B2B Nation

How well do you understand the content you have and the gaps that exist in your content strategy? Creating content at scale requires a level of visibility that many editorial organizations struggle to achieve and which many B2B marketing organizations can’t even imagine.

Jeff Coyle is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse, which built a platform that uses AI to help build out a holistic content strategy that helps brands and publishers demonstrate expertise and meet their buyers across the journey.

In this episode of B2B Nation, Jeff discusses his approach to content strategy, how he convinces content purists that data and AI are the tools they’ve been waiting for, and what the future of B2B content looks like amidst industry consolidation and complicated partnerships.

RELATED EPISODE: You’ve Scaled Your B2B Creation. What happens next?

Episode Guide

2:23: Jeff explains his approach to content creation.

3:46: The inputs Jeff looks for to inform content creation.

6:09: “You need to be there at every stage of the experience.”

8:03: How does Jeff convince content purists to rely on data and AI?

16:26: Where does B2B content go from here?

25:33: Jeff predicts consolidation around B2B tech and content.

27:29: “What’s Google going to do?”

29:38: What are Jeff’s favorite tools?

Scaling B2B content creation remains a significant challenge for many companies. The demand for content assets, including papers, videos, and articles for marketing, the website, sales outreach, and more never seems to end.

With the right mix of in-house resources, reliable partners and freelancers, and clever strategies, B2B vendors can scale their content creation to help meet the demand. But that isn’t the end of your content challenges. Keeping all of that content consistent in voice, up to date as your brand and products evolve, and in compliance with industry regulations remains a requirement.

Christopher Willis is the CMO and Chief Pipeline Officer at Acrolinx, a content governance solution that uses artificial intelligence to help keep your content up to date and aligned with your brand.

On this episode of B2B Nation, Christopher discusses content creation and governance, content effectiveness, pipeline creation, and more.

Episode Guide

2:36: How does Acrolinx help marketers improve the quality and impact of their content?

6:20: The connection between content governance and content impact.

9:35: The challenges of scaling and maintaining content in the enterprise

17:09: How Christopher got the title Chief Pipeline Officer.

21:00: What are the important lessons about marketing Christoper learned over the past two years?

23:38: What is Christoper’s favorite tool?

Many organizations are putting Revenue Operations roles in place and growing the role into an entire team. But confusion around the RevOps role, the functions it performs, and where it goes as the revenue team matures continue to be an issue at many organizations. 

Revenue Operations is not the same as a Salesforce Admin, but in-depth knowledge of your organization’s CRM is vital to the role. Nor is RevOps simply a sales operations job, as it should support the entire revenue organization from marketing to customer success. And maybe that’s why a definition of RevOps is so hard to develop. 

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to revenue operator Asia Corbett from Bread Financial about how to grow the RevOps function at your organization, how to grow into a RevOps role yourself, and how RevOps will evolve in the short and the long term.

Episode Guide

2:15: Asia’s thoughts on getting started in RevOps

4:49: The first step in developing a RevOps roadmap

7:43: What are the common misconceptions around the RevOps role?

10:40: What kind of experience makes someone a good fit for RevOps?

14:47: What would we be discussing about RevOps one year from now?

18:00: What is Asia’s favorite tool?

Software developers are the builders in their organizations, and like a lot of builders, they feel strongly about their tools. You can’t market to software developers the way you market to senior business leaders. 

Developers are more hands-on. They like to try before they buy. And marketing to software developers often means taking a bottom-up approach to selling your tech. Get your tools in the hands of the builders, and they will show their leaders what’s possible.  

On this episode of 2B Nation, we’re talking to Yonatan Shelach of JFrog about how to market to software developers, what some marketers fail to understand about developers, and the outsized role developers play in the decision-making process in many organizations. 

Episode Guide

2:26: The challenges of targeting software developers

4:05: What does Yonatan think businesses fail to understand about developers?

5:34: What’s been Yonatan’s most effective strategy for generating demand over the past two years?

6:43: What is the most important skill in B2B marketing today?

8:27: What is Yonatan’s favorite tool?

How are we going to develop the next generation of female revenue leaders? It’s a complicated question because the lack of women in revenue leadership roles today makes it hard to develop leaders for tomorrow.

Women are sorely underrepresented in leadership roles. And that’s as true of revenue teams as it is elsewhere in many organizations. Women in Sales Everywhere (WISE) developed out of a passion project at CloserIQ with the goal of developing female revenue leaders through mentoring, networking, and professional development opportunities.

In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Cassie Yettru, general manager of WISE, about supporting women so they can move into leadership roles on revenue teams, what women value most in career opportunities and the importance of clearly defined development opportunities. 

WISE's individual membership program allows women in sales or sales-related roles to network with peers, find mentors, and attend exclusive member-only events. WISE is offering 10% off membership to all B2B Nation listeners using the code B2BNATION10 — learn more and apply here. Apply the discount code during checkout. 

Episode Guide

2:19: Where was Cassie given support and encouragement in her career?

4:00: What are some of the aspects of a job women value compared to men?

5:19: Who is most likely to pursue professional development? And who should?

6:34: Why are younger professionals less likely to explore professional development?

8:45: Where is the market for HR tech, training, and professional development headed?

11:02: What is Cassie’s favorite tool?

How to Make the Transition from Lead Gen to Demand Gen

Moving your marketing from a lead generation strategy built on MQLs to a demand generation strategy built on revenue and pipeline is often discussed in B2B marketing circles. But if you’re making the transition, it needs to go deeper than the label.

Among the challenges you’ll face in the process are communicating the benefits of demand gen to a leadership team that likely favored the concrete results of lead gen over the abstract nature of branding. You may need to take a look at your martech stack and see how it needs to be updated with your strategy. And let’s not forget: you need to show results.

In this episode of B2B Nation, Adam Holmgren from GetAccept joins us to discuss his transition from lead gen to demand gen and how he helps other marketers in the EMEA region make the pivot. Among the topics we’ll discuss are the state of demand gen in Europe, how demand gen differs from lead gen and branding, and whether martech is too often guiding the strategy in B2B marketing.

RELATED EPISODE: 5 Ways Lead Gen Has Changed in the Past Decade

Episode Guide

2:00: “The current state of demand gen in Europe is traditional lead gen confused as demand gen.”

3:20: What are some distinctions between lead gen and demand gen?

4:55: Does Adam make a distinction between brand awareness and demand gen?

6:54: What is a relatively easy change SaaS marketers could make with a big ROI?

8:32: How much is martech leading the strategy in B2B?

11:50: What is Adam’s favorite tool?

Whether you call it organic marketing or inbound marketing, strategies that bring prospects to your brand in search of a solution to their problem stand in contrast to outbound strategies that are usually more costly. 

As B2B marketers pivot from lead generation to demand generation, organic and inbound tactics are gaining traction once again. Creating content that demonstrates your company’s expertise and increases your brand awareness are commonplace across B2B.

In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Vicki Frost, global director of content and campaigns at Vertiv, about organic marketing in the B2B space, content development, the role of analytics, and – of course –  the age-old questions about whether you should be gating your content.

Episode Guide

1:57: What does Vicki think is the biggest, most positive change in B2B marketing?

2:37: What are some of the most common mistakes B2B marketers are making today?

4:10: Which content formats are having the biggest impact for Vicki’s programs today?

5:24: Is there a B2B content format that marketers or the audience wouldn’t miss if it disappeared?

7:14: Where does Vicki stand on gating content?

10:04: What is Vicki’s favorite tool?

15:30: What would we be talking about if we had this conversation one year from now?

Maura Rivera is the CMO of Qualified, a conversational marketing vendor that infuses Salesforce data into chat to give the sales team a better idea of who is visiting their website. In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Maura about marketing in a space with a dominant brand, B2B marketing tactics she’s re-examined over the past two years, and why conversational marketing goes beyond chatbots.

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Michael Sciano, Sr. Customer Marketing Manager at Airship, about how customer marketing is evolving from formulaic PDF case studies to a customer advocacy strategy that creates fans and eventually a community around your product.

 On this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Patrick Quinn of BigCommerce about how to design and launch an influencer marketing campaign for your brand.

For decades, businesses hired famous people like actors and athletes to work as the face of their brand and influence their target markets. It was largely a one-way relationship because that’s how the media worked at the time.

Influencer marketing is a new twist on the idea for a new medium. Online influencers aren’t famous in the same way that Ronald Reagan was when he was the face of General Electric. If you’re over a certain age, you probably have no idea who most of today’s influencers even are.

But influencer marketing is quite common in B2C circles, and now it’s coming to B2B.