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Katie Robbert is the CEO of Trust Insights, a marketing analytics consulting firm. She is Google Analytics certified, with a Master of Science in marketing and technological innovation, and has years of experience in SEO and data analytics. 

In this episode she talks about Powering Modern SEO with Social Media Data, a white paper her team developed with Talkwalker, a social media analytics and monitoring platform, that talked about powering modern SEO and content marketing through data from social media.

As Katie pointed out, we may not realize it, but we’re actually doing the hard work for Google in terms of training its AI to understand audio and visual information. Consider Google Photos, for instance. Whenever Google Photos asks us to identify or categorize a photo, we’re actually helping them train their algorithm and the can apply that logic to their test data sets.

https://youtu.be/qf1ao1hNv9I

Search Quality Rater Guidelines

Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines highlight the importance of having high-quality main content, meaning the content that you specifically wrote about the topic, which is found in the main section of your page (and not, say, the sidebars or navigation panels).

When it comes to fact-checking and determining the accuracy of online content, it’s easier for Google to check for historical and scientific accuracy than it is to check for truth, which still can’t be algorithmically verified.

Katie mentions another potential issue, “New, cutting-edge research is always the hardest for an algorithm such as Google to understand, because again, it needs that test data, that historical data, in order to say, ‘Yes, this is a thing.’” An example of this is Google Scholar. Without any precedent in the form of existing studies or previous mentions, Scholar will have nothing to validate new research against, and will struggle with it (regardless of whether it’s accurate or not).

Trademarking and Zero Click Searches 

On the subject of trademarking B2B content marketing materials, context matters. Not every use of a trademarked phrase counts as infringement. As an example, Katie mentions her friend Gini Dietrich, who developed the PESO (paid, earned, owned, and shared media) model for communicators. According to Katie, she constantly has to contact companies who use the term without giving her due credit for it. “It's just being aware of the original source of a term.”

Hashtags, however, are a different matter. Casual terms are up for grabs for trademarking, which certain “internet influencers” have been taking advantage of. “They are constantly trying to trademark certain phrases, casual phrases that we all use all the time, so that every time somebody uses them, they get paid some sort of fee for us using that term,” explains Katie.

https://youtu.be/iUdwMwtlnEY

And that's where it starts to get into sort of that ridiculous area of trademarking terms and phrases, and then what you as an SEO person can do about getting around that.” If you want practical guidance on how NOT to infringe on the intellectual property rights as well as how to protect trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks and patents, and respect the intellectual property rights of others, check out my free course on Digital Intellectual Property Rights Management.

In our previous interview, Katie talked about Google Passages, and how it can take away views from a website. Passages is just one of the many parts of the Google ecosphere that help it keep users within its “bubble.

The shift to digital was hastened by the lockdown. But are B2B growth marketing ops professionals adopting technology at the expense of personal interaction? And is B2B growth marketing strategy tempting us to disregard the human side of building relationships with business customers?

In this episode, bestselling author and keynote speaker R “Ray” Wang, founder and principal analyst at Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research – which studies disruptive business and exponential technology trends – share his growth marketing playbook.

https://youtu.be/uSfcwTK62u0

Account Based is Outpaced

From a B2B perspective, account-based marketing is overblown. B2B marketers are tired of over building their stacks. Why overcomplicate things when you can manage a couple of thousand prospects just as easily on a spreadsheet?

We have so many tools for connecting with audiences. There's sales enablement platforms, vertically integrated stacks, marketing technology stacks, and even tools for managing B2B keywords and b2b networking sites, but they aren't even large enough to become unmanageable.

“Everybody talks about, ‘Hey, we got this ABM problem. We're spending millions.’ I'm like, ‘Why are you spending millions?’ Have you totally missed the point of relationships and marketing and account-based approaches?” says Ray.

He also emphasizes the importance of both the digital and the human elements in building relationships. Getting rid of one aspect and focusing entirely on the other isn’t an approach that would work in all situations. In the B2B customer journey, interpersonal relationships matter more.

Ultimately, it depends on your brand’s identity and the image you shape through content marketing, as well as your target market’s preferences. “Both are going to be important; offering choices are important,” said Ray. “But let's figure out what the problem is that we're trying to solve first, and then we can figure out you know which technology is to apply.”

Geographic Relevance of Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence (AI) gets better, whoever can get more data and more scale who will emerge at the top.

Ray explained that only countries with access to high-quality data can deliver signal intelligence, which is built on the dynamic feedback loops that bring everything together. Some of the questions and concerns that B2B marketing pros are bound to have is when to fully automate or whether to augment machines with humans to ensure precision decision making in AI. “You have got to have humans in the process,” stressed Ray, “and there are places where humans make a lot more sense, and it's where decision making gets a lot more complicated.” 

https://youtu.be/K-ztfMXZE5Q

We know why content marketing is important for b2b and that the more informational and educational content you publish to align with the various stages of the marketing funnel, the more discoverable you are, so long as your B2B content is topically relevant to your prospective buyers, as Robert Rose explained in a previous episode of this podcast.

But the reason that AI is Ray added that because China has the ability to aggregate more data and has a larger population (privacy concerns and surveillance capitalism notwithstanding), it gives the nation an edge when it comes to making AI smarter. Still, the dangers of automation isn’t an excuse to stay out of the loop, or to not try to become well-versed in the processes of your own business.

What makes the best podcasts great is a subjective question with no real answer. In this episode of the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, benevolent journalist Nick Quah – who has been covering the business of podcasting in 2015 – talks about the elements of the best podcasts, the search for niche podcast audiences, the basics of podcast marketing, his opinion of Clubhouse, the benefits of podcasting, whether or not he’d work for Courtney Holt at Spotify if they made him an offer, and the differences between Boise, Idaho and Kuala Lumpur. 

Nick Quah, is founder and publisher of the HotPod newsletter, which is syndicated by Harvard’s Nieman Lab, and covers the latest developments in the podcasting business. HotPod Insider is a twice weekly paid version of his newsletter that you can subscribe to here. He is also host of Servant of Pod, a podcast about podcasts that he does with LAist studios, as well as a contributing writer to New York Magazine's Vulture. 

https://youtu.be/Gc1pVLjA3M4

Creativity, globalization disparity, and underrepresentation

Born and raised in Southeast Asia, Nick had the opportunity to come to the United States to study for college, first at Wesleyan, and next at the University of Chicago. Over the last 13 years, he’s gained some interesting perspectives on business and life from both sides of the world.

On the subject of the abundance of cutting edge Southeast Asian talent on gig sites for visual design, Nick mentions the status of developing countries as emerging growing economies, an increased interest in getting into the creative arts, and of course the reduced labor cost of outsourcing. “There are deep, deep, inadequate inequities, and severe criticisms and questions about globalization,” says Nick. “But that is the world that we have.”

https://youtu.be/o-hy16MEjRQ

The Best Podcasts

As for the question of what makes the best podcasts great, Nick had this to say: “There are the shows that are built for mass consumption, and there are shows that are for niche consumption. I think the core idea is the same: It’s that you're making something that should be worthy of somebody's time, and that can be expressed in many different ways.”

According to Nick, a podcast worth listening to needs to either solve a problem in someone’s life to justify its existence in someone’s stream of the day, regardless of length or subject matter. “We only have 24 hours in a day, only so much of which we're awake, only so much of which that we are free to consume media experiences or do whatever we want to do, as opposed to we have to do so. On a very fundamental, elemental level, it is the thing that needs to justify its existence and give some value to the person listening to it, whether it's information or it's a good story well told.”

Nick also stresses that there’s no “one size fits all” strategy behind the best podcasts. “If the goal is the audience size, there are multiple strategies to achieve that outcome. And the strategies are just what they are, which are plans and ‘we'll see whether that works out’. What you could have executed, tactics — that’s a strategy.”

https://youtu.be/4qNO3J_bMdM

For Servant of Pod, Nick works with a small team of producers at LAist Studios who get together and figure out interesting hooks or topics to discuss. If you’re interested in the business of podcasting, it’s a great podcast. I’m a regular listener and he gets amazing guests. Nick and his team come up with a target list of who to get as guests. “We've gotten almost everybody that we wanted to get on the show,” shares Nick. “And you know, people are generally nice,

Trust Insights CEO Katie Robbert Shares New Keyword Research Strategy

Traditional SEO research has limitations that require more innovative methods of discovering keywords. One way is by leveraging subject matter expertise and audited social media data to identify which keywords and topics are truly relevant to your audience.

https://youtu.be/LcuCrp0YMQs

Watch the Full Video Interview

I spoke with Katie Robbert, the CEO of marketing analytics consulting firm Trust Insights. Through her extensive experience in SEO and data analytics, she built and grew multimillion dollar lines of business in the marketing technology, pharmaceutical, and healthcare industries. Katie and her team partnered with Talkwalker, a social media analytics and monitoring platform, to develop a white paper on using social media data to power modern SEO.

According to Katie, many people these days are just “putting in the bucket of basic SEO research” in the form of keyword planners and tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush. This approach, while effective, limits the user to just search terms that their target audience might be using, instead of reflecting the actual language and conversations they’re having online.

Using Talkwalker’s social media export capabilities, the team obtained conversational, qualitative data sets from different social media channels to figure out the common terms and phrases that people were actually saying – and this got them very different results from what their straight keyword research yielded.

https://youtu.be/E5qt-D_gAyc

Watch the Full Video Interview

Through a process that relies on artificial intelligence called topic modeling, Katie and her team processed the conversational data, figuring out commonalities and similar terms people were using for certain topics (for instance, “latte with extra foam” or “espresso” whenever people would talk about coffee). Katie shares that while there’s plenty of open source code for topic modeling, you’d have to do some coding yourself to have a good topic modeling tool - which was what Trust Insights did, when they developed their own proprietary version.

On Reddit Data, Difficult Keywords, and Google Passages

A great example of this approach is processing conversational data from Reddit forums. This is possible through an API, which serves as a tunnel linking the place you want to extract data from to the tool you’re using to extract data. “You can build the API to connect the two systems and say, ‘I want to extract these things,’ explains Katie. 

https://youtu.be/Ie_sfQhP1Cs

Watch the Full Video Interview

Competition for particular B2B keywords determines whether it’s a realistic target for your SEO or if it’s too difficult to rank for it. “Drawing the line is really sort of a judgment call in terms of how hard you want to fight for that particular keyword,” says Katie. “And in order to fight for it, you need to be creating a lot of content around that keyword, a lot of authoritative content.” 

Her advice? “Look at the organic keywords versus the branded keywords, because you should be ranking for the branded keywords for your own business, but the organic keywords might be things you might not be thinking about.”

Google Passages and Page Quality Guidelines 

In 2020, Google announced a new feature called passage indexing. As Katie explains: “If you Google for marketing over coffee co hosts, then you're going to get a little passage from the Marketing Over Coffee website, which is going to explain who the co-hosts are.

What’s the best way for digital marketers to conduct B2B lead generation without falling prey to malicious data breaches, ransomware-driven DDoS attacks, and other deceptive, criminal money-making schemes? 

In this podcast, Daniel J.W. King, Chief at IBM Security Command and a Former Officer in the US Cyber Command, discusses digital marketing and lead generation from a cybersecurity standpoint. 

Cyber preparedness is more important than response planning

https://youtu.be/9_uWyqHrKg4

Full video interview: https://youtu.be/clypYU1_IfQ

Cybersecurity risks are no different than other business risks. Business leaders need to stop flagging data breaches and malware attacks as IT problems. Cybersecurity threats as a business problem that can affect your entire IT ecosystem, causing crippling loss. 

Now that countless businesses are going digital, threats are bound to increase. When that happens, it’s natural for organizations to fail due to a lack of preparedness. So, it’s essential to focus on improving these core skills to mitigate cybersecurity risks when you accept data from lead forms into your digital marketing stack.  

https://youtu.be/fWIq6_WZpno

Full video interview: https://youtu.be/clypYU1_IfQ

How to Combat Cyber Threats 

Interactive elements such as data collection forms and clickable social media buttons can create numerous cybersecurity threats because they allow others to insert outside data into your tech stack. Here’s what you should do to minimize the risks.

Identify your crown jewels and protect them - Billing, accounting, and product data are under constant threat, so organizations stay focused on keeping those data assets secure first.

Know your systems - If you have it, threat intelligence allows businesses to mitigate against future malware attacks. Businesses with evidence-based knowledge about everything that goes on inside their systems are better prepared to scale their digital presence. 

Have a plan to recover - People, process, and technology can solve major business problems. Simply having a cybersecurity compliance clause in partner contracts can save money and protect data.  

Appoint a retainer-based cybersecurity expert - A retainer cyber expert can offer immediate sensitive consultation and help improve the business’ scalability without increasing overheads. Secure these resources in advance so you’re ready for the worst scenario.

Daniel also discusses the risks of using marketing technology to publish web forms for B2B lead generation that can be compromised through injection attacks, whether or not businesses should worry about China’s potential AI dominance, injection attacks, input validation, building an online community while eliminating cyber threats, and preventing bot attacks. 

https://youtu.be/5qjbT8ejlVU

Full video interview: https://youtu.be/clypYU1_IfQ

Check out the full podcast to gain a fresh perspective on cybersecurity in digital marketing.  

To support the B2B Lead Gen podcast, rate and review us here.

Brian Dean is founder of Backlinko, a website that offers next-level SEO training and link building strategies, sharing free tips through a website, YouTube channel, and email marketing that are designed to make a market for online courses he sells. 

He started his company in 2013, but it took three before his traffic started to pick up. Now he does roughly half a million unique visitors per month. Here’s what changed.

“When I started, I was really focused in quantity over quality,” Brian says, “because I was in a super-competitive space”. Back then, there were already a lot of SEO and marketing blogs, so he had to compete against giants like Hubspot and Neil Patel. 

When he realized just putting out content wasn’t working, he decided to start producing massive guides that were well designed to help him to stand out from the crowd. They were expensive to make. But he looked at it as an investment. When he found it hard to scale, he started hiring more people, mostly gig workers, to get the job done. He still writes all the text himself, but now he’s built a team around his content production. 

How to Hire Gig Workers

https://youtu.be/G_at1IIJ5RY

Brian’s advice is to not make your instructions that detailed. It’s better to just give people the end result, and let them figure out how to produce it. So rather than spell out detailed instructions on Fiverr and Upwork for his gigs, he just post links to the finished product and lets candidates use those as the guide for what they are trying to produce. At the end of the day, he’d rather have someone who can deliver the result than someone who needs a lot of instruction. He recommends hiring a lot of people for the same job and seeing who performs best.

Rank for Passages

https://youtu.be/sNaOgHmVFYw

Soon Google will introduce passage indexing, which Brian describes as the search engine making long pages on a website discoverable as segments or “passages”, which can rank individually. This will make it easier to find sections inside long form content without having to scroll and scan for what you’re looking for in a long form post. Brian invented the skyscraper technique so optimizing long form content it particularly important to him. “It’s really important now to divide up long form posts into clear sections, which was always a best practice, because it’s good for readability.”

That being the case, is it a good idea to have a table of contents index at the beginning of your page with links to each passage or section? Brian hesitates to call it a must-have, but he believes it’s helpful for users nonetheless. Unfortunately, there is no Wordpress plugin for that. You have to code those links by hand.

One of the areas I always struggle with is measuring traffic from my email marketing to my site. I do my UTM links manually with Google Campaign Builder. Is there a better way to go? Brian says that your email service provider will tell you how many people clicked on your link, but other than that, if you want accurate email metrics to show up in Google Analytics, you have to manually set up your UTM parameters for all your links.

https://youtu.be/ftyFLxYY3sA

In terms Brian’s favorite Digital Marketing stack, his frontend is still Wordpress, but he  recoded his backend with next.js, which is a JavaScript framework much faster than PHP. But he warns that it takes quite good technical skills to implement this type of solutions.

For more information about his favorite tools and how to create great online courses and newsl...

In this special episode of the Earned Media Podcast, I talk to Edelman Executive Director of Intellectual Property Tonia Ries about the 2021 Trust Barometer. 

We are living through a raging infodemic and a pandemic at the same time. The survey suggests that the Trump Administration and the GOP’s war against science has culminated in a crisis of confidence that threatens to prolong the coronavirus public health emergency. 

https://youtu.be/M9UcrzDhI0k

“In tweets to their followers, the political leaders of the U.S., Brazil and Mexico diminished the importance of masks and social distancing to accelerate reopening their economies; these nations now are among those leading the world in COVID deaths,” wrote Richard Edelman, who has served as President & Chief Executive Officer of the public relations firm since 1996, in his essay about the findings.

Fifty-seven percent of Biden voters say they trust the media, versus just 18% of Trump voters. The polarization is so extreme that 57% of Americans say they believe the U.S. is in the “midst of a cold civil war.” There’s so much politically motivated false information out there, people don’t know where to turn. “As a result of this daily diet of distortions and counter-factual narrative, we no longer believe our leaders,” writes Richard. 

https://youtu.be/si3-IBajUIc

Top Survey Findings:

Trust in traditional and social media as sources of general news and information are at all-time lows.Things have gotten to the point that over half of the people surveyed are worried that journalists, government leaders and business leaders are all purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations. People don’t know who to trust. All sources are viewed with suspicion. So bad information is not only contaminating the information ecosystem, it is also starting to make people doubt good information.People who are not careful consumers of information are less likely to be willing to get vaccinated and to aid the government in contact tracing.Employers have a key role to play in addressing the infodemic due to the high levels of trust they have with employees who distrust the news media.  

After surveying respondents in more than 28 countries, the report finds trust in journalists, government, and business leaders at an all time low. More than half said they think that journalists and leaders are purposely misleading people on a regular basis. This crisis of credibility has brought us to the point where most people don't know where to turn for accurate information anymore. 

Poor media hygiene -- which the report defines as relying on social media for news, not verifying headlines by clicking through and reading the actual story before amplifying it by liking or commenting and engaging in online echo chambers -- is threatening to prolong our recovery by discouraging a large enough percentage of the population from getting vaccinated, which will keep us from achieving herd immunity. As a result of the infodemic, inoculation hesitancy is too high.Just one 1 in 4 of the survey respondents practice good media hygiene.

Respondents who said they verify the accuracy of news they share on social media before amplifying it were also 11 points more likely to be vaccinated against coronavirus than people who don’t. Social media algorithms are juiced to drive engagement and truth is not a ranking factor, so sensational headlines travel farther,

Tim Soulo is CMO at Ahrefs, an industry-leading keyword research tool. With nearly 10 years of experience in SEO and digital marketing, Tim speaks at conferences around the world and publishes content on the Ahrefs Blog.

He’s also authored SEO research studies and digital marketing guides. In this interview, we discuss AI, domain authority, and conversion rate optimization.

Ahref’s has been upgrading their hardware and investing in AI, because “it really does give you and edge.” As big data processing gets easier, search engines will get “smarter and smarter, being able to factor in more ranking factors and blend them in a more sophisticated way.

So basically, the word ‘more’ is what AI means to SEO.” While everything will be more complicated, hopefully, it will be more useful, too. But Ahrefs needs more processing power, which means more hardware on the backend, to get there.

While neural networks that make decisions in specific scenarios aren’t that intelligent, Tim doesn’t see that as a limitation for Google when it comes to applying AI to its search algorithm. On the other hand, the raw amount of data that must be processed is a real challenge.

https://youtu.be/ZgyZzIPrIhc

Ahrefs is currently working on a metric that calculates how hard it would be to rank for a search query based on how many backlinks the top ten pages have. This has to encompass hundreds of millions of queries, which is hard enough to factor for backlinks. The formula demands exponentially more processing power.

In their page quality rater’s guidelines, Google uses “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness” to rate the quality of webpages. Tim says that no one’s quite sure about how Google exactly defines “authority”, but it’s probably not as simple as the number of backlinks a given page gets.

https://youtu.be/ZgyZzIPrIhc

Tim speculates that the algorithms also factor in how many times authors are mentioned on other pages, or how many people search their names, follow or write about them on social networks. But no one knows how Google prioritizes these signals.

In terms of which online outlets SEOs should be pitching, Tim says, “it boils down to what you have to say, and is the publication that you want to get a link from interested in that?”

Regarding domain authority, Tim reflects that Ahrefs’ approach is somewhat removed from that concept, stating that the rank boost you get from backlinks doesn’t come from domain authority, but from page authority. For instance, if you publish at TechCrunch and nobody reads or links to it, that page will have very low authority. 

https://youtu.be/IZCzBOsdBw8

There are no shortcuts to creating content that withstands the test of time. But consistently valuable content is the goal. Slow and steady wins the race. When it comes to leveraging AI, the lack of regulations around digital privacy in China means they have more data to inform algorithms than we do in the west. So I asked Tim if he thought the Chinese would dominate in AI. For his answer, listen to this podcast on SaaS marketing through SEO.

If you want to support this podcast, rate and comment on us at Apple Podcasts here.

If you don’t think your content is reaching its full potential - or you’re wondering how to build a sustainable B2B content market strategy that regularly brings in qualified leads - then you’re going to enjoy these tips from Robert Rose, the Chief Strategy Advisor at Content Marketing Institute. 

Not only is Robert with CMI, he’s also the Founder and Chief Troublemaker for The Content Advisory and a 3-time best-selling author.

Needless to say, he had some compelling ideas on building a content marketing strategy for B2B lead generation.

Which leads us right to the question:

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is defined as a plan to build a committed audience through consistent content that educates and inspires. Sounds simple enough. 

But not all content creative strategies are created equal. In fact, each one needs to be tailored to your unique business model. 

Robert’s 5 content marketing tips for startups and B2B businesses

1. Start with problems, not products

Many brands engineer a product and hand it off to marketing, hoping they can sell it.

That puts the solution before the problem.

You will be more successful if you reverse engineer your products based on a proven customer need. 

First, get to know your customers’ problems inside-out before making your next offering. Sometimes, they may not even know what their true problem is. 

But getting to the true core of what they need will make you much more successful in the long run. 

2. Focus on building an audience 

If you are creating scatter shot content marketing assets like blog posts or infographics that aren’t cohesively connected to a broader topic, you won’t attract anyone. 

It would be like publishing a magazine that covers a completely different topic every issue.

The best content marketing strategies are not necessarily campaign-focused, but they do have to be category-focused to connect with a target buyer over time. 

3. Be willing to change 

You wouldn’t take a race car driver seriously if he said, “I don’t want to change race cars, I just want to win the race.” It’s the same with your website content. You can’t think, “I don’t want to change my site, I just want to show up first.” 

Change. Test new things. Think of your website as something that is constantly evolving. 

4. Value quality over quantity

“Why won’t one amazing white paper suffice for the entire year?,” asked Robert.

Is it because it didn’t work? Are we tired of our own content? Do we think we need a different piece for every marketing effort? 

Firstly, each resource should not be limited to one-time use for a campaign. You should be creating in such a way that each individual piece makes the overall collection of content on your site more valuable.

Second, if you keep making more, more, MORE, you run the risk of sacrificing quality. The best content marketing tip I can give is to focus on quality - even if that means cutting back on quantity.

5. Sell solutions

Most of your B2B customers have already decided they need a change. It’s your job to sell them on the fact that your digital content marketing framework is the best one.  

Write a white paper with step-by-step,

Our guest is 5x start-up entrepreneur Jason Smith. He's the CEO of Klue, a competitive intelligence platform used by Cisco, Dell, and Hootsuite. They’ve raised $19M in venture funding so far. 

Jason is the Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winner, and Klue was off to great before the pandemic hit. He quickly realized that they needed to raise another round of funding to survive. 

The problem was he could only do it through video-conferences, which everyone advised against. But he had no choice. So he went for it. And he learned that pitching investors on Zoom meetings had some advantages.

https://youtu.be/rWbpGMUEWQc

Remote meetings eliminated the need to travel back and forth, so he could meet with more investors in less time. Plus Zoom brought in a surprising level of humanity. You don’t usually see kids with sock puppets in the boardroom, but when you’re working from home and the schools are closed, everyone understands because we’re all in the same boat.

For the first time in a long time, it was no longer all about data-driven startups. Obviously, the data was still key, but there was a very real human connection that didn’t always exist in the conference room. But that doesn't mean he didn’t get grilled on his numbers,

For those unfamiliar software-as-a-service startups like Klue, whether you’re an enterprise sales or product-led startup, one of the most important numbers investors want to know is monthly recurring revenue or MRR. 

To be attractive to investors, SaaS startups have their own unique set of requirements.  Whereas investors considering a B2B online marketplace would be looking at growth on the supply and demand sides, SaaS investors are interested in net customer growth. “You’ve got to prove that customers care about what you have enough to keep paying. And that’s gonna be reflected in your MRR,” says Jason.

The other thing they’re looking at is churn. You have to distinguish new customers from departing customers. You’re looking for overall expansion. That’s the net. New customers less departing customers.

If they like what they bought they’ll stick around. But if they’re saying ‘I overbought, and I want less now” that’s a negative. Some customers may be around for a while and then leave, which also causes a reduction of MMR. 

What is Klue?

“Klue is a competitive intelligence solution. What we’re trying to do is understand what your competitors are up to,” says Jason. 

The complexity comes from scripting the analyzed company - What’s happening on their website, what are they doing on Twitter, profiles on their employees, pricing, etc. 

The other side comes from analyzing the client – Emails and Slack conversations that they have about the competitor or rich text notes they’ve put into their CRM. “We combine everything we find from the external web and internal data into one continuously updated dashboard of activity on what they’re doing.”

Klue uses unstructured data -- which is more difficult to work with than financial data -- to create competitive intelligence profiles, competitor analysis templates, and target customer research that helps B2B tech companies generate and close more deals.

Eighty percent of the data that’s currently generated inside companies is unstructured. This is data that’s composed of rich text, voice to text translations, SMS messaging grists, Slack conversations (in Slack, podcasts, etc.), and other forms of natural language, which Klue analyzes with AI technology for competitive differentiation.