Transcription
And now for your listening pleasure, here's Polizzi and Rose covering the week of media, marketing, and digital content news. This old marketing. Take it away, boys. Well, hello, my friends. This is Robert Rose, and welcome to a special b to b marketing and b to b content marketing episode number 349 of this old marketing.
It's a whole lot of marketing for 11/11/2022. And with me as always on this show, my good friend, my colleague, and the guy who puts the number two in b two b, mister Joe Paulson. Oh my god. I couldn't resist. I can't believe you just said.
I couldn't resist. Who does number two work for? Number two work for. And plus, we just had an off the That's an Austin Powers joke, you guys. Wow.
We just had an off the record conversation too where it would bring a whole new meeting to number two, but we're not gonna go through. How are you doing, sir? And you excited about our little special gathering we are talking about? B two b just doesn't get enough love. We've we've No.
It doesn't. It you know, the funny thing is we hear it all the time at Content Marketing World. We hear it. I hear it. You know, and the funny thing is I I don't know whether it's just because I live so much b to b marketing and content marketing, especially.
Whenever I hear somebody go, you know, all the all the examples I ever hear of content marketing are all b to c. They're all consumer companies, you know, like Kraft or Disney or Red Bull or, you know, those kinds of examples. And I never hear b to b examples. I'm like, that's, like, all I seem to talk about is b to b examples. And in fact, I'm always looking for b to c examples.
So but I'm sure that's recency bias on my part just because I I do so much work in b to b. So I don't doubt their findings Sure. And their experience. But, yeah, I I'm really excited to actually talk about it. Tell the audience why why we decided to do this.
We I I had coffee with, one of our listeners, Todd, and, the first thing Which we don't do very often, by the way. Todd and I are both in Cleveland. So, hey, Todd. Yeah. Thank you so much.
We had a great time chatting. And the first thing he said is, are you ever gonna talk about b two b content marketing? And I said, we do. I mean, everything we talk about sort of and and and it's interesting because Todd really said we talk more about macro content issues like the Twitter, Facebook. That's true.
And we do. Absolutely. Yeah. We do. No doubt.
We've we've pivoted. We have pivoted in the last three years more toward, you know, and that's we we pivoted the tagline as well. We talk about media more than we do anything else. Because it's, frankly, just easier to talk about that. We don't have to prepare as much.
That's I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of not. So anyways, Todd and I were chatting, and I said, you know what?
That's a great idea. Whenever we get the chance to do a special episode, I'll talk to Robert, and I'm sure he would love to do a special episode on b to b content marketing or b to b marketing as you said in the intro. And so we're gonna we're gonna do thirty minutes or so on what you and I think are the keys to effective b two b content marketing right now. And, I've never been been so enthralled to have a conversation with you before. I see.
This is very exciting. You're right. Most of your examples are b two b. When I do presentations, I split fifty fifty. I try to do 50% b to c and 50% b to b.
Just to keep everybody on the assembly, you know. I try to do that as well, but it's it's often, I would say it's more often than not that I'm doing a talk or a keynote at a b to b or agency oriented, experience, you know, some event. And so I'm trying to match my case studies to whoever I'm actually speaking with so that it's, you know Very smart. Completely yeah. So completely well, it's it's if they ask.
I mean, they it's not like I've I've offered it up. They they say, would you please make all the examples relevant to our industry? And what I often push back a little bit with is I'll say, well, I'm gonna bring a few that are outside your industry because I want you to also have the perspective of what other industries are doing that you could copy to actually differentiate yourself in your industry. So there is some value to seeing things outside your own your own industry, of course. But, you know, because the the the concepts do apply.
But I did wanna touch briefly on the idea when I opened up and said cut b to b content marketing and b to b marketing because as we get into some of these six things that we'll talk about, one of them is how these things are becoming merging. They they are they are becoming, much more aligned and and part of one strategy rather than something separate. So So we'll talk a little more about that. So it's sort of it's either like the Included. It's either like the Ethereum merge or the merge from the movie Dark Crystal.
It's one of those two. And and Wow. Okay. That's where my head's at. Right there.
Really? Dark Crystal. You went to you went to Dark Crystal. Dark Crystal is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's a good movie.
It's a really good movie. What's the what it It's a very geeky thing. It's one of those movies that Is it The Happening? The Merge. What is it called?
The it's I can't think of it. Every there's a thousand people out there knowing exactly what that's called. But whenever the two, the Skeksis and the other ones merge together, it's a thing. It's the awakening. It's the oh, no.
That's a Robert De Niro movie. Oh, I can't okay. Whatever. I can't do that. That's it.
That's all I got. Anyways, this is a really good thing. I think we should start Okay. I think we should start the podcast. I was just gonna let you, like, sort of walk out of there.
Through my brain, and it's not working well today. But, anyways Yes. Alright. Well, it's it's a it's a great movie, The Dark Crystal. Every time it comes on, my my wife goes, really?
You're watching a movie with puppets? And I'm like, first of all, they're Muppets. They're not puppets. But second of all, yes. That does that.
You're the one that corrects. Puppets do offended me. They're not puppets. Yes. They're not puppets.
They are Muppets. So why don't I kick this off, and then I'd love to get your take on on a few things. So you and I are gonna talk about six or seven things that we think The great conjunction by the way, which is that's what you're really thinking about. Much. It was hurting that I didn't know the answer to that, and I was not gonna clickety clack on my keyboard.
So, so, yes, I wanted to give you a take. You know, I were kicking the idea back and forth, talk about these six, seven things, whatever the case is. But I wanted to to give you, an idea of why I started this in the first place because a lot of these things come from the idea that I think that a marketing a traditional marketing strategy or traditional content strategy is just not enough. I think that now is the time to really start making some significant changes in the program. And a lot of the reason I think that's the case is because we don't have as much time as marketers as we think we do.
So if you look at some of the research, the average person stays in a job about four years or so today. If you look at the average marketing role, like mid level marketing role, that's about three years. And if you look at the chief marketing officer, you and I have talked to this many time about this many times on this podcast, is about twenty four months, two years. So if you think that we just don't have a lot of time when it comes to that, but we're talking about a long term content marketing program that often takes years to really get going, to grow roots, to really start seeing significant change with your customers and prospects. I'm almost thinking like we have to treat it, without the patients that we need and we have to start making these decisions, and taking some risks that we normally wouldn't take because of this time issue.
I don't know if you agree with that, but I wanted to get your your take with it where I'm saying a solid strategy might not be enough today. We might need to, to add a little extra fuel to the fire, if you will. No. I agree a %. I mean, I think what you've, you know, you've it's the it's there's a very nice segue that goes into sort of my framing.
Right? You're framing it with the time issue, and I am time or I am framing it with a different issue, which is related to time, which is the the evolution of where we are digitally. Right? Twenty years later, twenty three years later in in in this particular case as b to b marketers. Hundred percent agree with you that the we often don't, and this is, you know, it's arguable that many b to b companies are just discovering marketing, much less content marketing.
When in the early days, call it early two thousands, b to b marketing was for most industrial companies something that was akin to just sales with a little bit of a softer tone. You know? There wasn't a lot of what we think of now as classic content marketing for sure, but even softer elements of branding, softer elements of looking at the same way that a consumer company would look at marketing and building brand and brand awareness and all the things that go on about that. And that's something that's a relatively new muscle for b to b companies, much less adding in the complexities of of content marketing. And and one of the reasons that or one of the implications of that is just to your point, the investments that we make in marketing are both transactional in terms of campaigns that we've run, in terms of the short term projects that we try and get, you know, call those day trading investments.
Right? We have a small investment into multiple things, campaigns or efforts or sales sprints or whatever we're doing. And then we have our long term investments, that which pays dividends over the long haul. Content marketing is definitely the latter, where it is a value investment. It's like building a house that's going to give you a return on investment, but only after you build it.
And I think that to me speaks to the time effort that you're that you really get to, which is you have to give it that time value, which is hard to do these days. We live in such a short attention span world, but that's where you get the value of balancing both a short term campaign driven strategy, which is usually marketing or sales driven, and then you have a content marketing initiative, which is much more value investment or longer time horizon oriented. No. It's it's a great point. I think that if you take both those things and you would want our recommendations on moving forward, I'm gonna start.
And I it really starts with Content Marketing Institute research that shows that the average enterprise distributes their content 13 to 16 different ways. And every time I see that statistic, Robert, I think that somebody's made a big mistake. As as tempting as it is to distribute content in all those different ways, and when we say that, we're thinking, okay, webinars and podcasts and events and research and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. So add them all up 13 to 16 generally for one audience, and it reminds me of the fact in Europe, of course, a history historian of of media. And if you look at media companies who have been great for a long period of time at building loyal audiences, they generally build one great thing first, and then they diversify.
So if you take take a b to c example, take our beloved Red Bull Media House. A lot of people don't realize that Red Bull Media House started with a print magazine. It started on the formula one track as sort of a daily show daily after the event took place. It went to, home distribution. It took six years to get into US, distribution US homes.
They had now 2,000,000 subscribers to the Red Bulletin magazine from Red Bull Media House, and now on they've been doing Red Bull Media House for seventeen years. It's probably valued at billion dollars. They do all sorts of things, but they started by focusing on one thing. They got really good at it. They found their voice, and then on you know, then they saw success.
Same thing with New York Times with the print newspaper. If you look at Huffington Post, they started with one blog to one audience. Now they've got, like, 400. Look at our great b to b example, God's Head Marketing Institute. We started by just blogging to one audience of enterprise marketers five days a week.
We end ended up, increasing that to seven days a week, but that was it. It was just the blog for the most part, added email, added webinars, diversified later. And I think the issue we have with a lot of B2B marketers is and I get it, But they wanna diversify immediately, which is the thing you can't do because you'll end up being mediocre at a lot of things. And we wanna do is be an expert at one or two things. And I think we've got a limited amount of energy, a limited amount of, of resources to use in a b to b organization that we can't waste it on doing being okay at research, being so so at social media, be having, an average podcast, having an email newsletter that gets 5% open rate and nobody opens or pays attention to.
I think we've gotta look and do a cursory content audit and lay all those things on the table and say, okay. What's really making an impact? Where are we wasting time? Where are things that we just started doing in the organization and we forgot about? Maybe we need to get rid of those.
Where are big opportunities that we're leaving on the table because we're spread so thin? And make some decisions and really focus on doing a few things really well instead of everything, which seems to be I mean, you go into these large b to b organizations. You're seeing that. What what do you tell them when you see them doing all the things, which we get? We get why they're doing it.
But what do you tell them at the end of the day when they're doing all this? Well, I'll tell them the same thing that I'll tell you right now, which is stop chasing audiences. The your the advice you're giving is is so good because of the quality aspect of things. Right? It's really hard to be good at a lot of different things at the same time.
And it's interesting. When you see great b to b case studies, you look at the great, you know, the ones that are often held up as being fantastic case studies for content marketing. Inevitable even in b to c, by the way, as well. Inevitably, what you see is some form of owned media property where the rationale for building it was something. Maybe SEO, maybe thought leadership, maybe differentiating a better customer experience, maybe whatever the rationale for building it is.
And what they did was very much like they brought the moths to the flame as it were. They they treated it like a product, and they promoted it, and they built an audience around it. What almost inevitably never happens is when you try and chase your audience on all the platforms that they're on and try and aggregate them in all those different places. I wanna aggregate them on LinkedIn. I wanna aggregate them on YouTube.
I wanna aggregate them on Facebook. I wanna aggregate them on my email newsletter. I wanna aggregate them on a podcast. And so you end up with lots of little knot of, you know, flocks, if you will, of customers or potential customers, which is nice, but it's so much it's exponentially more work to keep that small little knot engaged than it is to actually bring them into a common experience where they're getting common value, you're getting better data, you're getting better results, and ultimately long term, you've built something that is more attractive that you can then diversify from, that you can then add to. I don't know how many times we've said, you know, it's way easier to build a podcast if you've got an existing audience.
It's just way easier because they're already there. Now you're just giving them one other place where they can experience the awesomeness that is you. And so when I look at that diversification and when we talk with clients, we often say, look. They're in many cases, you're dealing with a large big b to b company where the siloed nature of the organization is just gonna be what it is gonna be. Right?
So product groups are gonna have their blog. The brand group is gonna have their blog. Everybody's gonna have sort of a resource center. And that's just the way it's gonna be. So for pragmatic purposes, you have to sort of create a strategy around the idea of how to optimize these things for different parts of the journey.
So the the best you can do is to take those multiple areas, those multiple platforms, and focus them. Get them really focused on one thing. So, yes, you're managing multiples as a portfolio, but you're managing them all against one goal, one audience, and one value. And they're and they're different, by the way. No.
I like If you can do that, you're if you can do that, you're way ahead. And but if you can even go further than that and sort of wrangle everybody into, for example, a Dreamforce like Salesforce does, now you're a step ahead of even the competition. But I like the idea of goal focus of one goal, one platform. It just there's no need to over overly complicate this. When it's not marketing is not rocket science, I think the simpler we keep it, the better.
But I want you to add on to that and take the next one because we talk about focus. We were building this owned media thing. We're trying to build a trusted, loyal audience, be the leading expert in something, especially from a b two b standpoint. We wanna be the leading expert in some informational area and then talk about the opportunity to then diversify. Yeah.
The opportunity to then, you know, it diversifies by differentiation. Right? You know? And and, you know, you can start diversifying your idea by looking at the what that one goal and really using that to differentiate yourself against everything else everybody's talking about. That's the real key.
Right? You you know, is is so many of your competitors and this is especially true. We just finished a project for a b to b company that that that is you know, what we did was we we took 20 of their competitors, and we mapped them on a positioning story platform basis. Looked at their blogs, looked at their resource centers, looked at how they were speaking to the industries, looking how they were speaking, you know, on their on their corporate website, and we plotted them on sort of a map, you know, of where they were, you know, on to where they were focusing. You know, we called this sort of a focused experience map and kind of a quadrant view, spider graph view, if you will.
And what we end up with is everybody is in the same pocket. Like, b to b companies, the biggest challenge with most is everybody says exactly the same thing, either because we've copied each other or because we've looked at, you know, or because there really isn't that much to talk about. It's a very niche topic. It's a very focused area. You know, our widgets do the same thing as our competitors widgets, but we've been doing them for twenty years.
They've been doing them for ten years or whatever the value is of the product. They're you know, it's a pretty commoditized business. However, as our friend Don Schultz used to say, the only thing that they can't copy is the way that you communicate about that, the story that you're telling. And so if you can focus on that one area on each part of the buyer's journey that you are different and the story is different. Well, now you've done everything to not just only diversify, but diversify in a differentiated way.
I love that because I I use in some of the presentations I do this idea of cloud computing. So we'll go and Google cloud computing, and we'll see who comes up in Google. And we'll say, oh, there's there's Amazon. There's SAP. There's, there's Oracle.
There's IBM, Salesforce. They're all listed. Right? And they all have their what is cloud computing. And we go into it, And we realize and I get it.
Right? They're trying to be found in search, but when you go into that content, it's all the same. I could take the content from Amazon Web Services page, throw it on IBM, and nobody would know the difference. We are talking about this thing exactly the same. And what we're trying to and when you're talking about, especially with thought leadership and b two b is, you have to find your real area of differentiation so you can break through all that clutter and be the thing that's noticed.
And we call that the in the content model, we call that the content tilt. Like, what is that area of little to no competition where you actually have a chance to break through all that clutter? And that's where I think a lot of b to b companies don't take it. Now media companies do this really well because they put together an editorial mission statement. And like, okay, well, who's the specific audience we're talking?
Not the general audience. We wanna get this audience as small as we can so we can be the leader in that. And then what are we going to send to them, and what's the audience outcome? What are we going to do? Are they we're gonna help them live a better life or get a better job or whatever the case is?
And you put together, at least in this case, of, you know, b two b content mission statement. And it's not about what you sell ever. This is about positioning yourself as an expert and delivering value, and you say this very well all the time. You deliver value outside the product or service that you sell. So when you're thinking about this, your b to b company, before you just start creating content about the thing, you really have to try to whittle down a specific audience and a specific content niche and look at that area and say, you know, if if you did if you did the work here, if you did all the things, if you did the podcast, and you delivered consistently over time, in this area, if this tilt, in this differentiation, would you actually become the leading expert in this area?
And that's what I want people to do, and I think and you see it all the time. You just they don't go the extra step. They say, oh, we're gonna do a podcast on cloud computing. Okay. Great.
Join the other seventy seventy thousand that have podcasts in that area or blogs or webinar series or whatever, and think about what's the spin that you're going to put on that's different that you can actually break through all the sameness out there. Yeah. Well, here here's here's an here's another way to look at it. Right? Which is so one of the things that b to b companies have a lot of them have in common is an industry marketing effort.
They separate marketing out by industry. Here's why we're good for aerospace, and here's why we're good for finance, and here's why we're good for health care. Right? So that's a common thing that we see on the corporate website. And then go look at your industry marketing on that corporate website and and look at the pages.
And how many of them are simply just affirmations of your resume in that industry. In other words, our you know, your the front page is our we're awesome in aerospace, and there's some quote from some aerospace VP on your on your site. And then here's the products we offer for aerospace and how, you know, it's the same products just with a little bit of a different description of them. And here's what our thought leadership in aerospace, and maybe you've got a link to a couple of specifically written white papers and so on and so forth. What if instead you took that website and you turned the aerospace section into a topic hub or a, you know, treat it like a publication?
Like, what is your point of view? Why aerospace? Why are you so awesome at aerospace? And what is the problem that needs to be solved in aerospace? And what is your point of view on solving it?
What if you turned it into truly a valuable resource for someone in the aerospace industry to get information on the aerospace industry in the particular topic that your product or service covers, and transform it from being a billboard of why you're so awesome into a valuable resource for your particular aerospace customer. It's a it's a very subtle but very important and distinct change because now you're taking a part of the buyer's journey, making it valuable for the customer, and differentiating yourself because guess what? Your competitors are not doing that. They're doing the exact same thing you are, which is puffing out their chest and saying how awesome they are in aerospace. But we when we used to sell this back twenty years ago, we used to say, okay.
You get to a cocktail reception and you're mingling around. What's the two things you don't do? Don't don't talk about yourself and don't talk about how great you are. And that's basically the core of most b two b content program programs. Right.
And what we wanna do is, hey. Let's be interesting. Let's let's focus on the audience's pain points. What what's the person on top? What's their need?
What are they interested in? And let's talk about that. Then they'll like me more. I mean, it's just it's just be human. Right?
This is I mean Well and so I mean, so well, speaking of channels and speaking of how you do that on the web, you know, one of the things and this is our third sort of, element here, which or fourth element, excuse me, which gets to the idea of, you know I mean, and I I I I know you're passionate about this. So it's it's all about the email. It's all about email. And now is that still true? I mean, is it still true that it's just email and email newsletters?
And in 2023, are we really focused in on email? Or, you know, should we be talking about Slack, or should we be talking about some other Well, there there's not the only thing, Robert. But I will tell you that if you look at, if you if you look at the m and a environment, I tend to look at some of the acquisitions that have happened in media. The most valuable content business out is out there run on me on email as kind of the core. If you look True.
Political, the athletic, Industry Dive was just sold for a bunch of money. Insider, Huffington Post, Bleacher Report. I got a whole list in front of me. Morning Brew, What do they all the hustle just bought by HubSpot? They've all run with email as the core platform.
Now why is that critical? Because if we don't focus on something we can control, and we talked about this ton in the last episode when we were talking about Twitter and building on rented land. There's nothing wrong with building on rented land. You and I, we've we've had a subscriber hierarchy that you and I have been working on for years. I think we first talked about it in, in killing marketing, and we went on and I kept working on it and figuring this thing out.
But if you look at Facebook and Snapchat and TikTok and LinkedIn and Instagram and YouTube, all those things are good. We want to have followers. We wanna build audiences there if it makes sense for our business, but we don't control it. We wanna move up that hierarchy and go to things we can control like email newsletters, own membership site. That's why you and I have gotten on the bandwagon of tokenization and Web three because there's an opportunity to own things, that that can't be taken away from you if you do it the right way, which we'll talk about in a future episode, I'm sure.
But it's this rent to own strategy, and I think email is there. And I some somebody always you know, raises their hand when I talk about this stuff, and I and I start talking email like the old guy in the room. And they're like, what do you like, what about the new stuff? Why are you talking about email? And I said, did you check your email today?
I'll use, sir. Did you check your email today, sir? And I said, oh, yeah. I did. Okay.
Well, did were there were there two or three emails, like email newsletters that you you didn't delete, that you didn't think were spam, that you really paid attention to, that you always open up and nodded his head. Absolutely. Every time. And I can talk to anybody about that, and we'll find that. The best way that we have right now where we have some control over the data and over that relationship is email, where you have a Twitter and a LinkedIn and Facebook that can't take it away from us.
And if you're thinking, hey. What about email platforms? Absolutely. Something could go wrong, but you can port that data out and have another service provider send that for you. You can't do that necessarily on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever.
So that's why we say focus on email when you possibly can. And to do that, well, you need what? You need a fantastic, remarkable newsletter, and you will attest more than I will that most b to b newsletters are horrific. Just terrible regurgitation of stuff on the site and in the industry. And if they get five to 10% open rate, they're happy with that, and that's despicable.
We we cannot be satisfied with those kinds of things, and that's where I'd like to, you know, figure out what that platform is. And that platform might be an email. But if it's not and you're looking at diversification, you might wanna say, okay. Well, I'm gonna have we're gonna have a YouTube strategy, and then we're gonna port those people off to email with a great email newsletter offering. Same thing with the podcast.
Same thing with an Instagram page or TikTok or whatever the case is. And I think still today, and I've been talking about this for almost twenty years now, I still think that's the way that you can take control over your marketing instead of giving it all up to another entity. Yeah. So it's it's worth talking about here because this comes to the practitioner side because one of the things that is especially true in b two b is you'll get a you'll get a lot of heads nodding when you start talking about email because, of course, every marketing department demand generation group, they're, you know, the they're they're called, you know, MQL machines. Right?
They're they're generating qualified leads to sales by what are they getting? An email address. And they're doing so by making gated assets available. What we have to remember is and there's a whole discussion to have around gating, which is whether or not we should gate content assets or not. The headline there, by the way, is neither is neither in binary choices is is right.
It's a much more nuanced discussion in terms of where gating is appropriate and where gating isn't appropriate. But more importantly, is realizing that in a content marketing program, you've got your gating strategy, which is a may or may not be producing good high quality leads that you wanna follow-up with with a drip campaign. That is a direct marketing effort in order to get that unique identifier of that customer that you wanna drip a regular funnel based campaign to. Nothing wrong with that. There's plenty of great practices to do there.
Let's put that aside for the moment. Because what we have to realize is what you're not creating is a subscribed audience. You are creating a transaction for a white paper or an ebook or a demo or whatever it is that you've promised on the other side of that gate. That is not a subscriber. A subscriber is someone who willingly asks for more content.
In other words, they're asking for stuff that they haven't even gotten yet. A subscriber is somebody who reads your ebook or reads your white paper or reads your white your website, then comes back and says, I'd love so much what I got from this. Please send me more. I don't even know what you're gonna send me, but please send me more because I want more of it. And I want it I want it to be one of the most valuable assets.
Now, the to your excellent point, you better have something good to send them. Right? Whether it's a newsletter or a quarterly report or whatever you're gonna send to those audiences. But that's when you're creating a subscribed audience. And the the the value in differentiating those two is so high because so many times what I see in b two b companies is they conflate both of those.
They just have one giant database. And it's one giant database of people who get spammed regularly with email. Email that says, hey, by the way, you signed up for this white paper. You probably would enjoy this. You probably would enjoy that.
And, no, I wouldn't. I signed up for that white paper because I had a need in that moment, not even thinking about buying. And you can actually argue, and I've done this with b two b companies that do this sort of gating and then immediately, you know, follow-up with a sales message. It's like, if I've downloaded a white paper from your site, unless that white paper is entitled 10 ways to have salespeople call me and bug me to sell me more software, that is probably the worst time to actually call a customer. If I've just downloaded a white paper, I haven't even read it yet.
And if I'm getting an email from you That's crazy. Or a sales call from you that says, hey. Saw that you downloaded this white paper. Let's set up a time for us to talk about your problem. I don't even know that I have a problem yet.
So it's not only improper, it's the worst time. Because now you're telling me that you're not interested in value to me. I'm just, a number, you know, in your in your in your spreadsheet. So that differentiating between those two things is the key difference between a gating strategy of drip campaigns and a content marketing strategy of building a subscribed audience. It's funny.
Our friend, Joe Chernoff, I remember talking to him years ago, and he said that he he didn't have the salespeople contact anyone until they touched at least seven pieces of educational content. It could be a webinar, an ebook, opened a couple newsletters, whatever. Okay. Because he looked at the data, and he said for some reason, seven was his magic number where they were ready, where they engaged in enough to have a conversation. I thought that was interesting.
So he told the sales team you could not contact before that. Yeah. What I like doing is layering it and being clever about the way that we write our content. In other words, if I write a white paper and the title of the white paper is the visionary change coming to our industry and our point of view on that change. Well, if somebody downloads that, I they are not a sales prospect yet.
That that is they're looking for reasons to change their business, and they're looking for the visionary change. If, on the other hand, I write an ebook called the top 10 steps I need to implement and the technical aspects of implementing x y z technology Yeah. That might be. Yeah. Because they're obviously interested in implementing something.
And so now I wanna ask them, alright. Well, what are you interested in implementing? How can I how can I help you implement? That's a good point. How to seamlessly switch your marketing automation tool.
You know? That's, like, whatever. That's exactly That's that's interesting to go for. No. I like that.
Versus the top 10 marketing automation tools that are out there. Right? Totally The the downloading of those two different assets tell you exact all you need to know about the intent of that particular download. I like that. Running for intent.
Somebody should write a blog post about that. Okay. Our next one. You and I have Yeah. And I have talked about this a bit, and I I will keep talking about it probably until I'm dead.
But I learned this years ago when I first started at Penton in business to business publishing. When we would get together for our p and l meetings, it was expected that we would grow in two ways. We would grow our audience and grow our revenue organically, and we would grow our audience and our revenue revenue by acquisition. So we had to come into these meetings, not only with ideas of how we were gonna grow from the stuff we already had and internally and great ideas, but who were we looking at outside where we could possibly purchase with the cash we had on hand to add to what we were already doing? I can tell and you know this, but I can tell you I have not been in a b two b company that has that kind of mentality.
And I think we have to have that because right now is the perfect time to start thinking about acquisitions. And I'm not going to go into all the details because we have shows specifically to this. But I would say that now is the time to start thinking about a simple process for making this happen. And I would do something like, first of all, if you're in the marketing department, think about who who is the person in your organization that owns the the purse strings for the budget. They need to understand that you're thinking this way because you have a company that probably has already been active in acquisitions, but they're acquiring a product or a service.
They haven't they haven't bought a audience or a content creation machine, if you will. So you want to get into buy in and let them know that this is a thing, and you could use things like what Salesforce is doing and buying up CMO club or HubSpot buying the hustle or whatever you have to to say this is a thing. And then you want to make a wishlist and figure out, okay, for this audience you're targeting, who are the bloggers, the podcasters, the newsletter writers that are in the creator economy, if you will? They could be small media companies or independent content creators that are reaching these audiences already. You probably already know them.
But what are the podcasts you're listening to? What are the you're going and searching out Google, and who's on the first couple pages of Google for those results that aren't your competition? There's an opportunity there to purchase those things, and I always recommend don't just go out and make an offer. Obviously, you wanna test first, and they might start with small partnerships. It might start with actually sponsoring a newsletter or a podcast or something so you can make sure this is the right audience, it's the right content tilt.
Maybe that your, your goals align with that creator's. And then once you make that shortlist, you can go through the process of acquisition. It takes a first of all, you've got to get this built into the culture of your marketing department, and you have to understand how these things work. And then the next year, you can really start to move. And I think what you'll see and we're already seeing companies like I just mentioned, Salesforce and HubSpot, they are on I mean, they probably have a super long list of possible acquisitions that they're going for, and they do have cash on hand and they're making these deals.
And if you're asking, is it easier to build something, build an audience from a content marketing perspective or buy? It's always easier to buy. You can cut out a couple years. Are there problems? Is it perfect every time?
Absolutely not. But some of these deals are 5 figures, folks. And sometimes the content creators just wanna stay on with the program and a little bit of cash. Yeah. So there's opportunities there.
Yeah. It goes right to your time question. Right? I mean, it's just a function of time. It it it you know, what it what what acquisition does is give you the time that you would spend organically growing something is cut, you know, so much down, in terms of how much time you have to spend.
Now there's time that you'll spend getting them integrated into your business model. There's time that you'll get integrated into that business model. There are talent and all those, you know, all the typical integration issues, but we're talking weeks and months, not quarters and years. And the thing that I wanna you you you talk about this a lot, but it's worth saying because this is a new skill. You know, many the biggest pushback I get on this particular idea is that's way above my pay grade.
I can't I can't you know, you you don't even understand how much it would take to unwind in the CFO's brain for us to even grok something like this. It's way above my pay grade. And so I get that. I totally get that. But one of the things that we have to understand is, yes, it it is complex.
That it's more complex than simply buying ad space or launching a blog or something, but it's also not a moonshot. You know, if you do the math, HubSpot's acquisition of the hustle was about 6% of their yearly marketing spend. So ask yourself, would you spend 6% of your marketing budget, your yearly marketing budget, would you spend 6% of it acquiring one of the leading publications in your space that would immediately give you audience, that would immediately give you staff, that would immediately give you content and resources, and would immediately give you data and measurability. I think most of the time the answer to that would be absolutely a % yes. Would I decrease my marketing budget by five to 7% in order to acquire one of those?
Hell yes. I would. Not even a not even a question. Now finding the appropriate platform, finding the the right people, The I worked with one b to b organization a few years ago, and they did what was ostensibly a hire, an acquihire, if you will. It was a blogger who had a relatively, not hugely, but relatively popular blog with a very niche audience that this company was trying to reach.
So literally, they went to that person and said, we'll give you a big signing bonus. We'll we'll hire you as our content marketer, and we'll get your blog. And voila. Instant instant acquisition. But it was positioned as a hire instead of an acquisition.
Yeah. Lots of ways to do this these days. And to your point, even to the point of saying, hey. Let's not acquire the company. Let's not jump through all the legal hoops just yet.
Let's actually just become the exclusive sponsor. Go out to one of these blogs or these magazines and go, what would it take to buy up all of your inventory? That, you know, every single bit of your inventory where you write, we we participate in the editorial process. We basically, quote unquote, own your magazine, and we'll put in, you know, our own webinars. We'll put in our own content.
We'll get the data, the subscriber data, etcetera. We'll get a co branding deal together very much like and I don't know what the legal structures of this are. But Pfizer, you know, for example, partners with, I think it's Pfizer. I could be getting this wrong. With arthritis to create arthritis.com, I believe.
I'm I'm maybe getting those URLs wrong, but it may be arthritis.org. But it's one of those where there's a co branding effort, but they are separate entities. And so that's, you know, another way to approach this as sort of exclusive sponsor or benefactor, if you will. I like that. I think that's an easier way to go, and I think that might be the Yeah.
The the middle step before you take it all the way and say because you already have those. You can make those decisions tomorrow. It's like, I'm just gonna take my budget and move it over here. And, the the last thing I would say is the the hustle specifically, it wasn't called SamParr.com. Sam Parr, who is the cofounder.
It it was called The Hustle. Right. It's a lot easier to work with these publications that are actually content brands outside of the individual. And we talked about this last episode, right, about Kanye. Yay.
Yeah. And and if if it wasn't called it was Kanye's business, we thought, like, if it was Beats, like Beats by Dre, it'd be different. So those considerations should be taken into, consideration as well because because if you want to consider considerations. Of course. And by the way, the again, with the non you know, and speaking of our friend Joe Chernoff, you know, Pendo, which is a product management software b two b company, bought mined the product, the community.
And the event. Yeah. Absolutely. Managers and the event. And I don't have any intimate knowledge of the details or the quantity, but they're not a huge company.
They're they're a small startup company, technology company, and they bought that event and they bought that platform. And now they have the biggest, one most wonderful community in the product marketing space or product management space. And now, you know, that's theirs to to claim in terms of being a leading media operator. And and, yeah, I believe that understanding the acquisition process is the one of the most important things you could do as a marketer today, and I think marketers don't get that yet. And I understand why.
We've never really talked about it. It's very important right now, especially from our time. And it brings up and it brings up a great it brings up a great, you know, sort of last piece here, which is our, you know, driving diverse value. Right? Driving you know, you talk about driving diverse revenue and building multiple paths here, but that acquisition can enable that as well.
Yeah. I mean, I we we first talked about this in killing marketing. If you consider the revenue model associated once you build a loyal audience and you look at direct ways to drive revenue, like you have conferences and events, you have sponsorship advertising, you have premium content offers, you have subscriptions, whatever the case is. Those are generally what media companies have done, but any company can do that. Then on the outside, you have your traditional content marketing goals that you're trying to fill for.
I'm selling I wanna create a loyal audience and sell more products or sell more services or, create more loyalty, which is the OG content marketing goal or better customers, whatever the case is, and higher yield for them from those customers and what they buy. But I really think that if you look I mean, it's already within what Apple's doing, what Google's doing, what Amazon. If you look at the most innovative companies, they're already driving revenue seven, eight, nine different ways from marketing. And I think we have to start you don't have to start do doing it right now in b to b marketing, but you have to start thinking about it. You have to start looking at what Arrow Electronics has done, where they have over 30 different content brands, and every one of those content brands are at least break even or profitable.
And they're driving 10 different types of revenue from each of those brands. It's very hard to wrap your arms around thinking about, I can mark I can build an audience and market to them and sell the things we always say, but I'll I can also break even with them or drive revenue or drive profit with those as well for noncompetitive partners or with, content buys or with subscriptions or whatever the case is. And when was that? 02/2017 you wrote that, Robert? That we said mark I think the sub I think the original title for killing marketing was marketing as a profit center That's right.
Which we thought was too boring. Which thank god we changed it. Thank goodness we Basically, the sub sub if there was a Yeah. A secondary line there, it would be marketing as a profit center. And, and I think that's that's where we have to go with this.
And and there's a key thing to know there as a b to b marketer when you're thinking about this, which is you heard us say earlier and and and we'll double down on that on one goal. Right? One objective. So it's one objective of value, but multiple ways of getting there. Right?
So it's in other words, when you start thinking about your platform or your media strategy or whatever you're gonna create as your content marketing effort, it is all about one objective to deliver value to this audience in this particular way to drive a business goal of now I can get there in multiple ways. I can create value through revenue. I can create value through, through the idea of sponsorship or efficiencies in the funnel. I can drive, multiple values through the data, the first party data that I'm gonna glean and making my ad spend more effective. And there are multiple ways to get to that objective, and that's the key of diverse value streams to get to a single overall objective.
Oh, I like that. I always talk about money. You talk about value. That's where we're different. And it's okay.
Yeah. Well, I'm you're you're making money. I'm I'm working for a living as a marketer. So yeah. I mean, yeah.
Well, but There you go. Hey. Before we get to, we we have a bonus. We have a bonus. Another one?
We wanna talk about. A bonus. There is one more that we need to talk about. A bonus. Not just six, but now seven.
There is a bonus. But before we get to that, first of all, we just wanna say if you're interested in all the stuff in our takes on the all this stuff, and maybe we'll find something to put into the show notes for this because not a lot of news to certainly put. But get on over to our site, won't you, this old marketing. Site. Hashtag us up with all sorts of the wonderfulness on, the Twitter.
We love story ideas. We're gonna be back to our normal programming next week. So hashtag us up with wonderful story ideas. What's Elon doing this week? What's, Mark Zuckerberg doing this week, what is happening in the world of acquisitions and content marketing and media.
All of it would be great to get over there, and just check us out. You can also get, obviously, and listen to other episodes, all 348 of them. So get on over to this oldmarketing. Site and subscribe and leave us a review. Won't you won't you won't you do that?
Just subscribe. Leave us a review. We love those reviews. We need those reviews. You want us on that wall.
You need us on that wall. And, that's all I have to say about that. Alright. What is our bonus? We have a bonus.
We have a bonus, thing here to leave to leave our our our folks with. What is what is your bonus? The bonus, I I think it's for context. The reason why I thought this was a good bonus one for everyone is, with writing you know, Brian Piper and I are writing the next, and you've actually contributed quite nicely to the next edition of killing or of, Epicash. Shit.
I forgot the book. I think the plagiarism is a plagiarism. Content. Yes. Something like that.
Yeah. One of the chapters is written by you, and I just asked if I could rerun something. But, Epic Content Marketing second edition comes out in March, and we interviewed Amanda Todorovic who runs the amazing content, program at, at Cleveland Clinic. And I was reading through what she was talking about, and she started talking about how that whole thing started. And I remember that well because when they were starting this program in 02/2008, '2 thousand '9, I was invited into some of these meetings, and they were really starting to think about, okay.
So Cleveland Clinic runs a great blog, health essentials. It's break even right now. She she's running all sorts of good, amazing revenue programs, not only driving patients into Cleveland clinics, but she does consulting and sponsored content, a bunch of other things. But in 02/2009, it was called Cleveland Clinic Health Hub, and the idea kind of festered for two, three years, and it launched in 02/2012. A gentleman named Scott Linnebarger launched this program.
Took every I mean, anybody listening to this and how much you have to champion to get these things done, he was able to do that. By 02/2013, he's out of energy. Scott no more. He's done. And brings Amanda on board, and then Scott ends up leaving a year or two later.
Amanda takes over and then the whole thing goes gangbusters because all the hard work's been done. So my recommend I know you have a different take on this, Robert, but my recommendation is if you're having a lot of problems in your b to b organization, you can't get by and you tried all the things that you can, I would go out there and find another b to b company that already has bought into it and is about three years into their strategy? Because this seems to be the spot where they've tried it, they still believe in it, the first thing hasn't worked and they're gonna try it to move in another direction or put extra, resources to that. And that's what Amanda did. She came in and now Health Essentials gets, I don't know, 13,000,000 people to their site every month.
It's totally crazy. But I think it's that timing thing back to that timing thing is a really important, idea. And if you're struggling in your organization to get all that buy in we're talking about, maybe you just leave is is kinda what I'm saying. So there you go. That's my wonderful career advice.
Just that's that's that's what a wonderful what a wonderful way for you to end. Right? Yeah. Just, you know, just quit. Look.
I I the way I look at it is this. I I I agree, by the way. You know, the the funny thing is one of the one of the interesting things that comes out of my consulting work. Somebody asked me one time, they said, how many of the companies, and especially the b two b companies, how many of the b two b companies actually execute against the strategy and roadmap that you lay out for them in a in a from a content marketing perspective? And I said, it's exceedingly few.
And they were surprised by the answer and I said, well, why? And I said, because it's the the roadmap and the strategy is relatively straightforward. You know, I'd like to think I bring a little bit of, creativity and and thoughtfulness to bear when we create those things. But the the the as you've heard throughout the entire episode today, what we're talking about isn't rocket science. It's not it's relatively straightforward when it comes to the change management and the execution part of it, especially in a b to b organization that is tied in their ways, especially those you know, I I can't tell you the number of times I've heard, well, we're run by technical people.
You know, we're run by engineers. And so if it doesn't, you know, if it it you have to explain things in a way that an engineer or a technical person would understand. And it's like, okay. I get that. But it's the change management part of it that's hard.
That's the hard part of it. They so anybody who has executed a success a successful content marketing program has executed a, you know, a meaningful change management program in their business. And that's difficult and it's and it's hard. And and so the punchline to the exceedingly few who actually follow the advice or are successful after following the advice is that way more often is what I get the response when when when those people can't do that are the people who call me up eight months, six months, a year later and go, you know, that road map that you built for us at x y z company, I couldn't do it there. But I went to this new company.
And because I was the new innovation person or I was the new content marketing person and they wanted to do it, it was way easier for me to actually execute the change management, and we did it. So sometimes it is actually better to leave and go find some place where you can be the new person that can execute something new rather than sort of the older person who can't, you know, who who can't change the the direction of the ship. So what I would say to that also is that there is a corollary to that, which is how do you keep your team? How do you keep people looking at what they're doing? And if you're a senior level marketer in a business and you're looking at keeping that content marketing team, the number one thing and this our our research, proved this out this year.
We did research in terms of salary, career placement, and all those kinds of things in content marketing. If you don't have a specific career ladder or a, you know, the sort of tiers of how somebody's gonna progress through their career from junior level writer to manager to content strategist or director to a VP to even some c level position, you've got to figure that out. Because most content marketers love their jobs, but most, and this came right out of the research, don't find a place for themselves within the companies they're with because there's simply no career pathing that's done. So the best favor you can do your for yourself on retention and building a long term program is to build a career path for content marketers to actually exist. So that's that's, I think, a a a good piece of advice for for those in b to b that are looking to create something lasting.
Well, that was well said. I think you said that much better than I said mine, which is just like, get the heck out. You just quit. You just quit. You you're done.
I thought that went rather rather well. I hope It was good. People enjoyed that. Yeah. What's, what do you what do you got this coming week?
Where am I? And, actually, I think that most of mine is just sell I have to sell a ton of sponsorships for Creator Economy Expo. Oh, you're gonna be on the front of the sale season. Sales season. Sales sprint.
Yeah. And I've got some ideas. So I'm sending out emails with ideas, and I've got an I I've I've I'm I'm doing trying to do some things differently this year. So we'll see how that goes. So I'm working on a lot of that before the Thanksgiving holiday comes up.
What do you got going on? Gotcha. I I don't even know that I've told you this, but next week, basically, I will be in Dayton, Ohio. My god. You're only three and a half hours away from me.
Yeah. Well, I don't expect you to drive down to see me or anything. I'm only there for the night. I'm visiting an agency there, speaking of b two b. They're called Trichome.
I don't know if you've heard of them or not. They're an agency that focuses exclusively on b to b, and I am their keynote guy kicking off their client event where they're gonna have a lot of b to b companies coming in and, you know, kibitzing throughout the day about b to b marketing and content marketing and all that. And I'll be there enjoying and sharing and eating some lunch and then jumping on a plane and flying home and back to Wow. That's a long flight for one one thing. But It's a long it's a long couple of flights, unfortunately.
There's just no way There's no direct end date. Dayton. Yeah. No. Not anymore.
I mean, not that there ever was, but, yeah, flights these days are are few and far between. Very good. Well, safe travels. Very good. Alright, folks.
Well, that is it. Until we see you again next week, remember everybody, it is your story to tell. Tell it well. We'll see you next week on This Old Market.