmed to think that marketing was a support function. And they’ll just, you know, if they need something, they’ll, they’ll ring the bell or pick up the red phone or whatever, whatever other analogy you want to use.
Hamish Knox 03:25
Yeah, I’ve heard, I’ll call my girl who does that and that, I heard that recently. So, you know, yes, like, hey, we have a girl who does our brochures. Like, okay, well, she is a wonderful human being who provides very great value to your organization. You’re just minimizing and diminishing her contribution. Fine. So yeah, it’s been seen as not the real work, right? Like marketing has been seen as, oh, well, you guys just like, make brochures and do trade shows and you have a lot of fun. And by the way, sales gets the same thing, right? Sales is like, Oh, you guys don’t do real work. You just take people out for lunch and go golfing. And there isn’t this understanding that until someone sells something, nothing else happens. However, marketing is the thing that gets us to Hello, so until we get to Hello, we don’t even have the chance to sell something. And I just had a client, we hosted a sales leadership conference in Calgary at the start of October, and one of our now former clients shared that they had sold their business in four years, instead of six years, at a 1200% ROI to what they paid for it, and what they showed on their slide was, before they started working with us, they were operations, finance, sales. And where they ended up was sales, finance, operations. And to me, sales and marketing are part of that client facing right? So some of the listeners are going to get offended because they didn’t hear marketing in there. What I want to share with you is, I look at that as client facing. So are you in some way touching a client, whether it’s before they even know that they want to work with you, to all the way after they’ve been a client for decades, client facing is what sales and marketing is.
Christian Klepp 05:17
Absolutely, absolutely and just for the benefit of the listeners, you know, I didn’t invite Hamish on the show to like, you know, have a go at marketing people, or even if, or even if he does have a go at marketing people. Perhaps there is a reason, right? But, um, I’m gonna move us on to the next question, and I think it’s one that really resonates with you. Um, what do you wish more marketers knew about sales?
Hamish Knox 05:43
That it’s really, really hard. Sales is really, really hard. Sales people, especially frontline sellers, get rejected every single day. And if we, if we break this up into like the BDR, SDR world, those BDRs and SDRs are hearing more no’s in a day than most individuals hear in a year, because that’s their world. They’re just out there trying to find that one person who says yes to an initial conversation. And so for marketers to understand that that sellers and all the other direct client contact individuals. They want support. They want their lives to be easier, and they often feel unsupported. And I will gently poke at marketers today, as I’ve already said, marketing is an incredibly important part of an organization, and sometimes they get up in their head about certain things and are not necessarily supportive of sales, just as much as sales is not supportive of marketing. So today’s episode will be fair and balanced.
Christian Klepp 06:54
Absolutely, absolutely. I’ll take your word for it. I mean, you know, to be fair, and you know, we’ve had a conversation about this. I didn’t start out as a marketer my career.
Hamish Knox 07:03
Right.
Christian Klepp 07:04
I actually started out as a salesperson, and I think my first job, if I remember correctly, and I’m gonna age myself a little bit here, c’est la vie. I started out as a sales guy, like doing cold calling for Motorola walkie talkies.
Hamish Knox 07:22
Wow.
Christian Klepp 07:22
Do you remember those old gals?
Hamish Knox 07:23
Oh, yeah.
Christian Klepp 07:26
And, you know, to your point about like, getting rejected. I mean, we had a call about 100 companies a day, and I would say 96 or 97 of them either hung up or said no or don’t ever call me again. Yep, they might have said a few other used another, a few other choice words after that, but I will not repeat those here, but you get the gist. And maybe there was one or two that said, okay, oh, it’s a free trial, sure. So you kind of can’t blame salespeople for the way that they conduct themselves, because, as you said, they have to have this a bit of a thicker skin. If I can say that, like, because just rejection is part of the game. So, and going back to a previous point, why do you believe it’s so important for sales and marketing to work together? Like, what is this magic that they can create if they actually, like, get all their ducks in a row?
Hamish Knox 08:20
Because ultimately, they create velocity in the revenue growth of the organization. Because if sales and marketing are aligned, it’s to use a tired analogy. It’s like rowing in opposite directions, and marketing and sales, and by the way, they think they’re rowing in the same direction, but they’ve got a wall between them. So like, Well, why are we spinning? Well, I’m rowing left. Well, I’m rowing left too, except that, because we’re on opposite sides of the boat, the two left spin us in a circle. So they, if we, if we align marketing and sales, now we have this rocket that can very easily bring in the right type of buyer to our frontline salespeople again, whether they’re BDRs or whether they’re that more traditional prospector qualified closer, and then that person is already set up for a successful conversation, because the buyer is coming in, knowing who the company is, knowing the types of challenges they’re solving, and it becomes a much warmer conversation for that first sales contact and to that point when marketing sends over a lead to sales, sales actually believes that it’s worth their time to call because that’s something that I’ve heard over and over. You know, in my previous roles, as well as working with my clients, it’s like, yeah, they send me a marketing qualified lead, which is essentially a single name that’s probably made up and a Gmail address. As like, how am I… I sell multimillion dollar pieces of industrial equipment. What am I supposed to do with this? So when we align everything, that goes away, everybody gets to be more effective and more efficient.
Christian Klepp 10:16
Absolutely, absolutely. And you did touch on it, like a few minutes ago. But how do you, what do you think marketers can do differently, because I get that, because I was on the receiving end of that, like getting the wrong leads, yeah right, or getting what marketing considered a qualified leads, and then sales looks at it and says, Well, no, in fact, it’s not.
Hamish Knox 10:37
Yeah.
Christian Klepp 10:38
Right. So how can we, how can both sides close the gap there? How can, how can we get this on the right track?
Hamish Knox 10:45
That is an amazing question. So it starts again, fair and balanced here. So number one, sales has to be willing to share. And this is a challenge that I see sales leaders in particular. They’re like, well, you’re marketing, we’re sales, we’re the, you know, we’re the ones who make things happen. You know, stop bothering us. Just go make some more brochures. And that is a defeating attitude. So if we look at the top end of the of each group, you know, the sales leader and the marketing leader, the sales leader has to look at the marketing leader as a peer and as someone who is going to support their team in getting to their goals faster. So sales, be open minded to working with marketing. Marketing, I’m going to steal from you a little bit, which is marketing. Go to the field. Go on sales calls, double Jack, which is a, you know, if you’re listening on the calls or or zoom along is another, is another new phrase, right? And by the way, for the marketers who are listening, and they got a little tight when they heard go on on sales calls, it doesn’t mean you have to participate. The salesperson says, Hey, this is Hamish. He’s my colleague. He just joined the firm. He’s sitting in to get a sense of what our clients are, and then he’s going to take notes. And then, by the way, the buyer is going to be like, awesome. Hamish goes in the corner, he’s going to take notes, and I don’t have to worry about him. Now, the key part of this is Hamish has to keep his mouth shut the whole time, right? He cannot be… The frame cannot be: Hamish is here to take notes and observe, and then all of a sudden, Hamish like, Well, what about this? Because now we’ve destroyed the credibility and the rapport that we’ve built with our client. So go on sales calls, which is something Christian and I talked about on my podcast. The other, the other thing is, really genuinely listen, not only to sales but also to the clients. Because a complaint that I had with a marketing department that when I was in the corporate world is they would probably be incentivized to really push a strategic product. This is a strategic product, by the way. It’s strategic for this quarter. It’s going to change in 90 days. But this is a strategic product. You’ve got to go talk to your clients about this strategic product. And in one case, I was selling investor relations services, and I said to our head of marketing, most of my clients are junior listed mining companies where 70 to 80% of the stock is held by the CEO and the CFO who go have their annual general meeting at a bar. If I go in and start talking to them about this strategic product, I’m going to kill my credibility. I’m going to be a pushy sales person so I get that you want me to talk about this, my clients are going to destroy me if I try to do this. So when marketers are actually going out and gathering this data, actually going back and really saying, Oh, this is the real data, not coming up with a hypothesis, and finding data that fits the hypothesis, having a hypothesis, and being willing to adjust the hypothesis based on the real data that’s received, because then that’s going to create much more effective content to attract more of the right buyers.
Christian Klepp 14:10
Amen. Amen. And you know, something that you said earlier really resonated with me, because, I guess you can use the police drama analogy right? Where you’ve got, you’ve got the suspect in the interrogation room, and there’s folks on the other side of the mirror, yeah, watching the interrogation as it’s unfolding. And I kind of imagine myself as the marker being the guys that are in that other room going, going, That guy’s lying right? Like he totally did it, right? Totally, yeah, they shouldn’t be the one bursting into the interrogation room. You did it. You’re guilty.
Hamish Knox 14:50
Exactly, exactly.
Christian Klepp 14:51
That’s the detective’s job or the interrogator’s job, right? In this context, the interrogator is the sales guy, right? But, um. You know, absolutely, absolutely. Um, just on that vein of, what are some of those pitfalls? And you spoke about a few of them already, but what are some of these pitfalls that marketers should avoid? Um, when working with sales?
Hamish Knox 15:15
Number one is delivering completed content. So my favorite word when I’m working with a marketing group is the word draft, because draft means there’s still room for adjustments. Now, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, both people have to be open to that adjustment, right? So I have worked with individuals, both in sales and in marketing, who, to use an Anthony Bourdain term, were artists. And so when they delivered something, whether it was a PowerPoint deck for a presentation or whether it was a brochure for a trade show, it was their precious object that shall never be in any way criticized like that’s not the real world. Everything is a draft. Everything is a work in progress. So for marketers and for sellers, I love using the word draft because there’s some there’s some opportunity. And even if we have to publish it because we got to get it ready for the trade show or we’ve got it ready to launch for our digital campaign, it’s still a draft. It can still be edited and still be adjusted. So using that word draft, like, Hey, we’ve drafted this looking for some insights, and then again, for the sales team to give genuine insights about because for the sales team to think marketing is here to support me. They are asking for my help, right? It’s the help me, help you scenario, so I’m going to make the time to give them real, genuine notes that are actually going to enhance whatever they’ve drafted, because ultimately, we’re both working towards the same mountain top, which is grow revenue for the company.
Christian Klepp 16:53
Absolutely, absolutely. There might have been one other one that you told me about in the previous conversation, that, let’s, let’s just say, rub you the wrong way. Is when, when marketers say we’re going to try something.
Hamish Knox 17:08
Yeah, well, that’s the that’s also the quickest way to kill any initiative with anybody, right? Is the the word try in a corporate context, uh, says this too shall pass. So when I and again, this is more, this is corporate world, and I would have the marketing team send out an email, Hey, we’re going to try this out. And the sales team was like, okay, so this is going to put us through a bunch of nonsense that we’re going to have to comply with for, hopefully 30 days, maybe 90 days, we just got to ride the storm out, and we’ll make sure that it’s not damaging to our relationships with our clients. It doesn’t hurt our brand in our local market. Because again, this is the other challenge as marketers, if you’re a national or an international organization, and marketers have gotten way better at this, especially in the in the 2000s is really hyper localizing things. So I don’t want the audience to think I’m absolutely beaten up on marketers. You’ve, you’ve really, you do amazing things, and you can now measure things, right? And that’s where sales oftentimes gets kicked in the teeth by management. There’s like, Well, hey, look at your friends over in marketing. They’ve got data all over the place. What about you? So for marketers, when you’re rolling out something, yes, it could be a short term thing, I get it. You’re doing a trial, even the word trial is better than the word try, because it doesn’t matter what we say. It matters what the other person hears. And when somebody says, We’re gonna try this ad campaign, sales rolls their eyes. Whereas, if we say, Hey, we’re doing an ad campaign trial, and here’s the outcome that we’re looking for, sales goes, Oh, okay, yeah, clarity, right, we understand this is a trial, and you’ve told us what the outcome is. It’s not a bunch of wishing and hoping that things are going to magically get better. You’ve got some real data behind here, by the way, that’s something that sales could learn from marketing on most occasions, is to have real defined outcomes and real clarity, as opposed to, I don’t know we’re going to talk to some people and hope to sell stuff.
Christian Klepp 19:19
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. The other thing I do remember from my experience, also being in corporate, what salespeople really hated was if we used to call meetings and we don’t say, Hey, listen. And we got better at it over time, obviously, but like, call meetings and not defining what the purpose of the meeting is and what the expected outcome is. By expected outcome. Do we want feedback? Do we want validation? Do we want collaboration? Who’s responsible for said meeting? Right? Because somebody has to be responsible, like who called it right?
Hamish Knox 20:01
Overarching in any role. High performers do not want to be in meetings. Now high performer, operations, marketing, finance, sales, like pick a department. The true high performers want to be doing the thing that they do really well, whether that’s supporting clients, finding new clients, developing new content to bring in ideal leads, delivering, whatever it might be, they don’t want to be in the meetings. And you nailed it. Christian of whenever someone looks at a at a meeting invite and says, I don’t know why I should care. I don’t know why it’s set for an hour, or whatever it might be because, and by the way, it’s probably because it was the default. And again, What’s the purpose? Like? What? Why? What am I expected to be doing here? Ultimately, if they’re going to get forced to the meeting, and then it’s not going to go well, because they’re sitting there. To you, you know, a bit of a terrible word, but they’re sitting there like a hostage, and they’re not present. They’re thinking about all the things that they could be doing that they feel would be a better use of their time than this meeting, which, by the way, might be really critical to the success of their role. However, the frame was so terrible that they’re not even willing to engage.
Christian Klepp 21:20
Absolutely, absolutely. Framing it, packaging it, and using the right approach, yeah, right, all of those things together.
Hamish Knox 21:27
Exactly, yeah, exactly, yeah. Sandler. Sandler. Part of the Sandler system is something called an upfront contract, and it literally is The Purpose. How much time? What are the agendas? And what are the expected outcomes? All of this is done in advance, so that everybody who goes in knows. And then, by the way, because we have those people in meetings who sometimes want to pontificate for lack of a better word, or maybe not stick to the agenda, that’s where the person who’s leading the meeting, who’s accountable for the agenda, can say, Hamish, I appreciate your insights on why your customers are very different and why this approach isn’t going to work. That’s actually not the purpose. What the agenda item we’re on is this, do you have something to say about that? By the way, the answer is usually no, I just want to hear myself talk. By having that frame up front. It’s way easier to have a much more productive meeting in significantly less time.
Christian Klepp 22:26
Absolutely, absolutely. We used to call those guys the meeting hijackers.
Hamish Knox 22:30
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Christian Klepp 22:32
And you have to have that guy, for lack of a better description, I’m just going to call that person the moderator. The moderator has to step in and say Christian or Hamish. Thank you for your contribution. Thanks for the thanks for, you know, sharing your opinion. But let’s stick to the matter at hand. If you don’t mind, we can certainly go back to what you were discussing in a couple of minutes. And of course, the trick is you never go back to that topic right?
Hamish Knox 22:58
Exactly, exactly. We’ll circle back to that later, which is never.
Christian Klepp 23:02
Which is never, yeah, we’ll talk about after the coffee break. Yeah. Provide an example, ideally, from your own experience, of course, of how sales and marketing can work well together.
Hamish Knox 23:18
So and I was gently touching on it a little bit earlier. Of in my organization, my marketing group is actually empowered to say, Hey, that’s a great idea, and it’s not going to work. So we have an agreement between us that when we want to raise our revenue, that’s the ultimate goal. We’re going to collaborate on this. So and each group has the right to say, I don’t think that’s going to work. What about this? And so when we have those conversations about, hey, let’s do an event, or hey, let’s do a campaign, or hey, let’s do this trade show, or this sponsorship. Both parties are equal in the conversation around, why should we do this? What’s the payoff? Is it going to work? If so, how and how are we going to execute it, pre, during and post? Because with that framing, everybody feels like their contribution matters, as opposed to sales coming in and saying, Hey, we’re doing a trade show next week or in next quarter. Figure it out, and marketing is like, awesome dude like, that wasn’t in the budget. That wasn’t in the planning. We were already on this, etc., etc. I have another client where the marketing group ended up going on some sales calls like I mentioned earlier, and it was that frame of Hamish is here. He’s just observing. He’s brand new to the company. He wants to get a sense of what our clients are like. And then marketing came back and said, Okay, here’s what we’ve heard from you sales people. And they didn’t literally say, you sales people, that’s aggressive. And here’s what we’ve observed in the field, and what we’re noticing is these disconnects. What we need help on is resolving the disconnects. So it was a collaborative conversation, not around you guys are lying to us, which is what sales think marketing is going to do if they actually get to go talk to real clients. Instead, it was I’m confused, and I tell all of the clients I work with that confused is a great place to be, because it means there’s a disconnect between what somebody said and what is actually observed. And so that was another great way of aligning marketing and sales, because marketing could go out and actually get real data and come back and say to sales, I need your help. And then from there, they were much better able to develop real tools that spoke to problems the buyer was experiencing, as opposed to features and benefits. We’ve been in business 25 years and won all these awards that no one cares about. And then again, when sales got a lead, it was actually based around a problem that my client solved, as opposed to, I don’t know, I just wanted to download a free report on the five things I should know about fill in the blank.
Christian Klepp 26:23
Absolutely, absolutely. I think it’s… you touched on a lot of points that really resonated with me in the past couple minutes. And I think a lot of it is really just also both sides, regardless of whether it’s marketing or sales, just leave your ego at the door, right? This shouldn’t be seen as a personal attack on your integrity or on your level of professionalism. It should be seen or viewed from that perspective that okay, continuous improvement or trying to get this boat rowing in the same direction, right? But that brings me to a follow up question, and it’s well, how do you maneuver because what I’ve been hearing you say in the past couple of minutes is all very constructive. That said you have a lot of internal politics to maneuver there. How do you deal with that?
Hamish Knox 27:22
So one thing that we or one person we haven’t talked about, is the is the CEO or the owner of the organization. And so ultimately, sales and marketing, yes, all this wonderful collaboration, all these things, and then, yeah, well, what about I’m trying to get ahead. I’m trying to advance my career. And, you know, in big, big corporate that’s that’s a reality. And so ultimately, it is on the leader of leaders to set the culture. And so a corporate culture is the behavior that is approved implicitly or explicitly. That’s it. There’s no other definition. You can go do all your off sites and planning sessions and whatever your corporate culture is the behavior that is approved implicitly or explicitly, so if we have a leader of leaders who is approving the behavior implicitly or explicitly of politicking and backstabbing and things like that, and we have someone in the in the marketing role who really genuinely wants to make their work with sales a collaboration, and they genuinely want to make it rowing in the same direction. Yet they have a sales leader who is playing politics, and they have their leader of leaders who is allowing it that is an awkward conversation that the marketing leader will need to have with their leader of leaders and say things like, here’s what I’m observing. You know, my sense is I’m struggling with and so then again, it’s not the finger pointing. It’s genuinely looking for a solution, which, at that leader of leaders level, that’s what they’re looking for. They’re not looking for. You know, wow, they stole my lunch box. They’re looking for. This is what I’m observing. This is how I’m feeling. And here’s what I’m thinking about, a solution. How do you feel about that? And then letting the leader of leaders say, suck it up and deal with it, which is one option, or the scales have fallen off. My eyes I can see again. Oh, thank you for bringing this to my attention. Another option, by the way, both are probably not going to happen. And and having that clarity right, creating that clarity around desired future state. And as I’ve coached plenty of clients in big corporate at some point, you have to ask yourself, is it worth the brain damage? Because you have to go have the conversation. This is not permission to just run away. Right? Yeah. At some point, if you do everything that’s under your control and have stated clearly your needs and in your desires to create success for the organization, and you’re not getting supported, you have to ask yourself, is it worth the brain damage. For some people, the answer is legitimately Yes. And for other people, the answer is, no, I’d rather go find an organization that truly wants to have a collaborative, client facing organization.
Christian Klepp 30:29
Absolutely, absolutely. So it’s got to be the right fit, right at some point. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, my friend, we get to the point in the conversation where we talk about actionable tips, and, man, you’ve given us plenty. And I guess the way that I’m gonna frame this question Hamish is, if there is a B to B marketer out there who is facing this issue that we’ve been talking about right now, and there are three to five things that you want them to walk away with, what would they be?
Hamish Knox 30:58
So the first one is, when you are listening to a seller or a member of the sales organization, sales leader, front line doesn’t matter. Always restate, never paraphrase. So we’re taught in conflict resolution to paraphrase. You know, Christian what I think I heard you say is, did I get that right? And I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t matter what we say, it matters what the other person hears. And in a conflict situation, and as we’ve already identified, it’s a conflict situation, typically, when we paraphrase, the other person doesn’t actually hear us genuinely wanting to engage. What they hear is you’re not listening. What they think is you’re not listening to me. So we have to restate exactly what they said. So Christian, when you tell me that all the leads for marketing suck, what do you mean by that? That’s a restatement. And by the way, I’m using my nurturing voice right now, audience, if you’re listening. So I’m going to be a little bit gentler in a real conversation. I’m saying it for a fact. So number one, restate, don’t paraphrase. Number two, bring a draft. The phrase of draft is great. Number three, create clarity at every stage “I’m asking you because”, “the goal I have is”, “we’re doing this for this period of time with this expected outcome” that creates clarity, that raises our credibility. Number four, seek engagement by ending sentences with question marks. The minute we end the sentence with a period. We’re doing this sales is like, awesome. We’re going to fight you. Now. They’re not going to say it, but their behavior is going to change, right? We’re doing this with this expected outcome. What else would you like to know? Or what do you think we might have missed? Or something like that. Again, that’s a draft, right? There’s no perfect plan. And the last one is, and I’m going to steal it from you, leave your ego at the door. Ultimately, this is about getting to the same mountain top, which is revenue growth for the organization. The minute that we decide that we are more important than that mountain top, things are going to go sideways.
Christian Klepp 33:23
Amen, wow. I’ve been, I’ve been, um, like, taking notes furiously here, but let me just quickly recap those, because I think it’s worth repeating, right? So listening to the seller, restate, don’t paraphrase, right. Bring a draft that was number two. Number three is create clarity at every stage. Number four, I thought this one was really awesome. Seek engagement by ending with a question, right, not a period. And number five, yes, leave your ego out the door. And that applies to marketing, when we interact with creative people as well.
Hamish Knox 34:02
Amen, yes, absolutely.
Christian Klepp 34:05
Fantastic, fantastic. I’m going to ask you to get up on a higher soapbox than you’ve already been on. But like, um, just on this, on this very topic, what is a status quo that you passionately disagree with. And why.
Hamish Knox 34:21
Well, so, and it ties across marketing and sales, and it’s that relationships are the key to growing a business. And it’s complete nonsense. There’s a Harvard study several years ago it turned into the book The Challenger sale, that showed that sellers who tried to base things on relationships were the single worst performers. And in marketing, it’s like, well, we have great relationships with our vendors or with our suppliers or with our creatives. And ultimately, I bet, if you went and asked. Them. You know, how do you feel about work with XYZ CO., you’re probably going to get some information that you didn’t want to have. So what I share is that rapport beats relationship, and the root of the word rapport is the word Trust. So trust is the reason why we have the societies that we have today, because we decided that we would trust each other instead of bashing each other in the head with rocks and sticks so I would rather focus on creating great rapport with my vendors, my suppliers, my colleagues in the sales department, the marketing department, the finance department, as opposed to attempting to go through the long slog of building a relationship. A relationship is trust over time. So if we focus on the relationship, we’re probably never going to get there, and we’re probably going to seem as pushy and aggressive and off putting. If I focus on building trust with my colleague in the sales department and by delivering consistently, by listening, by taking what they say and actually doing something with it, that is something that is going to accelerate us to that growth mountain top, as opposed to, well, I’ve got a great relationship,
Christian Klepp 34:26
And this, my friend, is exactly the reason why I asked this question, right? Because a lot of folks that I’ve brought on to the show, and, you know, interviewed and what have you, would argue that it’s everything is relationship based, right? And it’s all about building relationship. And that’s, you know, to you, to your point, that’s what we’ve been taught to believe over time, right? That it’s, it’s all about building relationships, and that kind of intermingles somehow with trust and credibility. Yeah, right. And so thank you for bringing that fresh perspective on that. That is definitely something I’m gonna ponder on. I mean, like, you know, after your explanation, it 100% makes sense. But I wasn’t that I was in that camp, right? That said, yeah, no relationships first, right?
Hamish Knox 36:55
Absolutely. And it’s, it’s something that, again, it’s, and also it feels easy, right? Oh, I’m building a relationship with Christian. Hey, Christian, kind of curious. Who’s your creative person working on this? I don’t know. It’s some guy who’s doing stuff for me, right? Like there’s no… but it’s the rapport that trust over time and relationships are crucial. I should, I should clarify to the audience, relationships are crucial. As I said, if we focus on the just, oh, I got to build a relationship. We’re actually not creating trust, which reduces the potential of a relationship.
Christian Klepp 37:27
Absolutely. Okay, two more questions. I’ll let you go. Okay, so bonus question, all right, rumor. Rumor has it that you grew up in BC, or you lived in BC for a bit.
Hamish Knox 37:39
I did grow up in BC. Yes.
Christian Klepp 37:42
Oh, I’m sorry. For the benefit of the audience. BC is British Columbia. So you know, for those that are not very familiar with that part of the world where you’ve spent, you know, quite a number of years of your life, what’s a fun fact about BC that not many people know?
Hamish Knox 37:59
So a fun fact about BC, and actually the town I went to high school in, because I grew up in a village of 500 people, so there was no high school. Sicamous, British Columbia is the houseboat capital of Canada. It used to be the houseboat capital of the world that is now Lake Tahoe in the United States. However, 80% of the houseboats that are on Lake Tahoe were actually built in Sicamous and shipped down there. So, yes, so little, you know, 3500 people year round, goes to 12,000 in the summer for houseboat related reasons. It’s a world leader in the production of houseboats.
Christian Klepp 38:39
Wow! See, I didn’t even know that. But then again, I do live in Ontario, so, you know, like…
Hamish Knox 38:46
You have cottages instead.
Christian Klepp 38:47
We do, we do, yeah, not many houseboats in this part, but Hamish. Thank you so much. I mean, like, as expected, this conversation was dynamite, and I certainly hope that there are B to B marketers out there that are going to be listening to this show, listening to this episode, and hopefully taking as many notes as I have. So thank you again for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Please quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.
Hamish Knox 39:15
Yeah. Thank you very much for inviting me, Christian. So Hamish, Knox, I am with Sandler Calgary, based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. There are not many Hamish Knox is in North America. So if you Google Hamish Calgary or Hamish Sandler, you’ll find me very easily. You can also go to go.Sandler.com/Hamish, which is H, A, M, I, S, H, and you’ll find my website. And then I’m very easy to find on LinkedIn as well. So best way to get a hold of us and at Sandler Calgary, we support our clients in having more effective human to human interactions, professionally and personally, so they can sustainably scale their sales and eventually exit for their number, not the number they’re told to take.
Christian Klepp 39:57
Fantastic, fantastic. So Hamish, once again. Thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Hamish Knox 40:04
Thank you, Christian.
Christian Klepp 40:04
Alright. Bye for now.
How to Use AI for Market Research
When used correctly, artificial intelligence (AI) can be a very powerful tool in a B2B marketer’s toolkit. It can help to analyze and aggregate large amounts of data, generate insights, frame the approach for the research, and make the entire process faster and more efficient. How can B2B marketers fully optimize AI for their work?
That’s why we’re talking to AI expert and “explorer” Dale Thomas (Founder, ActionableOps) about how B2B marketers can leverage AI for market research. During our conversation, Dale reiterated the importance of embracing the use of AI for research purposes. He also highlighted the pitfalls to avoid and how B2B marketers can better organize their approach when they plan for market research, find experts, and synthesize data.
https://youtu.be/S589ojh3N7A
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
Christian Klepp, Dale Thomas
Christian Klepp 00:00
Dale Thomas is the founder of ActionableOps, a company that specializes in AI driven business optimization. He’s had the privilege of leading businesses and witnessing firsthand the transformative power of AI and its implementation in practical, meaningful and ethical ways. He’s also the author of the number one Amazon bestseller, The Ultimate AI guide for small business success. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. Okay. Mr. Dale Thomas, welcome to the show, sir.
Dale Thomas 00:35
Well, thank you for having me.
Christian Klepp 00:36
Great to have you on. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation because, man, it is relevant to businesses. It is relevant to B2B marketers. So let’s get started. Shall we?
Dale Thomas 00:45
Sounds great. Let’s do it.
Christian Klepp 00:47
You’re quite the expert when it comes to helping, I’m going to say B to B companies unlock the power of AI, so you help them to look into tools and techniques and these then help take their businesses to the next level. But for this conversation, let’s zero in on a topic that I think is very relevant to B2B marketers, and that is how AI can help you conduct market research faster and more efficiently. So let’s kick off this conversation with this question, why do you think it’s important for B2B marketers to embrace the use of AI when they conduct market research?
Dale Thomas 01:20
Sure, and that’s a good question. And as we’re… and I’ll take a quick step back, I love to tell people that when I they use the term expert, I don’t consider myself an expert. I consider myself more of an AI explorer, because for most of us, AI is very new, even though it’s been around since the 50s, and the concept has and there are some true experts in the field who’ve been doing machine learning and all the different AI technologies for the last 10 years. Those are who I look to as experts. I can again consider myself more of an explorer as this is kind of like the Wild West and a new frontier, and we’re all kind of learning. I just may happen to be a few steps ahead of of most people. But to answer your question around B2B marketers and embracing AI and market research, there’s a lot that can be gained when using AI and market research, because it will definitely accelerate the research process, which will allow you to gather your data a lot quicker, and you can do analysis way faster than ever before. It reduces human error and increases the accuracy in the data processing. That said, I encourage everybody to never solely rely on the return from AI, and there should always be human oversight. So it does reduce the human error, and it does increase accuracy in data processing. There always should be somebody there that’s validating the data as you’re reviewing it, or as it’s coming back in, and then AI can uncover a lot of hidden patterns and insights that that humans may miss out on. And that’s something I that I really like to touch on, because especially when you’re doing like surveys and customer surveys, the sentiment analysis that AI can do, and it’s not just like one comment a person makes, but maybe some of the words that they’re using, but across 20, 30, 40, 100 different customers, or how many customer interviews you’re doing, there could be phrases that people say that you don’t catch, but AI may catch. And I’ve done surveys for different organizations where there was red flags that were being called out that we would have never seen have we were just looking at Survey Monkey data, or whatever the survey company is. So there’s so much that can be gathered or gained from embracing AI in your market research.
Christian Klepp 03:52
Absolutely, absolutely. I think you just inadvertently helped me come up with a title for this episode, the wild west and the new frontier. I love it. Absolutely it does sound like the sky is the limit, certainly when it comes to AI and the way that it can be used in market research. I mean, I find, like, not too long ago, it must have been like, at least, like a little over a decade ago, I had colleagues that were doing data analysis with Excel spreadsheets, and it would, it would take them days, right?
Dale Thomas 04:25
It’s super hard too.
Christian Klepp 04:26
To synthesize all that data. Well, yeah, and it’s going back to your point, right? I mean, like you can, you can plug in the formula in the spreadsheet, but if you overlook something, and you make a mistake, then it, it renders everything invalid, right?
Dale Thomas 04:40
Absolutely. And I had an executive come to me a C level of a company that needed to do a quick survey and survey analysis, and they and they told me, point blank, that I was able to turn around in about an hour what would have taken them several days to do. And they they didn’t have that. They had, you know, only a couple hours of time before they had to present it to the board. So it’s, it’s great.
Christian Klepp 05:02
Absolutely, time is of the essence, because correct me if I’m wrong, but as human beings, I think we become a very impatient species, right?
Dale Thomas 05:11
Of course.
Christian Klepp 05:11
Everything has to be delivered instantly, right?
Dale Thomas 05:15
Well, and I mean, with when the internet came along, it kind of changed the world, yeah, where you could get everything instantly, and especially now with AI. It’s absolutely incredible.
Christian Klepp 05:25
Absolutely, absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question. You touched on it a little bit. But like, how do you how do you think AI can be used ethically to conduct market research? Because there’s that part of it as well, right? That equation. Like, how do you use it in an ethical manner?
Dale Thomas 05:41
Sure. Sure. Well, one of the things I’ve already touched on was that there absolutely needs to be human oversight in anything that you’re doing and verifying the data. The challenge that we see with a lot of these models that are out there, and there’s there’s… they’re getting, I think, better and better, is the bias that’s in the models. And people need to be really aware that if these and I won’t pick on any particular company or particular model, but if it’s gone out and just scraped whatever it was on the internet, and the internet is biased in whether it’s politically or racially or whatever it is, then those results will return, come back very biased as well. So people really need to be aware of that bias that’s there. And then as you’re using AI, I think that you need to emphasize the transparency around your AI usage. I don’t think it’s, you know, when you’re using AI, and maybe your grandma, your spell check is AI based, you know, I don’t think you need to be transparent in that case, but I do think that if you’re using a lot of AI to generate content, that you may need to be transparent of not only that you’re using AI, but how you’re able to collect some of that data, and you would need to be able to explain how you came to those conclusions with AI, just in case you need to be able to do that, there also needs to be… people need to be aware, as far as like, from an ethical perspective around the data privacy and making sure that you’re getting the proper… using AI the proper ways. For example, never, ever, upload customer PII, personal data to ChatGPT, unless, I guess they have a new switch that you can turn off, that it doesn’t train their models. But a lot of times, if you’re going right to the source, and I can’t say Perplexity or Claude, do the same, I don’t know, I don’t use those front ends, but a lot of the data that you do use train their models. I know there was a big kerfuffle a couple days ago, and I apologize about that. I thought I turned off my email. Those are email notifications coming in. But there was a big kerfuffle on Facebook where, apparently, since I think it was 2009 that any of your public posts were training their models. That’s only if you made the post public, open to the world, where hopefully people stop doing that years ago. But and even on LinkedIn, there’s, a lot of people posting about how LinkedIn, all your posts that are that you’re putting on there are training the models, which to me, if I’m posting on LinkedIn, I don’t really care who sees it. Post in the public, publicly anyhow, but I know there’s some folks that are very sensitive to that.
Christian Klepp 08:29
Yeah, absolutely. I’m just going back to that point. I had a guest on the show the other day, and we were talking about that, and in fact, it’s, it’s something in your LinkedIn profile privacy setting. So you got to go, really go deep in there to find that off switch, right? Because if you don’t switch that thing off, basically you’re allowing LinkedIn to use your content and your data to train the AI, right.
Dale Thomas 08:58
Absolutely. And again, you know, to me, I kind of joke going, Well, half that content people are all scared about is AI generated anyhow. So… I understand, I guess I get, maybe understand it. I haven’t turned it off, mainly because I forget when I go on LinkedIn, I don’t really care. Because I don’t. I’m not posting anything that is, like, so creative that I’m trying to, you know, make sure it stays with me. I’m not that good.
Christian Klepp 09:29
Yeah, I love the humility. I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which is a little bit related, but like, what are some of these? You know, when you’re using, or when B2B marketers rather, are using AI to conduct research. What are some of these pitfalls that they should look out for?
Dale Thomas 09:47
I think some of the pitfalls could be, again, you know, you know, using biased or limited data sets, which will definitely skew your results, which is, I think, is incredibly important, depending on you know what you’re marketing or kind of what marketing research you’re doing, you have to have quite a bit of data out there, and it has to be… you have to at least be aware of the bias and be able to know, know how to kind of circumvent that, and also making sure that there’s not an over reliance on a AI without any human interpretation. And for, I guess, marketers, and I’m thinking more like from, like a social media marketing perspective, if you’re getting AI to generate all your content, and you’re not looking at it before you post, that’s going to be on you, because you should be reviewing it before you do post. Because I have generated some AI posts. I have generated content from my website because Google apparently does not care if it’s AI generated, as long as it’s quality. Which I was really surprised when I learned that, because I kept on thinking words Matt Cutts when you need them, because I think he would be… Matt Cutts is a very old SEO guy for Google, and I think back in the day he would have been losing his mind over that. But when I found out that Google was no longer caring whether it was AI generated or not, I did create quite a bit of AI generated content. It drips out to my website every few days, so I have constantly fresh information. But I also read the articles before they get posted, just because you need to make sure that you’re not completely reliant on the AI, because it is, it’s so biased, and there’s so many potential issues. So I think those are, like the top two to three things really be considered out.
Christian Klepp 10:16
And in fact, there’s even, if I’m not mistaken, software available out there that helps you to detect if the content was AI generated or if it was generated by ChatGPT.
Dale Thomas 11:53
There is, but I’ll be honest, I’ve used some of that, and the content is getting so good that it’s passing like AI detection tools. And I know even when I’ve played around with it, I’ve had an AI written piece of content generated by AI, and then I fed it back into the A and go, What do you think of this? Is this AI or human? And they’ll say, Well, I think it’s AI. And here’s why. I was like, Okay, well, rewrite the content with those reasons why it’s AI and make it more human. And I would just do this rinse, wash, repeat cycle with it until it kept on saying, Nope, this is 100% human. And then I don’t know then of because, of course, by then, none of the detectors were detecting it. And I just think, as we go, and we’re just… it is what it is. We’re living in an AI world now. And you know, I know schools are very concerned about this. I mentor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and was talking to some of the professors about it. Some of the professors completely embrace it, and they like use AI to generate your content, because they know you got to go in there and evaluate it and read it and think it through. And yeah, but some of them are completely anti AI generated content.
Christian Klepp 13:11
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. All right, I’m going to move us on to the next question, which is, how can AI help B2B marketers organize their approach and alleviate the burden of conducting market research. And I’m happy to repeat these because there are three points. Right. One is planning for market research. Number two is finding experts. I think that’s something that you and I had discussed in the previous conversation. And the third one is analyzing and synthesizing data.
Dale Thomas 13:40
AI can help find experts through… I know there’s a lot of different tools out there, and I’ve recently, I’ve purchased it, I haven’t used it yet. That’ll help me find experts, expert influencers, in whatever category I’m looking for, even running these tools are so connected to the internet that finding, I think experts is more… it’s easy now, but it’s finding experts that are truly experts, versus somebody who has raised their hand and said they’re an expert. And I kind of tease about this in my book, where there’s all these AI experts, and I know we’re not just talking about AI experts, but all the AI experts out there. But you looked at their LinkedIn profile, and they’ve only been in technology for six months, and before it was like retail at a clothing store or something. And I wonder, well, how do they get their expertise? But AI could definitely analyze some of those networks and a lot of the publications to identify the relevant industry experts. As far as analyzing the data and synthesizing it, AI could definitely process that large amounts of structured and unstructured document quickly, it can generate insights and visualizations from complex data sets. And that’s that piece, right there is really what got me very involved in in generative AI, is when I was taking a course on Gen AI, and I found out that you could feed it multiple data sets or data sources, whether it was an Excel spreadsheet, a SQL database, a company’s financials, and then be able to analyze all of that data as one. It was a game changer, in my mind, because it was able to find a needle in the haystack and identify patterns and trends that, and we said it earlier, that you just wouldn’t find any other way. I think that’s it, identify those patterns and trends, and then the go through the large amounts of data. And then there was one other question that you talked about, like, how could people plan…
Christian Klepp 15:58
Plan for market research. Yeah, that’s right.
Dale Thomas 16:00
If you’re using the right prompt, the prompt can help you, especially if you’re using Gen AI, to help you kind of identify what your plan is for the marketing research. It can help identify potential gaps and help you prioritize the areas of focus. And just like as I was writing the book. And I’m not trying to pitch the book or talk up the book, but the reason I wrote the book is I went in there and I said, if you were to plan a book on AI for small business, what would that look like? What would all those chapters look like? What would that roadmap look like? And when it came back, I actually said, Oh, I know 80, 90% of this already, so it really helped develop that roadmap and that framework and fill in those gaps. And I still use AI on a daily basis to help kind of identify those areas. It could make suggestions on different types of research strategies or methodologies, because AI is way smarter than me, and if you’re giving it your objectives and the available data, it could really help kind of, again, create those methodologies to make that marketing research just to another level. One of the things that we are doing is building AI agents to help entrepreneurs conduct market research and customer research, and we’ll be feeding meetings into models and coming up with hopefully some very interesting feedback as they’re going through the entrepreneurial process of starting a new business.
Christian Klepp 17:35
Yeah. No. Those are definitely some great points there. And I think part of the reason why I brought this up is because I’ve seen this happen, right? And you have as well, that when… not just people in the marketing department, but like when folks start conducting market research, if they don’t have the right experience, let’s just, let’s just filter it down to experience, it can become quite overwhelming, right? Because they don’t know where to start, and then when they do start, they’re not entirely sure what they’re looking for, so they start just collecting all this data. And you and I both know that. You know, when it comes to data, I mean, you just, it’s almost like a volumes game, right? And if you’re not, if you’re not entirely sure what you’re looking for, and what the goal of finding all this data is, you’re basically conducting research based on something that’s purely hypothetical that might not even help you generate the insights that you’re looking for. So that’s one part of the equation. The other part of the equation that I also found was after people have done their analysis and have synthesized the data. They may or may not know what the data is telling them, but I think they also struggle with, okay, so based on all of this, and you probably know where I’m going with this, you show this stuff to the board, and they’re like, Okay, so what do we do? Right? So I always say, like, you know, when you’re presenting data to somebody who’s, who’s not, you know, who doesn’t have a market research background, you always have to answer the what am I looking at? So what? And now, what? Right? So, based on all this, what do we do? Right?
Dale Thomas 19:15
Absolutely. And you know, to that point, we did a, we did some survey analysis for a correctional institution out on the West Coast, and as they were going into labor negotiations. And kind of where this ties in is, we were able to get all this data, synthesize the data, but we were also able to provide that well, if we don’t do this, this is what our employees are thinking. But if we don’t do this for the employees, this is what’s going to happen, or if we continue going down this road, this is what will happen, and they’ll be able to inform the local union and the they’re going into negotiations, they’re able to really use it to kind of position themselves. And I didn’t know anything about correctional institutions from this perspective, and if it wasn’t for AI, I would have never been able to do it, but I know how to answer the right questions. And now it’s almost gotten to the point where it’s just like, back in the day when I Google and the internet came along and somebody would say they don’t know how to do something, and you would just play like, well, you know, you can Google that. And to me, it’s almost like I use it so much now that it’s become part of my daily workflows and almost everything that I do well, I ask AI all the time about different things, and it’s open on my machine now, and it now has a permanent place on my desktop.
Christian Klepp 20:34
It probably has a permanent resident card too (laugh)
Dale Thomas 20:40
Definitely so.
Christian Klepp 20:41
Yeah, you kind of touched on it earlier in the piece, but I’m just going to dig a little bit deeper here. How can B2B marketers deal with the issue of plagiarism when it comes to AI?
Dale Thomas 20:53
A lot of tools, I mean, and this is always, I think, kind of a interesting predicament, because any AI generated tool could be plagiarized. But there’s a lot of tools out there, you know, and Grammarly, is one that comes to mind. I know text cortex has a plagiarizer, plagiarism check checker in its toolbar. So a lot more of these tools do have the built-in plagiarizer checkers, but I think it’s also part of the responsibility of whoever’s creating this information to go out and double check to see if it’s plagiarized, especially when I think that the challenge comes when you’re creating images, and all those images were generated, or were generated from other people’s images, and that, I think, can lead you more into hot water. And I know there’s a lot of litigation around artists suing whoever they’re suing because of that. So, you know, people, I think, just need to be more aware that it can happen and that they’re being responsible enough to check before they’re just outright publishing anything.
Christian Klepp 22:19
Absolutely, absolutely, and only because you brought up music. I think I lost count of how many famous artists have gotten lawsuits, but I think Ed Sheeran was one of them, right? Like, there was a particular verse in one of his songs from two years ago, and somebody, somebody who, apparently, who composed the song in the 70s, claimed, hey, that was my, that was my line, right? So it’s something as as minute as that, right,
Dale Thomas 22:45
Right. Well, it brings up an interesting thing. And you and I talked before we started that I used to have a background in the business of music. And years ago, in the early, early 90s, I actually was getting a degree in the business of music. And I don’t know why I remember it, but I remember the music professor or the attorney that came in and spoke to us was like four notes. That’s how they can if it’s more than four notes that’s the same, then you’ve copied their… the artist’s music. But if it’s under four notes, that’s what the courts have said are cool.
Christian Klepp 23:18
Wow, so interesting.
Dale Thomas 23:20
I don’t know if that’s still true or if anyone was, but it’s always kind of stuck in the back of my head. Four notes…
Christian Klepp 23:25
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Dale Thomas 23:26
And especially, as you know, if you’re looking at any of these tools that generate songs, which I think is absolutely amazing, I’ve done it playing around with my daughter and create songs about messy she is, or just having fun. But.
Christian Klepp 23:42
Yeah, yeah, no, no, for sure. For sure. Okay, sir, we get to the part in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips. You’ve given us some already. But if there’s somebody out there that’s listening to this conversation and you want, you want them to walk away with three to five things they can implement right away in terms of leveraging AI for market research. What should they do?
Dale Thomas 24:05
I think if they’re going to be leveraging AI for market research is to kind of least start with some kind of objective and strategy before you even begin. I think you kind of need to, you know. Need to know where you want to end up, or at least have an idea. But you can also use AI to help you kind of come up with some of those ideas and some of those strategies, then invest in tools that align with your your needs, and then incorporate them into your workflow. But be very careful. Do not buy every tool out there, because most of the tools are a wrapper for ChatGPT. You know, I had a meeting earlier, when we were talking about there’s so much overlaps between different tools, whether it’s AI or not, you have to have the tools that really address your needs. But there’s enough room for scalability and for growth within that tool set, I see all these tools that, do you know of content writing, and everybody’s doing that, but there’s they’re limited. So you want to get the tools that achieve what you’re looking to do, but also to be able to really integrate them in your workflow.
Dale Thomas 25:23
Also, I would say, you can combine AI generated insights with human expertise for more comprehensive analysis, if you have that expertise, or if you know somebody who has that expertise, and then understanding and implementing ethical guidelines and governance frameworks for AI usage in your organization. I would not if you’re a business owner or leader, I would not just start buying all these AI tools and letting people have free reins. You need to create what your policies are around them and how people are using them. You want to understand, you understand what you… make sure you understand what the regulations are in your area. I know New York, Colorado, California, have their legislation and their laws around AI usage. There’s, of course, GDPR in Europe. So you just need to be kind of aware of what those are, and then create guidelines. I think it’s the responsibility of the business owner or the manager, the leaders, to create what those policies are. And you better have very clear policies so people know what to follow. And then you have to have some kind of mechanism to really not be looking over their shoulder, but to really understand what the output is of those tools are
Christian Klepp 25:29
Yeah, to monitor, right? Yeah.
Dale Thomas 26:45
Some kind of something, yeah.
Christian Klepp 26:47
Absolutely, absolutely, no, great tips. Let me just quickly recap this here. So start with objectives and strategy, and I’ll get to that one in a second. Invest in tools that align with your needs, combining AI insights with human expertise. I think that one is really important. Yeah, it’s something that you brought up several times in this conversation. Don’t just like, you know, rely on AI for everything, and then don’t check the work, or don’t check what comes out of that, right? And then finally, have some kind of… implement some kind of ethical guidelines, or have policies in place that, I don’t want to use the word police, but to monitor, right? That is being used ethically. It’s being used properly, right? Okay.
Dale Thomas 27:29
Absolutely.
Christian Klepp 27:30
Yeah. Fantastic, fantastic, yeah. So I want to go back to the first point. So in your professional opinion, they probably should already be doing this. But do you believe that companies should have a long term strategy for AI, if they don’t have one already?
Dale Thomas 27:46
I think long term is really hard. I think they should have a short term stretch strategy, meaning, like the next six months. Because the challenge is the way this technology is moving so fast and it’s developing so quickly now. We don’t know what long term is going to look like, but I think a company should kind of understand what what their values are around AI, and make sure that they’re… that the tools that they’re using, and the usage of AI aligns with those values. But it’s, I think it’s going to be one. It’s going to be iterative, and you’re going to be constantly reevaluating and redeveloping what your strategy is around AI as more and more tools come online. Because I don’t think even, I mean, maybe there’s, like I said, there’s a lot smarter people out there than me, but a year and a half ago, I don’t think anybody would realize kind of where we’re at with it. So who knows what the next six months, next year, five years, is going to look like?
Christian Klepp 28:47
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s true. That’s true. Okay, so that was the first follow up question. Second follow up question. And I’m not expecting a laundry list here, but like, open your toolbox up for us a little bit. Dale, like, what are your go to AI tools for market research?
Dale Thomas 29:03
So 95% of our research comes from one tool, and that tool is TextCortex. We’re implementation partners of them and we use TextCortex because it is connected to the internet. You can use all the different models out there, or all the popular models. I think there’s now 10 that you can leverage. You can create knowledge bases. So if you’re having a chat, you can save that chat to, let’s say, a folder. You can sync your Google or OneDrive files over to that folder and then have conversations with it. So if you have like a branding folder or a marketing strategy folder, you can be having conversations with both of those folders that keep everything about your company in mind as you’re driving forward. And then I use one prompt. There’s only one prompt. I use it 99% of the time in everything I do, and it’s a prompt called Professor Cortex, which is a cross between Professor Synapse, which is a prompt that has made its way around the internet, and then TextCortex, which is our platform, and I forked it to create Professor Cortex. And what the prompt does is… it’s a freely available on our website, is you’ll give it a sentence or two. You don’t need to write these very lengthy prompts and act as a marketing guy or whatever that everybody’s doing. You give it two or three sentences, and it’ll kind of quickly understand what your goals are. It’ll quickly understand what it needs to do. And then it’ll develop through the chain of thought process, three to five different steps of what it’s going to do to help you reach your goal. And it’s very transparent. It’ll let you know exactly what… see if I can mute those notifications, it’ll very quickly tell you, or it’ll give you the three to five steps in a very transparent way of what it’s going to do to those goals. And then it’ll summon experts in those fields. So if you’re asking about marketing, it’ll create a marketing expert, and these are little agents that know all about the marketing business and and then it’ll start giving you the information. What I did is, is added the ability to if you have a learning disability, and you tell it I have ADHD, or I’m dyslexic, or I’m autism, if you tell it that, all the information that it’ll give you is in a way that you can consume it better. So it’s not like ChatGPT or a regular return where it’s it’s all this information that’s very overwhelming that’s in paragraphs. For me, I like visuals. I like bullet points. I want to quickly see the information so it helps deliver it so and I know that kind of went off track, but that’s a tool that I use 99% of my prompts. Again, through the text cortex platform, we help businesses leverage the TextCortex, create the personas, create the strategy, onboarding chat bots. Those, those are really, yeah. I mean, I do use Grammarly, and I call it a an AI tool, since it’s become more and more AI based.
Christian Klepp 32:17
Yeah, yeah.
Dale Thomas 32:18
But that’s really what I use. I love AI tools, and I’m a tool junkie, and I’m always looking at on AppSumo all the time, looking at the greatest, latest, greatest tools. But I rarely start using anything, because to me, TextCortex does it all now. We do have platforms we use to build agents on, but that’s those aren’t part of our daily tool stack.
Christian Klepp 32:43
Okay, okay, well, I mean, in fact, I don’t think that you digress at all. I think you just went into detail to explain what the platforms and what the tools are that you use and why you use them. And I think, I think that’s fair enough, right?
Dale Thomas 32:57
Okay.
Christian Klepp 32:58
Okay, Dale, three more questions, and I’ll let you go.
Dale Thomas 33:02
All right.
Christian Klepp 33:03
Okay, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why.
Dale Thomas 33:11
That I disagree with, and why? I think, for me, one of them is this concept that, like AI, is going to take over the world. I don’t think I necessarily buy that. I think because, fortunately, we have people that really want to step in front of that and make sure that doesn’t happen. I mean, it may take over the world. Who knows, really. But I think people are just very aware of this, and there’s, there’s organizations and and we do, I think government does have a place in AI. I don’t know exactly what that is, and I’m not a big fan of government, but there, I think there certainly is a role out there, but I don’t think like AI is necessarily going to take over the take over the world.
Christian Klepp 34:00
Not in our lifetime anyway. (laugh) All right, okay, so here comes the bonus question. So Dale, I have it in good authority that you’re a bit of a barbecue connoisseur. So let’s just say you got a phone call after this interview, right from what’s that show on Food Network, oh, Barbecue Brawl, right? Okay, and they say you’re gonna be in the next cookout or barbecue showdown, right? So we want you to, like, come up with your, your best, your best barbecue dish. So if you were, if you were on Barbecue Brawl, like, what would you be cooking, and why?
Dale Thomas 34:41
Well, if I was on Barbecue Brawl, I would, I would, I would be, let’s see if I remember that show. It’s so I would, I’d be cooking ribs. That would be at the top of my list, because I love pork ribs. I always have. I’m a barbecue judge for the KCBS. I judge barbecue competitions and ribs are there’s something that’s just great about how sweet they are, and you can make them spicy, and it’s just, yeah, it’s delicious.
Christian Klepp 35:11
Are you allowed to, are you allowed to disclose what your recipe is like, what you put in there?
Dale Thomas 35:17
Sure. I mean, I I’m not one of these guys. I do a lot of… I don’t do as much smoking as I used to, but I’m one of these guys that’s super-secret, because I use, there’s a company here in Kansas City called Meat Mitch barbecue. I use their rub. I use their sauce, Whomp sauce. Whomp sauce goes on everything, and that’s, that’s my secret sauce. Now I have a way that I prepare them that’s not really secret, but that I actually have to look up every time I do it, because there’s kind of, there’s a bunch of few steps…
Christian Klepp 35:48
Yeah, there’s, like, there’s like, a gazillion things in there, right? Like.. (laugh)
Dale Thomas 35:52
There’s quite a few. And I always, I’m trying to new, to do different things, and sometimes I forget. Well, this worked last time. It didn’t work the time before. Now, what are we going to do? And, yeah, trying new methods. And, but, yeah, ribs are ribs are words.
Christian Klepp 36:08
Yeah, nice, nice. I do agree. I do agree. And that’s probably one thing that AI can’t do yet, right? Like, make some good ribs.
Dale Thomas 36:16
Well, I will tell you I have, it’s been a long time, yeah, but I did get, I forget who I was using at the time. I did get it to create a master barbecue recipe to help me win competitions.
Christian Klepp 36:32
Oh, wow.
Dale Thomas 36:33
And I cooked it and it was good. I can’t remember how good it was, yeah, but it, it, it came up with great recipes. I do use just a little, little side note, I do have and will continue using AI to come up with recipes for the house, because I like meat and I like certain things. My wife’s a vegetarian. I have a picky eight year old. The biggest challenge in the house is, what are we going to have that kind of everybody will like. So I do recipe planning through it, and I also without… now I’m going off on a little tangent, but I also use AI to help me decide what I can eat on the menu, as my doctors put me on a diet of low or low sugar, no sugar, low sugar or low carb. And I don’t know what these menus have. So when we go out to eat, we eat a lot. I’ll take a picture of the menu now, and I’ll upload it to vision AI, and it’ll tell me the three or four things I can eat, substitutions that I can make. And it helps me, and you know, it’s helped me lose weight and get my labs back to where they should.
Christian Klepp 37:37
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, fantastic, fantastic. Well, Dale, I’d love to sit here and talk talk to you about ribs all day, but like in the interest of time, I do appreciate your coming on the show and of course, and…
Dale Thomas 37:50
I really appreciate you having me.
Christian Klepp 37:52
Yeah. So quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you, especially if they want to talk about AI.
Dale Thomas 37:58
So they can always send me an email. It’s [email protected] that’s also our website. You can get the prompt that I referenced, Professor Cortex at actionableops.com/professor. So you can get, get a hold of me that way. And then you can also get our book on Amazon and our book, if you don’t mind, me sharing, AI guide for small business success.
Christian Klepp 38:26
Fantastic, and we will put a link to that in the show notes for this episode. And…
Dale Thomas 38:31
Oh, perfect. Great.
Christian Klepp 38:32
Yeah, Dale, once again, thanks for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Dale Thomas 38:37
All right, great. Thank you again for having me.
Christian Klepp 38:39
All right. Bye for now.
How to Leverage LinkedIn’s Untapped Potential
LinkedIn is a powerful platform that can help unlock some incredible opportunities for B2B companies. However, many companies and their marketing teams have not optimized the potential that LinkedIn offers, or resort to tactics that don’t generate the best results. They can do better and lead with expertise as well as building trust.
That’s why we’re talking to LinkedIn expert Indrek Poldvee (Chief Executive Officer, B2B Growth) about how B2B marketers can leverage the untapped potential of LinkedIn. During our conversation, Indrek explained what LinkedIn’s untapped potential is and what pitfalls to avoid. He also highlighted the importance of having a good LinkedIn profile and why an understanding of your target audience, having the right strategy, and the right messaging are paramount. He provided us with some actionable tips and explained why commenting on other peoples’ posts helps to build trust.
https://youtu.be/4rwcj1D1f7Y
Topics discussed in episode
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
Indrek Poldvee, Christian Klepp
Christian Klepp 00:00
Indrek Poldvee is the founder and chief executive officer at B2B growth. He’s an Estonian LinkedIn expert and a dynamic marketer known for his problem solving mindset and entrepreneurial spirit. He helps people and B2B companies grow internationally via LinkedIn, enabling them to leverage this platform’s power to unlock new opportunities. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is.
Christian Klepp 00:30
Okay, fantastic. So, Indrek Poldvee, welcome to the show, or as you say in your language. Tere.
Indrek Poldvee 00:35
Yeah, glad to be here. And glueklich to be here. I can speak German.
Christian Klepp 00:43
Fantastic, fantastic. Indrek, I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because we’re going to be talking all about LinkedIn. So let’s just dive right in, because this is obviously your area of expertise. You’re an expert in helping B2B companies to unlock the power of this powerful platform, yeah. But for this conversation, let’s focus on a specific topic, and that is how to leverage the untapped potential of LinkedIn for businesses. So I want to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat, okay, so the first question is, what do you think the untapped potential is on LinkedIn. And number two, why are so many B2B companies implementing initiatives on LinkedIn that are not working?
Indrek Poldvee 01:29
Oh, yeah, so I’m pretty sure, yeah, if you want, we can make so that you don’t have any chance to ask any more questions. Because these two are so, so huge that, yes, top level. Yeah, okay. But so, so the question, So, to start answering your question, so what we try to do first is, first we need to ask, does your company even need LinkedIn? So the problem, what I see with a lot of companies, they want to be in all social medias, and then if you go to their website and etc., and you see that they have the icons, like five or six icons, the Instagram TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and it’s all fantastic that they have, but all of them are empty, or nothing happens there. So the first question is, do you even need to be there? So because if you have an account there and it’s not professional and doesn’t look good, and I think it will damage your brand reputation a lot more than for example, just focus on maybe Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, whatever the social media platform that you need or the your ideal audience are. Make it look nice and professional, and then focus on one and if you have more resources, then focus more and more so that that’s the first thing that I try to understand from the company side. But if we go, what is the untapped potential? What we see is 90 to 95% if you talk about the company profiles, a lot of them make really bad content, and the really bad content is they only talk about themselves. Look at our new product, look at what we did, and nobody cares about your product. That is, that is the thing. Nobody cares about it. And that, yes, they are some brands, and the biggest one, like Apple, Tesla, all of those things are really, really great. And people follow them because they are. They’re doing something new, and they have a really amazing fan base. But the thing is, in LinkedIn, the only thing we tell the companies that what you are selling is trust and trust with your audience. You’re building a community, and if you are not this well known brand as Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, whatever. Most of those brands do not have a lot of trust with their community. Yes, they have all these partners and consumers, etc., who trust them, etc. But in social media, like, for example, if you are a company that operates in Ontario Canada, then I’m pretty sure in Texas US, you have zero trust if you are not like a global like that, but in LinkedIn, you can be. So you need to always think in this, what is the untapped potential, what we see there is first, you need to ask the question, what is the reason our company is in LinkedIn? Who is our target audience? And what kind of content does our target audience want to read, or what is the value that we can bring to our target audience? So these are the strategic questions that we want to firstly tap in a little bit and then we start to produce content, or we start to focus on these people who we see that we have the content that we can provide value so this is the untapped potential.
Indrek Poldvee 01:29
And also the second question, also what you asked, what they are doing wrong and etc, this is what I see the most. The thing is what I see a lot in LinkedIn, especially here in Europe, the person who manages LinkedIn accounts, they also manage Instagram or Facebook accounts or do something like that, or they are assistant or secretary or something like that. And they don’t have any idea how LinkedIn works, because LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, they are all different social media channels, and they all have different algorithms, and they all have different content that works in that case, because Facebook is entertainment, LinkedIn is business and the content doesn’t work. You cannot copy paste LinkedIn content and put it in Facebook and you think it works or other way around. So you need to know the basics, like how it works, what kind of messages it works because, for example, in Facebook, really popular are, if you you do a lottery or something like that, they share this post with your friends, and you can win. This doesn’t work in LinkedIn, if you don’t like you can win a 20k expense paid to Ireland, to with Richard Branson, for example, to naked island and something like it. Yes, that that will also work in in LinkedIn, I’m pretty sure. And there are some cases that, but these, like 50 euro or 100 euro coupons, etc, because most of the people who are in LinkedIn, like 70% of them are decision makers. They don’t buy in LinkedIn emotionally so much like I see a product and then I just buy. No they will buy from companies and people who they trust, and most of the times they buy from people, people buy from people. So LinkedIn is not B to B, it’s H to H to human to human. Like that is also one of the things that you need to really think about. So I’m just pausing right here.
Christian Klepp 06:38
No, no, fantastic, fantastic, great answer. And I totally agree that it’s about selling trust, right? Because a lot of these people that you’re reaching out to on LinkedIn are decision makers. They tend to be also part of buying groups. I think that’s, I would say, 98% of the time on B2B, that’s the case, right? You’re, you’re dealing with more than one person who’s making a decision. I had a follow up question for you based on something you said earlier, because I think a lot of people either misinterpret this or have a different interpretation. When you say that the LinkedIn content or the LinkedIn profiles are not professional. What do you mean by that? Can you give us some examples?
Indrek Poldvee 07:21
So, so this is again, like something that we see a lot. So we have done over 1000 profile makeovers in the last four years. And what it is we go into a company and we fix like, about 20, 30, maybe 40 senior people’s profiles. And the thing is, what, what you need to do in the company, first, you need to do a training. So, because a lot of people think LinkedIn, and it’s correct also, but that my Facebook and LinkedIn account, they are my own personal. The company cannot tell me what kind of backgrounds, how my profile should look like and etc. But what we are trying to do with the training, people need to understand that in LinkedIn, you are not only representing yourself, you’re representing a company you work for. That is, that is the business environment. And again, like I emphasize on business environment. So LinkedIn, for me, it’s like a 24 hour, seven days a week, networking event. And for example, if you work in a company, and they are sending you other networking event, other potential partners and customers who are there. You are dressing up smartly. You are dressing up so that you are polite and you don’t go there… depending on the event, but you don’t go like a like a smart casual event with your flip flops and with a tank top, and you go smoking or half drunk or something like that. So the same analysis is going to your LinkedIn profile. So if your LinkedIn profile doesn’t have a background image your profile picture, it’s not your face or the profile picture that you have is like 5 to 10 years ago, your profile picture, the headline under it, like you say, like your CEO or project manager, and X company, again, that is these. These are like, flip flops to me, like, these are the nobody understands if you are a project manager at, for example, XCOM. What is XCOM? What is a project manager? What do you do? So we try to do in the trainings, you need to understand that the profile of your LinkedIn, LinkedIn profile, it is not for you. It is for people who do not know you. And on average, this is LinkedIn statistics that three to seven seconds one person it takes them to take a look at your profile. So in three to seven seconds with your profile, you need to have message there that if I do not know you, I come to your profile, I understand what is the value you can offer me. Is it? Is it marketing services? Is it LinkedIn services or for example, if you’re a sales professional who’s helping other companies to grow the revenue, or hit their sales. And then it’s a really fantastic headline, helping fast growing companies in sales department by systematic sales from zero to 2 million, something like that. You’re getting your value preparation already. And then you go to the About section. The about section also needs to be longer than four or five sentences. It needs to show who you are, etc. So for us, approximately takes like eight hours to do one profile makeover. And this is not… If you do it, depending on the profile, but again, like if, and this is not like heavy details. This is if you want to do like a full profile, like writing all the job experience, then it’s like 12 to 15 to 20 hours sometimes. And people don’t understand, or have never thought about it that they take so much work. It’s basically like writing your own CV. So you’re writing your own CV. It’s not like 20 minute job, because it’s easy to make a LinkedIn account. You just sign up, you put the profile picture, you blah blah blah, that’s it. But again, I really, really, really recommend people to think like, Who is this profile for? Who is my ideal audience, and What is the message I want them to write. Because in your profile, it’s like your company website, you are in control of the narrative that what you want other people to know about you so that so again, it might be a too long answer, but, but all starts with your profile and the company profile and all those.
Christian Klepp 11:33
Absolutely. The LinkedIn profile aspect of it is really good, and I think we’ll get back to that in a second. I wanted to move us on to the next question. So you brought up some of the pitfalls to avoid already, right? So, for example, not to be too company centric, talking too much about, oh, our product is so great, our company is so great. And try to make a more professional LinkedIn profile. What are some of these other pitfalls that people should avoid when it comes to leveraging LinkedIn?
Indrek Poldvee 12:06
Yeah, so this is a case study that we are just writing. So we are working together with. It’s not popular in US and that, but we are working together with little Estonia. So little is like a chain in Europe, one of the biggest food chains. So we are working and we did a report with them together right now for we’ve been working with them for eight months. And what we did is we took the eight months, we did about 70 posts in that time. So we posted like two, three times a week. And then what we did is we took their competitors in LinkedIn accounts, all that information that’s publicly available. We saw that they did 50 posts, which is, again, 20 posts differently. That’s how much. But what we saw when we did it, this is the competitor started to do the similar way, the post that we are doing it, the writing and structuring, and also the competitors, have similar amount of followers. So we all have like these follower amounts. It might different, like four or 500 people, etc, but what we saw was engagement. So that means comments, likes, all these things, our posts were getting four times better visibility and engagement than our competitors, and so the visibility is four times higher with organic reach. So and these are the pitfalls that we see that so most companies, they do not have posting schedules, they do not have content topics written. They don’t have it planned out. What do I write about? They don’t have a schedule. And what we see, which is what typically, most companies do, like they post maybe one or twice, twice a week, and then one week they don’t do any post because, oh, I don’t have any any content to share. Then one week they do like three, four or five posts, and then two weeks they don’t do any post. So there is no consistency and but LinkedIn loves consistency then, and this is one of the, one of the key things that you need to have. You need to have consistent, so to say, planning, and also it’s really important, is the days and times when you post, because, for example, in company post, really good times are morning times, when you post, because it gets more engagement, especially 7, 8, 9, in the mornings also post. You need to vary post. So those formats, some are a little bit videos, then you do a PDF, then you do pictures, then you do a text, then you see you make a question. So you need to see what works for you and for your audience. You need to test those things. But the consistency is key, because what we see is what LinkedIn measures, is how long time does one person read your post, and also that what LinkedIn values is the consistency. If you post it every week, and then LinkedIn measures the time, how much time do people spend on your post, and do they read them then? And they see an upgrade, like you’re doing consistently, people spend, like, 3, 4, 5 seconds more on your post. Of course, they want your post to get more engagement and visibility, because you are bringing tons of value to LinkedIn, because people stay on the platform longer. So so these are the couple of things, and then also one of the key things are getting your own employees to engage in the platform also. So, so the biggest growth in all the companies that we work is it comes with your own people. So getting them to share, getting them to comment or or those, these extractions only if you get like two or three people in your company to do them, that’s a massive boost. That’s a even if you have like 1000 employees and 300,000 followers, etc. But if you, if you get like three, four people in your own company who start to comment on post, trust me, the engagement levels will go up. And we see with every company we work with, after six months, all statistics, the organic visibility, likes, comments, shares, will go up, minimum for three to three, three times in six to the previous six months, when we do the statistics. So these are, these are a couple of things that needs to be but it is a system. It is a really, really big system, and you need to know how to play the system.
Christian Klepp 12:06
Yeah, yeah. No, no, absolutely, absolutely. I think, no, you brought up some really good points there. I wanted to go back to this one point you made, and just from your experience, what’s the best day to post on LinkedIn?
Indrek Poldvee 16:47
There is no like, yeah, there is no like, this day is the best. Very good days are Mondays, for example, because Mondays people go to the office, they start scrolling. But with your personal profile, also, weekends are really good because Sunday there is, again, it depends all on your target audience. Who is your target audience? So for example, LinkedIn studies have shown that the Sundays are really good, because if your target audience are CEOs and decision makers like this, high value. Most of them plan on Sundays their next week. So they don’t comment or react, but they read a lot on LinkedIn. They go and scroll it and see what’s happening, because they are in front of the computer. So we’re planning the next week. And so there are multiple things that it’s all about testing, and it also depends on the target audience.
Christian Klepp 17:35
Yeah, yeah. And I suppose your answer will be very similar to the question on the best format, because there probably isn’t one, right? It depends.
Indrek Poldvee 17:43
Depends. So the best formats right now are, for example, that we see if they are well done or PDF documents. So these are basically the ones that you can click next and next and next. And why they are really good if they are well done is because people spend more time on them, because they click on the next picture, next picture, next picture, next picture. These are really, really good. They have about 100 to 200% better engagement than most posts. Then the second format that is, that is really good, are picture posts so that you have about 1000, 2500 maybe 2000 characters of text, and then you have three, four pictures of people and post that have people in them, or pictures that have people in them work really, really, much better than other post when, because people love to see people because, again, like, for example, this is what we are doing with the employer branding side, is we introduce people in LinkedIn. And again, like you have, especially if you have a very strong, like, offline presence, like you have a lot of fans, then these people see your picture. They like it. They comment some people, etc. So, so it works amazingly, like we have some companies where we, we introduce the CEOs, etc.. And they have a really, how can I say, strong offline business culture. And then a lot of people comment on LinkedIn that I didn’t know that, etc. They are rooting for them, basically. So so we have seen that also. So, so again, it’s a lot of mix, because you need to know what is the company account. But when we talking about the company account, what is the company accounts purpose on LinkedIn? Is it the employer branding? Is this company branding? Is it building trust with your collaboration partners? Or is the company page a communication channel with the communication channel, etc? So, so depending on those goals, the content also varies, and how you plan the structure of posting, etc. So there are a lot of lot of things that need to take, how can I say into consideration.
Christian Klepp 19:52
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or, as they say here in North America, there’s a lot of moving parts, right? Because it’s an it’s an ecosystem, essentially.
Indrek Poldvee 20:00
Exactly.
Christian Klepp 20:01
And I’m glad you brought that up, because it’s such a great segue to the next question. And you’ve mentioned some of these things already, but talk to us about the importance of the following for leveraging LinkedIn the right way. So one is having a good understanding of the target audience, having the right messaging and content for the different groups, and having the right strategy. And you did bring up some of these already.
Indrek Poldvee 20:24
Well, the key thing is also having patience and consistency. These are, these are the thing, and also depending now on the company size, or there are also other things that you need to see, the company sizes, also when we and again, like there are different strategies with the personal profile and company profile. So the thing is, personal profiles, they get maybe 70 to 80% more engagement than the company profiles. But where the company profiles are really, really important are for bigger companies. And bigger companies are maybe like 75 to 100 people plus, because they are also doing recruitment, and they have a lot of partners, etc, so they need to allocate the resources to make sure that the company is also well represented in LinkedIn. But for example, in smaller companies, the CEO, founder, board member, whatever the title is, their personal profile is the key to unlocking LinkedIn and/or your sales people, etc. Because with your personal profiles, you can add people, you can communicate with them, you can message them, and this is right now with your company profile, you cannot do that. Well, in some cases you can, but it’s not very efficient. So people still want to talk with people, and that’s why making sure that your personal profile is more active. And again, with your personal profile also, there are, there are so many things that we see a lot of people have not considered, for example, if your target audience or CEOs, and let’s say in medical industry, medical industry CEOs, like hospitals, etc. But for example, your network, you’ve been maybe 10 years in LinkedIn, or your network, like you, I’m pretty sure that a lot of people have thought about it like, who are the people that I’m adding into my network? And most people, I think 90 to 95% of people I’m communicating with, they never thought about it, and they have added in their network people who were the former colleagues, school mates, random people, and somebody who sends an invite. But these are not your ideal audience. So if you want to target like a CEOs in the medical industry, and you want to get better content, then the network you already right now have, they are not producing it, so you need to very strategically, start adding these people that you are so to say, want to get as a target audience or your customers, you need to add them into your network. You need to follow those people, because then you can see what kind of content they make, what kind of messaging and again, like there is a multiple steps, because it’s not that easy. Oh, I’m just, I want to sell to medical people. Oh, I just started adding them, and that’s it. No, it’s not that easy, because you need to build trust. You need to know who they are. You need to like so, so again, like, and that takes time. It might take, like, six to 12 months before you see any kind of results in LinkedIn, and it’s a huge, it’s a big investment, because if you like managing somebody’s profile, depending if you do content or data, it’s like two to 10,000 a month. 2000 to 10,000 a month, depending on the services you need, and who are the people you are doing it together and well, so, so and the service, because it varies a lot, you can, you can get it from Philippines a lot cheaper also, but now depends on the quality, etc. Do they do…? So, so there are multiple, multiple things that you need to, need to think about, and your LinkedIn personal profile is really, really important, because if somebody screws it up, it’s not their reputation that goes bad. It’s your reputation that goes and you need to be very careful. But again, like we are working, for example, together with one investor. We did eight months, seven months working together. Nothing happened. We added investors. He had calls, etc, but nothing. Nothing did. But then one of the startups that he was working with, they were looking for a lead investor. So one of the investors that we added into his network, he mentioned, oh, that sounds like an interesting person. Maybe we match. He introduced the investor to the startup. They did a little, little over, over a million euros of lead investment for the company. That investor cut was 4% and then our, our services were paid for the next, like, basically one and a half years, basically our services. So, so again, like these happen, and I’m 100% sure in these next one and a half years we will get multiple deals, like two or three deals more. And then again, like the ROI is there. So to say. Like now, but again, like it works with this bigger deal. So in LinkedIn, what I normally recommend with the sales is like your product needs to have a return of investment at least, like two to $3,000 a month, or something like that, then LinkedIn makes sense. But if you, if you’re selling pizzas, then LinkedIn is not for you if, but if you want to sell container full of pizzas, then LinkedIn makes sense, because the deal values are much, much higher so and the ideal, the best, the best companies that I also… I’m looking this like where the deal started, 100,000 or half a million, or a million euro, million dollars or more. Because even if you get like, two sales per year, then our costs are covered there, etc, and there are multiple opportunities will come from those connections, I’m 100% sure.
Christian Klepp 25:50
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. I’m glad you talked about strategy, because I think especially based on what you’ve been talking about in the past couple of minutes, there’s many ways that you can look at it, right? Because there’s a strategy, there’s an overall strategy, but there’s also a strategy based on what you said, that links to how you plan to approach members of the target audience, right? How do you connect with them? What’s your strategy there? Right? Because, as you said, it’s not just okay, I’ll just connect with members of the target audience, and then we’ll definitely be able to jump on a call. That strategy. That’s one part of the strategy. And I think the other strategy is, going back to what you said earlier on in the conversation, is based on the content strategy. So what are we going to write about? Right? Because I’ve seen, I’ve seen this happen, right? If you don’t come up with that kind of strategy, you’re going to run out of content ideas, right? You’re not going to be able to fill that content calendar. The way that you produce content is going to be very reactive, which leads to, as you said, inconsistencies, right?
Indrek Poldvee 26:53
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And again, with the content, think about quality over quantity in LinkedIn, definitely you don’t need to start posting five times a week and all those things. You can start once a week, even in the beginning, just to get so to say your… How can I say, content idea of flows getting to go because writing content is basically the same as learning to drive a car or learn a new language in the beginning, it’s not that easy, but if you do it consistently and well, then, trust me, writing, it becomes very, very easy. Or you can just outsource everything. So that is, there is also so there are… I’m a really believer that you do not need to do everything, like, if you are really good sales and host and, and then basically outsource everything else, and you do that, but what you are where your ROI is the maximum, basically, so whatever skill set for you that is. And again, like I normally don’t recommend to do like content strategy in the beginning with the personal accounts if the person is not very LinkedIn familiar, because there are other ways to build trust, etc. And one of the ways is, for example, commenting. Commenting on others people’s posts is a very, very effective strategy if you, for example, comment right like 20 to 40 comments per day. It takes a lot of time, but if you do that, then 100% I can guarantee you, in one month, you will get a lot of inbound messages. Are there the right messages you’re looking for? Definitely not, but you will start a lot of conversations and people notice you, as long as your comments are adding value. Not these comments, like well done or Thank you. These comments, they do not add absolutely nothing. So I do not recommend those.
Christian Klepp 28:54
Well, I mean, and you’ve probably heard about this, but there are these groups out there, like the LinkedIn pods, and that’s what they’re doing. It’s artificial engagement. So they’re, they’re probably posting something out there that, in essence, adds no value and doesn’t mean much, but then they get like 500 likes.
Indrek Poldvee 29:10
Yeah, right. I’ve been also testing with the with the posts, and we did it. You can also, you can in the post. You can also write the comments yourself and make it longer, etc. And they are also those and, but again, like you, you kind of see which posts have using the LinkedIn pods, etc, because LinkedIn is banning them, and, and. But if you’re using smartly, it still works, but again, like I think in some places it is a interesting strategy in the beginning to get stuff going. I do not recommend them. Definitely not. But depending on the pods, sometimes the pod can be also five or six people that let’s, let’s help each other grow like we build an engagement pod ourselves, and then we add valuable comments to each and if your content doesn’t resonate with me, I don’t have to comment basically like that. You do that, or maybe there are 10 people. But what I see with those you can really see that the comments sometimes, if somebody who doesn’t know how to use them, you see that they are using a pod, because all the comments are coming like in seconds, baba, baba, you have 20 comments that are written pretty similarly, even if they are, but you can, if you start to read couple of comments, you you see that these are AI made or somebody like that, because they are all kind of similar and they all have like this, also timestamps, you know exactly five minutes, five minutes, one minute, five minutes, whatever that they put like, but they are also, I’m pretty sure, randomizers there. But even if you’re using that, the key is also in LinkedIn, you need to respond to those comments. And this is also a good way to see if there are pod or not. Is if the author responds to the comments and there is no response to the author, then again, these are automatically made, so if they have like, 20 comments, and they added 20 responses and none of them replied to the author, then again, you can see that, okay, this is, this is… some something is going on there basically.
Christian Klepp 31:16
Yeah, no, exactly, exactly, okay. So we get to the part in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us a lot already, but just imagine that there’s somebody out there that’s listening to this interview that really wants to leverage the power of LinkedIn, and there’s three to five things that they can implement right away. What would those things be?
Indrek Poldvee 31:38
Yeah. So another question is, Is it personal, a company account? Those are totally different. So, so, but, but I will come to what we started in the beginning, like, what is the reason you want to, want to use LinkedIn? What is the number one goal? Like, let’s say it’s sales, let’s say it’s recruiting, let’s say it’s whatever… building your personal brand. Okay, so then you need to map out who is your ideal audience? Like who I am like, or the other, other way, like who I would like to be surrounded in the next two years. Who are the people that I want to be surrounded within the next two years? Because that’s how long it takes in the beginning, if you, for example, building a personal brand and for example, let’s say I want to be surrounded with business owners, CEOs, board members and these people. These are, these are my target audience. Okay, that’s fantastic. So, but if you’re living in the US or Canada, these bigger countries like you, like, I don’t recommend that. Why all in US are my target? No, definitely not, maybe, maybe 100 mile radius, maybe 200 mile radius. So let’s say we want to go Ontario Canada. So basically, it’s a place. But okay, like I narrow down, so to say, basically my target audience, and then the question is, what is the value that I want to bring to those people? Maybe I finished my university. Oh, I don’t have any experience. I don’t have any money. I don’t know what to add them. But then it’s a personality that you’re curious. You’re asking, for example, the way to starting reaching, reaching to start people out. They said, Hey, I really love your background, and you have done a lot like, what are your tips as a starting entrepreneur, or as a starting somebody who started out of university or something, you can, you can approach like that in people, and trust me, maybe 10 to 20% would reply to you. That is okay, so, but the thing is, in LinkedIn is it’s a long time game, but you need to think also like, don’t be afraid of connecting people, but be very, very polite when you connect with people. And if you like to ask for help, that that works really, really well in LinkedIn, or you’re looking for a mentor, or something like that. But if you want to do sales, it’s the same, same approach, again, like, who are the people? What is target audience? What is the value that we bring? And then if you have those things written down, then try to optimize your profile so that that when they come to it, they understand, what is the service you offer, what is the company you work for? And, and what do you do? So those, those are… and make sure your profile picture is also it looks professional and, and it’s up to date. It’s not from 2005 or something like that. And 70 to 80% should be your face on your on your profile picture?
Christian Klepp 34:21
Those are some really great tips. And I hate to do this, but I have to bring up this question, because I’m sure you see a lot of this on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn and AI, and I’m sure you have some opinions about that, and I’m sure you also caution your customers against overusing AI, right? So what are your thoughts on that?
Indrek Poldvee 34:43
No, I think AI is here to stay. AI is amazing, amazing tools. But again, like, just like you mentioned, you need to know how to use them. So that is, that is the main thing. Like, I do not recommend, yeah, we are also using AI to write some of our poll. Still do, but the AI does maybe 70 to 80% of the work. And then the final 20, we will go over manually. We go over by hand, because it’s the storytelling, it’s the personalization. The AI, when I did my post it, it added some words that I have no idea how to even pronounce in English. So, so my English, again, like a basic if the words are more than five characters, I have no idea what what they mean, so I try to keep it extremely basic and simple. But AI added some and yes, there are prompts that will help and etc. But again, like I think majority of people, they are not, they don’t know how to use to test the thing, because I know that the people who are AI experts, etc. They make content that actually you don’t even need to change, because they have, they have trained them and etc. They are really, really fantastic. But again, on LinkedIn is also trying to adapt the AI a lot. And I really do not like them, because if I, if I see the messages that it automatically prompts and etc, these are really, really bad. And also, what I don’t recommend is, like, LinkedIn says, Hey, I will write the about section with AI with you too. Like, don’t use it. Like, it’s, yeah, it’s really, really terrible, and, yeah. So, so yeah.
Christian Klepp 36:15
There was something that was circling around on LinkedIn, and I’m sure you’ve seen it, but it’s, something in your profile settings where you can go in and you can switch off that functionality, where it’s basically giving LinkedIn permission to use your data for, like, AI training, right? So that was something that was circling around for a couple of weeks.
Indrek Poldvee 36:37
So basically, basically, it was LinkedIn automatically added in the settings that whatever you post, whatever you do, it goes automatically do their AI LinkedIn training, and it is automatically turned on. So you need to turn it off if you don’t want it. So, so basically, but LinkedIn is collecting a lot of data, so, and I’m sure that 90%, 95% of LinkedIn users have no idea.
Christian Klepp 37:00
They have no idea that this exists. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay. So here comes the next question, what is a status quo in your area of expertise… So in this case, LinkedIn, that you passionately disagree with and why? So what is it that people are saying about LinkedIn, where you’re saying, No, I don’t agree with that at all?
Indrek Poldvee 37:20
Oh it depends on the people who are listening. Is it trainer or is it average people? With the LinkedIn trainers, I, like a lot of them, say all the right stuff. So like, but most of the things, like, again, like we talked about it, but it’s the personal profiles. Like people think, like, whenever I do trainings, etc, they say that, Oh, we can fix our own profiles, etc, and people think like, it’s quite easy, but actually it is quite, quite challenging. That is, that is something that I see a lot. Like, people think like, Oh, yes, I can fix my profile, but trust me, very few people can. And this is where I say, like, try, like, get professional help if you, if you want your profiles to look good, like, if it’s a copywriter, if it’s your friend who knows how to speak better English, etc, like, get them, get feedback or or whatever. And what I also recommend with your personal profiles is write down like, five to 10 questions and let somebody ask those questions from you, because then it’s easier to it’s always easier to answer questions than going to into front of your computer and say, oh, I need to do my profile makeover. I start doing it, and then you are stuck. You have just no idea how to do it because, but if somebody asks you, hey, tell me the things, what you are proud of, like in professional session. What are your achievements that you have done? These, these, these are the questions. You open up and they can record it, and then you have a really good, so to say, draft of what can you write in your personal profile, for example?
Christian Klepp 38:48
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I’ve done that for clients before, like, rewritten their LinkedIn profiles, and I can definitely attest to what you’re saying that it does take time. It’s not a simple exercise that you complete in 10 to 15 minutes, because it is… there is a bit of a process to it. You have to conduct the interview. You have to conduct some research. You have to talk to people that they’ve worked with and collaborated with, because it is, in many ways, as you said, it’s a kind of like a condensed not necessarily a CV, but it’s a condensed CV, it’s a condensed bio, it’s a condensed promotion piece, right? It’s all these different things, at least in my opinion.
Indrek Poldvee 39:31
Exactly, exactly.
Christian Klepp 39:32
Okay, so here comes the bonus question Indrek, because a lot of people outside of Europe, I’m just gonna say, probably have no idea about Estonia, like number one, where it is and you know, they just don’t know anything about this country. So if you were to tell an audience outside of Europe, like, say, specifically North America, one unique thing about your country, what would it be?
Indrek Poldvee 39:59
Oh, there are so many. I can make a new, new podcast about it.
Christian Klepp 40:05
Just pick one.
Indrek Poldvee 40:06
Yeah, but, but if we go, what is the like most fascinating. A lot of people have no idea that Skype was founded in Estonia, and Estonia has more… Is number one in the in the world per capita, the unicorn startups. We have so many billion dollar companies. So we have, I think, 11 or 12 billion-dollar-startups here in Estonia, wow. And we are extremely technologically advanced. So, so, so that is, that is something I think, fascinates people. And we are also a digital nation. I said, you only one but, but everybody who’s interested, if they Google Estonia e-residency, they think people can become digital residents of Estonia, also, we are the only world in the only country in the world. I think, who does this right now.
Christian Klepp 40:57
Yeah, yeah, I did know that, actually, right? Because I did know, I didn’t know somebody from Estonia, and she did mention that, right? So that’s a that’s an incredible, incredible piece of information. Okay, for all you listeners out there that did not know where Estonia is or what Estonia is about, feel free to reach out to Indrek. Speaking of which, I want to thank you for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. How can people get in touch with you, especially if they want to leverage LinkedIn for their businesses?
Indrek Poldvee 41:28
The easiest thing is, just hit me up in LinkedIn and they will they will find my name Indrek Poldvee B2B Growth. And quite easily. And I think that is the best way. And all my emails, etc. are available, so hit me up, and more than happy to assist and consult whoever is interested.
Christian Klepp 41:56
Perfect, perfect. Once again, indirect. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Tänan I think is the word, right?
Indrek Poldvee 42:03
Perfect, yeah. No. Thank you Christian for doing it and inviting it was… it’s easy to talk when you do the things, and it’s easy to talk about them.
Christian Klepp 42:12
My pleasure. Okay, take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Indrek Poldvee 42:17
Yeah. Same here.
How to Build a Powerful B2B Content Moat
Success in B2B content marketing (or marketing in general) comes from a deep understanding of customer needs, goals, pain points, and buying triggers rather than trying to emulate larger companies. How can B2B content marketers be more strategic and have success with limited resources? What approach can they use that will work consistently over time?
That’s why we’re talking to conversion content marketing expert and B2B copywriter Jessica Malnik (Founder, JM Content Group) about how marketers can build a content moat that creates lasting results for B2B brands. During our conversation, Jessica talked about the importance of the content moat framework and why she thinks the current B2B content marketing playbook is broken. She also highlighted the pitfalls that B2B content marketers should avoid, what the content moat consists of, and how content marketers can use AI ethically.
https://youtu.be/NBTuqNj8708
Topics discussed in episode
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
Jessica Malnik, Christian Klepp
Christian Klepp 00:01
Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on the Mission, and I’m your host Christian Klepp. Today I’m going to be talking to Jessica Malnik. She’s the founder and chief conversion content marketer at the JM content group. She works with B2B SaaS and professional service firms to build a marketing moat that compounds over time via her signature content moat framework. She’s also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Next Web, Wynter, Social Media Examiner, SEMrush, HubSpot, SX, SW and MSN UK, among others. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. Okay, so here we are. Jessica Malnik, welcome to the show.
Jessica Malnik 00:45
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Christian.
Christian Klepp 00:47
Great to have you on. And you know, I really enjoyed the previous conversation that we had, and that really told me, like, Oh, wow. Okay, this is gonna be this conversation is gonna be dynamite. So no pressure, but let’s dive in to today’s topic, because it’s so pertinent for B2B content marketers out there. And let me see if I phrase this the right way, but like you’ve been on your own professional mission all this time, right with B2B SaaS and professional firms, and that mission is around how to build a content moat that creates lasting results for B2B brands. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. Okay. So question number one is, why do you believe that your framework is so important? And number two is, why do you think that the current B2B content marketing playbook is broken?
Jessica Malnik 01:45
Yeah, okay, I’m gonna start with the second question. These are excellent questions right away, Christian, but the first one is, I think a I feel like everyone always says, Hey, there’s a current playbook. I’m like, actually, I don’t actually think there was ever a playbook. And if you were trying to listen to, quote, unquote, a playbook, just by its definition, if you’re just trying to repeat what’s already been done, you’re probably 9.5 out of 10 times going to get worse results, or more mediocre results, than if you’re trying to actually understand, let’s just say, the playbook of your customers. What are your customers care about? What are their goals? What are their pain points? What are kind of the buying triggers? What are the emotions behind it? Create your strategy based on all of that. Don’t create it off of what your competitors doing, or some quote, unquote playbook that you know, HubSpot used and grew, and they’re an amazing company, but like, for my own example, most of my clients are, like, early or mid stage companies. They don’t have the luxury of the size of the marketing team or the size of the marketing budget of HubSpot. If you try to replicate what HubSpot is doing, or monday.com is doing more recently with your budget, you’re just setting yourself up for failure, and instead, there’s just better ways to kind of go about getting the results that you need without having to look towards bigger companies that have just, quite frankly, just a larger brands, larger budgets and larger teams than you’re going to have. Why do you want to try to compete with someone with 100 person marketing team, when you have a team of five,
Christian Klepp 03:23
I love that answer. And I think it reminds me of something that I saw on LinkedIn. It might have been like two years ago now, where people are always talking about, I want to be like Gary Vaynerchuk, or one of those types of people, right? And, and the one thing about that is like, okay, it’s like you said, if you think that you can get to that Gary Vaynerchuk level within such a short time with very limited resources, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. I mean, the one thing that a lot of these guys don’t think about is that, yes, Gary Vaynerchuk is famous and he’s popular and he’s wildly successful. He also happens to have this massive team behind him that’s doing all of this work, right? And I believe that was your point. But let’s go back to the first question. Why do you believe that this content moat framework is so important?
Jessica Malnik 04:15
Yeah, I feel like time and time again, and like, my background, like originally came from the journalism world, very quickly, kind of fell into social media marketing, which is my foray into content marketing, and then copywriting as well. And really, like, started to hone in the fundamentals of marketing and fundamentals of copywriting. But like, the reason why, I think kind of, and then I’ve honed this framework over the last five years working very closely of a bunch of different clients. I think the reason why it works is because A, you’re no longer having to compete on volume, and you’re now just kind of competing much more about you know. Do we know, understand our customers? Do we understand our audience and figuring out ways to, like, you know, do more with less, which is a big theme now across the board. And also being super consistent and just super disciplined about building out evergreen assets that are going to work for you today, tomorrow and even two years from now. Let’s figure out the assets are going to work as hard as you do. And instead of what a lot of teams do, which is you publish it once, and then it just collects digital dust and it’s never really working for you. I kind of say what’s the opposite of that? You don’t necessarily need as much volume at this point. You don’t have to play the game of publishing once a day, or even, you know, two or three times a week. You can publish way less and have a much bigger impact.
Christian Klepp 05:38
That’s a really good point. And I think it also goes back to something that I experienced with a client like years ago. And I’m not sure what your experience is, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it, but I’ve worked with some teams that don’t do this kind of work upfront, that you’re referring to right, this kind of framework, this kind of planning and research and strategy, and what tends to happen, eight times out of 10 is they run out of ideas. They run out of things to write about, right? What’s your experience been?
Jessica Malnik 06:10
That’s an interesting perspective. I always kind of think if you’re running out of ideas of what to write about that generate, or what to produce content about, whether it’s audio, video, text, and I just don’t think there’s a very large margin. White text is still probably the most important asset, and should be the foundation that I could maybe get into. But I think, like, if you’re running out of ideas, it just tells me you’re not talking to enough customers, and you don’t understand your audience well enough. Generally speaking, that’s like, if ever I’m thinking I don’t know what to write about, I’m like, Okay, well, I just need to go interview a couple customers, maybe do a test case study or two, or talk, listen to sales calls, listen to support girls. Every single time I do that, I will come up with a list of 10, 15, 50 new ideas to write about. Whereas, you know, and that’s also a way to just make sure that you’re creating content that’s going to have a much higher chance of resonating versus, you know, just using the same tools that everyone else uses.
Christian Klepp 07:05
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question. Okay, we’ve highlighted some of these, like common mistakes and what have you. But what are on this topic of building that content moat? What are some of these pitfalls that B2B content marketers need to avoid, and what should they be doing instead?
Jessica Malnik 07:23
Yeah, I feel like one of the bigger pitfalls is just focusing too much on output or volume. It’s easy to do because, you know, hey, if you need to measure something, and measuring for content marketing is hard, there’s definitely things you can be doing. And I definitely lean much more heavily towards okay. What are things that are actually going to help build up more qualified leads, either through a system conversions or straight up from that content being kind of that last source. But yeah, so quality of, you know, basically just doing too much quantity is a major pitfall. Another one is basically like spreading and praying and getting to the point where you’re like, hey, like, we don’t really know, so we’re just gonna post a whole bunch of things out there. And I feel like the biggest one in my experience is like content positioning. I think it’s probably the most underrated aspect of content marketing in general. Like we always talk about brand positioning, we talked about messaging, but each individual asset you create, whether it’s a social post, an email, a case study, a long form piece of content, a white paper, or whatever it should be, like you should have positioning there as well, and that’s how you can differentiate your own brand. So like, if you’re writing about this topic, it should feel like it’s from your brand and not be something that could be on your competitor’s website and will feel exact same. And I think a lot of brands, if they’re really honest with themselves, are just creating 10x copycat content. And what really, really, really resonates is like actually thinking, doing the hard work up front of figuring out, what are their content positioning, what is their point of view, and how can we make sure that, like, it’s very clear why we’re talking about this topic.
Christian Klepp 09:00
Yeah, exactly, yeah. In terms of the copycat content, I do agree with that. I mean, you tend to see a lot of like that, for lack of a better description, vanilla content out there. A part of that may be AI, and we’re going to touch that in a second. I think the other part, unless I’m completely off, is they just don’t do enough research so they just see what the competitors are doing, and they try to come up with a slightly different version of it, and then they just pepper it with some little like elements of differentiation. But it’s not really that differentiated, is it? Like…
Jessica Malnik 09:35
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like another really big issue of that is, and this is no fault to the people on the team who are doing this, because I feel like this is very common, and I’ve been guilty of this as well, particularly early on in my content marketing career, is you hire a junior person, a junior content marketing manager who’s in their first role, maybe you have a couple of very green freelance writers who don’t know the industry very well, so they’re relying on having to mostly Google their way around. And that can work out okay, if you have a 101 level content, but if you’re trying to reach out to people who like, really understand their topics like you can’t…. you’re kind of setting up your team to fail. If you’re just trying to Google your way around how to like write about that topic. You really need to lean into interviews, internal, external, you know, to make sure that you’re actually writing things that are going to resonate. Because yeah, and that just does not work as well in my experience, when it comes to thinking besides 101 level content.
Christian Klepp 10:39
Absolutely, absolutely, moving on to the next topic, which is about market research and strategy, which are so important, especially if you want to build up that moat, and you want to build a… you want to come up and develop this plan for content that will hopefully give you enough ideas of what to write about for the for the next couple of months, or perhaps even for the whole year, my question is, because it can get really overwhelming, right? Because, I mean, we’ve all been through that exercise where you just get, you just drown in this incredible amount of research. What are some tips that you can give marketers out there to help filter through all that overwhelm, like, what are some of the things that they should be focusing on in their research? So they go in there with an intention, and from there they can build the right strategy.
Jessica Malnik 11:28
Yeah, I love it. I actually helped, actually produced a small course for thinking around this very idea. So look at that. There are some, there’s some good tips in there. However, some other things I always like to emphasize there is, like, you can drown in research. You can drown in creating the perfect strategy. There’s no such thing as a perfect strategy. The best strategy is the one that you can consistently and I would try to fit for with all my clients. I want to make sure you have a strategy within one to two months. It’s not going to be perfect, but I want to have it be 80 to 90% of the way there, and then, like you know, from there, we are going to learn so much by starting to ship on that. And then, you know, we can execute it. We can change. We can make tweaks every single month. Or I used to recommend every quarter, let’s tweak it. This worked well, let’s double down on this. This maybe didn’t go so well, okay, let’s not do that this quarter. So that’s one of the ways to just make sure that you are constantly don’t get into what I call procraster planning, where you spend all of your time on research and all of your time building out the perfect strategy, and then you never trip anything. And guess what? You’re not going to have results if you don’t trip anything at all. So that’s part of it is just knowing what good enough looks like, and get it that to 80-90% of the way there. That’s how you can actually start to get results. And then this head taking, and I have to think in terms of experiments, and just in general.
Christian Klepp 12:52
It almost sounds to a certain degree like SaaS, where you’re not supposed to wait for the perfect product until you launch it, you build it, you launch it, you collect the feedback, right? Or you start with the beta testing, then you get the feedback, and you iterate, and you put the next version out, and so on and so forth. And I’d imagine, if I understood what you were saying correctly in this content mode, it’s a similar approach to a certain extent.
Jessica Malnik 13:22
Yeah, absolutely. It’s about, you know, building on every green assets that work harder for you. But it’s also about just thinking in terms of experiments. And I feel like one of my own, maybe insecurities, is I don’t necessarily, you know, I can’t be like, Hey, here’s this web, here’s the strategy I built over, you know, you know, three months, and suddenly it led to 100x results. More often than not. It’s like, Hey, these are results that are compounding over time. They start off slow, but hey, fast forward a year or two years or three from now, now you’re starting to look at those 50x returns, but it’s, you know, not immediate. Like, it’s much more about like, you know, thoughtful, methodical, building out something that’s going to be consistent and give you everlasting success, instead of chasing virality, which I feel like a lot of marketing, is like chasing the viral effects. And I’m the first one to say I’m probably not the right person to work with if you just want to create viral content. I’ve certainly created some of it, sometimes directly and sometimes by accident, but like, it’s much more about, I feel like the results that actually last, and when you’re getting the right types of qualified leads, or when you’re really focusing in on consistency, and you’re, you know, looking to get 1x 2x 3x better every single month.
Christian Klepp 14:34
You made me giggle there for a second, because, um, you reminded me of a client I was working with a couple of years ago, and one of the things that they mentioned in their brief was we want to launch a viral video. And I said, with all due respect, you don’t get to decide if the video is viral or not, right? And they kept insisting on it. And I. I think I can say with great confidence that we turned that business down. We told them that we’re afraid we can’t help you with this, and we never looked back, and we don’t regret it, because, sure enough, they gave it to somebody else, and it actually it didn’t work. But I wanted to go back to what you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes, and I totally agree with this approach, but I’m sure you’ve dealt with this before, right? How do you deal with clients that push back on the whole notion of, okay, why are you spending so much time on all this research and strategy, we don’t need it. Just jump straight into the execution and just produce the content, because we need to show results. We need to justify the ROI. And I’m sure you’ve heard that at some point, right? How do you how do you deal with that kind of pushback?
Jessica Malnik 15:57
Yeah, I mean, that’s such a great question, and definitely something I get all the time. It’s definitely a push and pull. And I’m going to give the classic marketing answer. It depends on how you approach it, I would say, in my experience, how I tend to approach it… And I try to figure out, okay, what is the minimal viable amount of research that I’m going to need to feel confident that I can execute at a reasonably high level, it won’t be perfection. And then I tried at the onset with, Okay, what’s the underlying goal here? Like, what are they looking for? and what do they expect in terms of timeline? And I try to kind of meet somewhere in that middle when it comes to all of this, and the other side of that, as well as it’s I also kind of sussed out if they’re looking for, like, absolutely immediate results, and they need content marketing to be producing results in a week or two. You laugh. But that, you know, occasional I see them and actually, you know, I don’t have content marketing, and especially not SEO, even though SEO and content marketing should 100% be different, you don’t. They’re not one in the same. I will die on that hill. But if you’re looking for results from content marketing within two or three weeks, maybe not the right strategy for you, it does, you know, you can certainly get really good momentum within, you know, a quarter. But if you need something like immediately, and you’re not willing to invest a huge amount of budget and a huge amount of research, there are other strategies, like cold email, cold calling and/or paid ads that will get your results faster. Granted, they all have pretty big pros and cons, but so does content marketing, right? I don’t know, did I answer your question?
Christian Klepp 17:37
You did. You did. You absolutely did. And I just like to add also, on the topic of paid ads, or paid paid anything to be for that matter, the moment you stop paying, what happens? Yeah, right.
Jessica Malnik 17:54
I count my clients all that all the time. When it comes to paid ads in general, it’s like, hey, it’s the minute you stop or the minute you saturate your market, you’re now back to square one, and you have no moat to stand on.
Christian Klepp 18:05
Yup. And I think it goes back to something you said earlier, right? Like, and this is the importance of all this research and planning, because that will also help to determine whether this is the right solution for them or not. Because it’s one thing for the client to tell you, Hey, Jessica, we need a white paper, or we need a video, or we need a new website. And then sometimes this, I call it like the diagnostics or the investigation, right? The diagnostics and the investigation will help you to determine whether that’s actually the right solution for them or not, because it might not be right. Maybe having a new website won’t solve their problem. To your point, there might be an issue with the product, right? And if there’s an issue with the product, no amount of marketing, whether it’s content or anything else, is gonna solve that.
Jessica Malnik 18:56
You bring up such a good point. And one of the biggest reasons I will DQ a prospect from working with me and or I will, is if I don’t think they have product market fit, or any path to getting to product market fit, like if you’re so early stage that you have less than five customers, please do not invest your time on content marketing unless you have a massive, massive, massive amount of capital at your disposal right now. You are wasting so much energy and so much time creating content that is probably going to change and not be relevant even a month from now, let alone a year from now. So like, I feel like, in that perspective, like you should not be doing, I feel like you shouldn’t… There are 99% of the times if you don’t, if you’re pre-revenue or you have fewer than 10 customers, content marketing isn’t the right strategy. SEO isn’t the right strategy at that point. You need sales, and you need to get enough customers to be able to find patterns.
Christian Klepp 19:54
Yep, yep. That’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. Break it down for us. Okay? What are these essential components that B2B marketers need to build this content moat that you are referring to? So what should they be doing differently?
Jessica Malnik 20:11
Awesome. I feel like there are three main components to my content marketing framework. I hone this over about five years of working with a lot of different brands. I feel like most brands do intuitively one of those things well, maybe two, but you need all three to be working in lockstep to be able to create a content moat that’s going to compound in every single month, your assets are going to be working just as hard, if not harder, for you than you’re working. So insights is kind of the first key, and think about as messaging and positioning of each at the strategy level and at each individual asset level, you also you also have community, which I am kind of basically calling 10x distribution. How are we making sure that our content is going to the right audience in the right channels at the right time, and then content efficiency, which is, how can we make sure that each asset that we’re producing works harder for us? So that could be, you know, updating it, you know, every couple of… anytime we have a product change, anytime we have a brand change, anytime SEO changes a little bit. It could also be newsletters. It could be repurposing it for individual social channels, repurposing it for webinars, guest posts, making each individual asset you create have multiple layers to it, so you’re not just producing it once, sharing it on social media and saying you’re done with it. So to chime in again, kind of my content moat framework has three components, insights, community and content efficiency.
Christian Klepp 21:34
Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s go to the community piece for a second here. Can you elaborate on that a little bit further, like what, what needs to be… Defined community.
Jessica Malnik 21:45
So, I mean, kind of my background is at the introduction of community and content marketing. Um, in the perfect world, you would have a branded community of your own. But there are 1,000,001 reasons why that’s generally not the recommended strategy for most of the clients I work with. I don’t recommend that. Um, there’s other ways to go about it, the way what, what I’m really thinking about when it comes to community, when it’s not your own, is, who are the super connectors and or the major influencers in our space, in our niche, you know, where do people turn to for information? What social media channels are they on? What are they searching for on Google? You know, what other resources are out there? Are there subreddits on this? That’s probably one of my favorite, favorite, favorite voices to normally get ideas, but to also understand how our customers are actually talking about this particular pain point, figuring out all of those places, and then building out strategies to make sure that our content and our marketing assets are getting into the right people and also the right platforms.
Christian Klepp 22:50
So if they don’t have to, they don’t necessarily have to create their own community. They can, so called like, for lack of a better word, piggyback off somebody else’s community, or perhaps even use a platform like LinkedIn?
Jessica Malnik 23:04
Absolutely, that’s actually what I usually recommend, is figuring out who are the influencers, and how do we start to get on their radar and get them to, you know, be bought into what we’re doing and even organically sharing it or doing partnerships. There’s so many different ways you can go about it, and it’s really going to vary based off of your industry, based off of where you are as a product, how much you want to do in terms of sweat equity versus pay to play. There’s so many different ways to go about it, but it’s really just about, you know, figuring out, how do we make sure that our content is going to the right people at the right time.
Christian Klepp 23:36
Absolutely, absolutely okay. Jessica, here comes the question, because I know we spoke at length about this in the previous conversation, but what are your thoughts on using or leveraging AI in B2B content marketing? So how can B2B content marketers use AI ethically in their work?
Jessica Malnik 23:56
Man, you had thrown the word ethical in there as well… you are using all the buzzwords. I feel like, in general, if you’re… AI is a tool. AI is a tool, just like any other marketing tool you might be using. It’s not a crutch. I think that is probably one of the two ways that people go wrong with AI. They think it’s like some magic apple, and they just tell it one little, quick little round and suddenly you’re going to get everything you need. Yeah, it doesn’t work that way. But notice, there’s no such thing as a magic tool. The other one is people who are just ignoring it and putting their head in the sand, usually out of fear. And in that case, cool, that’s kind of a self-fulfilling prosperity, in my opinion. If you are scared of it, then of course, it actually might replace you. I think on its own, AI is not going to replace a lot of marketers. I think as long as you’re figuring out ways to use it in your tools and in your own workflows, systems and processes. But like, yeah, so my own approach to AI is, okay, how can I use it and things that I’m already doing to either be more efficient? To help me level up my thinking. Help me do a little bit more with less. There’s so many different ways to do that in that scenario. So like, while I think AI writing the perfect blog post is not going to… realistically just doesn’t work, I’m going to quote something that I learned from Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media. He kind of said that AI is average ideas. I freaking love that, because if you’re just doing lazy one shot prompts, yeah, it’s gonna just spit out ideas that everyone else already has. It’s gonna tell you, because it’s trained off of what’s already been out there. So, like, if you’re using it to think for you, that is a massive mistake, in my opinion, and how you use it as a crutch. However, if you’re using in my case where it’s like, I go in, I’ll kind of do the thinking of positioning, point of view, depth, kind of have all those, like, rambling thoughts. I’ll tell that to AI, and I’ll put like, three, four or five paragraphs, and be like, hey, help me organize this rambling and something that feels coherent. Yeah, Claude and ChatGPT are great at that, but I’m also doing the thinking up front. How often that times you’ll be like, Okay, here’s this idea. Where are my logic gaps, and they have made me kind of level up my thinking. That’s one of my favorite ways right now to use AI. Another way that I really like to use it as well is for, like, the all of those really tedious things that, quite frankly, I didn’t ever enjoy in the very hard place, like creating featured images for, like the little tiny thumbnails on, you know, a blog post, or helping me level up. And I have to do like an SEO audit, and I need to write 500 meta descriptions. Guess what? I write two of them now, and I have aI help me spit out an 80% version, and then I just go in and edit it. Yeah. It saves a ton of time. There things like that.
Christian Klepp 26:50
Yeah, no, absolutely no. I agree. I mean, I’ve shared my thoughts with you in the previous conversation, and I truly believe it’s like that typical marketing answer, as you said, right? Like it depends, I do believe that there’s a place in time to use AI and to a certain degree, yes, absolutely use the tools to help make your work more efficient, perhaps to a certain degree, even faster. But I caution. Here’s my word of caution. Make your work fast. Make your work faster. Doesn’t mean cheat the system, if you know what I mean, right? It doesn’t mean, okay, get ChatGPT to write something for you. Because the other big problem that I have with some of these platforms, and I know there’s people out there that disagree with this, but what about the issue of plagiarism and writer integrity, right? And I know some people probably don’t care about that, because they’re pumping out all this content, and then it becomes a volume business rather than a quality business, to a previous point earlier on in this conversation, right? So I’m not saying that we should completely throw AI out the window, and that’s why I say we need to be able to use it ethically, right?
Jessica Malnik 28:09
Yeah, that was such a really great point. I would also just say in general, in terms of another thing that I think AI is great at, is I’m a pretty technical marketer, but I’m not like writing code every day. However, I’ve now been able to troubleshoot things in it with ChatGPT in particular that like, I used to have to, like, bug a developer for, and now I can just kind of ask ChatGPT and be like, walk me through how to fix this weird bug in WordPress or another one that’s good at caveat here, also from an ethical standpoint, it’s really, really good at data analysis. Just make sure you strip out any sensitive information. The amount of times I’ve had it like, be like, Hey, here’s a GA4 report, and I’ll do be like, help me find patterns here. It is so much faster than what I used to do myself, just in, you know, several hours in spreadsheets in Excel. Now I can kind of cut that down to like an hour or two, but again, caveat with any time, especially if you’re using a tool that’s not proprietary, just make sure you’re stripping out any like sensitive customer information. Don’t get yourself into like, hot water with GDPR, or like, yeah, in particular.
Christian Klepp 29:22
Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so we get to the part in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty already, but if somebody was listening to this conversation and you wanted them to walk away with three to five things around the topic of building this content moat that they can implement right away. What would they be?
Jessica Malnik 29:44
Great question. The first one is, content positioning is super underrated. The more you can do, the more work you can do up front to query, communicate, not only your own strategy, but each individual asset and like, why we’re writing about this, you know, what’s our unique point of view? So what is something… It doesn’t you can’t believe it original, because I don’t think there’s ever anything that’s 100% original. But like, what 10% of new things are we adding to this, our new our own experiences are we adding so we’re not just creating 10x copy content that you can do on AI now. Another point is, AI is a tool, not a crutch. If you’re not already using it, please start. Like you don’t have to do much with it. Like you everyone has their own comfort level, but like you’re gonna get left behind if you’re not using the latest tools to at least help you so that at least understand what it can and can’t do. And there’s so many great resources out there now, pretty great, like companies like Paul, the guy who runs mike on and like the AI Marketing Institute, I think, don’t quote me on that, has just some amazing resources to kind of get you started with AI. That’s kind of my second point. And then my third point is, you don’t have to compete on volume. And please, please, please, don’t compete on volume if you’re a team of under five people and your marketing team, which is the vast majority of the companies I work with, you cannot try to out compete HubSpot if you don’t have HubSpot’s budget and team size and also just, quite frankly, their brand awareness, you might be able to get to that point later on, but don’t try to do that when you are a team of five.
Christian Klepp 31:20
Absolutely, absolutely, try not to be the next Uber or next Apple with a with a marketing team of three to five people, right? Absolutely.
Jessica Malnik 31:30
It sounds ridiculous, but I have that conversation in some capacity a lot.
Christian Klepp 31:35
No, I believe you. I certainly believe you. Okay, just a quick recap of the things that marketers need to do. So first of all is focus on its content positioning. Number two is leverage AI the right way, at least start using the tools. And the third one is, don’t compete on volume, right? Okay, fantastic. Okay, last three questions before I let you go. So here comes the first one, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why.
Jessica Malnik 32:13
The fastest path to mediocre marketing is editing by committee. I think we may have talked about this a little bit offline, but that is…
Christian Klepp 32:22
Not a little bit like a lot.
Jessica Malnik 32:24
The fastest path to just getting a very mediocre, watered down marketing when you have four more stakeholders all giving their direct opinions in their two cents. I can walk through like super tactically and how to like address who should be giving feedback and who shouldn’t, but that might be a different conversation.
Christian Klepp 32:43
I totally agree with that, because I have had the unfortunate experience of having gone through a couple of projects where there was decision by committee, death by 1000 cuts. I mean, I can throw in every analogy. Too many cooks in the kitchen, and it just gets watered down. Everybody throws in their opinions. Everybody suddenly becomes a copywriter, or a conversion copywriter, and then at the end of it, more often than not, at least in my experience, what I found jokes aside is that if you have so many people getting involved with the editing of the content. What then happens is the content becomes more inside out, rather than outside in. Right?
Jessica Malnik 33:31
You are so incredibly right, like the voice of the customer gets completely lost in my experience as well.
Christian Klepp 33:37
Yeah, because especially if you get the people involved that are more on the technical side. So they may or may not have that, you know, they may or may not be customer facing, but even if they are, they’re very focused on the operational aspect of the business, right? And we’re not blaming them for that. That’s just the nature of the beast, right? That that said, That doesn’t help for the cost for content marketing, right? Okay, and here comes the bonus question, if you had the opportunity to learn a new skill, what would that skill be? And why.
Jessica Malnik 34:10
That is a good question. I would probably say, like, the one that I’ve kind of dabbled in a little bit, and if I had, you know, completely, like, you know, unlimited amounts of time it would be learning how to code, like, fully, oh, I can read a decent amount of like code. I can, like, make some small fixes on, like, a WordPress or a web flow site. But I feel like if I could learn how to code enough to, like, build my own, like, SaaS product, that would be interesting. I feel like there’s definitely some ways around that now, with no code and low code tools out there that are so much better, and even ChatGPT and Claude can help out of town with this as well. But yeah, feeling having the foundational like things like what computer science is and how to code is probably that one skill. Yeah.
Christian Klepp 35:00
Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Um, I correct me if I’m wrong, but I think isn’t that Wix is, like, unique selling proposition that you can build websites without coding. So they have this whole, like, drag and drop spiel. Might be them.
Jessica Malnik 35:14
I don’t know. I maybe, like I in general, I probably wouldn’t recommend using Wix if you want SEO.
Christian Klepp 35:20
True. True.
Jessica Malnik 35:23
But yeah. I mean, I think there’s definitely a lot of ways there’s, I mean, I there’s a lot you can do. You don’t need to know how to code, but I feel like, for myself, like, you know, I if I one day I want to, like, launch my own SaaS product, like, knowing how to code, like, the right way, I feel like would be, yeah, yeah, no. I mean, I can certainly, like, you know, tackle me around it, around it with, like, no code and low code tools that I do know how to use, but yeah.
Christian Klepp 35:48
Yeah, yeah, no, without a doubt, without a doubt. Fantastic. Jessica, this has been such a great conversation as expected. So thanks so much for coming on and for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. So please, a quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.
Jessica Malnik 36:04
Yeah, thank you again for having me Christian. So a very quick intro about myself. I am Jessica Malnik. I am a conversion content marketer and copywriter who works mostly with kind of B2B SaaS and professional service firms. I like to say I’m kind of a solopreneur with a tiny team. Fancy way of saying you don’t have account managers, you don’t have separate strategies. I am that own thing, but I do have a small team that helps me out with research and administrative processes. And you can find me pretty much on my website, jessicamalnik.com, I also have my own podcast and newsletter over at the remoteworktribe.com and I’m on LinkedIn. I’m still gonna call it Twitter, even though I know it’s X, and threads as well. It’s kind of my three main platforms.
Christian Klepp 36:48
Yes, it’s just one of those rebrands, probably a story for another time, or probably even another podcast interview, but it’s just one of those rebrands that I still can’t wrap my head around, and it’s still so hard for a lot of people to say X, right?
Jessica Malnik 37:04
I know I should be saying X, but it’s still gonna feel like Twitter to me.
Christian Klepp 37:08
Absolutely, absolutely so Jessica, once again, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Jessica Malnik 37:14
Awesome. Thank you again.
How Insights into Your Target Audience Can Lead to Success
A deeper understanding of your target audience – who they are, how they buy, and their challenges, pain points, and aspirations – is instrumental to everything B2B marketers do. It will help them develop better content, have a more user-friendly website, and develop marketing campaigns that generate better results.
That’s why we’re talking to B2B digital marketing expert James Hipkin (CEO & Founder, Inn8ly) about how avatars of your target audience and buyer’s journey maps are crucial to B2B marketing success. During our conversation, James elaborated on the pitfalls that marketers should avoid and what important aspects of customer research they should focus on. He also provided tips on how to get internal buy-in to conduct the relevant research and explained how the customer avatars and buyer’s journey maps can help with B2B content and marketing campaigns.
https://youtu.be/p8M_ao0DtW0
Topics discussed in episode
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
James Hipkin, Christian Klepp
Christian Klepp 00:01
Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’m going to be talking to James Hipkin. He’s the founder and CEO of innately, and helps B2B companies to scale by providing professionally designed, built, hosted, secured and maintained websites that are built with a customer centric strategy. Tune in to find out more about this B2B marketers mission. All right, Mr. Hipkin, I’m gonna say, welcome back to the show. It’s always a pleasure to have you.
James Hipkin 00:37
Christian, it’s always just an absolute blast to chat with you and share our experiences. And I mean, I’m just looking forward to this.
Christian Klepp 00:47
Absolutely. I think it was something that you said, and in response to something I posted on LinkedIn this morning. It’s the quality of the people that you connect with on LinkedIn and the conversations, but it’s also the fact that no matter how many times you connect and engage in conversation, it’s always amazing how, with some people, you just never run out of things to talk about, and you happen to be one of those people. So um, (laugh), and I mean, I mean that in a good way, of course, absolutely delighted to have you back, and let’s dive right into the topic, because it’s not only highly relevant and pertinent to B2B marketers, but it’s also something that they actually should be doing, right? But here we go. So you’re obviously quite the expert in when it comes to B2B digital marketing, because you help companies rise above the increasing noise out there. And I know that you talk a lot about digital noise when you post on LinkedIn, but for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission, how a deep understanding of your target audience will lead to better results. On the surface, that kind of sounds like something that’s table stakes and pedestrian, but you and I both know that there are so many companies and so many B2B marketers out there that don’t do this, right? So I’m going to kick off this conversation with the following question, why are avatars of your target audience and buyers journey maps crucial to B2B marketing success?
James Hipkin 02:29
Well, I’ll tell you, they’re crucial because in this world, the average person is exposed to between 6 and 10000 marketing messages a day, and I have what I like to call the world’s most boring slide that I use when I’m speaking about this. It’s a white field with a big gray blob in it, and what that’s representing is this is the marketing landscape from your customers point of view, they get exposed to so much information that everything’s just becomes digital noise, and if you’re going to break through that noise, you need to have deep insights into two sides of the customer and you mentioned the both, the avatar and the buyer’s journey. The avatar is more common. Lots and lots of marketers will tell me that, oh yes, I have an avatar of my customers. Awesome. Can you show it to me? Much fumbling around while they try to find it because they haven’t looked at it in months. So there’s problem number one. Then I’ll say, Have you mapped the buyer’s journey? And I usually get a blank stare, and that buyer’s journey in conjunction with the avatar as two sides to a coin. That’s what you need in order to craft marketing that supports the the old direct marketing axiom. Everybody’s gonna nod their head when I say this, because they’ve probably all heard it before. Doesn’t make it any less valid. Get the right message to the right person at the right time. The avatar helps you with the right person. The journey map helps you with the right time. Because when they don’t have a need for what you’re doing, it’s just part of the gray blob. But when something happens in their life, suddenly their awareness increases, and suddenly they start seeing the advertising and the marketing for your category. They see yours, and they see your competitors. What was the thing that happened? What stimulated them to go from uninterested and uninvolved to aware. Now, if you craft marketing that resonates with that point in their journey, they’re going to see your marketing and engage with it. But it doesn’t stop there. The journey goes through four distinct phases. There’s sort of the unaware, aware phase, top of the funnel. Then there’s the two phases in the mid funnel. And the mid funnel has two phases. It says consideration, and that tends to be where they’re doing research work, exploring what their alternatives are, investigating what’s going on these days, into prospecting, where they’re actually making decisions about who they’re going to go with. And then the fourth page was, which is the decision phase, if you can understand the kinds of things that are going on in the minds of the consumers, the confusions they have, the questions they’re trying to overcome, the obstacles they’re trying to get around, all those things, then you’ve got a way to craft your marketing messaging so that it’s resonating with those folks where they are, and that’s how you break through the noise, and that from a B2B marketers point of view, my God, you know, which would you rather be some guy standing on the top of a building shouting at the world at large about, My God, how awesome we are. Or would you rather be the confidant, the person who’s there with them, who’s giving them the information they need who’s supporting the journey. The Holy Grail here is that the purchase decision shouldn’t be a sale. It should be the next logical step in their journey. And when that happens, you’re getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and you’re building a relationship through through value and trust that’s going to generate customers who are loyal, customers who are like more likely to buy from you again, customers who are, you know, going to be telling their friends and colleagues about what an amazing experience they had.
Christian Klepp 07:19
Absolutely.
James Hipkin 07:21
Now, you can’t do that if you don’t understand their journey, if you’re just shouting at people randomly from the top of a building. Yeah, some of it might work, but you’re missing so many opportunities.
Christian Klepp 07:35
Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s go back for a second. Run the number past us again. How many marketing messages people are exposed to?
James Hipkin 07:45
6 to 10,000 is the what you hear when you sort of sort of common practice, people talk about 6 to 10,000 marketing messages a day.
Christian Klepp 07:56
Yeah, that’s…
James Hipkin 07:59
And I tell you all, the best marketing in the world is not going to change a customer’s need state. If they don’t need what you’re selling, they’re not gonna see what you’re doing. That’s just accept that. But when they do have a need, you want to be there, and you will be there if your messaging resonates and it’s something that they can relate to.
Christian Klepp 08:27
Absolutely, absolutely. I had another follow up question for you, James, why do you feel, at least in your experience, why do you feel that companies, marketers skip this part, like, why don’t they do it? You talked about the clients that you talk to that don’t have a customer avatar. They say they do, and then they can’t find it. They can’t find it. They’re like, Where was that thing? It was in here somewhere, right?
James Hipkin 08:52
Why they don’t do it? Well, it can get hard. Back in the day when I was managing large budget, multi, seven figure marketing budgets. I mean, we get market researchers to come in and help us with this. And the typical charge for one of these avatar journey map exercises might run 50 grand because you’ve got focus groups involved, and maybe some quantitative research and some confirmation testing, and, you know, just lots of stuff to do it properly. And so a lot of times, people don’t. The other thing that often happens is they may have an avatar or a journey map, but it’s not of the right people. It’s a very common mistake that’s made where marketers just, you know, they use demographics to define their audience, and they go out and do research amongst those people. But the reality is, in virtually every business, 80% of your sales is being generated by 20% of your customers. The specific numbers might change, but the concept is, is sound rock solid. What you need to do is you need to understand who that 20% is, because they’re not going to be the same as the average consumer. They are likely to be heavy category users, and heavy category users are better informed. They’re more knowledgeable, they have more experience. They better understand your product, and they better understand your competitors products. So you need to speak to them in your marketing like you know this, so doing the avatar work and the buyer’s journey work is important, but you also need to do it with the right people.
Now, the other reality is, in this crazy, crazy world that we live in, Christian people are all over the damn map. You know, it’s not the linear journey that maybe existed 20 years ago. I mean, people pop around. So you need to craft your marketing in a way that anticipates and accommodates that so it can get, it can be hard work, but I’ll tell you the results are spectacular, if you can… imagine for a second your competitor’s customer base sort of reflects the market in total, 80% of their customers are occasional buyers and 20% of their customers are frequent buyers. But your customer base, because you’ve done this work, 40% of your customer base are frequent buyers, and 60% are occasional buyers. You have the exact same number of customers as your competitors, but you’re generating 2, 3, 4x revenue from the same number of people. That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens when you understand who those best customers are, what they’re like demographically. Demographics help you set your media strategy, what their like, what their characteristics are, what they’re like as people that helps you understand how to talk to them in your marketing. And then, what’s their pain? What are they struggling with? What is the what are the problems they’re trying to overcome? And then what’s the gain that they get from you? And so you need to understand the mindset and the details at each of these phases in order to craft, you know, marketing, one of the other things that I talked about is the hub and spoke strategy.
Christian Klepp 12:52
Yes
James Hipkin 12:53
Where the website is the hub, the media channels are the spokes, and the content and messaging strategy is the rim that holds it all together. Well, the avatar and the journey map help you with all of that
Christian Klepp 13:09
Absolutely and we’re going to get into the research aspect of it in a second. But before we do, you already brought some of them up, but let’s dig deeper into some of the common pitfalls that marketers should avoid when they’re thinking about customer avatars and buyers journey maps.
James Hipkin 13:29
Well, a common thing, again, it’s the issue, the issue between best customers and regular customers. If you’re talking to the middle of the bell curve, yeah, there’s lots of people there, but they’re not heavy spenders, and all the marketing in the world is not going to change that. That’s the nature of who they are in their situation. The other common mistake that’s made is in the how I remember being in a meeting in Chicago and we invited our client up from Kansas City. It was a large telecommunications company, and the creative director had placed all of the work we’d done over the last 24 months up on one of the boardroom walls. And she turned to them and she said, Do you see the problem? And of course, they didn’t see the problem. They they’re like, Well, it all looks great. So she took a ribbon with two push pins, and she pushed the ribbon into the wall at a certain point, and she said, Now, do you see the problem? And they said, Well, no, no, we… I don’t understand. What are you doing? She picked a piece up off of one side of the ribbon, and she read it out loud. Then she picked a piece up off the other side of the ribbon, and she read it out loud, and she said, Do you see the problem now? And they’re like, no, they both sounded great. And she said, Exactly, that’s the problem. Everything to the left of the line is acquisition marketing. Everything to the right of the line is customer marketing. We are talking to our customers with exactly the same tone of voice as we’re talking to our prospects. Our customers have a relationship with us. We’re not talking to them like we have a relationship with them. That is a really common problem.
Christian Klepp 15:22
Yeah, and hence the reason why this kind of research is so important, right?
James Hipkin 15:29
Right
Christian Klepp 15:29
Because, and I don’t know who said this, but like, you know, not all customers are created equal, right? They are all different in their varying degrees, different. To your point, they have a different relationship to the company or to the provider, right? There are different stages of that relationship, sure, and as such, they need to be treated accordingly with the respective messaging that that is appropriate.
James Hipkin 15:57
For where they are within their journey.
Christian Klepp 16:00
Correct.
James Hipkin 16:01
Another example. I was helping a woman who was a paid keynote speaker. People pay her $10,000 to come and speak to their event, to their group or their business, and when we got right into it, she had three distinct target audiences. In her 20%, there were event project managers whose primary motivation was, don’t make me look bad, right? There were corporate HR directors who are bringing her in to help so that she could help their senior executives be better communicators. And then there were solo senior executives, mostly women, who’ve been promoted to a position and were finding themselves on stages and they didn’t really know how to, what to do, other than the gender being the same, those three groups are very, very different in terms of their motivations, in terms of their needs, in terms of their pain, etc. If you have avatars and journey maps for each of those sub segments in your audience, then you’re going to be able to craft marketing that’s going to support them, that’s going to build a relationship, that’s going to generate trust. You know, one of the more controversial things that I talk about is, I’ll say to people, I want you to stop saying call to action, which makes everybody go, wait what? Because they’ve been told for their entire career, you’ve got to have a call to action. It’s vital that you have a call to action. It needs to be above the fold, okay, a call to action is a marketer shouting at a customer and telling them what to do. Customers don’t want to be shouted at and they don’t want to be told what to do. If you create people like you, pathways that call out to the sub segments in your audience and visually with headlines, maybe a sentence or two, that communicates the benefit of what’s going to happen if they select that pathway and they click on that “Learn More” button, two very powerful things have happened. They’ve told you exactly who they are, and they’ve given you permission to give them more information. Which would you rather have? People being shouted at and randomly clicking on buttons or people selecting pathways? Effectively, they’re exactly the same thing, but the mindset shift is really important. And the mind set shift is when you start to recognize that your audience and your target audience has personalities. They are… there are distinct subgroups, and they have different needs, and your if you support that, you’re going to get purchases that are the next logical step in their journey, as opposed to being tricked into buying something. As a marketer, which would you rather have?
Christian Klepp 19:12
Of course you want to guide them, yeah, right, down a path, right, help them to make an informed decision, because we all know that most of the time in B2B, people are not ready to buy.
James Hipkin 19:24
No,
Christian Klepp 19:25
Not yet, not yet. They need a lot more proof, a lot more evidence
James Hipkin 19:31
Exactly
Christian Klepp 19:32
That you’re the right fit.
James Hipkin 19:33
But if you, but if you, rather than regurgitating everything you can think about on your homepage, your website, which is what people do, right? How many websites have you seen? It’s like, Oh, my God, where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to look at? Where am I, you know, versus a big call out. That’s, you know, people like you. And then you choose that path, and you get to a landing page that’s full of information that is just completely relevant to who you are and where you are in your journey. That’s… and so that’s where, why I say the avatar and the journey in combination is extremely powerful.
Christian Klepp 20:16
Absolutely, absolutely. I know you brought up some aspects of research earlier in the conversation, but I’m going to move us on to the next question, which is focusing on how, or I would say, the recommendations that you have like walk us through some of those important aspects of customer research that marketers should be focusing on to develop those relevant customer avatars and buyers journey maps, because, as you said earlier on in the conversation, it can get pretty overwhelmed.
James Hipkin 20:47
Yes, it can,
Christian Klepp 20:47
Right? It can be a lot of work, and it can be a lot of data, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to do all this work, and not much is going to come up.
James Hipkin 20:56
Well, sometimes I like to tell the dad joke. Now…
Christian Klepp 21:02
All right, here we go.
James Hipkin 21:03
You know the dad joke about the two guys in the forest who run across a bear, and the one guy says to the second guy, Hey, man, we got to run. And the second guy says to the first guy, we can’t outrun a bear. And this first guy says to the second guy, I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you, right?
Christian Klepp 21:26
Okay
James Hipkin 21:27
An awful lot of marketing is the two guys in the forest with the bear. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to be better than what your competitors are doing. And it doesn’t even have to be a lot better, because most people are pretty forgiving. If they think that you’ve got something that they can relate to, and they understand that they’re going to gravitate towards you, it doesn’t take much, because they’re on a journey to solve a problem, and if you even hint at the fact that you’ve got a solution to their problem by just talking to them about things in their language, they’re going to be all over that, because this is hard work for them. They do, you know. So when you’re doing this work, pick up the phone and call your customers. I know it’s a shocking thing, but ask them, you know, tell them, you know, this is… that by itself, even if you just do that, you know what happened to get you thinking about this to your life? What you know? What? What kind of steps did you go through when you were researching a solution? So how did you come to, you know, choosing your sort of final, top two, top three, and then why did you choose us? Get into those conversations, and you will start to gain a tremendous amount of insight into what your market, what your clients are looking for, because most people are nice, right? They’ll answer your questions, and they’re probably be thrilled that you called up, called them up and said, hey, you know, I’d really like to know more about you and about your process and what you went through it. You know, it doesn’t have to be all smarmy. They will value that. So, yeah, you can spend money on research, and a lot of big brands do, and it’s valuable getting focus groups and a professional researcher to help guide the conversation, that sort of thing, but anybody can pick up the phone and call their customers, because if you spend a little bit of time in your data, you can pretty quickly identify who the best customers are. Have we talked about RFM in the past?
Christian Klepp 21:32
Not that I remember.
James Hipkin 23:06
Are you familiar with RFM?
Christian Klepp 23:57
Yes, but I’m pretty sure you’re gonna help remind me a little.
James Hipkin 24:04
Okay. RFM is an old analytics technique out of the direct marketing and catalog industry. It’s an acronym. It stands for Recency, Frequency and Monetary so if you go into your customer base and you find first of all, do a filter for all of the customers who’ve bought from you in the last two months, one month, whatever’s appropriate for your business. Okay. And then do a filter for all of the customers who’ve bought from you two times in the last year, or three times the last year, whatever the frequency is that is appropriate for your business, and then do a filter for who’s spending the most with us. And if you score your customers based on recency, frequency and monetary you will very quickly identify who are the 20% of. That are generating most of your revenue. So that’s step one. Is figure out who it is you should be talking to, and then, you know, pick up the phone and call some of them. It’s, it’s amazing what you can learn from just conversations with people.
Christian Klepp 25:20
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, I do quite a bit of that customer research myself, so I do not only understand, truly appreciate the value of going through that process. I have two follow up questions for you, James on the topic of customer research, or just market research in general, where you also focus on customers. The first one is, what’s your take on the importance of not just talking to current customers, but perhaps even talking to prospects in the past that you would park under perhaps lost deals.
James Hipkin 25:56
For sure, because their life is dynamic. It’s not static, and you don’t know when, when things are can change. This is one of the reasons why email marketing is so valuable and so important, because that sort of lazy river sequence of emails that you just generally send out to folks that have been in touch with you, it’s full of valuable information, etc. You just never know, but you want to have the metrics in place so you can track what they’re doing if they click on a link and go to a landing page on your website. You want to have a plan to do something about that, because they’ve just told you something, right? So, yeah, past prospects are valuable. You want to understand look alike audiences are really valuable. You know where you if you use the RFM technology to identify this particularly important for E-commerce businesses, because then you can use those look alike audiences to help you with your media buy, right? So, yeah, absolutely, talk to your existing customers first and foremost. But definitely talk to your prospects, the folks that didn’t choose you, and find out why. But it’s the same kinds of questions. You know, what got you thinking about the category? You know, what were the steps you went through when you were researching options? What were the factors that you used to to identify your top two or your top three choices? And then, why did you choose the people you chose, the resource you chose, the product you chose, the software you chose, whatever it might be. You know those that… it’s the same phases and sometimes people go through these phases really fast. I mean, in a, you know, consumer packaged goods world, it’s still valid, but it’s, it’s literally gets done in 30 seconds at the end of a grocery aisle. But consumers still go through the same steps. They’ll see the grocery aisle and they go, right, do I have, you know? Do I have cereal for the kids? And you know, then they’ll walk down the aisle and go, You know this. So what are my choices here? What am I looking.. Yeah, well, normally, I’m gonna buy this brand, but this other brand sometimes, so awareness, consideration, prospecting, I think I’m gonna grab this one this time. It can happen really fast, or it can take six months, but the process is the same.
Christian Klepp 28:30
No, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. In your professional opinion. How often would you recommend that customers or companies look at these avatars and these buyer journey maps to see if anything’s changed, and if they need to update them
James Hipkin 28:46
That’s probably worth checking in on a yearly basis. These are big picture things, unless something radical has changed in the marketplace, chances are at this kind of high level, principal level that we’re talking stuff doesn’t change that quickly. You know, beware of boardroom boredom, just because you see the stuff all the time. Remember the gray blob on the white screen? Right? You may see this stuff all the time, but for all your best intentions, if they don’t have a need, they’re not seeing it at all. It’s just part of the noise. So you don’t have to change things nearly as often as people think they have to change them. And these, these segments in your audience, don’t change all that quickly either. So once a year, maybe even once every two years, depends on your market, depends on your sector. If you’re in a very volatile sector where there’s a lot of technology changing very quickly, then you might want to do it even… you might want to do it every six months. But so the classic diplomatic answer, it depends.
Christian Klepp 30:00
Fair enough. Fair enough. We talked about this earlier in the conversation, but I wanted to go back to it. Lord knows, you and I have probably come across clients like this. What do you say to people, or how do you deal with that pushback from clients that say, James, we don’t need all this stuff. We don’t need to do the expensive research. We don’t need to do the customer avatars and the buyer’s journey maps. We know who our customers are. What would your response be to somebody like that?
James Hipkin 30:31
Well, sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they really do know who their customers are. But the reality is, this is where you get a lot of what I call inside out marketing. This is where the marketer is shouting at folks and with all the best intentions, because they think they know what they’re looking for. The shift in perspective is really important. And even if all you do is reach out and talk to people, it’s going to change how you think about your messaging. It may not change what you’re saying, because your product is your product, and it does what it does, but it may absolutely change how you say it, because, you know, people don’t want to be shouted at. They don’t want to be told what to do, but if you reach out to them with information that’s germane to where they are, resonates with what they’re searching for, they’ll pay attention.
Christian Klepp 31:36
Absolutely, absolutely okay, my friend, you know the drill. We get to the point in the conversation where we talk about actionable tips, and especially on the topic of customer avatars and buyers journey maps. It does take time. Yes, it does. But if some if somebody were listening to this conversation between you and I. And you wanted them to walk away with three to five things that they can take action upon immediately. What would those be?
James Hipkin 32:05
Well, the first thing I would suggest is start to compartmentalize your marketing into those like major funnel buckets, so that you’re clearly understanding what marketing is doing at each stage. One of the principles, I mean, your digital marketing agency probably talked to you about this. They’ll call it message matching. When you’re doing a Google AdWords campaign, you want the headlines in your Google AdWords to take people to a landing page that echoes what that headline was. You want that those messages to match so that people aren’t struggling with Am I in the right place? They’re instantly comfortable. This is what I clicked on. I got to a page. This is what they’re talking about. So that message matching is vital, and you can’t really do that if you don’t understand what part of the funnel you’re attracting. You know, if you’re doing email marketing to folk prospects who’ve already engaged with you at the top of the funnel, you want them to go those links, to go to a landing page that recognizes that they’re likely in the consideration phase or the prospecting phase. So you know that that message matching is a is an important part, and you can only really do it if you understand who you’re talking to. What is it that they’re looking for? What is it that you’re offering? And then where are they in their process? And then invite them to join you on the journey, or for you to join them on their journey. And that’s where I talk about, stop saying call to action and start saying pathway. Effectively, they’re exactly the same thing, but the mindset shift is really important. A pathway is the marketer supporting their customer on their journey.
Christian Klepp 34:08
Absolutely, absolutely. I’m just going to throw this in here like a shameless plug, but this is for the benefit of the audience. I had the pleasure of hosting James on the show previously, and there was a three part series about the different stages of the marketing funnel with Kylie Lang, if memory serves me well, and I’m gonna just drop that into the show notes and the description of this episode for the benefit of anyone that’s interested in listening to that those conversations. Okay, my friend, I’ve got three more questions before I like, okay, all right, so I know that you have many, but James, I’m only going to ask you for one. All right, a status quo that you passionately disagree with, and why.
James Hipkin 34:58
I sometimes get pushback on the buyer’s journey map, because people say, in the digital world, people are all over the map, and they bounce around, and, you know, it’s no longer a linear journey. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Yes, people absolutely are bouncing around, and they might be moving very quickly, but if your marketing is crafted to support where they’re at, they will find it and they will appreciate what you’re saying. You just need to recognize that you need to be ready for them however they engage with you and whenever they engage with you. You know that one of the things that we’ve talked about in the past Christian, which is a good example of this, is the quiz funnel, where you do, like, an entertaining, little fun thing at the top of the funnel that that resonates with people, where they are, and they’re just the beginning of their journey, and then you draw them along, and then at the bottom of their funnel, you do a much deeper and more involved assessment survey that may take them 15-20 minutes to complete, but if you’ve done that assessment survey correctly, by the time they’re done the assessment, they’ve talked themselves into buying your product.
Christian Klepp 36:24
And that’s the objective of the exercises.
James Hipkin 36:27
And that’s a great example of, you know, the journey exists, whether, however and whenever they jump in, you need to be ready for them.
Christian Klepp 36:40
Okay, My Friend, here comes the bonus question. All right, I have it, I have it on good authority. All right, I got this information from a guy that knows a guy, right, that you have a passion for cooking.
James Hipkin 36:52
Oh, yes,
Christian Klepp 36:53
Right, yes. So the question is, if you suddenly, if your wife suddenly came in and said somebody famous was coming over for dinner tonight, right? Could be a celebrity. It could be somebody that you follow on social media, the mayor of your town, whatever. If you found out that this person is coming to dinner tonight, what would you cook them? And why?
James Hipkin 37:19
Probably a leg of lamb. Oh, most people don’t know how to cook lamb, but earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to live in Spain for four years, and they know how to cook lamb in Spain, and I got some really good coaching from some folks there that I met, and it’s, it’s a really, it’s an absolutely wonderful meal. I remember when we were in Spain. I’m going to make your mouth water here, Christian.
Christian Klepp 37:53
I’m already…
James Hipkin 37:55
My main client. It was Rover cars. We were building a Pan European database marketing system for Rover cars. And the executives came down from London to Madrid, and we booked them in to a restaurant in Madrid. And this restaurant, you have to book like months and months in advance to get into this restaurant.
Christian Klepp 38:16
Was one of those. Yep.
I’m trying to picture it now, while you were talking. I’m trying to, like, envision what this restaurant looked like and the meal, and you guys sitting on the floor and whatnot, right?
James Hipkin 38:18
They brought a whole lamb spread out on a giant platter. It is a Moroccan style restaurant, and they set the platter down on the table. We were all sitting on the floor. It was set up for Westerners because we had a place to put our feet so we didn’t have to sit cross legged, because most of us probably couldn’t but and then this guy came, and he had two large sharpened spoons. The tops the spoons are razor sharp, and he just hovered over this lamb. And with these two spoons, he deboned the lamb, and when he stepped back, there was a pile of bones sitting on the side, and the lamb had a slit down its back, and it was still basically intact. And I’m telling you, that was the most amazing meal I’ve had in my entire life.
James Hipkin 39:26
Oh yeah. I mean, everybody had, like, little tiny bowls with spices in them. And in the Moroccan culture, they eat with their hands. And so you’re picking up pieces of meat, and you’re dipping the meat into the your bowls the different spices. And it was just amazing,
Christian Klepp 39:44
Yeah, not, not to get too much into the weeds here, but I would imagine there was rosemary in there might have been a bit a touch of cumin.
James Hipkin 39:52
Oh yeah, lots of cumin, lots of oregano. It’s some spicy… You know, the Kashmiri chilis and all sorts of things. It was awesome.
Christian Klepp 40:07
Yeah, no, James. I mean, as usual, right? This, this conversation did not disappoint. And I really appreciate you coming back on the show. It’s always a pleasure to have you. But before I let you go, please, for the benefit of those who have never heard of you, short introduction and how folks can get in touch with you and what you’ve been up to lately.
James Hipkin 40:27
Well, I tell you, I’ve been banging around the marketing and advertising world for over 40 years. I still really enjoy it. I just love helping people. You know, my wife keeps saying, you know, when are you going to retire? And says, I don’t know. I’m still having fun. If anybody wants to chat with me, I love conversation. VIPChatwithjames.com. It’s a great link. You can get some, you know, book 30 minutes on my calendar. We can have a fast chat about marketing, about websites, about food, you know, right? This past weekend, I made some homemade salsa, and I’ve got a whole pile of tomatillos and jalapenos sitting on the counter that need to be turned into hot sauce. So and then on, what am I up to lately? I tell you, we’ve been doing a lot of work in the AI space and harnessing machine learning to help marketers with exactly this kind of problem with the avatar and the journey map. And we’ve developed a product that is in beta testing right now that is going to basically, for, you know, $2,500 you’re going to be able to generate an avatar and a journey map using professionally designed interview guides. You record the conversations with your customers, put the recordings into the system and the AI, which we again, we’re in beta testing right now, it analyzes the conversation, takes the inferences from the conversation, reads between the lines, and outputs an avatar for your customer and a buyer’s journey map for your customers based on 6 to 10 customer interviews that you can do with your existing customers, and that information can help you craft your marketing so that it can be more effective, not with your prospects. Because your best prospects are the people who look like your customers.
Christian Klepp 42:38
Absolutely, absolutely, if you’ve got like a website, or if the platform’s already online, yeah.
James Hipkin 42:44
We have a landing page for it. If you go to Marketing sage advantage. Sage, as in the wisdom interpretation of the word marketing, sage, S, A, G, E, advantage. When I told my VA about this. He’s, she’s like, Is that the kind that you light up and wave around in the room? No. Also sage, but no, we’re not talking about that. So marketingsageadvantage.com is the landing page for this product. We have a beta program up right now, but we’re hoping by sort of later this month, we’ll be launching the product as a minimally viable product. And then, you know, the next logical extension of this is I have an avatar. I have a journey map. I need to have my agency generate a campaign for me. How do I do a campaign brief? And so that’s the next stage of this product development, is to use this data to generate campaign briefs that you know the marketing agency can actually use that. That’s the thing we see most often, is you hire a marketing agency, and they’re lovely people, and they want to do a good job, but you’re not a marketer, and they’re not strategic, and they make your noise pretty.
Christian Klepp 44:10
Nope. It’s expensive, though.
James Hipkin 44:14
It can be very expensive, but strategic marketing that resonates with customers and is pretty. That’s a win.
Christian Klepp 44:26
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. James, once again, it was a pleasure to have you back in the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Take care.
James Hipkin 44:36
My pleasure as always.
Christian Klepp 44:38
All right.
How to Build Organic B2B Content Strategies
There are so many moving parts in B2B content marketing that content creators and marketers need to be aware of. Many of their efforts might fall flat because they don’t diversify their approach beyond paid traffic. What should they focus on instead and how can they build something that will ultimately succeed?
That’s why we’re talking to marketing experts Shreya Banerjee and Paul Counts (Co-Founders of Marketing Counts) about how to build profitable organic B2B content strategies. During our conversation, Shreya and Paul highlighted the pitfalls to avoid and provide tips on the type of research that should be conducted. They also explained why a well-defined customer avatar and a mix of content types are important, and which metrics to pay attention to.
This episode was brought to you by Leadfeeder: Know who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com/try
https://youtu.be/rjVVnS4aar4
Topics discussed in episode
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
Shreya Banerjee, Paul Counts, Christian Klepp
Christian Klepp 00:00
Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp, today I’m going to be talking to Shreya Banerjee and Paul Counts. They are innovative marketing and lean leaders with significant experience in digital marketing, sales funnels and SEO. They have proven experience creating winning processes that help increase efficiencies across different industries, and offer expert insights into creating promotional strategies that capture emerging market trends. Tune in to find out more about what these B2B marketers mission is. Okay. Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. I’m your host, Christian Klepp, and today I am joined by Shreya Banerjee and Paul Counts. Welcome to the show, folks.
Shreya Banerjee 00:45
Thank you so much for having us.
Paul Counts 00:48
Great to be here. We’re excited.
Christian Klepp 00:49
Yeah, so am I. And I, you know, I have to be honest, the last time that we jumped on a call and we had this conversation, after we left that call, I was still laughing, so I’m not sure. I’m not sure what you guys did there, but you had me hooked, and perhaps it’s a sign of things to come. So let’s keep the audience guessing for a while longer, right?
Christian Klepp 01:11
But onto more serious things, because this is a serious topic. I mean, this is something that you guys are not only professionally doing, but it’s also something that you’re extremely passionate about, all right. And somebody out there is going to be like, okay, Christian, The suspense is killing me. Just Spill it out, right? So the topic for today’s conversation is how to build profitable, organic content strategies for B2B. So both of you guys, in your own right, are content marketing experts in B2B, and you have proven experience in creating winning processes that drive results. So I’m gonna kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat. Okay, so question number one is, why is it so important to build organic strategies for content and number two, where do you see most B2B content marketers fall flat?
Paul Counts 01:11
I like it.
Paul Counts 02:01
Yeah, yes that’s a big one. I mean, the reason you want to be focusing so much on organic these days is because the you know, you don’t want to pay for traffic, like, it can be so expensive to pay for traffic. There’s so many variabilities there. And yes, paid traffic is amazing. It’s got its place. But the problem right now is that they’re so, you know, there’s so many ways to spend your money online, and if you’re not getting organic reach, you’re really a one trick pony. We run into a lot of brands of businesses that they’re just strictly Facebook ads and Instagram ads, or they’re just strictly Google ads, and they have no other, you know, strategies where they’ve diversified. And so having our organic content strategy so critical, and especially more than ever. Like organic used to be amazing from the standpoint of there are all sorts of sites you could publish on. Now there’s even more sites. And what’s even crazier about it is like over 60% of Gen Z audience is now using Instagram and TikTok as their search engine of choice. And so that means you can’t just be running ads on those platforms. You have to be showing up organically, because you don’t even know what they’re going to be looking for. They’re using it like we used Google. So if you are not doing an organic strategy, you are missing out on huge volumes of traffic, and you’re also going to be overspending and wasting your money before you know, unnecessarily.
Shreya Banerjee 03:20
And most of the time we see that when businesses come online and they want to do social media and they want to reach out to organic traffic, they don’t have a plan. They just want to be out there. They want the visibility, but they don’t have a plan. Or they’re boring. I call them boring because they’re just talking about their product, and no one just wants to hear about their product, right? They need to have a good plan. They need to follow trends, and sometimes they also miss that trend. For right now, like, for example, the demure trend is going on TikTok, very it’s all over the place, right? I don’t do too much. I’m demure. How do you apply that to your business? You gotta start thinking a little bit outside the box. Any business can apply that. If you’re a real estate agent. You can apply that. If you have, if you’re selling something in a store, you could apply this like that trend is very easy, but then that would give you eyeballs, right? People that are following the demure trend will follow you now to see, oh, I’m interested in the product or service that you’re kind of offering. So we forget the social part. I think a lot of times when businesses get on social media, they think, I’m still a business. I need to be rigid, but social media is social. So you have to be social. You have to have that attractive character in social media, in your presence, and, you know, reach out to your customers that way. You can’t be a very rigid, solid business account.
Paul Counts 04:42
Yeah, it’s such a great point. You know, one of my favorite, one of my favorite accounts to watch is, like Wendy’s. They do it right? You know, they’re a big brand, but they are hilarious on their social media. So if anybody wants to see, how do you add personality to a brand? They have it spot on. They are just hitting. It out of the park. They do a great job of that. Slim Jim’s another one. They chime in, in their own way. They’re always the first to comment on any viral post. And everybody’s like, well, Slim Jim’s here, you know? But it’s like, they’re, they’re doing that. What Shreya said, they’re making social media social, which leads to organic traffic. And also, like, you know, if you want to amplify your organic reach. Like, let’s say you make a post on LinkedIn, for example. Like, this doesn’t just apply to TikTok and Instagram and Facebook, but like, you make a post on LinkedIn, one of the things you should be doing is spending five to 10 minutes of intentional, you know, intentionally going out there and engaging with people. We call it intentional engagement, and that’s where you post content. Then you go out and engage with similar profiles. And it doesn’t just mean, like, it means leave a comment, because one of the best things that happens is when you leave a comment, now your comment is in front of people that are also your target audience, and so then they go check out your profile. Because if your comment means something, it doesn’t mean you go out and, like, spam them with your links. Like, oh, check out my new post on this topic. Like, you go out and add value, like, just be a normal human. The biggest thing I could say is to echo what Shreya said, is the social media is social, it’s not just media. And a lot of times people get in this rut of like, it’s a one, it’s me posting to the world because they want to hear from me. But the reality is, it’s social too. You have to interact, and they go both ways, and the algorithms will reward you for going both ways on that front.
Christian Klepp 06:26
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, these are some fantastic insights here, and I wanted to just go back to a couple of them, okay, first of all, totally agree with regards to paid because correct me if I’m wrong, even if you do know what you’re doing, right? It can be a little bit like a black hole, right? Just takes your money, right? And then the danger there is, if you stop paying, well, guess what? You stop showing up. No traffic, right? It’s all gone. It’s all gone. No traffic.
Paul Counts 06:55
It’s gone. Yeah.
Paul Counts 06:56
And, and, like, let’s say things happen, like, an election year, your ad costs go up, and you can’t control that, you know. So now you were getting a certain ROI, and your ads return on your investment, you know, your ad dollars, and now you have no return, because ad costs went up because election year, some new big campaign, some large brand came in with their billion dollar budgets, and that’s the reality. 99.9% of business owners out there are small businesses. You don’t have a billion dollar marketing budget, you know. So that’s just the reality. And so if you don’t have a billion dollar marketing budget, you can’t afford to make mistakes, right? You have to be strategic. And you know, to me, true marketers are people that can take a $10,000 ad budget and make money with that. Marketing is not take a million dollars and throw it at a campaign, because I like to use the analogy that a blind squirrel finds a nut some of the time, you know. And that’s true. Anybody can throw a million dollars and maybe make a conversion, you know. Yeah, you’re not going to be ROI positive, but you’re going to make a few conversions, you know. But large brands don’t care about that. They’re just, oh, we got our brand reach out there. But small businesses, we can’t afford that luxury, and so you have to think strategic. You have to have multiple traffic streams. You can’t be a one trick pony. I I know the guys have been, we’ve been fortunate to do this for so long. I’ve been doing this since I was 13. 26 years now, in this business, and I have seen so many people come and go in the space that I’ve worked in, and a lot of it’s because they were one trick ponies. They were like, one traffic source. That was it, one solo traffic source. And when that source dried up, their business dried up. So, you know, you gotta diversify.
Christian Klepp 06:56
Absolutely.
Christian Klepp 08:35
Absolutely, absolutely. I have two follow up questions for you guys based on what you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes, right? So the first one is this whole notion of, like, you know, it’s about also active engagement on social media. It’s not just posting, you know, you have to engage with other people’s posts or comment or people that comment on your post. You should be answering or commenting, commenting on their comments, so to speak. Right? Why do you feel that a lot of people, they either skip that part or they go down what I call lazy avenue? Right? The name of the software escapes me now, but apparently, and you probably guys probably know it, but there is a software where you It analyzes the post and it comes up with a… it generates a comment, right? And the comment is really just a summary of everything you just said, which I find super annoying.
Paul Counts 09:32
And that’s the… Yeah, that would be the approach that is not going to work even, even using software for it. Some people have tried that, yeah, but it becomes so canned and so generic, and it just looks out of place. And when you do this, it’s so easy to do easy street AI has made it so easy for people. And you know, and I’ve got a warning I’m going to tease out here that I’m going to tell people about using AI in just a little while, but it’s a little warning. I’m going to open that loop here. But the the reality is, with AI and all these things, it could be easy to go down easy street. So either you decide, okay, I’m just going to use canned responses. Well, that doesn’t work, because if you want, if you’re doing the intentional engagement right, you make a good comment to somebody, and you want the people that are viewing that person like, I love to go to the post where there’s like, this person has 100,000 followers, and I’ll go make a comment on their stuff, because all of a sudden, 10 other people are going to comment below me. Now, if I just said, Oh, great post, thumbs up, you know, like that doesn’t do anything, but if I say, you know, I really agree with what you’re saying. Because in my experience, I’ve dealt with this, you know, now, all of a sudden, I’m a human now, all those 10 people that commented below it now are interested in what I have to say, you know, because they saw that I gave value. So now they end up on my profile. Now they end up some of them, like me, connect me, get to know me, whatever. And that’s how that, that’s intentional engagement, you know, getting in front of the right people and so it’s quality over quantity, too. So people would say, like, oh, go to 100 of these and do it all day, because you can, you have the tools to do it well, you’re not going to be effective with those hundreds. So do it three times and do it well. That’s kind of what it comes down to.
Shreya Banerjee 11:10
And I would also say that it’s about the value you provide, and not so much just generic content that AI spills out. So I know it sounds like, sounds like a old person giving you advice here, but even in this day and age, it’s value. Whether you’re giving value with your post or providing a reply to somebody else’s post, you’re giving value. That’s what people remember you for.
Christian Klepp 11:32
I’m so glad you brought that up, Shreya, that keyword, that buzzword, value, because I want to dig into that a little bit further, if you’ll permit me. From your perspective and your professional experience, define what it means to give value, because that’s another one of these words that that’s been thrown around so loosely out there and some people, and you’ve probably seen it, that people go in with a pretext that they’re adding value, But it’s actually a veiled sales pitch.
Shreya Banerjee 12:01
Yeah, right, yeah. Actually, one company that does it amazingly is Zapier. Even the ads, it’s a tutorial. It’s a they’re showing you how to connect and get your workflows together, which is going to save you time. And they’re obviously, they’re selling you their service so that you’re zapping things here and there. But the way they do it, it’s just a how to video, and you as a user are so engaged in watching that because you want to learn how to fix your problem, because you obviously have that problem, right? You want to automate things. I think Zapier does an amazing job. They’re providing value, but still selling their stuff. By the way, in order for you to simplify this, you’re going to have to use our program, but this is the way you make your life easier. And everybody’s looking for that.
Paul Counts 12:46
It’s just giving people helpful tips, helpful advice, helpful strategies. You know, I think too many times people are so worried about, you know, thinly veiled value. So they’re like, Oh yeah, I’m giving value. And then they’re going to pitch you right at the end, and it’s like, you’ve just got to speak from the heart. If you deliver true value, true content to people, it also means don’t hold back on your good content. I mean, I’ve learned that the hard way too. In the past. I used to be like. Yeah. We used to do that. Honestly. I used to be like, Well, we know this little secret strategy. I might share it with people, and then some knucklehead down the road, who really I was, literally, was like, I don’t even, this guy is a clown. He barely knows marketing, and he’s sharing this strategy. And I’m like, Oh, okay. And then I learned, like, we just need to share, you know, share the best value, because they’re gonna remember you for sharing that rather than them. So like, you know, now we don’t hold back, you know, it just we share it because the internet’s so big, there’s no new idea out there from a marketing standpoint. You know, there might be new adaptions to things as always, but you’re not going to create the new whiz bang marketing idea that nobody else knows. You know, it’s probably been done 100 other times.
Shreya Banerjee 13:55
Or if you do, it was done 20 years ago, and it’s making the resurface like SEO, right? People are going gaga over SEO and organic traffic right now. That’s been there since the beginning of internet.
Paul Counts 14:07
Nothing drives me crazier than an Instagram guru who I saw recently, yeah, talking about how, yeah, there’s this new thing called SEO that you do in your post and you put keywords in there, and it’s starting to work. And it’s, and I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me, you know? Like, this is like…
Christian Klepp 14:22
Unfortunately, they’re not kidding.
Paul Counts 14:24
They’re not they’re yeah
Christian Klepp 14:26
They’re dead serious.
Paul Counts 14:28
And people are listening to this person who just discovered SEO, and they’re following him like he’s the next guru… he didn’t even know. So it’s… wow.
Christian Klepp 14:36
Yeah. I’m getting a little confused here. Guys, are you like stuff from 20 years ago? Are you talking about B2B content marketing? Are you talking about the music industry and fashion?
Shreya Banerjee 14:47
Yeah, a lot of pants are back.
Paul Counts 14:52
Oh yeah, no. I remember my kids on a side note. They they came back home from school all excited to share this new dance they learned. And it was the Macarena. And where were they…when I danced along to it with them. They were like…
Shreya Banerjee 15:06
For them right then and there.
Christian Klepp 15:07
Yeah. They were like how do you know this…
Paul Counts 15:10
Yep, yeah.
Christian Klepp 15:16
Love it. Love it. I’m gonna move us on to what I call the deadly sins, right? So talk to us about the pitfalls that B2B content marketers should avoid if they’re trying to build profitable, organic content strategies.
Paul Counts 15:32
Yeah, yeah, go ahead Shreya.
Shreya Banerjee 15:34
One of the main ones is not having a proper customer avatar. Thinking that your product applies to everyone is the biggest mistake that we find. It might apply to everybody, but the way you talk to everybody is different. The way you would talk to Paul is different than the way you would talk to me, right? We both might be your customer, but it’s a little bit different. So having that customer avatar completely dialed In is very, very important. And we see every single client that we actually work with ends up that they don’t… either don’t have something at all or it’s not very clearly defined. So that’s always a starting point. And the biggest pitfall, pitfall that we see.
Paul Counts 16:12
Yeah, and for customer avatar, you’re really just looking at what are their interests, what are their likes, what platforms. I just did this with the client, we were trying to reevaluate their social media strategy. So I was like, no, no, let’s go back to the basics. You know, who is it that you want to reach? Who are you hearing? Who comes to your events, who comes to your live workshops and online webinars and master classes and all this, you know? And then we drilled it down and realized, okay, what do they like? What are they seeking? What solution do they want? You know, here originally, we were targeting weight loss, but the reality is they just wanted to get rid of inflammation and not feel pain anymore, you know. So the ads were mismatched for that targeted group of people, right? So now the ads are being reframed to be like, Okay, we’re going to focus on your you know, inflammation issues. You know now, now we can speak to them better, because when you reevaluate and reassess, what are your customers really want to know? That’s what that’s about. And it’s also knowing, like, what websites do they visit? What platforms do they know about, what influencers do they follow? You know, because you can get ideas from those people. And if you don’t know who your customers are and it, nobody wants to do it because it’s not sexy, it’s not attractive, it’s not the newest marketing trend, it’s old school. But the reality is, if you want a business that’s going to last for 20 years, you’ve better put the old school tactics into place. That’s why business owners are around for 20 plus years. If you want a business that’s going to be around for a year or six months, follow the fads, you know. And so everybody wants to follow the fads, because that’s fun and trendy. But if you do that, you’re not going to have a business for long. So you got us have these foundational pieces there.
Christian Klepp 17:51
Yeah, exactly. What about, like, the understanding of the buyer’s journey, and a mapping out those critical touch points? I mean, I would have it, I guess, if that’s critical tool.
Paul Counts 18:01
Yes, oh, yeah. Customer Journey part is so good. It’s like, yeah, understanding where do you want them to go next? You know, we were just working on a project where it was like, okay, when they visit our website, you know, what is the next step we want them to go? Is it straight to a quote form, or is it to a informational page? You know, especially you know, one of our clients, they’re selling a 30, you know, they’re reaching B2B sales, right? They’re reaching a 30,000 plus dollars a unit sale, you know, for high end equipment, right? And so people aren’t going to go to their website click add to cart. It just doesn’t happen. Not to mention that their customer base has to get a PO from the city, you know, most the time. So it’s not a credit card order, so you have to take them through a journey, right? So that journey is, go to the home page with enough information to wet their beak and get them excited. Then take them to a separate page which sells that specific product, and then take them to the, you know, request a demo page or quote page, you know, because whereas, like, if I was selling just, you know, house plants. Let’s say, you know, they’re gonna come to my our Shopify store, or Shopify website, whatever, and they’re gonna find the house plant that looks good, click on it and, okay, it’s a $25 purchase, bam, I’m gonna click on that and buy it right there. You know, that’s a different customer journey, because, you know, you can use a credit card for it, so it’s, you know, very different experiences.
Shreya Banerjee 19:22
Yeah, but you still can’t do that without customer avatar, right? That is still the first step.
Paul Counts 19:28
Yep, you’re not gonna speak at all to those people.
Christian Klepp 19:31
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So they should focus on the customer avatar and not something like marketing Mary or frustrated Frank. I mean, we’re talking about like some serious avatars here, right? Yeah, with their pain point, the objections and whatnot, right? What’s going on in their lives that trigger that demand, trigger that motivation to look for a certain service or product, right? And then having that that respective customer journey map? How often would you say, B2B marketers should be reviewing these avatars and journey maps, because, you know, these are not set in stone, right? The markets change. You guys talked about an election year. I’m over here in Canada, so I empathize with your predicament. But how often do you would you suggest customers look at that?
Shreya Banerjee 20:22
Yeah, we say at least six months. Yeah, at least every six months, reevaluate it, just because things do change, something that might be working. And then you also, when you’re reevaluating, you might find out a few things, because if you’re spending money, now you’re actually collecting the data too, right? The first thought when you’re doing it, it’s what you thought it was, but now you’re getting inputs from your customers, so things might change a little. They might give you that feedback. So it’s very important to keep that updated all the time.
Paul Counts 20:53
Yeah, it’s a big deal to really just keep it fresh and, you know, keeps you top of mind. And the other thing, if you get your customer avatar, this is going to, hopefully this will trigger and get some people excited to do customer avatar. If you get your customer avatar, right, you can do the trendy things now. You can have the great post on social media. The difference is, instead of you just blindly throwing stuff out there, it’s now going to stick and have a chance at reaching your audience with the message they want.
Shreya Banerjee 21:20
It helps you with your strategy.
Christian Klepp 21:23
Absolutely. I love that you guys brought up research and collecting data, because that’s a great segue into the next question, right? And you guys have probably seen customers do one or the other, and what I mean by that is they either don’t do any research at all or they don’t do it properly, right? So talk to us about the importance of conducting the right research. And so what I mean by that is, what should they be looking out for, and what should what type of approach, rather should they be using so that they’re researching with intention?
Paul Counts 21:57
That’s so good, yeah. So some of the biggest things that you can do there is, you know, look at YouTube. We love to do this kind of research. So there’s a tool that Shreya knows about with YouTube that we use all the time. Do you mind sharing that Shreya that?
Shreya Banerjee 22:11
Vid IQ.
Paul Counts 22:12
Yeah. Vid IQ is the tool. Vid IQ. Vid IQ. It gives you a really good idea. As far as, like, if you look at channels that you are competitive with. It’ll tell you things like, what channel tags are they using, what keywords are they using in their videos? How are their videos ranking? What are they doing, optimization wise, that you could do better. You know, what kind of content are they sharing? It gives you really good ideas around that, and that’s more of a deeper dive, but it’s a really good tool. And if you want to just go like surface level, you can go out to YouTube itself and just start typing in how to lose or how to get rid of or how to whatever your niche is, right? You know, back pain. Just type in the word back pain, and you’re going to see a whole bunch of suggested searches where YouTube is pre filling that data, and YouTube’s literally saying this is what people also searched for related to this niche. You can do the exact same thing over on Google and do the exact thing, and actually scroll down to the bottom, and Google’s gonna say people also search for and they’re gonna give you about 10 other keywords related and Google is literally handing you this data on a silver platter. And so it’s one of the best things you can do. The other thing we love to do is Quora and Reddit are two great sites. Those are forum sites. Those are informational news sites. And you can go out there, B to B, B to C. It does not matter your industry, right? You’re going to find people asking questions on specific topics. Those become ideas. I get a lot of social media content or ideas of what to do based on questions I see people asking on these forums, you know, and Reddit and Quora are forums. And I know I’m saying forums, I’m we’re going back here, you know, we’re going back to the old school. That stuff still works. And I’ll tell you right now, the reason those sites is my own little side note. Those sites are blowing up right now. Reddit and Quora, Google just paid $100 million between the two of them to license their content on the first page of Google. So if you look at almost any search result now, you see Quora and Reddit results show up.
Christian Klepp 24:11
I did notice that, actually, yeah,
Paul Counts 24:12
Yep. Okay, so you’ve been seeing that, yeah, Google paid to license their content. And you want to know why that is my prediction, simply because of the fact that it’s their forum content. It’s not AI generated, it’s human policed. Redditors will kick you out faster than anything if you use AI content. I have watched them literally roast people in non business niches, call people out for using AI to get their karma score up on Reddit. And so Google knows that like so AI has no place there, and Google does not like AI because AI content is ruining the content game. And I’m not saying AI is terrible. It’s got its place, but you can’t use it for the easy button solutions. You can’t use it to go comment on all these Reddit threads. You can’t use it to do that like you have to use AI intelligently. And that’s what I’m saying. That was my you know, when I talked about earlier, if you’re going to go out there and Google’s already slapped websites using AI, and I’m telling you, Instagram and TikTok and Facebook reels and YouTube shorts, they’re next. If you start using your AI for your captions and your descriptions, it’s going to destroy your rankings overall. Google’s already gotten rid of them, Reddit and Quora already, you know, big on that, like you just the easy buttons, not there. Everybody does. We’ve been in this business 20 plus years. Everybody wants to rush to the easy button. The reality is easy button just basically, you end up not having a business in a few years, or a few months.
Christian Klepp 25:34
Exactly.
Paul Counts 25:34
So business takes a little bit of work, you know, you got to get you got to think. You got to think intelligently and outside the box.
Christian Klepp 25:40
Yeah, funny thing that that, it takes a little bit of work, right? I thought, yeah,
Paul Counts 25:44
Right, yeah, yeah.
Christian Klepp 25:45
Thought that was an easy button. Or, what’s that? What’s the alert trending phrase, chasing the next hack, right? Like,
Paul Counts 25:51
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. Everybody wants the next hack. You know, there is no hack.
Christian Klepp 25:57
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, I’m gonna move us on. And for this question, I want you guys to break it down, if you can, right? So what I mean by that is break down for us, like what type of organic content strategies there are. And here probably comes the more difficult question, how can you ensure that these will ultimately be profitable?
Shreya Banerjee 26:18
Yeah, so actually, you could do multiple things, and it needs to be a mix of things, right? Lots of people say, reels are it. They say videos is only thing. Carousels are the only thing. It needs to be a mixture of everything. It’s when people share their lives on social media, they give a mixture of everything. So that’s you’re pretty much kind of mimicking a human for your business, right? And that’s why it’s so important to have that attractive character set for your business, whether it’s a guy, Go, get, go, or, you know, whatever, even if it’s a gecko, it’s the attractive character for your business. So once you have that, then it’s a good mixture of different things. I think National Park Services, they do an amazing job on their social media where you know, they’re national park, you wouldn’t think that they would have a good social media presence, but go check them out. They do an amazing job. And it’s a mixture of everything. It’s video, this carousels, it’s quotes. Is funny, funny stuff, because people relate to funny things. I think there’s a Tampa airport that has a giant Flamingo.
Paul Counts 26:18
Yeah, the Tampa Airport’s one of the best as far as humor.
Shreya Banerjee 26:23
People relate to it. Right? When you’re flying and you’re thinking of, where should I get my Florida ticket to. Tampa airport sticks in my head because of their funny social media posts, yeah. So it’s a mixture of all of those things. You cannot just say, I’m only going to post five videos a week, or, like, it’s not structured that way. You’re almost mimicking a human. think about that.
Paul Counts 27:51
Yeah, I think some people too, they get into this, this rut and exactly what trace. And you have to have variety. But people also are like, Okay, I gotta make my social post by 10am every day, and I’m like, stop. Like, like, No, you don’t. Like, not everybody’s as rigid as you, you know, like, you gotta post at a different time. Like, it’s okay. Like, yes, I’m all about consistency, and that’s wonderful. But like, you can post at different times. Quite frankly, you don’t know. I used to send emails at the exact same time to my list, come to find out, I was off by about 12 hours as to when they responded the most. So if you’re gonna go out there and post at the same time, you don’t know you might be missing the mark. Your audience might be looking at your post at 2pm so you know, like you’re only gonna know that if you continually post at different times, and the time varies by days too. Some days people are active in the morning. Some they’re more active in the evening. Some are more active middle of the day. So you just be have a variety and I’ll give somebody another really interesting tactic. So we’ve, you know, we’ve been around a lot of people in this marketing world and in this space, and especially the Instagram gurus, the experts on Instagram and goobers. And what we’ve come across, is they don’t know it any more than any of us do, to be honest, they don’t. They really don’t. They think they haven’t figured out. And just when I think, I’ll be the first to tell you, just when I think I haven’t figured out, I don’t, it comes down to being consistent and giving valuable content, like we talked about, on a consistent basis. It doesn’t mean 10am every day. It means, you know, constantly showing up, constantly providing value, interacting with people. That’s when you see the growth. But, you know, Instagram is one of those things. I see this with the gurus too. They’ll have a million followers, some of them, and they’ll have one post do 5 million views. The next post will do 5000 views, you know, like they did nothing different, and they’ll admit that too, like it’s just a game of social media. So you can’t sit there and expect one piece of content to change your life, because it’s not. You’re gonna have to show up every single day. And that’s really what separates the winners from the losers in this business game. Are the ones that keep showing up? Yeah, yeah.
Shreya Banerjee 30:02
So don’t like when people ask, what’s a set strategy for social media? It’s a good mixture of things, and it’s going to be different for you and your business than it is for somebody else’s business.
Paul Counts 30:13
And your avatar too, yeah.
Shreya Banerjee 30:15
Based on your avatar, based on where your customers are looking for so it’s going to be a little different, but that’s something to keep in mind. Now, the one thing that everybody fails at is they don’t monetize their social media. Yeah, make sure you’re capturing your leads. So everything that you’re doing that should be at the back of your strategy is, how is your content, not only just getting likes and follows and you know all that, but how are you capturing their email address? That’s a very important metric to even keep in mind, when marketing teams are, you know, collecting metrics, it’s not just likes and comments and follows. It’s also, are we getting new email addresses? Are we getting new leads?
Paul Counts 30:55
Yep, yeah, that’s that’s the biggest thing.
Christian Klepp 30:58
Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, again. So this begs the question, how do you ensure that your organic content then becomes profitable? And I know that’s a that’s a tricky one, because it’s not like, oh, well, it’s easy. Just download this app and then, poof, right? It’s, yeah, it’s something that happens over time. It requires, as you said, a lot of effort. Um, some people it might even take months, years.
Paul Counts 31:20
Yeah, oh, months, yeah, yeah. No. A friend of mine is a real estate agent, and she just started her Instagram from scratch, or realtor one, and you know now she’s got 800 followers, but when she’s in her videos, when she started, we’re only getting 100 views, or whatever. And fast forward three months, and I kept telling her, be consistent. Be consistent. Just don’t give up. Don’t give up. Now she’s got 800 followers, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but for her niche, it worked really well. Now her views videos get 4000, 5000 views. Now she’s getting leads of people wanting to talk to her about a $2 million home, or a million dollar home or, you know, and she just keeps showing up on social media. She just kept doing it. Kept doing it. She stuck it out, you know. Now she’s seeing the results, but it took a couple months, right? It’s, and I think of the lure that happens, a lot of people get sucked into these ideas that if I’m going to be doing, you know, marketing on my social media, it’s going to be an instant thing, because social media is so big, and it’s not, it’s it takes time and energy.
Paul Counts 32:18
The other thing I’ll say, is repurposing your content. I can’t stress that enough like how valuable that is. Like, it’s so big, and if you’re already going through the effort to make the video for Instagram, why not post that video on LinkedIn, and why not post that same video on YouTube shorts, and that same video on TikTok, and that same video on Instagram? And I know it seems like effort because you’re going through multiple channels, but it is amazing to me how, like one piece of content on my TikTok might get 500 views, and then my Instagram posts will fall flat on its face, and then you reverse it, and you’ll get 5000 views on your YouTube video, and it’s the same piece of content. And I can’t tell you why one platform chosen over the other. Honestly, it just depends. And so, like, I’ve been amazed by that, where I used to just do, okay, just Instagram, you know, and next to, you know, get a few views, then I’d have a great day, you know. And then I finally realized, like, if I diversify this, it’s amazing because one platform is going to jump to the other. And I know it seems difficult, but literally, if you’re making one video. It’s nothing to sit there while you’re watching TV and upload it four other times, or pay somebody to upload it for you. Like, you know, put your social media team to work, you know. Or put the person at your front desk playing solitaire to work, you know. Like, do something you know.
Christian Klepp 33:35
Does anybody ever still play that stuff these days?
Paul Counts 33:38
I don’t know people do play solitaire. Wow, I feel old now. Yeah,
Christian Klepp 33:41
Probably, probably, Pokemon Go.
Paul Counts 33:43
Yeah, Pokemon Go, yeah. I’ve been tick tock, and I’m like, saying play solitary.
Christian Klepp 33:51
Yeah, no, but I hear you. I totally hear you. I totally hear you. No, fantastic. Um, so we come to the point in the conversation. You guys have given us plenty already, but like, Give us something actionable here. And what I mean by that is, if somebody is listening to this conversation between Christian Shreya and Paul, and you want them to walk away with three to five things that they can take action on immediately on this specific topic, right? What would those things be?
Shreya Banerjee 34:20
Customer avatar. Make sure you have that. I feel like that’s a passion of mine after talking, because I’ve mentioned it so many times here. So make sure that that’s dialed in. Start creating a content strategy based on your target audience and your customer avatar that you just did. And also remember have a mixture of everything in there. Talk give value, lead with value, and make sure you’re somehow capturing their email address. Because it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Best Buy, it doesn’t matter if you’re Walmart, it doesn’t matter if you’re like any of them. They capture emails. Everybody capture email. So whatever you’re selling, whether you’re ecom, your brick and mortar, whatever you’re selling, you need to capture your leads email. So that’s a huge step, if you’re not doing that, and start working on that,
Paul Counts 35:11
Yep, yeah, that’s such a, such a big step. You have to have that and, you know, and I would say, you know, set up a time like to be consistent. You know, there’s that, there’s a book out called Atomic Habits, and it’s all about, you know, doing little, you know, habits every day and it’s amazing how you can do small habits in your life, right? That add up. And one of the habits that you can do it, like, one of the things I’ve gotten into, and it’s really helped my business, like our business lately, is, I’m now been like, Okay, I’m doing one email a day. I’m gonna make sure nothing else happens during the day, at least, get one email out a day, you know. And it’s been steady over a while, and it’s starting to help. And, like, that’s a big thing. And then so, like, same thing goes to social media, if you’re like, you know, do one short video or one short clip, or post something. Or some people do batch things too. I mean, I’ve but come up with what it is that works for you. Like, you know, I know a guy that is a prolific podcaster, 2500 episodes, but he does five episodes on Monday. That’s, you know, and then he’s done for the for the week, but he does all his episodes on one day. And, you know, I know people have done that with social media, where they batch do their social media for the week. They’ll do five or seven posts in one day, and that’s fine, but then go in, and then every day you go in and make those posts then, because the contents already done. So it’s just a matter of, like, coming up with what works for you, but coming up with that consistent flow, and that’s going to be critical. And I would say the third thing to add on there is to the, you know, everything we discussed is, don’t forget about the social part of social media. Like, if you miss that, you’re going to miss the mark big time. In fact, the algorithms we reward you for that, one of LinkedIn SSI scores, you know, the Sales Navigator scores that they give you on LinkedIn, and the higher your SSI score is, the better your stuff ranks in LinkedIn when you post it, especially for B to B side. But if you are interacting with people, it actually improves your score. So if you’re commenting, these platforms are all the same, though, that’s the funny part. They’re all greedy. They want your time and attention. So if you are showing them that you’re willing to produce good content on your own wall, but then also engage with other people to make people stay in the app longer. They’re going to reward you for that. So that value stuff Shreya talked about earlier is real, you know, if you’re giving value longer, people are going to stay longer. So it’s going to you’re going to get rewarded for it. Yes, it takes a little bit of effort, you know, but again, a lot of its mindless effort, because you’re just talking about your niche already that you already talked about, and you can do it from your phone, you know, just, you know, maybe come up for air from your phone during dinner. But, you know, there’s times to do it. You can make it work. So.
Christian Klepp 37:52
Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. Don’t forget about the social part of social media. I think that that’s worth repeating, because, you know what I’m sure you don’t mean by that is, Hey, Christian, bumping this to the top of your inbox. That’s probably one of my most hated phrases ever.
Paul Counts 38:11
I can’t stand that one. Oh, that’s the worst. Yes, that is not social.
Christian Klepp 38:18
No, that’s not social. That’s, that’s, that’s just spamming.
Paul Counts 38:21
Yeah. And I would say some people think that social part of it, they think, Oh, I’m just gonna leave a like, you know, yeah, that doesn’t do anything, you know, like, leave a comment because it didn’t, you know, it’s funny because I run into guys at events that I go to. I’ll go to an event, a person’s like, you know, you always like and comment on my stuff. I’m like, it might have been intentional, but I don’t tell them that, but they realize it, because they see, like, I run into people, oh, I appreciate you, because you’re always in there on my post. Because, like, the comment game is so big, especially on LinkedIn, and like all these platforms, comments are big, and it’s, it’s funny to me, though, if you look at the ratio, like, you’ll see 100 likes on a post, and you’ll see three comments. And I’m like, what you know? Like, just think, if you went and made a comment, those 100 people that liked it actually would see what you wrote and maybe like what you wrote, and it also is going to help the person using it to be like, Wow, that this guy’s, you know, cares about me.
Christian Klepp 39:21
Is that what they call a pod? You guys have heard of that, right? Yeah, a pod.
Paul Counts 39:27
What’s that?
Christian Klepp 39:28
A pod. So,
Paul Counts 39:30
Yeah, pod, yeah.
Christian Klepp 39:31
So, artificial engagement, right? So, you like, when I was first starting to, like, get active on LinkedIn during covid, um, I post something out there and I get probably, like, seven likes. And I, you know, I crack open a bottle of champagne, right? But then you get all these people that are posting stuff which I love it. A friend of mine here in Toronto, um, coined that phrase, so I can’t claim credit for it, but he wrote, some people post absolute nothing burger, and they get 1000 likes, all right, yep, but then you’ll see it in the comments, right? Like, to your point, Paul, right? Like they say, Oh, amazing post. Thumbs up, right? Yeah, absolutely, I agree. Such a great post, but there’s nothing of substance in any of the engagement. Yeah, right, yeah, that blows my mind.
Paul Counts 40:22
Yeah, it’s mind blowing. And, you know, this goes back to the, we’re going back old school here, right? This reminds me of the old days where you comment on blog posts. That’s that, that no longer really is a thing, so, but this does go takes you back to that, yeah, where, if you added value, your your comment would be seen, you know, and heard. But, but, yeah, it’s, it’s fun how these things, kind of, you know, all fit together.
Shreya Banerjee 40:45
It’s amazing how you stand out by just being yourself and providing value, which is so silly to me, but that’s how you stand out in this day and age,
Paul Counts 40:55
Right. No, that’s people ask us all. We have some incredible partnerships in our business that we’ve been very fortunate to have and people ask us, How did we get those partnerships? And I was like, consistently showing up and adding value. I mean, that’s what it is like, showing up to these people’s events, caring for them, supporting their movement, interacting with them on social media, sharing their posts, commenting, being in their life, sharing it with our following, like, all these things add up, and then, you know, builds this trust and this rapport, and then it’s easy to get into these deals. And people just think, oh, it just, it just happened, or you’re lucky, but reality is, you’re just showing up and, you know, you add value. It’s all the difference,
Christian Klepp 41:39
Absolutely, absolutely, speaking of value, here comes the love it or hate it. question, metrics, because at some point in time, you or your customers are going to have to go to somebody internally and report back and say, hey, look, it’s working. So what are some top level metrics that you would recommend B2B marketers pay attention to when you’re talking about profitable, organic content strategies.
Paul Counts 42:07
Oh, I like this. So the biggest thing I would say is, you know, really, when you’re looking at it, is look at your overall website clicks. That’s number one. I mean, what are your website clicks to? And look at it by channel. You know, one of the things that B to B sales does this, we’ve worked with some B to B organizations. One of the worst things that can happen is, is… The other metric is look at overall sales and overall leads. Those are the three metrics I look at. And this seems so basic, and so like, you know, so basic. But we live in a world. And I just got off a call with a client that their sales are B to B, and we do the organic SEO strategy, and one of the issues we’re running up against is, for example, their ad team is thinking that, you know, basically, they just want to track every lead, and they want to know, okay, did the lead come from organic SEO, or did a lead come from ads? Or did a lead come from here? Now, overall, the company’s leads are up. Company leads are up, sales are up, revenues are up, right? But now they’re trying to silo it down and figure it out. And I had to bring up the point today where I said, You do realize that when SEO captures that, you know, or you know, traffic’s up from SEO by 6000 clicks year over year, you know, for in one month period, which is great for their brand and what they’re doing. And I said, Do you realize that with all this increased traffic, those people now are getting pixelated, so now the ads team now runs ads to people that their first touch point was from an organic content strategy, whether it was a blog post, you know, Instagram post, whatever. And so do you realize like that potentially came from SEO, but it’s not getting credited for an SEO lead, because you can’t really track it that deep. And also, the other thing that happens in a B to B world, and in any online business world, is all these new browsers that have popped up. There’s the brave browser, there’s the all these different browsers that have all these safety measures in place to to block third party cookies and block JavaScript and all these things your phone is loaded with privacy things. Now you know, iPhone, Android privacy protection, there’s only three metrics to look at, or clicks up, or is traffic up, leads up and sales up for a business. And I think too many businesses try to silo these things down. And there’s, I think there’s too many type A personalities in the business world, which I’m not one. And I think there’s too many of them that want to know every little detail. And it’s like, can we just accept that? Yeah, and it happens every time with every brand we work with. And the other one I see in B to B world that drives me bananas, is, was this a marketing win or a sales win? And I’m like, okay.
Shreya Banerjee 44:44
It needs to be cohesive, like, you can’t put one team against another team, right? The company is winning. Let’s celebrate that, and let’s see how we can optimize the flow between the two teams and everybody else, and how can we move them forward? And even the product team. Let’s get feedback from them, so the marketing team can use that as you know, new marketing things, but that doesn’t happen as soon as leads go up. And this is like a warning for any, any of the owners, right? Because you’re going to fall into this trap. And it’s okay, because every single person we have worked with has fallen into this trap. Leads go up. You apply these strategies, you’re going to start thinking, Okay, we need to go in more detail, more detail, more detail. This is a time to make everything come together, every team come together and start working better, not siloing them, not separating them out, not putting them against each other. That’s the worst thing you could do because then things start going down. Because why would anybody and and also this day and age a person needs… it used to be seven touches before they make the buying decision. Now it’s more than that, probably 14 touches. So yes, they might come in as an SEO lead, or yes, they might come in as an ad, but then an email could trigger the sale, a retargeting ad could trigger the sale. So whose win is that? It doesn’t matter. It’s the company’s win, right? It’s the team’s win. It’s overall team’s win. So that’s something that you have to look out for yourself and say, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to drive that culture, because that drives the wrong culture within the team, and then things go they start going down again, which is very sad.
Christian Klepp 46:25
Yeah, unfortunately, I think it’s the nature of the beast, though, right? A lot of these organizations are structured that way. It’s not necessarily because people want to swim in that direction. It’s just the way that they become wired, I’m gonna say, once they join, right? And I find that to be true in bigger organizations. And I think we’ve all worked for big organizations, and coming out of that experience, I came to this realization that I am not wired for big organizations, right, but because that’s the way they were wired, like exactly what you guys were saying. Oh, was this a marketing lead or a sales lead, and almost all the time, the sales will claim the credit for it because they closed the deal, right?
Paul Counts 47:07
Yep. No, it’s one of those where it’s going to be an ongoing problem, but it’s, you know, I would say from the metrics that people are tracking. I also, the other reason I bring up the metrics is, with all these privacy things. It’s not as easy as it used to be. Like email. Email metrics are near impossible. Now, there’s proton, you know, emails or Gmail, where people don’t want to track opens and all this. And so, like some people have asked me, like, you know, and there’s robots that open emails now, all these things, right? So when people want, if I want to know the health of an email campaign, I look at clicks, how many clicks happened, and how many people visited that page, and how many people purchased or took an action you wanted to on that page. That’s the metric I look at. It’s as bare bones, basic as that. Open rates. Yes, I do like to track those things to get an idea, but it’s not a one to one anymore. There’s just, it’s just not. There’s too many privacy and blockers and ad blockers and all these things that traffic is no you know, and I think businesses, instead of, they focus so much on the minutia, instead of what actually could make a difference, you know, in the organization, and they worry so much about the granular details. And it’s like, look at the big picture, focus on the stuff that works. Yeah, that’s what you should do.
Christian Klepp 48:22
Exactly, exactly. Okay, guys, two more questions, I promise, then I’ll let you go. Okay, so here comes the bonus question, and that’s the only one you know that I I’ve been keeping to myself all this time. If you were stuck on a desert island, what are the three things that you would take with you?
Shreya Banerjee 48:44
Water, food, okay, I don’t know, water and food. Those are the basics for me to survive.
Christian Klepp 48:52
Okay, all right,
Shreya Banerjee 48:54
Yeah,
Paul Counts 48:56
All right, I’m bringing let’s see. Let’s see. Okay, I’m bringing my phone. Okay, I’m gonna, I’m bringing a solar phone and a solar battery back. And I, you know, I’ll bring my backpack. That’s what I’ll say. I bring my backpack, which has my, my entire business fits in the backpack, so I’m bringing that, and that’s one item my backpack with all my items in it.
Christian Klepp 49:26
Okay,
Paul Counts 49:26
Oh, wait, you said three things. Okay,
Shreya Banerjee 49:30
You’re cheating (laughing)
Paul Counts 49:30
Okay, so I’m bringing my… Okay, then I’m gonna bring my phone and a solar charger, a solar portable charger, and then water. 3 things.
Christian Klepp 49:40
Okay, nice,
Paul Counts 49:41
Yeah, because, you know, because then I can still get off the island. I can, you know, write a book, write a business, do all sorts of things on my phone. So
Christian Klepp 49:50
That’s fair enough, I would probably bring a portable desalination plant if that thing exists,
Paul Counts 49:56
Yeah,
Christian Klepp 49:58
Toilet paper. And a book.
Paul Counts 50:04
There you go.
Christian Klepp 50:05
Because if it’s not for entertainment, at least I could use it for kindling, right. There you go, like it. There we go. Shreya and Paul good. This has been a fantastic conversation. And you know, I’d love to talk for 10 more hours about all this stuff, but, you know, I want to thank you once again for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please, quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.
Paul Counts 50:30
Yeah, definitely. They can find us marketingcounts.com you can just take a look at us there marketingcounts.com and you can also email us at [email protected] if you have any questions about the show, so you can just do that. Those are two easy ways to get in touch with us.
Christian Klepp 50:48
Fantastic, fantastic. Once again, Shreya and Paul, this is such a great conversation. Thanks again for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Paul Counts 50:57
All right. Thank you.
Christian Klepp 50:58
Thank you. Bye for now.
How to Leverage Social Selling Through Brand Ambassadorship
The human element is something that’s often overlooked in B2B demand generation. It’s important to remember that even in B2B, people buy from people. Therefore, personal branding and brand ambassadorship are key components that can help build trust and engagement.
That’s why we’re talking to the “B2B Demand Gen Queen” Dilara Cossette (Founder & Head of Demand Generation, Focus Image Pro) about how marketers can leverage social selling through brand ambassadorship. During our conversation, Dilara explained the importance of personalization and being intentional in content creation. She elaborated on which pitfalls to avoid and how to get buy-in for social selling. Dilara also shared strategies on how to work with subject matter experts (SMEs) and obtain testimonials.
This episode was brought to you by Leadfeeder: Know who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com/try
https://youtu.be/zACCj5Nl8OI
Topics discussed in episode
Companies and links mentioned
SPEAKERS
Christian Klepp, Dilara Cossette
Christian Klepp 00:01
Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host. Christian Klepp. Today I’m going to be talking to Dilara Cossette. She is the founder and head of demand generation at Focus Image Pro. She has extensive experience in helping B2B marketing leaders to navigate growth. Her company does this by creating, capturing and converting demand through demand generation strategies specifically tailored to the unique needs of small and mid-sized businesses with B2B demand generation solutions. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is.
Christian Klepp 00:38
Okay, fantastic. Dilara Cossette. Welcome to the show, and I’m so glad to have you on here. And I also want to give a shout out to Anthony Leung for the introduction.
Dilara Cossette 00:50
Yeah, hi, hi, thank you for having me.
Christian Klepp 00:54
Absolutely, absolutely. So without further ado, let’s dive in, because this is, we’ve had a couple of guests previously on the show that have talked about demand gen, but not this specific aspect. So what specific aspect am I talking about here? It’s how to leverage social selling through brand ambassadorship. So why don’t we kick off the conversation with this question, why do you think the human element is often overlooked in demand gen?
Dilara Cossette 01:18
I think if we look at our news feed on LinkedIn, on any social media, as well as open our inbox, we will see that we’re getting tons of messages. They’re coming from individuals, from companies. But when we ask ourselves, do we know those people? Do we trust them? Where they’re coming from? Where is the background? The answer is no, and we all know that people buy from people. They don’t buy from companies. So this is where personal branding is very important, but it’s so much tied with brand ambassadorship and social selling, because there should be someone behind the brand, behind every single brand, the person who will be brand ambassador or advocate of that brand, who will become a thought leader of the industry and also share the expertise. And it’s not necessarily sales people. People really think that, Oh, if we’re talking about brand ambassadorship or social selling, it has to be sales team, not necessarily. I think even if it’s someone outside of the sales department, it’s even better, because the person will sound very authentic, knowledgeable, and that will actually increase the engagement awareness and potentially lead to some really cool conversations that will eventually lead to closed deals.
Christian Klepp 02:33
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I had a follow up question there for you, if you can. Is there any difference between personal brand and brand ambassadorship?
Dilara Cossette 02:45
It’s very similar I would say. Personal branding is like, more when it’s like, I would say, maybe you’ve heard about the founder-led company, right? I’d say like, it’s there where the personal branding, the person is building their brand through the thought leadership, founder-led content I would say. This is where the person is building their brand to help the person or the company eventually to sell. Brand ambassadorship. It could be like, really, for a bigger organization with 1000s of people, right, but it’s still important to have this brand ambassadorship. It could be one person, like dozens of people, just like doing this brand awareness. And I would say, like, see it as a more brand awareness, right? We think that brand awareness should come only from the company page when it’s a boosted, promoted content, not necessarily. Now on LinkedIn, you can actually boost a personal post as well. That actually it’s a sign for us that, okay, this is how LinkedIn and all our social media channels, they put more emphasis on personal branding rather than company branding. And I’ve done several tests when we took the same content, we promoted it from company page versus the personal page, and it has 10x more engagement than the company page. So it means that people resonate, you know, and they engage more with the personal content, which leads to the personal branding and personal, you know, promotion as well.
Christian Klepp 04:07
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. It’s, um, it’s very interesting that you mentioned that, because, you know, I’ve noticed it as well on platforms like LinkedIn. If you look at the company pages, even if they do post content on a regular basis, you see that either their engagement is quite low, or if there is engagement, it tends to be the employees. So it’s kind of like, let’s pat each other on the back and internal high five. We’ve posted something, right? Whereas, if it’s from somebody’s like, as you said, like personal feed, right? It’s, it’s also, to a certain extent, a reflection of their personality, but it’s also a reflection of their expertise on a specific subject, right?
Dilara Cossette 04:49
100% I would also add to that, brand ambassadorship can be not necessarily from the employees of the company. Actually, it will have like, even maybe 100 more results and engagement if that is some something shared by customers, by, you know, other employees, by the experience. So that’s where the reviews and customer support comes in place. Testimonials is now a really good example when you actually promote thought leadership content. This is where you can actually work and leverage, let’s say marketing team, sales team. They work very closely with the CS team to get those testimonials, and it’s not hard to get, like, a few really happy customers, and they would like really to advocate for your brand, just getting a few sentences, putting a nice, really visual, and just like sharing that content, I had a call with someone earlier today, I asked the person. It was a marketing leader in the very big organization, and I asked, like, what is important to you when someone is reaching out to you, what will make you to hop on a call with someone and explore the marketing or sales opportunities? She told me, testimonials. I will believe someone else about the person, rather than the person, no matter what the person is saying, and that’s so interesting, that’s a real feedback of person who is really working with external vendors.
Christian Klepp 06:07
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And I had a follow up question for you there on the topic of testimonials, because this is a challenge that I see time and time again, even with some of the customers that we are working with, right? How do you get those testimonials? How do you get buy in from customers, to give those testimonials to your company?
Dilara Cossette 06:28
I think it’s, it’s about the moment, right? How to find the moment? It shouldn’t be at the beginning of the you know, your collaboration, and I’ll give that example. You know, we work with… someone is working with a marketing agency, for sure, it’s required minimum few months to get their results. And honestly, it doesn’t mean that the results will be right away positive, because we do a lot of testing and trials and AB testing, so they might be like not so impressive results, but you know better what you can achieve and the moment when you get some really good results, this is a moment to ask testimonials. Another way, an advice for someone who is just starting and they don’t have a lot of clients, or they don’t feel comfortable, or the results are not there, is to ask, you know, someone to give that in return to something for free. So, you know, I’ve heard something recently, and I agree with that, because when you start and launch your own company, or any in the business. You think, like, all my time is like, you know, gold, but I think, like, you should give your time, you should offer something for free. And, you know, it can be service, it can be free trial, if you’re in the product market, if you have a product or stuff. If it’s a service, you can offer free audit. You can offer like, you know, free Trial or something similar, and asking the person if you’re satisfied, if you like it, would you mind leaving a testimonial? That is the best way to get the first testimonials, even without the strong database. And that will help, actually, to close the first clients, and then you can find the best moment to ask for those testimonials.
Christian Klepp 07:56
Yeah, no, you bring up an interesting point there. It’s like leading by helping, right? Leading by helping. Okay, fantastic. I’m gonna move us on to the next question, and I’m sure you will have no problem answering this. Pitfalls to avoid. Right. When it comes to social selling through brand ambassadorship.
Dilara Cossette 08:15
Number one is being too pushy and too salesy. It’s so interesting, but I’m getting dozens of invites, connection invites every day on LinkedIn. And, you know, in the first original message, person saying, like, Oh, I’m impressed with your background, and I would like to learn more. I would like to be connected. Second message down, they’re selling you something. I’m like, seriously, that’s not authentic, right? And I’m not saying, like, I’m not responding. Sometimes the offer is great, and I’m always open to network, communicate, collaborate with others. I truly believe that we work, you know, we work and grow together, because that’s the only way, you know, to help each other and make sure we achieve our own goals. But I would say, like, yeah, try to be salesy. Try to be pushy. I don’t think, yeah, sales outreach, you know, cold outrage, cold calling, all this stuff really worked very well 5-10 years ago. I don’t think you know, especially if you’re targeting marketing leaders, and maybe depends on the industry, but it doesn’t work, right? We’re just overwhelmed with tons of messages every day. But what works when person is really offending and the person really wants to connect, network, offer something without asking anything in return, and that’s the best way right to refer clients, because it’s not only black and white, right? If you meet with someone, the product is not the right fit or the service is not something you’re looking for right now. But there’s always great to have people in your network where you can refer people, help someone else. Maybe you will see a post if someone is looking for specific solutions and you can help someone. I do believe in karma, so I would say, just be nice to people and treat them the way how you would like to be treated? Would you like to be sold? You know, right away the first message? Probably not. So try not to do that.
Christian Klepp 10:02
Absolutely, absolutely. There are so many examples I could give here, but there’s an individual, also a B2B marketer, that I’ve been following online on LinkedIn for many, many years. His name is Steve Watt. He’s also based in Toronto, and one of the posts he put out there, in fact, I think he put it out countless times, is that people do not wake up in the morning and check their LinkedIn hoping to get pitched right. Nobody wakes up in the morning and drinks their coffee and checks their phone and says, Oh, I am looking forward to getting pitched today, right? In fact, there was another guy and I cannot. I’m not. I cannot claim to have coined this phrase because other people have used it, but nobody likes to get pitch slapped, right? And that’s what that is like, for example. Case in point, you know, we get there every day.
Christian Klepp 10:50
Hi, Dilara. Your name, your name popped up, and I was recommended to connect with you, and I’m looking forward to expand my connection, and then you accept the connection request. And then the moment you do, bam, auto, pitch slap. We do whatever the service is that is actually not really relevant to your business at all. And then, would you like to jump on a quick chat to talk about this? And in my opinion, it’s never a quick chat, right? It’s at least 30 minutes.
Dilara Cossette 11:19
Yeah, there are always different tactics and methods. People are asking to get your feedback on something. People are trying to share something, they’re offering like, Oh, I’m working on a case study. It’s like a free something at the end of day, people don’t believe anymore. They know that it’s all about the sales pitch. You know what is interesting? I was really asking someone recently to get their feedback on, you know, the offer that we came up, and the person was like, and we’re having a chat, we were asking some specific questions and so on. Was probably the person. And it happened three times within a week, because I was trying to get feedback from marketing leaders. Three people asked me, are you trying to sell me something? I’m like, No. I was like, I was waiting for the sales speech. I’m like, No, that was a really genius question. I really wanted to get your feedback. Thank you. Have a great day. I’m like, That’s it. People were really asking me, is that it? I’m like, that is it? I told you. It was a real question. Thank you for getting back to me. Do you think that makes sense? Yes, bye. And people don’t believe anymore. They were like, Where is a sales pitch? And they were really asking me, like, is it something coming up? Are you trying to say… I don’t understand the reason of this conversation. I’m like, it’s just a question to get your feedback. It was so funny. Three people. I’m like, Oh my God, right, we overused LinkedIn and, you know, you know, email and everything.
Christian Klepp 12:37
I mean, it’s probably the same reason where a lot of people don’t have landlines anymore, and also why they don’t pick up if they recognize, like on the call display, they see a number that they don’t recognize, right? Because, chances are at somebody like, you know, you can drop any name you want of any of those big corporations here in Canada that are trying to sell you something right, from telecommunications to insurance to internet and everything in between, right?
Dilara Cossette 13:06
Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly, yeah.
Christian Klepp 13:09
Okay, I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which where I’d like you to like talk to us about the importance of having the right strategy, but also conducting the right research, right? Because social selling through brand ambassadorship is not something that, you know to use that North American phrase, wing it. It’s not something that you should wing, right? It’s something that needs to be thought out. It needs to be well researched. It needs to be intentional. But over to you, your thoughts.
Dilara Cossette 13:35
I think personalization is a key, and I know like how people are like leveraging AI right now with personalization in order to send one to many messages. I mean, AI and personalization, honestly, I don’t see that matching, because with AI, you don’t need AI to personalize the message. If you’re checking someone’s profile and you refer to the post that you saw or maybe something resonates, maybe you went to the same university, you can use AI. You don’t have to, because that’s your own personalization. That you will take that example and link it, and that will be very personalized. Um, you know, like the emails when they say, like, oh, I noticed, like, someone gave you recommendation, and the person mentioned this, this and this. So the person for sure, like, look into the details, right? And refer to that. There is certain way to do AI, but now I think people are they, they, they relied too much on AI, and now they don’t know how to do personalization, and they call personalization AI, which is still not very personalized, and you can feel it right away. And there’s so many copy paste messages very similar that we’re getting every day. And you can feel right away if it was really written by human or by AI. But I understand also, if you know sales team, they all have quota as well as marketing, and they need to reach hundreds of people every day, because they go after volume. Definitely there’s not enough hours in the day to do all this personalization one by one, and it’s hard, right? Going after volume. I think we’re creating the problem for ourselves first of all, but also for the industry. We’re trying to succeed by sending 1000s of emails. Someone has to send even more. So it’s sometimes like people are overusing and purchasing domains, you know, hundreds of domains in order to send more, the results are getting less. So they have to do more volume in order to get… I mean, it’s hard, right? We’re not making it easier. And if we are where we are now, what’s gonna happen in five years, right? I mean, how will we reach out, how we will talk to people, who will respond, who will believe us?
Christian Klepp 15:46
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, again, I suppose it goes back to the industry, the vertical, and also like what it is that you’re trying to sell to people, or rather, what service you plan to provide. Because, for example, like the services that you and I provide Dilara, I would, you know, I would park that under consultation. It’s a certain level of consultation. I would, I mean, even for myself, it would be very hard for me to close a deal for a consultation project on a cold call and automated, like, you know, something that’s done through automation, like, you know, an email campaign, an email blast, a blast on LinkedIn. Because it’s a, it’s a multi, as you as you well know, it’s a multi stage process, right? And it’s also about a lot… it’s trust building, right? Because what you’re selling is your expertise. It’s not just necessarily your time. It’s your expertise, because you’re helping your customers to transform their business for the better, right? So to a certain level, that’s not really something that AI could solve on its own.
Dilara Cossette 16:54
Yeah, I don’t think so. And this is where demand gen comes in place. And I would say like it’s across all industries. I never saw any brand that the demand generation brand awareness harm that company. And this is what you can do through social selling. We can do for brand ambassadorship and social selling. And again, I don’t want people to think like if there is a selling, it means that it has to be salesy. Social Selling doesn’t necessarily have to be pushy or salesy. Social selling is something. There’s so many methods to do that. You can share the content. You can be a thought leadership you can share case studies. You can do or whatever you want without even sales approach or asking anyone to hop on a call. That’s part of demand gen, and when you do that, people, it will ring a bell, or they will remember you when the need will come. So let’s say they’re looking for the solution, but they are not in the market right now. You create a demand. It’s kind of like a three steps. You create a demand through brand ambassadorship, social selling, thought leadership content. You have someone on the team who is like an advocate, as a true advocate, and feels comfortable to be on the video, to share the content, to share the tips, maybe weekly product newsletters, something that you share, and you leverage that content. That’s where you create the demand. Then it’s like converting the demand. When the demand is there. This is the way to make sure they find you. This is where you know some paid ads comes in place, where you can leverage some review websites and capturing the demands, make sure you actually capture and assign it to the right sales team, and make sure you actually provide the excellent support there as well. Because if they see that, you leverage and just like share so much tips and best practices at the beginning, you also want to leverage and continue the same level of support.
Dilara Cossette 18:39
As an example, I’ve been working with so many vendors. It’s all all great until you sign the contract. Once you sign the contract, it’s not exactly what has been, you know, promised, right? And you feel the huge difference, I think, like it has to be across sales and marketing. This is where I say demand gen sits in between marketing and sales department, because it’s connecting and building bridges between two departments, and one of the reasons is to make sure we provide and help a prospect, eventually potential customers with the same level of support.
Christian Klepp 19:12
Absolutely, absolutely. So moving on to the next question. And I’m sure you get this a lot right, because more often than not, especially in B2B, there’s not many people outside the marketing function that actually understand the concept of social selling. So what’s your advice to marketers out there that are dealing with internal pushback? How do you, how do you, how do you get buy in from those that don’t understand what social selling is?
Dilara Cossette 19:41
So interesting. I would recommend to start maybe with internal sessions, like more educational content, and then I will make it in a very game type of contest, like maybe, like incentivize or maybe like to make some internal contest, let’s say, you know, announcing the months of Social Selling for sure, it has to be supported with some internal sessions and then to provide them with maybe like support. Because the biggest roadblock for people that they don’t want to share, they don’t want to be judged, and they don’t know what to say and how to say, especially when it comes to product or services, they don’t want to share something which doesn’t make sense, and get a feedback. And that’s the biggest concern. If marketing team can support with educative content, by sharing, what is social selling, what are the best tips, but also support them with the content creation and provide with this tools, and then create a contest, or just like, you know, announce the winner, or like, incentivize that, that will be in a game like, you know, type of you know, environment, I would say that will make sure, like everyone, not necessarily sales and marketing, are involved in social selling. It can be customer support. It could be, you know, through different departments and content might slightly change, but will be something interesting to see. Let’s say how many… The winner is, like the person who is getting the highest number of impressions or engagement, or someone who books a call, I don’t know. And you know, this incentivize can help to increase engagement.
Christian Klepp 21:12
Yeah, something a little bit like healthy competition, if I understood you correctly, right?
Dilara Cossette 21:18
Yeah. Well, if you push too much. It won’t be healthy, but, yeah, it depends. It depends how competitive, competitive they are. Yeah.
Christian Klepp 21:27
Fair enough. Fair enough. You mentioned something that I wanted to go back to right because obviously a lot of what you’ve been talking about during this conversation, when it comes to social selling, is also developing the right content. And for a lot of B2B marketers, to develop that right content, they probably have to almost obviously look outside their function and lean on subject matter experts or SMEs, right? So these SMEs, I would say, nine times out of 10, are not in the marketing function. They’re in different business units, and they’re probably very busy people. So what’s your advice to marketers out there? How can they build those relationships and that rapport with those SMEs and get them on board with the content development?
Dilara Cossette 22:15
Yeah, it’s a very good question. I think if marketer, it’s content marketing falls under like if there’s someone internally, the person usually works with different departments, and one of the biggest challenge, I would say, is to come up with the brand positioning, and also, like, you know, the way how the content is presented. I believe there’s someone internally, the person who really knows how to put the content in the way that it will sound actually authentic, and also will make sense if CS team, or IT team is sharing something that are not related to their, you know, expertise, so that’s something like, you know, content marketers should take in consideration while preparing the content to be shared by the different departments of the organization.
Christian Klepp 22:58
That’s fair enough. That’s fair enough. So we get to the point where I wanted to ask you to walk us through the process, right? And you’ve given us plenty already, but walk us through the process of leveraging social selling through brand ambassadorship. So what are the things that B2B marketers need to do differently to achieve this, and what are the key components required for this approach?
Dilara Cossette 23:21
I think their main point is to find the right person I would say. I mentioned that sometimes people say that, Oh, social selling, it has to be salesperson. Has to be founder. I would encourage actually, to find someone who is first comfortable to be on the video because I think video content is the best performing and it’s easy to connect on a personal level when you share something valuable. For the video conversation, the person has to be very comfortable. The person has to have knowledge in the industry. Usually it could be someone in the product team. Could be sales, it could be customer support. The thing like this is a great example, where they know the brand, they know how the customer, they know the market, and the chances that are comfortable are very high because they talk to people every single day, they are in customer support, and find the person. And it could be again, through the content, you know, create a survey who would like to become an ambassador. It could be changing if the organization is bigger than, let’s say 100 people, or there’s like a more interest. It could be changed every month. For sure, they will require support from the marketing team in terms of the video editing, you know, content creation, posting and scheduling, but that will be the first step to do, to find the person who would like to share the content and work with that person for the social selling. What sales and marketing could do. They could leverage the content and include it in product newsletters, in sales outreach, in LinkedIn outreach. They could, it’s so easy to take that content so like, Hey, I’m just reaching out to you. It could be sales outreach, but still, I would like to share this that you might be interested in or you find insightful. So it’s not a sales outreach. Nothing selling, just sharing, because sharing is caring. And I think that content can be reused in so many different ways. It could be used in product email marketing. Could be used in the marketing newsletters. So it could be actually used in e-blasts. If you know, you know the company is investing in external vendors and supporting that could be interesting idea as well, just to me and make a series of that. Another idea I just thought about that. It’s an interview series, so that person is comfortable to do the 5 Minutes interview, and if the person is actually in the CS team, that will be actually very smooth. Asking clients and customers, also depends on the number of customers the company is having, if they would like to interview them for like a five minutes. And that could be actually the series of thought leadership content.
Christian Klepp 25:58
Wow, you’ve given us plenty already here, but like you know, and there’s also different… mentioned different content formats. So in your experience of all these content formats that you’ve mentioned for social selling, ultimately, also demand gen, are there any one of these that you say would perform better than others? Or Would it depend on the industry, depend on what stage the company is at. What are your thoughts to that?
Dilara Cossette 26:23
The shorter is better.
Christian Klepp 26:25
Okay.
Dilara Cossette 26:25
It doesn’t really matter the industry. I think the shorter is better. I mean, look, people don’t spend hours like, you know, listening hours and hours unless it’s very specific that they really want to deep dive into specific, you know, topic or industry. Other than that, if we’re talking about social selling, it has to be very short. I would say maximum five minutes. To be honest, if you make a series, you can talk a lot about, like, you know, someone very sub, sub topic. If it’s something like, you know, related to one product feature or like, one tactic, I think five minutes will be more than enough, especially if it’s like, not an interview series or just the video, and you’re sharing the best practices or tips, I believe it can be really short, but it will be very valuable. So I would say the shorter is better.
Christian Klepp 27:12
Okay, okay, okay, you’re definitely not the first one that’s mentioned that. So there’s definitely some truth in that. Um, could you give us an example of how social selling, through brand ambassadorship, helped the B2B company to generate positive results, ideally, from your own experience.
Dilara Cossette 27:31
We recently launched a campaign where we collected all the testimonials and put them, excuse me, in the really nice you know, on LinkedIn, you can do a carousel photos, images, not a PDF. It’s like a one long, but they can actually scroll. We combined all that, and we started boosting it, and that was very successful. We actually got a lot of engagement for that specific boosted post, what we also did, we asked the person who is doing the thought leadership content, and we agreed with the person that we’re working. It’s someone working in the sales. Like, the person is overseeing marketing and sales, but he has a lot of experience, so we actually shared that content from his personal page as well, and we boosted both. And people started reaching out to the person because they see instead of the company, sometimes they don’t know who to reach out to when they see that the testimonials or next piece of content is promoted by someone, they click and they can get in touch. We got a really good prospects for one of our clients coming directly from those boosted testimonials of their clients. So like, yeah, it’s step by step, but it’s very successful.
Christian Klepp 28:37
Yeah, and I believe there’s something to be said about leveraging client testimonials that way, because, you know, it’s one thing for a company to talk about, like, oh, you know, this is, you know, we’re so great. Our products and services are so awesome. And there are some thought leadership pieces, but to have the testimonials there, which is basically that company’s customers talking about how this provider, or this company, helped to make them successful. That just adds so much more substance to their claims, right
Dilara Cossette 29:13
Yeah, 100% and, you know, sometimes I don’t know why, but companies are hesitant to ask for testimonials. I mentioned about, like, the best time, and I’m not the only one saying that sometimes I was like, I’ll wait a little bit more, I’ll ask later. I’ll do that. But I mean, it’s never late. Sometimes, like, you know, the contract ends and they don’t, they actually churn, and you never have a chance to ask. So in addition to just like, also trying to find the best time and thing, like, you have to have a lot of courage and just like, let’s do it. This is where the customer support can come in place. I don’t know, maybe like, every third month when you still kind of like, you wrapped up on boarding, but you’re still getting the first results. I would say, Yeah, on the third or fourth month will be the best time to ask for testimonial, but it has to be kind of like documented somewhere. Okay, on 12 week or 42 week, we’re asking for testimonial. At least it will be easier to compare. Are we getting positive responses or negative responses? Because if someone doesn’t want to leave a testimonial, I mean, it doesn’t really matter when you’re asking that person. Another thing that could happen you started working with one person, the person is leaving and you don’t know who to ask, just… So, yeah, the quicker is better. But I would say not to quicken up. Depends on the industry and services or product offerings, you have to, like every company should think about their own timelines of asking testimonials, and then they can create a file, collect them, and, you know, set a minimum, maybe three, then, just like, boost a post with three, then collect two more. Just recreate that. Just have five. But sometimes it was like, Okay, 10 is perfect. I’ll wait for 10. Just start with three. Three is better than nothing.
Christian Klepp 30:57
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, okay. Dilara, this is what I call the soapbox question. Okay, so what is a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why?
Dilara Cossette 31:14
I think when people say we don’t… When I meet with people, especially like CEOs and founders, they say marketing doesn’t work for us. And I’m like, What do you mean? I was like, well, we invested in paid ads 2000 and it didn’t work. I’m like, Okay, so just put a x on marketing. Yeah, we don’t believe in marketing. And I think even when people work with agencies, right? And there’s so many agencies out there, and they all have unique approach. If it didn’t work with one or two, it doesn’t mean that all agencies are bad or like, for example, you hire someone and the person doesn’t match, you know, or aligned with your values. You let that person go. You don’t just, like, eliminate the title entirely. You still look for another person, right? The same thing with agencies or fractional folks or external vendors, if it didn’t work, you know, with one or two, it doesn’t mean that you should just, like, completely forget about that. I would say, like, yeah, when I hear marketing didn’t work, I’m like, you had a bad experience with marketing. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, because it works for a lot of companies.
Christian Klepp 32:20
And this is, I’m so glad you brought that up, because this is the reason why it’s so important to yeah, sometimes I hesitate to use this word, but to educate yourself, right? It’s to also educate yourself and understand what’s out there that you have options and so that people can also make informed decisions, right? It’s absolutely right for you to say that you know people… I guess, as humans, we tend to say, Okay, we have had one one bad experience, and as a result of that bad experience, we tend to put labels, or throw people into boxes, as I like to call it, and we have this preconceived notion of certain people, certain industries, certain professions, and there’s always this negative connotation or association, and I totally agree with you that we have to get out of this type of mindset, okay, that, yes, you had a bad experience, but perhaps maybe you can look back at that, and I always say, do an autopsy to see what went wrong, and not to play the blame game. It’s to do investigation. All right, this is what happened. This is what didn’t happen. This is what didn’t work, and this is probably the reason why. So moving forward, what can we do, or what steps or procedures or systems can we put in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, right?
Dilara Cossette 33:43
Yeah, 100% I think, like looking back, is very important to analyze. Okay, maybe it was not enough budget. Maybe you didn’t choose the right channels, maybe you didn’t, you know, work with the right agency, right? Or maybe you didn’t hire the right fractional person. There’s so many why? Why? Why? But I agree with you 100% you have to look back and say, okay, it didn’t work. Lessons learned. Let’s move forward. But it doesn’t mean that you have to say, no, never again, right?
Christian Klepp 34:12
That’s right. That’s right. Well, you know you and I both are entrepreneurs and we’re business owners, and we know that that’s how we grow, that’s how we learn, right? It’s through the mistakes that we make.
Dilara Cossette 34:23
Oh, yeah, 100%. Every single day. You know, you make something small by mistake, that’s for sure, right? Well, I always say, if you don’t make mistakes, and I think, like, it’s not my expression, something like, I’ve heard like, a long time, though, if you don’t make mistakes, it means you don’t work, you know? I mean, like, it’s very straightforward, right?
Christian Klepp 34:42
Yep, that’s definitely one way of looking at it. That’s for sure. That’s for sure. Okay, so here comes the bonus question. So with all these conversations that we’ve had in the past, I did come to realize that, like me, you’re also a student of languages. Let’s put that way. You speak a few languages, and you’ve learned a few along the way. So if you were given the opportunity to learn another language, what language would it be? And why?
Dilara Cossette 35:11
I would say it would be Spanish, because my daughter, she’s going to high school, and she will be learning Spanish, and my husband started learning Spanish a few years ago, but I think 6 language would be a little bit too much. So I’m not quite sure about that. So I’m like, I’ll still give it another thought or so, but yeah, it would be Spanish.
Christian Klepp 35:28
Oh, nice, nice. It is a beautiful language, and in this part of the world, very, very useful.
Dilara Cossette 35:37
Oh, yeah, 100% and I also know that it’s if you speak French, it’s also easier to learn Spanish. There’s so many similarities, like, like, you know, simpler version, it’s not other way around.
Christian Klepp 35:49
Absolutely, absolutely. The difference, I would say, is that the speed at which language is spoken.
Dilara Cossette 35:56
Yeah, exactly right.
Christian Klepp 35:59
Fantastic. Dilara, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. A quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.
Dilara Cossette 36:09
Oh, I’m an open book, you know, my LinkedIn inbox is always open. I really get back to someone who is asking for help advice, you know, or just want to connect. I think, as I mentioned, we grow together. And I’m always happy to, you know, share my expertise and knowledge, because you never know right where our path will cross in future and how we can help each other, because it’s all about networking. So yeah, I mean, I’m on LinkedIn, I’m an open book. Always like sharing my knowledge with people.
Christian Klepp 36:40
Fantastic, fantastic once again. Dilara, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.
Dilara Cossette 36:46
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Christian Klepp 36:48
Bye, for now. Bye.
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