B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. I haven't done a lot of episodes lately. That's because I was busy writing a novel! Yes, I'm writing a novel. I will tell you more little later in a different episode. However, for this episode, I have a special guest for you, Agnes Fotino O'Connell, a Director of Sales Operations & Demand Generation for HMI Performance Incentive. We met at the B2BMX Conference in February. Agnes came to my workshop, and we hit it off right there. At that time, I was talking about sales enablement. Agnes told me that's something she's been doing for quite some time now. So, I invited Agnes to my podcast to talk specifically about a couple of things: how to better support sales and how to align sales and marketing for demand generation success.

Pam Didner: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. Yay. I haven't done a lot of episodes lately. That's because I was busy, I don't know, writing a novel! Yes, I'm writing a novel. I will tell you more little later in a different episode, but today I have a special guest for you and she is a Director of Demand Generation for HMI Performance Incentive. And she is Agnes Fotino O'Connell. Hey Agnes, so happy to have you here.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: Pam, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.   Pam Didner: Yes, and we met at the B2B MX in February. Agnes came to my workshop and we had a great time. We hit it off right there, and at that time I was talking about sales enablement, and Agnes told me specifically that that's something that she has been doing and also is doing it. So that's why I invited Agnes to the podcast to talk about specifically couple things, how to better support sales and also better supporting sales through demand gen. Before we get started, Agnes, talk to us about your job and also what does your company do?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: Yeah, sure. HMI Performance Incentives is a leading incentive strategy company, helping companies with a broad spectrum of needs and challenges, motivate both their direct and indirect sales teams, customers, et cetera, to meet sales goals, increase loyalty, change behaviors, and everything else that you come to know and love about customer loyalty and incentive strategies.   Pam Didner: If I'm not mistaken, I think the incentive program that you set up is very much tailored for channel partners, such as the wholesalers working directly with their distributors and the dealers and the value-added resellers, assisting integrators. It's basically kind of like a channel marketing tools and then that you use that to incentivize and a lot of channel partners to reach the sales goal. Can you give us a very specific example about that?     Agnes Fotino O'Connell: Yeah, sure. We might work with a large wholesaler. Let's say they were in the building material space. They're a company that's trying to go after the contractor or the dealer, and we'd help them do a couple things.  One, we'd help them create a customer loyalty program that might go after what we call the “middle 60” of customers, that group that is always with you, you know what to expect out of them. And then might also help target their top 20% of their customers--the customers that bring 80% of their business, typically. And we might put together some form of group incentive travel trip for those top customers, helping build a moat about around them, helping them diffuse from competition taking them, and again, help grow that middle 60 to do more than they've historically done with them.   Pam Didner: So it is whatever your customer want to incentivize and you build a program and you are able to track the performance and then be able to, uh, award whoever reached that specific target.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell You're spot on, Pam, for an incentive marketing agency.   Pam Didner: Very, very good. So then talk to us now, you have told us specifically in terms of what your company has done. Your role is a Director of demand gen, and I remember when I was talking to you and you said you've been on the sales side, you've been on the marketing side. Before I talked to you about demand gen, can you talk to us a little bit about being on the sales side, being on the marketing side for any B2B marketers would like to supporting sales?  Do you have any specific tips, trick, or advice?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: I think you have to just really understand what's important to the sales folks at a myriad of levels. Right. And Pam, I actually think you gave some really amazing advice during your workshop at the B2B MX on. About, you know, finding your sales advocates, right? Finding those folks who are gonna help you make an imprint, make a case study of what you wanna accomplish as a marketer. You really have to go put your trust in sales' hands and help-- really help them help you get the job done. So what I like to say is, you know, go find that top salesperson and make them your advocate.  Show them how your campaign--whatever you wanna roll out as a marketer--is gonna make them successful. Get them on board, and then go find someone maybe more in the middle, right? Someone who's meeting and exceeding their KPIs, uh, but is maybe not a rock star. And then onboard them onto your plan. And then when you have, you know, those two or four, six people on board, you're gonna be pretty untouchable with whatever you try to roll out to your sales work.   Pam Didner: So the bottom line is really, really get to know them. And it started with a small group of people might be your ally. Build your own tribe try first and show them what kind of value you would add, and then take it from there step by step.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell As marketers, we talk so much about trialing, right, and piloting and looking at data.  And I think a lot of times marketers forget to do that internally. You know, we only tend to look at doing that externally, and it's kinda like, “Hey, take a moment, pause, pilot internally, see what the reaction is, and then go run that external.”   Pam Didner: Love it. Love it. With that being said, I'm gonna touch the next topic demand gen. So demand generation is hard. I mean, I've been doing demand generation myself. I mean even actually try to build my own pipeline; that is hard. Not to mention that you work for a company and you have to sell products. And the many B2B marketers I have talked to a lot of time, they actually have a demand gen targets like a monthly basis.  It's actually very, very hard. Do you have any kinda like a holy grail or any kind of campaigns or anything that you do to actually help people to understand what they can do to better optimize their marketing campaigns?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: That's a great question and it's a loaded one at that. You know, I think right now we've moved away from a lot of what I would call short-term KPIs and we're really looking at the long tail and--   Pam Didner: So can you clarify that? Sorry to interrupt. What is the short term KPI versus the long tail? Can you be very specific about it?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: In our business, we have a long selling cycle, like hopefully most B2B marketers are experiencing right now. Yeah, we're, we're talking about 18 to 24 month sales cycles on the long end of it, really high end, high dollar value amounts. So for me, looking at monthly MQLs is really not a great output of what we're gonna expect in that quarter.  For us, we're spending a lot of our time and attention looking at thought leadership, the sorts of downloads, the sorts of referral traffic that we're getting from that. If we can get pings on how that's coming up in conversations, how people are leveraging what we're putting out, there is our best metric right now to understand.  We tend to not look at as much leads per month--net new MQLs--we're really looking at is our thought leadership content creating opportunities.   Pam Didner: So does that mean that a lot of your metrics that you are responsible is tied to, say, pipeline opportunity driven?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: 100% of our metrics.   Pam Didner: What do you do to quantify that pipeline opportunity through say, referral traffic or through like a thought leadership content? Because I feel there's a gap there is in terms of like the content consumption and the leadership play, and all of sudden there's a pipeline activity, so there's a gap right there and how do you connect that gap and bring that content consumption or thought leadership play down?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: We're doing something very simple, which is capturing it at opportunity state--essentially understanding from the salesperson's perspective how and why did this opportunity turn into a deal? And we're asking them in the opportunity form to state it. And it's really interesting the amount of people that are essentially saying, “Hey, I feel like this was demand gen oriented for these couple of reasons.” So our goals are to have essentially 50% of our opportunities be self-validated from sales saying this was demand gen who helped me create this.” And then you can start to look backwards in the customer file, if you will, or in the contact card to understand where did they first come into our database? When did they start to engage with us? And then when did they turn into an opportunity? I think the future state is really looking at those three moments in time in identifying is demand generation, at least a portion responsible for those important turns.   Pam Didner: I love you identify the three moments as when they come in and when they probably become the opportunities. So based on your experience and the working backwards.  What are some of the channel, from your perspective, is most common to capture that moment that possibly can train into pipeline opportunity? What kind of campaign tactics tend to drive to that specific point?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: For us, it's a lot of referral traffic from third party subject matter experts, and I can give you an example. If we see that a contact is constantly attending one of our subject matter expert partner's webinars on a certain topic that we're sponsoring, it's essentially a form of intent data, right? Yeah. It's so we're able to start to aggregate, “okay, there's something here, right? Their, their ears are up, they're looking for something in this. Can we start to feed them a more aggregated, essentially marketing plan of and around that topic?” And then can we start to create a conversation essentially using ABM tied to that?   Pam Didner: Yep. That makes a lot of sense. So you actually watch data like a hawk, I assume.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: Yes, we're a small team and we're feisty at that. So you know, when you have a small team--as I'm sure a lot of B2B marketers can relate to right now--data's your best friend. I mean, to go do things at scale is you have to be data driven right now.   Pam Didner: I 100% agree. So can you talk to us about what some of the tools that you use to actually unravel some of the key insights?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell For us right now, we're pretty excited about our tech stack. I think a lot of things are kind of coming back in style right now. You know, at B2B MX, we heard a lot about direct mail. We're trying to add a few different tools for that into our marketing stack right now to try and understand behaviors; we have two instances of intent data formally stood up, one at the top of the funnel and one at the bottom of the funnel using our friends at Rollworks. We're also trying to find a partner for more of that middle intent data where we just have some listening out in the universe. We're big advocates of HubSpot. We use them for both our CRM and our marketing automation. On the send standpoint, we've just set up an integration with a very cool tool called Hand Write, which is sending out, uh, handwritten notes from our sales team after they meet in person, automated at a conference.  So we're able to track that. It'll have a QR code to send them to some of our resources put on it, as well as a QR to their business card that we can track on the back end. We're doing obviously a ton with QR codes and trying to leverage that as another source of intent data. You know, we're played around with Gong as a great marketing tool, which you know, for your listeners is an incredible sales tracking tool that listens in, using machine learning and AI to sales calls. It's a marketing tool. Yeah, it's a marketing tool. So we've started to leverage a bit of the insights that that provides us. But at the end of the day, it's really putting people right now to look at those moments in time that were training opportunities and then trying to scale those moments.   Pam Didner: So you brought up a lot of tools. A lot of marketers are overwhelmed because they feel they have to add a different tool at a different stages. And all a sudden, your Martech stack becomes pretty complicated. And I think to some extent that's inevitable. You have to use a different tool at a different time, and there's no one tool that fits all. And also, depending on what kind of campaigns you are running and different channels, you might need to use the different listening tools, as well. So that I want to make sure everybody understand that. When Agnes was talking about different tools that she needs to use, that's probably based on the process or the workflow or the marketing channels that she is utilizing. You have to kind of understand and to talk to the vendors and see if that actually fit your own Martech stack or your own workflow. So it may fit, it may not. But make a note of that, understand what those tools will do, and then you can make a decision if that actually works for you.  So for longest time, When I listened to a tool, I said, “oh my God, Agnes, you used that tool. You know what, I probably should use it too, right?” But then later I found out I need to evaluate that tool first before I can determine if that actually applies to me. But, uh, there was a period of time I was like, “you know what? Everybody's using it, I should do.” But that's not necessary the case. So I wanna make sure you understand that? Go ahead, Agnes.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: If I can, you know, it's something I'm passionate about. I love giving people the next tool sort of recommendations. And something I'm coming outta, actually just yesterday with one of my team members is essentially a Martech stack audit.   Pam Didner: Audit?  OK got it.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: We look at how are all of our systems working together, and if you don't already have a flywheel of this, I would look at it and it's gonna become, hopefully it becomes a pretty complex flywheel because your different tools will speak to one another and you should draw that out. So just start drawing dotted lines or hard lines if it's a very strong integration. And then you'll be able to show and explain internally how everything works, which is really helpful for both your team, but also the sales team, right? To show them, “Hey, here's how everything can work together. Here's what you can use, here's what I can use, here's what we can both use.” And then what you could layer on top of that is where different tools layer in. So, for example, you could start to augment that flywheel to show here's what we're using at a lead level. Here's what we're using at an MQL level. Here's what we're using at an SQL level. Here are tools that we use everywhere. And then you can start a part of this maybe ongoing deck is how I do it, at least, that's updated, that are, “hey, here are some tools that are not the right fit for us right now, but I've evaluated, I understand their pricing and I understand what they can do.” And then you just put a slide in for them with some of your raw notes.  That way when a gap does come up, you're not scrambling trying to go on G2 or wherever you might go for your insights, it's, “oh, I think I already did something there, or let me see if I've already evaluated that.” Flip through your deck and it's waiting for you.   Pam Didner: I love it. So do you have that flywheel you can share with us?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: Yeah, I can send it out after this. I would love that.   Pam Didner: And I would actually add that to the video. Yeah. And uh, so people can see it.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell Yeah, I'm happy to.   Pam Didner: Yay. I love it. So, last question: now you've been working on the both sales and marketing side. Have you have any advice for anyone who are interested, kind of moving back and forth between sales and marketing, you know, any kind of career advice that you have for them?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell My first thought would be do both, and I truly stand behind that and I don't just stand behind, I put it in action. I've put up and stood up a program at HMI that is the HMI Sales and Marketing Excellence Program that allows young grads to come in and, and see and experience both sides of the house, everything from biz dev to field marketing, to social, to digital and so on. But I, you know, I think it's really important your trajectory to understand how hard both roles are. It's an amazing skillset to understand what it's like to go, you know, do the role of a biz dev, making those 50-100 calls every day. And I will say in turn, you understand then, and I think have a higher level of appreciation for when you need those marketing assets at your disposal to send out how great those are to have and how to design them to be a better fit for not only the actual salespeople using them, but to the recipients. So, do both if you can. It'll make you a, I think a more well-rounded individual going into either your sales or marketing career on whatever side that you end up. Or you could be like me and just maybe hover somewhere in the middle, if you find an organization that will let you.   Pam Didner: Well said, I really have nothing to add except I don't do two at the same time, but try each one of them in different time. So you really don't want to be Michelle Yeoh. Like be everywhere, anytime at the same time (laughs).     Agnes Fotino O'Connell: I couldn't agree.   Pam Didner: So one last fun question. So what show are you binge watching right now?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: I've been watching a bit of “Top Chef,” but the really old seasons of Gordon Ramsey, which has been fun and “Hell's Kitchen.”  But I'm, I'm reading some really good books right now, Pam, if you're interested.   Pam Didner: What is it?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: I'm rereading Thinking Fast and Slow, which I think it's the best. And then for a fun book, reading, When Life Gives You Lululemons.   Pam Didner: Love it.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: What are you reading, Pam?   Pam Didner: Oh, I'm reading (laughs) . I'm reading a drama. This is very dark. Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects.  My God, it's so dark.  After I read it, I was like, “you know what? I'm actually getting a little depressed.”   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: Maybe a light book after thus, huh?     Pam Didner: Yeah, exactly. But that was like, I'm reading right now. I'm actually reading more and more fictional. I got away from the business reading in the past two years. I guess I just need to take a break after 10 years. It was like, you know, “I'm done. Lemme read some fictional book.” Anyway. Hey, Agnes, it's wonderful to have you. You share a lot of insight and by the way, it was so wonderful, so wonderful to meet you at my workshop. Such a great, great addition to have you at my workshop. We had a great time, right?   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: We sure did.  Cannot recommend going to both B2B MX—I'll give them a bit of a shout out cause that was a really excellent conference--but also if you have an opportunity to get to one of Pam's. workshops. It was incredible. Truly lucky to sit in her grace there for like two and a half, three hours. You don't get a lot of those opportunities to learn like that from a marketing expert.  Amazing Pam.   Pam Didner: I actually pay Agnes to say that. (both laugh) Just kidding. Just kidding. But I'm actually doing a workshop, a very similar one about sales enablement and how the marketing sales op, Biz op, even, uh, marketing ops, how what you can do to better support sales in a changing environment, Ignite Chicago on May 23rd. So if you are interested, check that out or reach out to me. And by the way, bring any questions, uh, to the workshop. I do answer them. Seriously, I do.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell: The entire time. She answers them the entire time. It's amazing.   Pam Didner: Alright. Hey Agnes, it's wonderful, wonderful to have you here. Wish you best of luck and keep us posted about all the stuff that you are doing and come back next time.   Agnes Fotino O'Connell Thanks Pam, I appreciate it.   Pam Didner: If you want to see Agnes' flywheel, look in this episode's show notes or visit my website at pamdidner.com/podcasts, episode 226.  

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! I'm Pam Didner. What can I say about 2022? I can sum it up in one word: Great! The great pandemic, the great resignation, the great relocation, the great retirement, and the great stock market crash. Somehow, all of that led to the great reshuffling of our lives. It was exhaustingly great. I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast! I need to do an episode of my experience living in North Carolina one of these days. If you are a listener and a native in North Carolina, reach out and talk to me about North Carolina. I'd love to learn about and understand this state a whole lot more. One of my 2023 new resolutions is to drive around in North Carolina, Charlotte, the Outer Banks, Asheville, Blue Ridge Mountains and more. I can't wait!! I think we all agree that we are somehow go back to a sense of normality in 2nd half of the year. I was on the road for 8 weeks from September to December, speaking at conference, visiting clients and seeing friends and colleagues at different cities. Love to see people in Zoom, but hugging people in-person, it's just lovely! If you're not a hugger I completely understand.   But it's also been wonderful to continue having thoughtful and inspiring conversations here on the podcast. For this final episode of 2022, I'm going to highlight some episodes I think are especially helpful for my B2B peeps and listeners.  So let's get started!   As I mentioned earlier, I love to travel.  So I thought today I'd take you on a trip with me.  It's a sales journey of sorts; but this one includes some special stops along the way.  At each stop an expert guest of mine from the past year will share tips and tricks to help you improve your sales and marketing chops and to reach more ideal customers.   This journey begins with a conversation I had with Carla Johnson back in February. Carla is a marketing and innovation strategist, keynote and author. For her book REThink: Innovation, Carla interviewed her clients to unlock how innovation happens and can continue happening. What she found boiled down to the five steps of what she calls the “Perpetual Innovation Process.” The steps are observe, distill, relate, generate and pitch. What I loved about our conversation is that Carla has found a way to demystify innovation.   It's not solely about geniuses coming up with ideas no one has ever heard of before. Everyone, I mean everyone, is capable of innovating, says Carla, and they can learn from other industries. Like how McDonald's studied Formula 1 pit crews to help their drive-thru teams work better and faster. Carla shared another example from the B2B world:   Carla Johnson: - I have a great friend named Tim Washer and Tim is a comedian. And he's worked with some of the best of the best Conan O'Brien. He was a writer for Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, you know, that level of comedian. So he worked, he was a Creative Director at Cisco. And he had a new product launch to do. And you know, like a technology company, you don't think of them as doing amazingly creative and innovative product launches. It's usually an executive or an engineer talking about, you know, the features and all of the new things that customers can do because of this product. But Tim said, “let's do something really different and innovative.” Then he happened to be in a comedy club in New York City one night and the comedian Ray Romano was on stage and Tim kind of sat back in his chair and he really observed the whole audience, not just Ray as a comedian and a performer. But he said, as he watched it, he observed how Ray moved on the stage and he observed the body responses and how people began to lean in as Ray went through his routine and Ray talked about things like family and in-laws and kids and, and all of these things that people could really relate to in a short amount of time, but all through humor. And as Ray got people to laugh, in the audience everybody's emotional wall started to go down. And so as Tim looked at that, all of these things that he observed, he distilled that into patterns--patterns of being able to build relationships very quickly with people that most likely Ray didn't know, and then talking about things that were very familiar. Doing it with humor. And it was this laughter that got people to lower their emotional walls and be willing to hear things that they normally wouldn't hear. So it was those patterns that he related into his work. Now the next step is generate and generating ideas. So now when Tim went to generate an idea for this product launch, he said, “how can we use humor to talk about something that everybody knows, but in a way that gets them to laugh and lower their emotional walls?” And that's how he used humor to do a video for the product launch, which happened to come out right around Valentine's Day. And so instead of having an engineer talk about how fantastic the ASR 9000 router is, he made it into a Valentine's Day video that talked about the ASR 9000 router being the perfect Valentine's Day gift. And you think about putting this router right up there with diamonds and jewelry and flowers…. Pam Didner: It certainly stands out (laughs)! Carla Johnson: Exactly, but because he was able to tell the story of what he observed, the patterns he noticed, how that related into the work, how that generated his idea, that was his pitch. The pitch is actually to go back and walk through each of these steps and you have a natural story structure to it.   That's Carla Johnson. Love her! To learn more about innovation and how teams can move on if they get stuck in the process check out the full episode. I'll put a link in the show notes.   So, building off my conversation with Carla, let's say your company has come up with a fantastic product, service or upgrade. Your marketing time has come up with great messaging, collateral, and a plan. Now, it's time to get the word out and sell it to your customers.   In today's marketing world, a big part of advertising is digital ads. Of course there are a lots of options: FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, you name it. Back in June, I reached out to AJ Wilcox, to talk about his specialty: LinkedIn ads. He told me he likes LinkedIn because you can target your pay ads to people with specific job titles, at specific companies, in specific regions. That means you can target your ideal customer.   But when AJ and I spoke we agreed that's only one part of the equation. Pay ads (on ANY platform) campaigns also need to be set up to help you learn more about customers. So that means avoiding one-and-done ad campaigns.   AJ Wilcox: It's really important on any channel to make sure that you generate enough data, that you can tell whether or not something's working. And if you go in and just spend the very minimum that you can on LinkedIn, which is $10 a day...    Pam Didner: Don't bother.    AJ Wilcox: If the $300 in a month, that'll give you a handful of clicks; you will not be any closer to finding out if it's a channel that works. So what I recommend is if you're going to approach LinkedIn Ads, don't do it with less than about a $5,000 per month budget. And so many small businesses can still afford that, but I'm assuming some listeners will be like, "Man, I don't have that." So if that's your case, as well, what I would recommend is just make sure that you are set to spend $5,000 before you shut it off. So if your budget is only $1,500 a month, great, just make sure you are running it for at least three months before you make the decision to cut it or increase.    Pam Didner: The other question I want to ask, which is kind of on top of tha,t as well. If you do have $5,000, how long should you run? Of course, you're going to say as long as possible, but minimal level?   AJ Wilcox: Yeah, for me, advertising is very much a linear process. You're going to spend money; you're going to get impressions. And then those impressions are going to turn into clicks. And then a certain percentage of those clicks will turn into conversions. And then a certain number of those conversions can become sales qualified or marketing qualified leads. A certain percentage of... I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, but for me it depends on what level of surety, the level of confidence that you want.    Pam Didner: Got it.   AJ Wilcox: If you just want to find out, what is my cost per lead from this channel going to be? Yeah, you could spend for two, three months and go, "Oh, looks like my cost per lead is— .”   Pam Didner: Okay. I got some baseline. Yeah.    AJ Wilcox: Yeah, exactly. But if your goal is to find out what is my ROI from LinkedIn Ads? Yeah, you're going to have to look at how long is my sales cycle and how long does it take us to nurture these leads to close? And maybe you're going to be in this for two, three, four years before you have statistical significance around that data. So it really is up to you, but I would say if you are running against Facebook ads, hands down, Facebook ads is always going to be a lower cost per lead because the cost per click was cheaper. But when you follow that into your CRM, you look further down the sales cycle, you're going to find that, wow, because LinkedIn's targeting was so good at getting the right people, even though we're paying more for it, by the time you're looking at your cost per sales qualified lead, or your cost per proposal sent, or your cost per closed deal, all of a sudden LinkedIn looks really good compared to Facebook. But so many people were scared off by it because of the initial high costs that they never gave it a real chance.   I was speaking with AJ Wilcox who specializes in running LinkedIn pay ads.   He also shared some dos and don'ts about setting up campaigns in LinkedIn, so be sure and check out the full episode.   As we continue on this year-end episode of B2B Marketing & More, let's continue on our journey to: sales! You know I'm all about effective Sales Enablement and helping sales and marketing teams work together. Having worked along side-by-side with the sales teams for many years, I know there are some particular challenges they face—especially if they're tasked to bring in more contracts.     So back in March I checked in with Ryan Staley, a long-time sales professional and the CEO and founder of Whale Boss to talk about what it takes to land a deal. In the conversation I asked him about common mistakes sales teams make when they approach a potential customer.   Ryan Staley: One of the things that a lot of companies where people focus on are sales reps or sales leaders is like, “Hey, the ROI for the company is this. They're going to save millions of dollars are going to do this.” But one of the things that they forget is, okay, how is that individual person evaluated? Like what kind of KPIs are they evaluated with? You know, at the end of the year, when they sit down with their boss and you're just finished, are they going to get a bonus or are they going to get demoted? And did they hit on what they were supposed to? So that's the tangible business side of it. But then also it's like, what does that solution going to do emotionally for that person that you're selling to? Because logic is how people make decisions. Emotion is what creates action. And so those two kinds of triggers are key things to look at when you're trying to work and sell. So I would say that's number one. Number two is just ask really, really good questions. Okay? That's one of the advantages that sales has over marketing. We can physically talk to the people, versus like looking and getting feedback from communities and social. You can actually talk to the people and ask them specific, tangible questions on the outcomes they want, what's bothering them, all those details. So I would say just being a ninja at asking really, really good questions that are thought provoking and that make people question thoughts that they've had previously. Pam Didner: So what if you're trying for a corporate client and you can't get in there for the one-on-one to ask questions? and have to go in cold? Ryan Staley: So there was a deal that my team was working and the reps were full cycle. And so they had a prospect. Um, they didn't have like an SDR team or we didn't have any marketing support. So they had to find a way to get into these really, really big Fortune 1000, Fortune 500 companies. One of the companies that are trying to get into was Walgreens and Walgreens is like Fortune 10. So they're even bigger than big. Right? Well, what happened was Walgreens has recently merged with Boots--this was maybe four years back. They just merged with Boots and their CEO and chairman identified in their press release that one of the number one priorities and outcomes from the merger is gain quote-unquote “synergies”; where they're going to get $500 million in synergies from merging the companies. And what they were saying basically is they're taking $500 million out of the business in costs. So one of the levers we hit on to get in there was to link to that initiative that the CEO was talking about— Pam Didner: Because it's top down, it's coming from the management. It's top down. Ryan Staley: Exactly, exactly. And so, so that's a good example of how to hit on that. You could look at 10K's. You could look at other financials if you want on that; the letter to the CEO in the annual report is great. Obviously that doesn't scale for small-to-medium sized companies but for big, big deals that's what I would recommend. Ryan Staley is founder and CEO of Whale Boss. When we spoke he also shared ways to develop rapport quickly with a potential client, so check out the full episode.   Connecting to potential clients through a sales team is one way to reach new customers or re-establish past relationships; but another approach I like is marketing through thought-leadership. It may not be as direct and immediate as pay ads, but it's a long play which is sensible with B2B companies with a long purchase cycle. Use content to influence your customer's point of view about specific products or technologies.   When I thought about addressing this topic in the podcast, I knew I had to talk with Erika Heald. She's a founder and the lead consultant at Erica Heald Marketing Consulting, where she helps SaaS startups, specialty food companies, and many others. She told me, too often, thought leadership can feel like a “one-way blast of information coming from a brand.”       Erika Heald: For me thought leadership is when you're putting those unique perspectives from leaders within your company out there in the public on a regular basis through various types of content. So it can be everything from blog posts, to eBooks to public speaking engagements, podcasts, all of these different avenues. But the key is people who are subject matter experts and having a point of view. And this is for me where I see the biggest kind of issues come up because frequently--and not to disparage PR agencies--but frequently you will see thought leadership as a couple of slides in a PR presentation, as you know, “oh, hey, so for this month, here's the thought leadership” and it's a couple of catchy headlines with your CEO's picture next to it. And it's like, “well, that's all great, but they're not necessarily thought leadership.” A lot of times they're tied into the PR campaign or what have you, but they're not really focused on that human being and their experiences and sharing them with people in a meaningful way. And from my perspective, you have to have that involvement with that thought leader and have that unique perspective and point of view that they're willing to share. If they're gonna just tell you everything that you already read in HBR that month, that is not going to work because people want something authentic and real. Pam Didner: If they know specific topic or field, very, very well, they can help other people to learn or provide some insights that say other companies or competitors cannot provide. That's also a sense of a thought leadership. Is that correct? Erika Heald: 100%. You know, thought leadership is not limited to your C-suite. If you're only putting your CEO out there or the other folks who sit on that same floor--you know, if you have a physical headquarters anymore. Realistically, some of your best thought leaders are going to be those folks with deep subject matter expertise that know a lot about your customers or who used to have jobs that are the same jobs that your ideal customers have. They're going to be those people who deeply feel the pain and the challenges that your customers have everyday. Those folks are gonna be fantastic thought leaders and have so much to offer out there. So I definitely encourage folks to look a little bit more widely at who could be part of their thought leadership programs.   That was Erika Heald. If you struggle to identify thought leaders, Erika has some good tips in this episode. We also talked about how to juggle when multiple teams play a role in communicating thought leadership. That's a tricky one, so check out the full episode.   And again, links for all the episodes I featured today are in the show notes.   Thanks for taking this journey with me today. These experts have some fantastic tips and tricks to help you and your company innovate, advertise, sell and educate. I'm always here if you have questions about B2B sales and marketing, so don't hesitate to reach out. Happy Holidays and see you on the other side in 2023. Take care. Bye!

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. My guest today is Chris Carr, founder and CEO of the digital marketing agency Farotech. Tune in to learn how to boost content promotion, and improve your digital marketing with programmatic advertising. ------------------ If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.

Welcome, and thank you for listening to B2B Marketing and More with Pam. My guest today is Tracy Niehaus. Tracy is the board member for MPro, Marketing Professionals in MHI Association and MHI for Material Handling Industry Association. She is also a Senior Marketing Director for Vanderlande, a Dutch company with a 75-year history. In this podcast episode, Tracy shares important steps to help you create an account-based marketing strategy. ————— If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.

Welcome to another episode, B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner from Raleigh, North Carolina. So big, big hello to everyone. And this time we really want to talk about something very special: podcasting. Well, I'm doing podcasting right now, but I really want to talk to an expert that has been in this field for a long period of time doing podcasting, and then come talk to us in terms of what dos and don'ts and also, how can you showcase value add if you want to use podcasts as a content marketing channel. So today we have Jeremy Shere. He's a founder and the CEO of Conversa, which is the B2B podcasting agency on top of it. He's also the host of the B2B content show. Yay. Thank you for coming to my show.   Jeremy Shere: Well, Pam, thank you so much for having me. It's uh, so awesome to be here.   Pam Didner: I know you are the expert. So I have many, many questions I would like to ask you. Okay. So the thing about podcasting is, has become so popular nowadays, like almost every celebrity has their own podcast show. What is the value add for B2B companies and what should the B2B marketer think about podcasting as a channel.   Jeremy Shere: First of course you're exactly right. Podcasting just generally has really blown up over the last 6, 7, 8 years, you know? And with tens of millions of people just in the United States alone--and around the world, many more than that--regular podcast listeners, you know, it's just become a part of a daily part of people's lives. And for the general person, you know, why are people listening to podcasts for entertainment to learn things. But you asked a good question, like, “oh, okay. That's fine. But what does any of this have to do with B2B marketing?” And there are a lot of ways to answer that question, but, um, podcasting alongside your other marketing channels, it can add some really dynamic and unique elements that you're not necessarily already getting from say a blog, or a webinar series or the videos that you're doing; you can break that down in a couple different ways. Really the central value of podcasting is that, by its nature, it involves having real unscripted one-on-one conversations with people that you want to be talking to; just like we're doing right now, right? And so if you're a B2B market, And you start a podcast. It's really all about who do you want to talk to on the podcast? When you start a podcast and you start in inviting guests on, that means you're having 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, maybe an hour of time with them to have a real conversation with them that's not a sales call. It's not a marketing event; it's just a real human interaction. And if you're strategic about who you invite on, then that's really valuable time with that person. So let's say you, you, from among your audience, you, you target your best prospects.   Pam Didner: Invite them on. Yeah. Or your customers have them talk about their best practices. Yep.   Jeremy Shere: Yeah. Your, your existing customers, your prospects, um, thought leaders in your industry. And so you bring them onto your show and you're doing a few things there. First of all, you're getting kind of exclusive time with them to have like a really in depth conversation about something that they're passionate about. It's really a great way to develop a relationship with the people that you're talking to. You also learn a lot about them and what they really care about and how they think and what really matters to them, both as people and in business. So that gives you really valuable insight into going forward, you know, how to communicate with them. And you're also, you're, you're creating content with them. So, just by the nature of having them on your show and then producing the episode, you're already working with them and collaborating with them and kind of demonstrating what you can do and what it's like to interact with you. And as long as you follow through and you do what you say you're gonna do, and you, you make it a great experience and you do a really good interview and it's fun and it's invigorating and then you produce the show at the highest level and you put it out there and you promote it--and so you're promoting them and their thinking and their thoughts and their expertise--you've added a lot of value. And you've gotten a lot of value. So it's this great exchange of value without doing any explicit selling or marketing. It's just, you're really building a strong relationship.   Pam Didner: I love that. In fact, one of my guests, Bernie Borges. He was using the term account based podcasting for his company's podcast. They always have a list of accounts and the prospects they, they would like to reach out and, uh, possibly build a relationship with. And they use the podcast as a channel to reach out to a prospect and invite them to be on the show. And it turned out to be a great way for them to actually build a relationship. So it's taking that account based marketing concept down to the podcast channel.   Jeremy Shere: Yeah, no, that, that's a great example.   Pam Didner: So Jeremy, I know that, uh, you manage podcast productions for many B2B companies and clients. So how do they measure success? I mean, is it just number of downloads and that is it? I know subscribers, anything else specific?   Jeremy Shere: It depends on what your goals are for the podcast and sort of what your expectations are.   Pam Didner: Well, give us some examples.   Jeremy Shere: Well, let's start with what you already said. The standard way to measure the success of a podcast is by downloads, right? So what we're really talking about is for a given episode, how many people are engaging with it? how many people are listening, right? And you get that data and you, and if you're producing a podcast, then you have access to that data. And that's all about your, uh, your audience, right? How, how is your audience growing? How large of an audience are you, are you managing to build? I think that that metric is very different if you're a, B2B marketer and you're doing podcasting. Then if you are doing podcasting to just sort of reach, you know, as many listeners as possible anywhere, if your show is mainly for entertainment. And it's important to keep in mind that you're doing a very niche podcast. If you're doing a B2B podcast right, you are aiming it at a very particular audience. One of our clients is a, um, a SaaS company in the, uh, supply chain space. And so their podcast is really aimed at like supply chain professionals.   Pam Didner: Yep. Procurement managers, supply chain professionals.   Jeremy Shere: Yes. And I don't know how many of those people there are out there in the world. Right. But it's very particular group of people like very niche audience. And so you're trying to capture the biggest percentage of that audience, you can, but in raw numbers, it's not gonna be anything like the most popular podcast in the world that get like millions of listeners. Right?   Pam Didner: So you set up expectations, obviously, with your clients; but still, how do they major their success?   Jeremy Shere: It really helps to have a sense of your audience and of the potential audience out there. So you might be getting 150 like regular listeners per episode, let's say. And in raw numbers that might not seem like a lot, but. It all depends in the context. That means every single time you put in, put out an episode getting 150 people, the exact people who are your audience, right? that you're providing services for, who are tuning in to hear what you have to say and what your guests have to say. Right? So there's a different way of thinking about it.  So, but in any case, that's just one way of measuring. Another way of measuring the value is the content that you're generating from the podcast. I was on a call with a client just the other day. And I asked her, you know, “how, how is the podcast going? What can we improve?” And I said, “well, why don't we look at the, you know, the numbers, the download numbers.” And she said, “you know what? We can do that, but I'll be honest with you. I'm not really, I don't really look at those numbers so much. Like I have a general sense of them, but that's not really how we value the podcast for us. It's all about the content that it generates.” So for every episode, they get the audio episode. They also, we record some video for them. So they also got the video. I take that video and repurpose it as promotional content, and then they turn their turning every episode into at least one blog post and a bunch of social media content. So for this particular client, the main value lies in the fact that it's a content generation engine and it helps them produce content much more efficiently than they were doing before.   Pam Didner: Can you also share with us, given that you work with mainly B2B companies and a lot of B2B marketers will be curious to find out how much it cost to say, uh, produce an episode. And, uh, if they have to set up a budget, you know, what is the set of budget will look like? And also how much it costs to actually produce an episode?   Jeremy Shere: Yeah, absolutely. There's a pretty wide range and it, of course, totally depends on what kind of podcast you're doing kind of the level of, you know, production that you're getting into. So for us, I mean, I can just tell you how our pricing range is. At the simplest end, where we're just producing a pretty basic audio podcast, interview style and we're focusing primarily on the post-production, meaning the, the client records and then they send us the files and we edit them and produce them and make them sound awesome and package it all together. Put in the music, put in the intro and outro, upload it to the hosting platform. That's gonna be somewhere in the range of probably $700, $800 per episode, per episode.  And you know, typically people will buy like a package of episodes that might have some, discount built in. If you're getting a little more complicated and you're also looking for preproduction services--that might include helping you find guests, book guests, uh, right. questions, sort of do all, everything that needs to happen to get you prepared to actually record the interview. And you, you might want like an engineer, just like you have Scott behind the scenes. If you, if you need, you know, uh, an engineer just to make sure that everything sounds good, looks good to troubleshoot if any problems comes up. So then that's a higher level of service and yeah. Then you're talking, uh, anywhere from about, um, you know, $1,200, $1,500 an episode. And then another tier is reproducing each episode to create other kinds of content. So producing a full-length video episode, promo videos of blog posts, all that stuff. Then you're looking at anywhere from about maybe $1,800 to over $2,000 an episode, somewhere in that range. And it really, you know, that's, that's kind of where we are at the moment. And if, if people go online, they'll probably find some that are a bit less, some that are, that might be. More depending. And, you know, there might be companies offering services that we're not doing right now. So people who are watching or are listening to this might be thinking like, “well, okay, what if we just found like a freelancer on Fivrr who could just, you know, do some really basic editing and, and stuff like that. And, you know, I'll say you can definitely do that. You can find a much cheaper way to do all this.   Pam Didner: Can I actually interrupt and provide feedback on that? Yeah, sure. Jeremy, I do agree with you that all the B2B marketers can do that. And that if budget is a huge concern, they, they have no choice but to do that; however, I have done that because I, I produce podcasts myself and I also produce YouTube video myself in the past. So I started to go to Fivrr. I started go to UpWork to find, uh, the production systems and also the editor to do that. And I'm not saying that you cannot find the right way. I agree with Jeremy on that because I have done it in the past. I end up not doing that. If you are B2B companies and you are happy to be marketers and you are representing your brand, I hate saying this. I strongly suggest not to do that. Unless budget is a huge, huge issue. And, uh, I would hire someone that have a, a high level experience of doing it. It's a quality over quantity from my perspective. So, but that's just my very strong opinion. The reason I'm passionate about that, Jeremy, sorry to interrupt you again, is I have done that. So, and it was not it was always not what I was looking for. That's I hate saying it, but.   Jeremy Shere: Yeah. Well look, you know, obviously I'm a little biased, but I think. The reason and, you know, tell me if this was your, your experience, but what you run into when you, you know, might hire somebody for like 20 bucks an hour to edit your podcast is you usually get what you pay for in pay for in terms of the quality.   Pam Didner: Yeah. I, 100% agree with that. Yeah.   Jeremy Shere: And there are different schools of thought on this. You know, there, there is one school of thought that just says, you know, just record some stuff and put it up there. The audio quality is really not the most important thing. It's most, it's more important that you just record and get stuff out there at volume. And personally, I disagree with that just because maybe at one time that might have been true; but I think these days there are so many more podcasts out there that if, if you're serious about it and that you actually, you want to grow an audience and you want to attract people and you want to get the best guests, you're kind of competing against the best podcast out there. And people have come to expect a certain level of quality.   Pam Didner: I do agree with that, too.   Jeremy Shere: And to keep producing episodes week after week, month after month at that same high level, it takes a team of people. Yep. It can get overwhelming if you're trying to do it yourself. Or if you just have a freelancer who may or may not be that good at it, or who might disappear at some point. You know, to really get the level of quality that I think people have come to expect and that you should want, you know, if you're gonna put stuff out there with your voice in it, or your name on it. The quality matters a lot.   Pam Didner: Hey, this is wonderful. Jeremy; it's wonderful to have you with me at my show and share a lot of your wisdom and the knowledge and insight in terms of doing the podcasting and the value provided to the B2B marketers. So thank you for coming to my show.   Jeremy Shere: Oh, you're so welcome. It was a real pleasure. I, uh, had a great time.   Pam Didner: Take care, everyone. Bye.

Pam Didner: Hi, welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. Yay! Today I actually have a special guest. Stacey Danheiser is the founder and CMO of SHAKE Marketing Group and also a host for Soar Marketing Society, which is a community on Mighty Network. So if you are interested in joining, check that out. She has worked with many companies, at the same time, being in the CMO positions. Now, she is a mentor and also created many marketing training programs for B2B Marketers. So Stacey, welcome.   Stacey Danheiser: Hi. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.   Pam Didner: Yay! So I have a couple of questions for you.   Stacey Danheiser: Sure.   Pam Didner: I know that in your program, you are talking about the skill sets that's needed for B2B marketers, and I work with many B2B marketers and me included, for a long period of time, we tend to focus on hard skill sets, like search engine marketing, email marketing, event marketing, yet soft skill sets are so important. So what is the number one soft skills, from your perspective, that marketers should possess?   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. Well, we're gonna go into competencies a little bit more, but from a skill perspective, absolutely, I would say marketers are expected to be amazing communicators and very high creativity. In fact, creativity happens to be, I think the number one in-demand skill year after year, and so marketers that are only focusing on the hard skills aren't necessarily taking the time to become creative, which is really what the business needs marketers to be.   Pam Didner: You know, that's actually very interesting. Before you answered the question, you mentioned about competencies, and from my perspective, competencies and skill sets are very similar. Do you actually have a different definitions for that?   Stacey Danheiser: We like to talk about skills as what you need to do to be successful in your job.   Pam Didner: Okay.   Stacey Danheiser: So if you're a social media manager, then you obviously need to know how to use social media. You need to know about content creation, right? You might need to know about how to create ads. That's kind of what you need to do. Competencies on other hand, are more about the behaviors and how you do your job. So how do you show up as a social media manager? It's the things that aren't often talked about and you might not necessarily see them in a job description as to what it will take to be a successful person in that role.   Pam Didner: When you were talking about it, the only thing I can think of is like the softer skill set.   Stacey Danheiser: Exactly. It's maybe what we would traditionally call a softer skill set, but it's also leadership.   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: It's what somebody is looking for to promote. If you have two marketers and they're both really great at SEO, that's the skill, which one do you promote? Do you promote... And if they have equal skill sets in that area, you end up promoting the one that is showing leadership capabilities and competencies beyond just the skills that they need to be successful in the job. I wanna take a step back maybe, and introduce you to the framework, 'cause we did a bunch of research on well, what are these competencies that today's modern marketers should have to be successful in their role? And so it all started a couple of years ago, when we did research, we started noticing a trend that... If you looked at the websites and Twitter feeds and LinkedIn feeds of companies that are operating in a similar industry, they all started to sound the same. Everybody was pretty much copying and pasting each other. And so we wanted to know why was this happening? And you could go into... This is, I think, where the creativity piece evolves from, right? Because companies wanna stand out, they want to feel like they're doing something different or bringing something different to the world. But we were really interested in why this is happening from a marketing perspective, and what we found is that it's not because marketers didn't know what to do, it's because there was a skill set gap or a competency gap happening within the marketing function.   Stacey Danheiser: So people were getting into these roles, had high demands to get something out there fast. Well, what's the fastest way to do it? You go and you look at what your competitors are doing. You scrape their story from their website and then you put it onto your own, changing some of the words and making it sound slightly different. And so what emerged from that research was a set of competencies that we call the VALUE framework, because it's an acronym that spells value.   Pam Didner: What are these five?   Stacey Danheiser: Yes, so the first one is visionary, which is the ability to look ahead, to use your imagination, to have your pulse connected to what's happening in the market, and not only your industry, but your customer's industry, so that you can see ahead and build strategies. The second one is A for activator, which is the ability, not only to get things done, which marketers traditionally rate themselves very high on, but also the ability to collaborate and get buy-in and say no to ideas that may not work for the business. The third one is L for learner, which is not only just staying in touch with your own career path and the upskilling and reskilling required to just be a marketer, but also what are you doing to learn about your competitors, your market, your customers, and even your business and your company products and your company priorities. The fourth one was U for usefulness, and this is really the ability to connect the dots from, on one side of the bridge, what the customer cares about and values, to the other side of the bridge, which is what your company sells. How are you leading your customers over that bridge, and you really can't be useful to customers if you don't understand both sides of that equation. And then finally, the E is for evaluator, which is the data analytics side and the ability to objectively look at your marketing activity, look at what's happening and to be able to analyze it and make decisions based on that, and this one requires a little bit of political savviness as well, because as we know as marketers, there's a lot of opinions that are being thrown around internally and pet-projects that come up from the CEO or the head of product, and so this is really being objective and being able to analyze the data and make sense of it so that you can use it to make decisions.   Pam Didner: Got it! Those are, I would say, a lot of competencies or the skill set that people need to possess, and it's a journey. It's a multi-years type of effort. Obviously, you have written a book, talk about it. For these five different competencies, is there one more important than the others? Or is there any way to learn the competencies at once?   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. Yeah, that's a great question. So the book is called Stand-Out Marketing, and we are just in the process of launching a self-assessment tool so that somebody could go on and figure out where do they have the biggest gaps across the five. I've done the polls for other audiences, and typically, the one that seems to be rated the lowest as of now, kind of trending amongst marketers... What do you think it is?   Pam Didner: Vision?   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah, it's visionary.   Pam Didner: Either vision or evaluating?   Stacey Danheiser: Yep. Yeah, if you think back to a few years, there's been this push for data-driven marketing, data-driven marketing, data-driven marketing, so I think you're starting to see more people sort of comfortable in that role of thinking ahead about what data do I need to collect.   Pam Didner: That makes a lot of sense. I like that. Yup.   Stacey Danheiser: But what... I think the gap is around sort of this visionary piece, and this is really... If you look at the CMO tenure and the turnover in the marketing position and the frustration with the CEOs, it's that marketers aren't really tapped into business priorities and able to connect to suggesting marketing activity that aligns to the business, and so this requires a lot of strategic thinking and permission to give yourself time to think strategically, versus what I think a lot of companies tend to do is, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that there's a bunch of steps in foundation that we have to build, but let's just go execute, and let's put something out there and let's see how it does." And what ends up happening with that kind of approach is that sure, you get results, but you're kind of sporadic about collecting that information, versus being intentful and purposeful about where you wanna focus. So to answer your question, we have a self-assessment tool that we're building that will help somebody identify those. The second piece of that, like which one is the most important, really depends on the organization. So...   Pam Didner: I like that answer. Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: It does because there's different stages of companies, there's different sizes of marketing teams. And I would take a holistic approach to it. When I work with organizations, kind of looking at the skill sets on the team, if you have a strong team of activators and you have nobody doing the evaluation and nobody doing the visionary piece, well then that's the gap, and that's what you should be focused on, is filling that gap.   Pam Didner: True. True.   Stacey Danheiser: Whether you're upscaling somebody or potentially bringing on a new hire in that area, that's kind of how the prioritization would work, and so these can all be learned. It can.   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: Each chapter has an explanation of what the competency is. There's some exercises and self-assessment that you can do to figure out how you would score yourself, and then there's suggestions and ways to get better for each of those areas as well.   Pam Didner: So Stacey, I love your answer and I want to do a quick summary actually, for my audience very quickly. Granted I ask a very specific question. I say, "Hey, these are the five skill set. Which one should we go first?" And Stacey basically said, determining down your gap, and there's assessment that you can do. And then you can determine with your individual assessment where maybe you fell a little short or maybe the area you have the biggest strength. From my perspective, there are two ways to work on this. You can work on to improve the areas that you need improvement, or you can even continue to work on your strength and make your strengths shine. But doing assessment, I think, is very, very important. So your answer is wonderful. Doing assessment and actually using your assessment to determine the gap and what you want to do next. With that being said Stacey, is there any specific link that people can actually do that assessment? Is that assessment free at this time?   Stacey Danheiser: It is not ready. However, you can go sign up. There's a... Can I share a link?   Pam Didner: I will add that into the show description and as a part of my podcast and also the video.   Stacey Danheiser: Yep, great.   Pam Didner: Fantastic. So with that being said, I actually have a couple more questions. You mentioned about strategic thinking. I'm using myself as an example. I was a CPA and I was incredibly operations-driven. And strategic thinking was never my Forte, ever. For 10, 15 years of my career, I'm always incredibly focused on how. When I took on a strategic type of role to create a global marketing plan for an enterprise, I remember I struggled tremendously the first two years. [laughter] I have colleagues like came to me and said, "This is a bunch of tactics. It's not strategic enough, and I was like, "What does that even mean, to be strategic?" And took me a long time to actually understand that. You brought a very good point in terms of for marketers to understand the business imperative and also the business goals of a company, and that's how I start when I started thinking strategically, is understand the business goal, the revenue goal, what are the sales people trying to do, what are some of the key things we want to accomplish? And then understand it, internalize it, then take that and try to incorporate it as a part of my marketing strategy. That's how I see as a strategic thinking. What is your thought on that? Can you provide additional insight?   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah. I love that. That really is strategic, is knowing why you're doing something. So I spent 14 years in corporate marketing working for five different Fortune 500 companies so...   Pam Didner: We can talk about that (laughs).   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah.   Pam Didner: Both of us have been in the corporate world for a long time.   Stacey Danheiser: For a long time. So I have, yes, a lot of stories about the marketing planning process, but what I've found, and this is still happening pretty prevalently, is that depending on the marketer and how strategic they are, a lot of people start with how, right? "Here's what I need you to do. I need you to go build a website." "Okay, how are we gonna do it?"   Pam Didner: "We need to do an event." [laughs]   Stacey Danheiser: "We need to do an event." "Okay, great. How do we get started? And let's go build out the tactics." But it's stopping yourself before you jump to that level and asking the question why. Why are we doing this? What do we seriously want to achieve? And how do we know if we've achieved it? What does success look like for this program? So I think a lot of companies, and especially back in my day in corporate, we did a lot of events, because we had always done events. Of course, we're gonna show up at this trade show because that's just what you do. But...   Pam Didner: And sales has been asking for it. And because sales want the events to happen, it's a trade show, so and they can get leads and therefore we do it. Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So it's the marketer, starting to think strategically, is stopping and saying, "Why? Why do we wanna do this? What are you trying to achieve?" And you'll find, this is really interesting, it seems like a lot of people are making assumptions that these answers are understood, but when you actually pause and ask that question to the person making the request, half the time they don't even know. They'll stop and they'll say, "Oh, that's a really good question. What are we trying to achieve with this? How will we measure the success of this?" And so it really forces people to sort of think through the request that they're making and maybe events are not the answer. Maybe there's a different way to come up with the outcome that people are looking for, rather than spinning up a whole bunch of work that's going to take six months to come to fruition. So...   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: That would be kind of number one is to just get in the mindset of asking that question, why? The second thing that I think helps to start thinking more strategically, especially as a marketer, is what I would call the customer-focused mindset, and I think this is missing in a lot of organizations that are very inward-driven. They sit in a group around of sales people and products people and executives, and they all speculate about what the customer may want, and the reality is, marketing should be owning customer research, and marketing should have their pulse on what the customer needs or wants, or values, or expects. And unless you're in an organization that's budgeting for customer research, which I've found most B2B organizations are not, then your avenue for getting input from customers is either you need to build your own relationship with customers and ask these questions directly as a marketer, or travel along with the sales team, and build the respect and relationship with the sales team so they start inviting you along to have these conversations directly with their customers. And so this will help you be a more strategic thinker because you'll have another data point which is, "Here's what my company wants to do, I have their goals and I understand what we're trying to achieve, but what do my customers want and how do I... Like I said earlier, kind of bridge the gap between the two." And so forcing yourself to always be thinking about the customer, and is this really adding value to their world, how is this gonna help us, how does this help the customer? That's definitely a piece that helps you think more strategically, and then kind of along with the research piece, and I know that there's maybe an unpopular opinion about how much time to spend with competitors. But reality is that we have ended up in this sea of sameness because marketers have not focused on what the competition is doing. So said in another way, we know that customers are looking at 10 or 15 pieces of content. They're looking at multiple vendors, and so putting yourself in the shoes of the customer would then help you as a marketer see that is what you're creating contributing to the noise, or is it truly differentiated and helpful and educational and really progressing the customer's journey along a little bit further. So I advise for marketers to spend time doing that competitor research because that helps them ultimately create something more useful.   Pam Didner: And I 100% agree with you in terms of marketers like us in addition to do our job, which is... We have a lot of jobs we have to do and tactics and deliverables, but also understanding the competitors is very critical, which is apt to in terms of connecting different thoughts, and that's one thought that you should connect and to contribute in terms of the thinking strategically.   Stacey Danheiser: Can I add one more thing just real quick, that I have a very strong point of view on, for marketers as well to again, think strategically. So it's not just understanding how your customers buy, and the buying process, and the decision-making process they go through, but it's also about understanding the sales process and so...   Pam Didner: Exactly, the topic. I love the sales part of it. Sales Enablement!   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So this is very interesting because again, I spent a lot of time in corporate marketing, and when I... I started my career in B2C, and I realized that we didn't really have a sales team. We were the sales team, the marketing engine was sales. We had big budgets to support that as well. So when I switched over to B2B, I was pretty surprised at how one, little my budget was. [laughter] Marketing didn't have a very big influence in the company. It was the sales team that really owned a lot of that influence. And so I realized very early on that I needed to build a relationship with my sales team if I was going to be successful in my role as a marketer.   Pam Didner: So true.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So one of the first things I did, we had an annual sales training, so there was product training that the sales team had to go through, and then there was sales methodology or process training. And so I'm asked to attend both of those, and I remember when I showed up to the sales methodology training, the trainer said, "Why is there a marketer in here?" And I said, "What do you mean?" He's like, "I can't remember the last time we had a marketer in the sales training." And it was true. All the sellers are looking at me like, "Why are you here?" And I said, "We all want the same thing. We're both trying to get customers."   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: "If I understand how you guys are doing your job, then I can help you and figure out where I can fit in."   Pam Didner: You can do a better job supporting them. Yes.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. And not only just supporting them, but also the customers, and like I wanna know each of the touch points that the customers need to help them make that decision. So we started working together once they knew that I understood the sales process, and I read sales books, and then from that point on I attended sales methodology training at every company I went to because I was really interested, and I wanted the sales team to develop a really good working relationship, and speak the same language so that we knew it wasn't marketing versus sales, it was marketing and sales, and how can we work together? So that's another piece that I would add for marketers to think more strategically is really understand the sales process.   Pam Didner: Okay. So for folks who are listening, that was coming directly from Stacey. I did not even prep her to say that, and that was also one of the major reasons that I wrote my second book, Effective Sales Enablement. And that whole book is really about how marketers, especially B2B marketers, can do to better support sales in addition to your point, understand customers. Very nice. Lovely. Lovely. This is awesome. So after they listen to, say, this show, or this podcast, and that's assume they also did the gap analysis, and understand what they need. What are one or two like very easy, quick actionable suggestions that you have so that they can continue to hone in these five competencies on regular basis?   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah, there's so many. Let me see if I can narrow it down here. I think I would prioritize... I mean, one thing in our research for the book and how we came up with the five competencies is that we interviewed business and marketing and sales leaders across the US and the UK. So this is not just coming from a marketing standpoint, this was really coming from business leaders who are leading large global organizations. And the one thing that was very interesting to me was about going back to the learning bit, which is a lot of companies had budgets for their marketing teams to use for learning...   Pam Didner: To attend conferences, to take classes. Yes.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes, and the one thing that we heard as a barrier was my marketing team is not using it.   Pam Didner: Really?   Stacey Danheiser: So we have a budget, nobody comes to me and asks me to use it, or I think there's maybe one person on our team who ever finds something and asks to attend. So that was interesting. And I started to look into why, and it went back to these long list of things to do, that marketers are notorious for having. And so learning was de-prioritized. Way, way down on the list, and so I would say prioritize yourself. Nobody, especially if you're working in an in-house agency or a corporate job, is going to come and tell you what you need to go learn. It's really up to you, and this is like your own personal growth and your own development that you get to own, so make that a priority, and if it's 30 minutes a day, spend reading about your industry, spend reading about something that your customer is doing, learning more about your product. There's so much to learn. But that would be one piece of advice that I think everybody has full ownership of, is blocking off 30 minutes a day to learn and replace it... And this was the thing, "Well, I don't have the time." Well, I guarantee that there's probably 30 minutes in your day that you're spending scrolling mindlessly on social media or sitting in a meeting that you might... That you don't need to be in. [laughter]   Pam Didner: That is so true. That is so true. Or when you are driving, you can always turn on the podcast.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes.   Pam Didner: Any kind of marketing-related podcast, or any kind of like know-how type of podcast.   Stacey Danheiser: 100%.   Pam Didner: I do agree with you. Yes.   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah, so that would be my one thing. And then two would just be, if you don't already have a really good relationship with your sales team, go sit with the seller.   Pam Didner: So true. So true.   Stacey Danheiser: And really, you can even ask them like, "What's one piece of advice that you wish marketing knew, or what's one sales book that you think every marketer should read?" So that you're starting to build that knowledge base and build a better relationship with the sales team.   Pam Didner: Sounds like a jam (laughs). So spend some time to learn something new every day and also build a better relationship, or start having the relationship with your sales team. Excellent. Stacey, thank you so much for coming to my show. Can you also tell us, remind us one more time in terms of where we can find your book and as also where people should go in terms of finding more about you.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So first, I'd love to connect on LinkedIn, Stacey Danheiser, and then my company website is shake, S-H-A-K-E, M as in marketing, K-T-G.com. And there, you'll find my books. I have a new playbook program that I'm rolling out, the assessments, of all of our tools and resources are on that website.   Pam Didner: Very good. Thank you so much for coming to my show, Stacey.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes, thank you for having me. It was awesome chatting about one of my favorite topics, B2B marketing. [chuckle]   Pam Didner: Yay! Take care everyone. Bye.

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another SOLO episode where I answer a common B2B marketing question people always ask during my sessions and workshops. That question is: what is the difference between ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and Buyer Persona? Then, the next question is when and where to use an ICP and Buyer Persona?  In today's episode, I will: Cover the differences between the two Give specific examples of when to use ICP and buyer personas So, what are the differences between ICP and Buyer Personas?  ————— If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.

Pam Didner: A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. Christina Del Villar is our guest today. She's the author of the book called Sway. Does that sound cool or what?   Christina Del Villar: I think so.   Pam Didner: And the book is all about marketing strategy, revenue and growth. Woo-hoo. Like me, she is also a B2B marketer. So welcome, Christina.   Christina Del Villar: Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited. I know, Pam, you and I could talk B2B geeky marketing for hours.   Pam Didner: Yes, yes, yes.   Christina Del Villar: Absolutely. Absolutely.   Pam Didner: So the topic we want to talk about today, and we want to get some insights and wisdom from Christina is how a marketer can better talk to the C-suite so they can understand us so much better. And marketing tend to be very complicated, and many marketers have a hard time helping their C-suite understand marketing's impact. So, Christina, do you have any suggestions in terms of what marketers should do, go about communicating with C-suite?   Christina Del Villar: I have so much, and it's interesting because I feel like marketers in general do a bad job marketing ourselves, right?   Pam Didner: What? That is not true.   Christina Del Villar: I know. I know. It's-   Pam Didner: I'm completely offended.   Christina Del Villar: Well, maybe you're amazing at it. There's some people who are amazing at it, but-   Pam Didner: Trust me, I'm not.   Christina Del Villar: Right. But I think that's the key issue that we have as marketers is really understanding, first off, that we are speaking a very different language than the leaders of our companies are speaking, right?   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Christina Del Villar: We are in our day-to-day, our minutia, and really trying to help the company overall. But then we have a really bad way of articulating what that is to leaders. So basically, whenever I go into a board meeting, I have one slide, and it shows the revenue that we brought in for our company. And it usually is all of the revenue that the company brought in, because we had an impact in that, some way, shape, or form, along that entire customer journey. And we'll start with that number, and then we can have conversations about it. And so that's where I start. Now, obviously, not everybody's going to be going into a board meeting. And so how do you talk about it? How do you phrase it? And how do you think about it? And I think that one of the key things that we need to do is really start understanding that we own revenue. We are the ones who are bringing in the revenue, and we need to start talking about it from that standpoint. I know you talk a lot about data and AI and how all that's playing into it, which I think is amazing. And we need to take that and really talk about what it is that we're doing, the value that we're bringing, the impact that we're having from the standpoint of revenue.   Pam Didner: That's great. I love that, but I know a lot of marketers, they have a hard time quantifying the revenue contribution.   Christina Del Villar: Yeah.   Pam Didner: So what are some of the specific steps they need to do from the get-go to make sure they capture that?   Christina Del Villar: There's the component of the data itself, like you're saying, and that actual revenue number, and then there's the attribution, right? And that's where we often have trouble with that. And so I like to take it a little bit further back and think about the entire customer journey and all of the things that marketers are doing as part of that customer journey. Like, starting with a product, what do we do with product and the product team to help them build a better product, think about features and functionality, look at pricing and bundling? We are involved in all of that when it comes to product. And again, we are involved so many different ways across that customer journey: sales, obviously marketing, sales enablement, and then even customer support and success. Again, we do a lot with B2B, so we're talking long-term contracts, multiyear contracts. And how can marketing help customer support and success ensure that we can reduce churn? So these are all areas that marketers actually already have a hand in. We just need to recognize that more and then help others in the organization understand the contributions we're making across that customer journey. Therefore, when we say, or when I go to the board meeting with my one slide that shows all the revenue we brought in for that quarter, and it's all attributed some way to marketing, they have a better understanding of what I mean by that, right? So I can say, "Well, by increasing our price and talking to product and increasing our price or changing our bundles, which allowed us to contribute more value and charge a higher price, this is how marketing contributed to revenue from that standpoint." From a sales enablement standpoint, what content, how did we help sales sell better, sell faster, sell bigger deals? Right? We can show that because now people understand all of the different ways that marketing has played in these different roles. And then from a customer success standpoint, again, when you're talking about churn, are we helping customer success build how to videos, or do webinars, or have FAQs on our website, or manage the knowledge base? What are we doing as marketers? Which, again, we're already doing all of this, we're just not thinking about it in terms of how it really is contributing to the overall number that we're looking at, which again is usually that revenue number.   Pam Didner: Number one is to expand a marketer's influence, kind of like when I call it upstream.   Christina Del Villar: Yeah.   Pam Didner: Like, as a part of product development, as a product, the bundling package, if you are selling SaaS-based platforms or whatnot. And understanding in terms of how the pricing work. And if you actually have external data or some insights to actually share that information, bring that in.   Christina Del Villar: Absolutely.   Pam Didner: And so that's on the product side. And on the sales side is obviously sales enablement. What can you do to actually support them? One of the easiest way to support them is actually share the content with them, especially for the long purchasing cycle. And content is one way of doing it. And also, if you understand their sales stages and along the different sales stages, what can you do to actually support them? But I think in order to do that, you have to understand what their needs are. Would you agree, especially on the sales side?   Christina Del Villar: Absolutely.   Pam Didner: You have to understand what they do, what they need, then you tailor your support specifically for that need.   Christina Del Villar: Absolutely. And I know we do that in marketing with our own roles. We're trying to get better at it from a sales and a sales enablement standpoint. And then from the product standpoint, I think it's important to consider sharing things in context, right? So like when we're talking about why we need this feature or function or why we want to bundle it this way, or why we need to maybe listen more to our customers and manage an advisory committee, whatever that looks like, we need to put everything in context so they understand what it is that we're trying to accomplish and how we can help them. And I think that goes very much to sales as well, right? There's so many times when we're like, "Okay, here's a script," or, "Here's a case study." Right? We don't really explain how to use the content that we're developing and, like you're saying, at what stage we should be using it, right? Like, "This is a perfect piece for when you're nurturing it. If you have a really long sales cycle that's 18 months, at 12 months, this is a good piece to use." We need to help them understand how to use that content as well.   Pam Didner: Understood. Another thing I would like to get your thought is obviously for marketers, a lot of things we do, especially the money we spend on, tend to be for campaigns and outreach. It doesn't matter if it's inbound and outbound, right? And it's driving leads, build that brand awareness and drive demands. And a lot of information we receive or checking, in terms of marketing, the performance, is based on the past campaigns we have run. And you said that's lagging indicators.   Christina Del Villar: Yes.   Pam Didner: Yes. In a way, because, well, that's shared the results of the campaigns we have run in the past six months, right?   Christina Del Villar: Right.   Pam Didner: And if that's lagging indicators, and you mentioned leading versus lagging indicators, can you talk to us a little bit more about that? Well, I am being measured by how many leads I brought in. Of course, that's going to be lagging. How can I put myself a little bit more proactively upfront?   Christina Del Villar: Yeah. And I think that this is another problem that marketers have, because if you think about it, first off, again, we are in our day-to-day minutia, right?   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Christina Del Villar: So we're like, "Oh, web traffic increased today. This is great." It really doesn't mean anything to our CEO. It may not even mean anything to your CMO, right? Because they're trying to understand, "Great. You have that, and that's nice, but how is that going to help us get to our goals?" Right? And so these lagging indicators, again, we as marketers, we need to have that. We need to measure that. We definitely want to show ROI for the campaigns that we have, no question about that. But if we're talking about leading indicators, we're talking about, how is this now going to predictably have usually revenue growth or growth of some kind? What is this going to lead us to? And so this is why it's really important. So if you think about, let's just take an example, right? Let's say you have 20,000 visitors to your website this month or this quarter. So if you go into a meeting and you say, "We had 20,000 website visitors," there's no context around it and it means nothing.   Pam Didner: Nothing.   Christina Del Villar: It means nothing to leaders, right? So a good way of saying it, but it's still talking about still lagging, is to say, "We had 20,000 visitors, which is a 10% increase." So now they're like, "Oh, okay, you spent some money and now you've increased by 10%." So, that's a good way of talking about it. But a better way would be to say, "We increased our target audience website visitors by 10% because we knew what they were looking for, and we created content and delivered specifically for that audience." So, that's a better way of saying it. But best, combines the lagging and the leading, would be to say, "We increased our visits by targeting our audience and increased it by 10% due to our campaigns that we knew we were going to do. And we expect that this will lead to 20% more pipeline and 10% more revenue." Right? We don't really talk about it, but everybody in the company is trying to get to predictability, right?   Pam Didner: Yeah, true.   Christina Del Villar: That is how you can say, "This is what we're expecting." And so if you can bring more of that leading into your conversation, it helps them frame it, like, "Okay, I know what you spent your money on. I can understand the ROI, and I can understand what your expectations are going forward."   Pam Didner: Actually, we can take one step further, if you will. And I like the way you expand it, right? It's not just about 20% growth, but you talk about 20% growth in relationship to how you're going to help the sales, how it's going to help the business objective.   Christina Del Villar: Right.   Pam Didner: And also that you really narrow it down to a target audience. We can also expand it a little bit more, take all your points, if you will. Sometimes if you use IP sniffer, you can see which account or what companies that actually come to our website. If you actually do a little research and not just look into the aggregate number of 20,000 traffic, but you can also say, "Out of this 20,000 traffic, these two, three account is actually account that we want to go after." Guess what? Some of them actually come to our website. So I think call that out will also help tremendously.   Christina Del Villar: Absolutely. Or to your point, even if, again, because we're in B2B so we have multiyear contracts, usually if we see that even one of our customers is on our site, and so that might mean that not everybody in that particular company knows that they already have the solution, or maybe they're looking for something else from our solution. So it's a good opportunity for the account managers to go take a look and see what's happening, or customer success, to hopefully either reduce churn or help when it comes time to renewal as well.   Pam Didner: Yeah. All this, honestly, Christina, I agree with you, but it does require some work on the marketing side. You actually have to analyze and go behind the data to understand what the data is trying to tell you and then find the nugget.   Christina Del Villar: Yep.   Pam Didner: And that's work. I always tell B2B marketers, like, "The job is not that easy." A lot of people say, "Oh, there's a lot of blog posts out there, say, 'Oh, B2B marketing make it simple.'" I was like, "Seriously? It is hard work."   Christina Del Villar: I think I was at a Starbucks one time, and I don't know how it happened, but the barista was like, "Oh, what do you do?" And I said, "Marketing strategy." She's like, "Oh yeah, that seems really easy. Maybe I'll get into that." And I was like, "Many degrees, 30 years of pain, a lot of drinking." Right? Yeah. And I think that somebody once asked me like, "If you were to tell a marketing person or somebody who's interested in marketing, what's the one thing they really need to focus on?" And that is understanding data. If you're afraid of it, you don't want to touch it. There's so many things that marketers could do better, and one of them is literally owning the technology, right?   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Christina Del Villar: I know your book about AI is really important and critical. It's not just about AI and how it's used in marketing right now and how that will help you become a better marketer and help your company succeed both professionally and from a business standpoint, but it has to do with marketers understanding that we can use this technology to do our job better and show that influence and impact and value that we're bringing. But that means owning the technology. I can't tell you how many times I've come into a company and it's like, "The IT owns Salesforce and my marketing automation tool." And I'm like, "Well, what does IT know about the data I'm trying to extrapolate?"   Pam Didner: A lot of time they probably can own it in terms of maintaining the tool.   Christina Del Villar: Sure. Pam Didner: But in terms of what the tool will do, that part of it needs to be owned directly by the sales side. And then you also need the administrators and developers. A lot of time you still have to do some custom coding-   Christina Del Villar: Oh, absolutely.   Pam Didner: ... to make sure the tool is useful for you.   Christina Del Villar: Yeah.   Pam Didner: Yeah. I mean, that's work. Again, that's work.   Christina Del Villar: It's work. It's work. And I think that's one of the reasons why I've been so successful and my teams because I push two things. One is, "We own revenue, period, whether you like it or not," and, "You need to understand the data." I've had people on my teams who are like amazing, amazing writers and content producers, and they're not going to get the data. And that's okay. Then I'll supplement with somebody else on the team to help.   Pam Didner: But I always encourage marketing of, oh, skill set or facets, if you will, that they make an effort to understand other fields of marketing.   Christina Del Villar: Right.   Pam Didner: Say, if you create content, you know what? Well, try to understand email marketing. Well, if you understand content, well, try to look at Google Analytics and see how your content is performing. Right? You need to somehow get out of your specific job roles and responsibility, do a little bit more of that. Yeah.   Christina Del Villar: Right. And again, like you're saying, really understand it, because I think whether it's your own marketing teams or whether you're expanding and working more closely with product or sales, having that understanding and going back to the context really helps you do your job better and present, going back to the original question, present what it is that you're doing in a way that's understandable for that audience. I mean, we do it. That's what we do as marketers. We create for a specific audience. So we should do that internally as well.   Pam Didner: Well, that leads to another question, internal communication. And obviously, one of the key models of the marketing is to understand your audience, understand your audience deeply. Obviously, that also apply to internal communication with C-suites. It is actually for the marketer to frame their discussions or their takeaways around the CEO, COO, CTO, and CRO, if necessary. So can you give us an example in terms of how to frame that discussion, say, if you want to talk to, say, COO and the CTO?   Christina Del Villar: Yeah, yeah. And you should. And it's interesting because as a marketing leader, you know the suite, we talk to the CEO, the CFO, the CIO. Every CXO that's out there, we talk to them. But it's important for everyone in your marketing organization to feel comfortable speaking to those folks, or at least to having that knowledge to present. Because I've been in meetings where it's not like a board meeting, we're not presenting results necessarily, but the CEO might turn to the person who just did an event and be like, "Oh, well, what's our expected revenue?" And they're like, "What?" And then they look at me. I'm like, "No, no." You need to own your campaign and know what it is and feel comfortable talking to them. And I think, again, it goes back to really understanding, at the end of the day, what it is that this person is seeking. Again, know your audience. So the CEO, or let's not even talk about the CEO, let's talk about a VP of sales, they're concerned about pipeline and revenue and making sure that their team meets their numbers and their quota, right?   Pam Didner: Yep.   Christina Del Villar: So, that's what you need to be speaking to them about. When I was working at a company, one of the sales team complained that, "Marketing just talks about all the great stuff we do," and it's meaningless to them. And so I thought about it, and I'm like, "Yeah. No, I get what you're saying. We're like, 'We're great. This is what we did.'" And he said, he's like, "It makes sales look bad when you have..." Because I had this big chart up, like, "We brought in 50,000 leads this month." And then unbeknownst to me, the CEO's like, "Well, marketing just brought in 50,000 leads. What are you doing with them?" Right? Not even realizing that we haven't even given those to sales yet. Right? We're still nurturing them. They're still with us. They're not qualified for sales yet. So we were giving this misimpression to the CEO. It was making the sales team look bad. So we had this monthly meeting that we would have with the sales team, and we would always start off-    Pam Didner: Make sure you're on the same page. Yeah.   Christina Del Villar: Yeah, yeah, right? And we were about to go into this meeting, and it was right after this conversation I had, and I told the person my on my team who presented, I'm like, "Flip our slides." He's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Start from the back. Start from how much pipeline and revenue we brought in. And then if we ever get to how many website visitors we have, it doesn't matter, right? Because this is what's going to engage sales to have an interactive conversation about what's working and what's not working." So he's like, "Okay." So he literally flipped the slides around and we started with, "This is the pipeline we brought in, and this is the revenue we brought in." And we never got to how many website visitors we had, because it didn't matter to them. They wouldn't understand.   Pam Didner: It didn't matter to them anymore. Yeah.   Christina Del Villar: Right. And so that's what we're talking about here. Think about who you're talking to. And again, I've had this happen so many times. You're walking through the hall, and somebody's like, "Hey, blah, blah, blah." It's not scripted, it's not a planned meeting, but people want to know what's going on. And so you always have to have these nuggets in your back pocket so you can talk about it. But again, you need to talk to them in a way that's meaningful to them.   Pam Didner: Yeah. I do agree with you. On the sales side, I 100% agree, even with the CRO, chief revenue officers, talking about the sales revenue and the pipelines are very important. And CEO cares about that a lot too. If I talk to a COO, I usually focus on processes. What kind of processes that we are doing, especially on the Martech Stack. On the CTO side of things, if they really care about all the tools that we are using, and I always talk about in terms of how tools are performing, right? There's no tools are downed, and Salesforce, or the CIM, or marketing automation tools are running very nicely. And another thing I will bring into COO and the CTO's attention, it's usually about processes and also how the tool's usage.   Christina Del Villar: Right, yep.   Pam Didner: What's the tool's usage? And to make sure that they understand that part of it. But most of the time I do agree with you, the key things that everybody cares the most tend to be a revenue and growth impact.   Christina Del Villar: Right, right. And that makes sense, because if you think about what your overall corporate objective is, it is usually a revenue number, right?   Pam Didner: Revenue, yeah.   Christina Del Villar: Right? Even if it's an IPO, maybe you're looking at revenue, maybe you're looking at EBITDA, maybe you're looking at number of accounts, or you're going to look at some of the things, but, at the end of the day, you're really looking at that revenue number. And I think the other thing, to your point, that's really important when you're talking to that COO, CIO, CTO, they want to understand, because some of that, oftentimes that budget will come from their budget or they-   Pam Didner: Exactly. To support it.   Christina Del Villar: Right?   Pam Didner: Yeah. Especially in a big enterprise. Yeah.   Christina Del Villar: Where they're putting resources. Absolutely. I can't tell you how many times people are like, "Well, I have this list of all of your... Do you use all of these tools and technology?" And it's like, "Yes."   Pam Didner: "Do we need it? Do we need tools?"   Christina Del Villar: "Do we really need Salesforce? Do you need that?" Right.   Pam Didner: "Yes, how did you use that in the past two years?"   Christina Del Villar: Right. To be fair, there are times when I'm like, "Oh yeah. Okay. We should probably leverage that more or get rid of it." And that's great. It's good to do that kind of an audit. But again, we need to help them understand how these tools are helping us do our job better, and again, getting us to that ultimate corporate goal that we have.   Pam Didner: Understood. So what is one thing that marketers need to do when preparing their communication or presentation to C-suite? If you actually have one advice, what would that be?   Christina Del Villar: Yeah, I would say keep it short.   Pam Didner: I love that. I like that.   Christina Del Villar: I know, right? And it doesn't need to be a fancy, pretty slide. Again, I literally just throw up a number. It's like, "4.5 million this quarter," right?   Pam Didner: Five million. The font size, 78.   Christina Del Villar: Right? Keep it super simple, because what you want is you want them to take that away immediately and then you still need to have that backup material, because they're going to ask more questions about it, which is fine. But I would just say keep it simple and keep it to the point, and again, what it is that they're looking for, right? If the CTO is trying to understand how you're leveraging the technology and, "Do we need all these licenses?" then start with that. If the CEO wants to understand what revenue is happening, talk about that sales pipeline, right? Product really wants to better understand how people are using their product. And marketers tend to have that information because we own all the tools that people are communicating with, whether it's chat or-   Pam Didner: Certainly.   Christina Del Villar: ... things like that. Right? So there's definitely ways that you can consider it. And if you don't know, simply ask them, like, "What motivates you?" Right?   Pam Didner: Just ask.   Christina Del Villar: I know. Have a conversation. Just ask, right? Just ask. It was funny, I had a conversation with an engineering team. I basically made them come to a marketing brown bag once, and they were just like... The fact that they even showed up was great, but they were all on their phones, eating their lunch. And at one point I was like, "Look, this is the role you can help my team. We need data about how our customers are using our products. And we need to get some information on case studies." And suddenly this one guy pops up and he's like, "Oh my God, we have 10 years of usage data. Would that be helpful?" I'm like, "Ah-   Pam Didner: Yeah!   Christina Del Villar: ... yeah. That would be freaking amazing!" And they got all excited about it. And so then they felt like they were part of our process. They were total geeks about the data, so they were deep diving into it. And again, just helping them understand how they can help you and you can help them, and helping them really understand what it is that you are doing and how they can help you as well as you helping them.   Pam Didner: Very nice. Very nice.   Christina Del Villar: Yeah. It was super cute.   Pam Didner: How can people find you?   Christina Del Villar: Yeah. You can find me at christinadelvillar.com. Also, my book is on Amazon, Sway. And I'm on LinkedIn. I love connecting. I love talking about this. I know you do as well, so happy to always chat with people and be their mentor, give advice, just commiserate, whatever.   Pam Didner: Excellent. Well, Christina, it's wonderful to have you. Thank you so much for coming to my show.   Christina Del Villar: Yeah. Thank you.  

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. For this SOLO episode, I want to address an important question, but it's not something discussed widely. That's right, today's question is how to improve your emotional intelligence. In this episode, I will answer questions like: What is emotional intelligence? Why is it important? What can you do to improve it? So, what is emotional intelligence, also known as “EQ”?   Here is my own definition: EQ is the ability to see other people's points of view and make an effort to modify your actions to reach a resolution during conflicts or disagreements. It's a more business-setting definition.   Here is a definition from our BFF, Google: EQ is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict.   So, possessing a high EQ allows someone to be able to communicate with others from an empathetic perspective and defuse conflict in a positive way.   Once you understand the definition, it's easy to see the benefits of having a high EQ.   It can help you: -  Build better personal relationships with others -  Defuse conflicts and find compromises -  Enhance team morale -  Be a better version of yourself     How can you increase your EQ?   Work on listening intently It's not about hearing what others say, it's about listening earnestly and attentively. Sometimes there are underlying messages that others try to communicate, but they are either too polite to say things bluntly or unable to find the right words to explain their points of view.   You need to listen carefully. The best way to be sure you understand is to paraphrase what you've heard back to them. Use words such as “Ok, let me try to understand…”, “Here is my understanding…”, and “Let me paraphrase…”   By regurgitating, you subconsciously open up your mind a bit, and your brain takes a mental note of a completely different opinion.   At the same time, you show others not only that you are willing to listen, but that you “understand” them. The willingness to listen is a way to show compassion and empathy. Listening intently is the first requisite to improving your emotional intelligence.   Walk a mile in someone else's shoes Yesterday, I watched a 2019 movie called The Best of Enemies on Netflix; the Taraji Henson and Sam Rockwell film is based on a true story that happened in Durham, NC, in 1971. An unlikely friendship was forged between Civil Rights Activist Ann Atwater and local Ku Klux Klan leader CP Ellis.   Honestly, the Rotten Tomatoes review is only 52% and the audience score is 76%, so take that with a grain of salt, but I think the message of the film is useful to our discussion today.   The backdrop of the story is that a Black elementary school was caught on fire, leaving students with nowhere to learn.   The city council made a finding that the school was still usable which was not true so NAACP helped to file a lawsuit and asked for the students to be allowed to temporarily attend the local white school while the fire-damaged facilities were being rebuilt.   Rather than the judge making a decision, he decided to bring proven mediation expert Bill Riddick to help the town come to an agreement about what should happen.   Bill used an approach called charrette which invites everyone to have their say. He asked Ann and CP to co-chair the charrette, and through the open discussions, they narrowed down the issues they needed to discuss. The townspeople were broken down into different groups to brainstorm and hammer out different resolution points. Then, they would regroup as a whole each night for the wrap-up.   They also selected 10 people, 5 people from each side, for what they called the Senate. The Senate would vote on all resolutions on the final night of the charrette.   Many things happened during the course of the film to shift CP's mindset, but a pivotal moment came when he took a visit to the fire-damaged school in the summer, typically a season of leisure for children, where Black students were still attending school to try and make up for the lost time. It was then that he began to have a real change of heart.   Spoiler alert: He cast a pivotal vote for the resolution of school integration. At the end of the movie, you can see the real Ann Atwater and CP Ellis sharing their own stories.   Walking in someone else's shoes always has some profound impact on all of us whether we agree with that person's point of view or not.   You don't need to agree with them, but you need to be able to see where they're coming from and why they do certain things or think in certain ways. Sometimes, learning to accept differences is one way to move forward. Other times, making a pivotal change is a way to move forward.     Ultimately, your level of emotional intelligence directly equates to your level of empathy. It will affect your ability to healthily resolve conflict and form and maintain relationships, both in your personal life and at work, so it's well worth examining where or how you can make adjustments and improve.   Honestly, I am not a very emotional person, aka, I am not very sympathetic at times.   My take on life: it's tough (life is tough so deal with it!), and as humans, we often just have to deal with it. Although plenty of people share that viewpoint, it doesn't mean that everyone is on the same level, so I need to remember to check myself in order not to come off as an ass.   We all deal with hardship differently, so it's important to be sensitive to others' coping mechanisms.   I've become more sympathetic over time, but I won't lie, it's taken patience and practice! Life experience and interactions with a wide array of people have taught me a few things such as putting myself in other people's shoes.   I'd like to end this video with a quote from Brene Brown:   “Empathy has no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It's simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You're not alone.'”   There is no right or wrong way to improve your emotional intelligence, but a good starting point is to start listening intently, be open-minded, and imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.   What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts.   Take care, bye!

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. For this episode, I want to address an important question, but one that is not widely discussed. That is how to overcome Imposter Syndrome. How many times have we wished that we were someone else because their lives are just seems so much better than ours? Growing up, I always wanted to be someone else. It took me a long time. I mean, long time to overcome Imposter Syndrome. So now I want to share with you what I did so that you can be your unique self with full confidence as well. Here are several things I've done to overcome those intrusive thoughts and negative feelings.   1. Don't believe everything you see on social media. Honestly, social media has exacerbated Imposter Syndrome for everyone. Everyone's life seems so perfect on social media and their accomplishments appear larger than life. I want to tell you to take what you see on social media with a grain of salt. Don't get too caught up in someone else's photos and their happy lives. Remember that a photo or a video conveys one moment at a time. No, one's life is perfect every single minute, every single day. Someone may show off great travel photos, but you don't know if they charge credit card or take on debt to pay for these trips. Some may post scenes of a great time partying on the weekends. Great! But you don't know what their other days are like. If people are happy on social media, be happy for them. But remember that you don't know what their real lives are like. They have daily struggles, just like every one of us. There's a statement I have seen many, many times on Facebook: “We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't even like.” (laughs) So true. That pretty much sums up what social media is all about. Once you see through that, the feeling to keep up with the Jones will recede a bit.   2. Learn to love yourself. (I mean, really love yourself!) You can be self-critical, but never be self-loathing. Be aware of your own strengths as well as areas for improvement. Pat yourself on the back when you accomplish something, but don't be yourself up when you make a mistake; acknowledge mistakes and do better next time, then head up, walk like a winner. Or like what the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel says “Tits up!” I cannot believe I said that! It took me a long time to like myself, a long time. When people complimented me, I would make self-deprecating jokes and brushed off the compliments until someone told me, “Pam, don't put yourself down. Just say thank you when someone praises you and enjoy the moment!” I agree with that wholeheartedly. Remember that we are all screwed up to some extent; every one of us! Learn to love yourself, because if you don't no one else will; or if you don't, how can others love you?   3. You need to earn your confidence. The key here is earn. I've come to realize that to overcome imposter syndrome, you need to be confident. Confidence, in general, doesn't come naturally to most of us. You need to earn it. One way to gain confidence is to be very, very good at something that people will come to you for advice about. When you see people respect and appreciate your recommendations and ideas, you'll feel like, “huh, I'm pretty good.” And that's a good way to build confidence over time. For me becoming an independent consultant and a speaker has helped me tremendously. I mean, tremendously to build my confidence. When I tell people I didn't usually speak up at any meetings for like 10, 15 years and was very, very shy, nobody, nobody would believe that they were like, “Pam, you shy? No, it doesn't compute.” (laughs) I become more confident by slowly building my B2B marketing expertise and knowhow. Once you have a skillset that you can use to help others, you start tapping into your full potential. You become unique and you become, you.   4. Never stop learning AND exercise. This is another way to overcome Imposter Syndrome. You continue to enrich your mind and your wellbeing. If you feel good about yourself mentally and physically, then you start liking yourself. When you start liking yourself and have a unique skillset that you can call your own, you start recognizing your worthiness. If you start realize how good you are, you want to be you, not someone else! Bear in mind that Imposter Syndrome comes and goes. It will never completely go away. And that's just part of being human or being alive; there will always be moments when you are going to feel the other side of grass is green. When you have these thoughts, you need to turn “love yourself switch” on and tell yourself that you are worth it. Don't be shy. Say that out loud.   So quickly recap. Here are my four top tips to overcome Imposter Syndrome. Don't believe all the wonderful photos that people post on social media. It doesn't mean their lives are perfect. Learn to love yourself. If you don't, it's harder for others to love you Earn your confidence by being very, very good at something. Anything. Continue to learn and exercise.   I mentioned this earlier in the episode that when I was growing up, I wanted to be someone else. I think that had a lot to do with I didn't like myself and I didn't think I was good enough. And I learned to love myself in my late thirties. Seriously! Can you imagine, not liking yourself with 30 some odd years? So don't do that to yourself. It's a torture. I gained confidence when I started to be good at something. Then in the past 10, 15 years, I also learned to take care of myself by managing my own stress, even though I work long, long, long hours. And I do yoga every day and I help tremendously. I've slowly realized I'm pretty good the way I am. Maybe that realization also comes with aging. When you start getting older, you're just like, “ah, I don't care.” So how do you overcome Imposter Syndrome? I'd love to hear from you and if you really like my podcast, feel free to subscribe on your favorite listening platforms. Take care. Bye-bye.

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and more with Pam. I have a very special guest, AJ Wilcox. AJ specializes in paid ads for LinkedIn. He is a LinkedIn Ads Fanatic, host of The LinkedIn Ads Show, and founder of B2Linked, the Linkedin advertising agency. You can guess, that AJ is here with us to share many practical tips for running LinkedIn ads. In this episode: What kind of ads work best on LinkedIn? How to run LinkedIn ad campaigns Why are LinkedIn ads not converting? How much budget does a company need to run Linkedin ads? How long should businesses run paid media for a specific channel? What are LinkedIn's different ad options and formats? What is recommended length for a Linkedin video ad? How can businesses avoid making the most common mistakes? Quotes from the episode: "LinkedIn allows us to target people by who they are. So if you look at it with LinkedIn, you can ensure that every single one of your clicks and leads comes from an ideal prospect." "You need to set expectations, especially realistic expectations with your salespeople and also with your management when you rent paid media ads. And a good chunk of it is building awareness, not necessarily driving the conversion." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Pam Didner: Hey, big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam. Yay. Today I actually have a very, very good friend joining me, Robert Rose, Chief Strategist of Content Marketing Institute. And I have known Robert for at least, I would say, 10 years maybe. We have known each other for a long while.   Robert Rose: Yeah. It's been the better part of a decade, for sure. Yeah.   Pam Didner: Yeah, exactly. Welcome to my show and I have waited so long to actually have you. Shame on Pam! (laughs)   Robert Rose: I'm so excited to be here. I'm long time listener, first time guest. I'm super happy to be here. Thank you.   Pam Didner: Excellent. And today we are going to talk about our favorite topic, which is buyers, the B2B buyers. And obviously in the past several years, there's a term called empowered buyers, especially the B2B buyers. And they have all the information at their fingertips, AKA Google search, so they are armed with so much knowledge on hand. And many of them are very, very good at consuming, doing research on high quality content pieces, to make sure that they have enough knowledge to source the right technology. Does that mean they are totally in control and they are incredibly knowledgeable about the technology and the platforms they need to buy? What is your thought on that?   Robert Rose: Well it's something that we've been noticing more and more over the last few years because our business isn't the only one doing content marketing. Our competitors are doing it, everybody's doing it, in some cases. And what has come to pass is that in many ways, businesses have this belief that there's this asymmetric relationship between them and buyers and buyers are showing up on their door, and that's true. The stats that we see from Forrester or Gartner, the other research firms that say 70% of the buyer's journeys done before a sales person gets a call and people don't like cold calling and all that stuff. It's all true but the question underneath it is what's important, which is why. And the key there is there's research to actually to show this, which is buyers aren't feeling terribly empowered these days. And the question is because we have to remember that the selling and marketing process is not the only one that changed. The buying process changed as well. And in many cases, those buyers, they're not doing this because they love it. It's like asking me to go buy a new something for my car engine. I hate cars. I don't want to get into a car, but I'm going to go research it and learn about it so that I can actually buy the best one. In many cases for B2B, that's the exact same thing. One CMO told me one time, he said, "Look, we're going out and buying this enterprise marketing technology, but I got no interest in learning and becoming a subject matter expert in this stuff. I hate this. I don't want to do it, but I have to do it because my boss, the CEO, wants us to put this committee together so that we buy the best purchased product that we possibly can." And so many times what happens is that our buyers are showing up and all we're doing is pouring more research on them and basically not adding any value to their process because they're just trying to check a box that they did all this research. It's the equivalent of saying we've got buyers showing up on our doorstep and they want to learn how to play chess and we continually give them more research on why chess is such an important game and they'll have fun playing it. They're like, "Yeah, I get it, enough." And we just need to be more helpful. Instead of teaching buyers why to change, we need to be teaching them how they can change more easily.   Pam Didner: So with that being said, how do we know what they want and how can we be helpful to them in a way that they need it?   Robert Rose: We can start listening a lot more. Is what we can do.   Pam Didner: That is true. I 100% agree with that.   Robert Rose: Look, we're marketers, so we are trained. There's that wonderful, active listening idea. And the idea is that we're waiting to speak. Are we really listening or are we just waiting to speak? And most marketing or sales enablement teams, they're pretty much just waiting to speak. It's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear what you're saying, but how many licenses do you really need?" And so we can listen a lot more in terms of hearing what the intent is of the buyers that are showing up, what are they really looking for? When they ask or when they come in and download a piece of content, how many B2B companies do you know that treat every single download of every single piece of content exactly the same way?   Pam Didner: Same. They assign the score. You download this piece, you get 30 points, you download that piece, you get 40 points.   Robert Rose: Exactly MQL is triggered and all of a sudden it triggers an email saying, "How many licenses or what would you like to buy today and can I schedule a call with you?" And instead, if we start listening for the contextual signals, because what we're putting out with all of our thought leadership and with all of our marketing content are signals that can get tripped. And so if we look and say someone downloaded a White Paper entitled Everything, I Need to Learn About the Introduction of My Industry versus How Do I Implement the Best Solution for My Need, those are two very different signals and we can start responding in appropriate ways instead of treating both of those customers exactly the same.   Pam Didner: I completely can relate to what you are just sharing with us in terms of that the lead score or the content score related to the download, even you assign a specific point or a score associated with someone downloading it, but don't use that number as, "Oh, you got 85 point, therefore we should do this." Even though they download a specific piece of content and you have to do some research to understand where they're coming from, what else they do, try to identify their intent or possibly their interest before you actually determine how you want to respond to that, so that sounds like the automation workflow is not going to work very, very well or you have to use certain kind of algorithm to attest or discover what that intent is. Is that correct? You have to do it manually or you have to use some sort of tool to help you out.   Robert Rose: We all have a tendency to want to over automate things that don't necessarily need to be automated, but there are ways certainly to think about this from a marketing automation perspective. I think the key thing is not to just look, you said it very well, it's not just looking at how many things that they downloaded and assigning a score or even looking at exactly what they downloaded and assigning a score. One of the things that we need to look at is the context of how those things happen. In other words, the order is important. So if someone comes in and downloads the paper that I just mentioned that says, "How do I implement X kind of solution," and then goes and downloads the, "What do I need to learn about this particular industry?" well, that's two different ideas, rather than if they came in and did the reverse. One is I'm learning and then I need to know how, and then the other is maybe I need to just check off a box and get to the how, but then I'm really confused by everything and I'm coming back to learning the why. And so really understanding the context of what the customer is doing and what they're actually asked ... One of my favorite things to do, and so few B2B companies do it, is instead of gating a piece of content with your email address, why don't you gate a piece of content with just, "Why do you want this content?" Just ask. Just say, "What are you looking for?" "I'm just looking to learn. I'm trying to get as much research I'm trying to figure out what's best for me." Get insight and listen. Even if you only did that for one out of every five visitors, just start to get an insight and listen more than simply just waiting to speak.   Pam Didner: I like the idea, even if you gate the content, that you ask a very simple question. Obviously, everybody wants to get the first name, last name and email address.   Robert Rose: Right. Well, they want the email address, because that's, for some reason, we've started to equate that with value.   Pam Didner: I guess it's probably another thing to check off the box. Guess what? I got another lead.   Robert Rose: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So many companies, they have this algorithm set up to where somebody downloads something and immediately, trips up an email to say set up a thing with a... It happens to me all the time. I go to some site and I download a white paper.   Pam Didner: Oh yeah. Honestly, I'm the guilty one. I set up that process myself, somebody subscribe and I actually have a three email over three weeks. The first one you just welcome them and then share with them some contents. And the second one is basically say, "Hey, these are the top five popular most downloaded blog post." And then the other one-   Robert Rose: That's right. That's what you should be doing, but it's the company that I go to, I'm looking at you, Gartner, when I go and I download something that's available on Gartner and not five seconds later, do I get some sort of sales email saying basically-   Pam Didner: Sound like an automatic email, hundred percent.   Robert Rose: Automatic email saying basically. And if you think about it, the minute that I've downloaded a White Paper is actually the worst time to email me and actually try and sell me something. It's the worst time because I haven't even read the thing that I've downloaded yet. I haven't even experienced it yet. And you're already banging on my door saying, "Hey, can I sell you something?"   Pam Didner: Hello, I need to talk to you now.   Robert Rose: If you could pick the worst time to try and sell somebody something, it would be the 5 or 10 seconds after they've downloaded this thing you wanted them to download, but yet we do it. It's the first thing we want to do.   Pam Didner: Yeah. In general, I want to wait for a little bit, two or three days down the road, even when I do a workshop. Even for CMW, I will send a thank you note, but usually I send that right away, 24 hours, because I just say, "Hey, thank you so much for coming to my workshop," and that's about it. And then I have a call to action. "If you need to talk to me, feel free," and that's the end of the conversation. And I don't usually do a lot of pounding, like, "Hey, talk to me, talk to me, talk to me." But whenever I get a chance, I always have a call to action. "Yeah. It's a complimentary. Schedule a call with me," so yeah, but I hear you. You don't want to be right there that minute. Well, now we are looking ahead, which is the post-pandemic. Based on what you have seen, and also some of the research that's been conducted by Content Marketing Institute, what should marketers do differently, now it's completely different era?   Robert Rose: There are a couple of things, I think, that have been accelerated from the pandemic. And the first is we were just talking about is the need for different kinds of content. There's a statistic that I read. It was a few, maybe a month or two ago, that talked about how B2B organizations really pivoted and started doing much more of their sales enablement online and in live video versus getting on a plane and showing up and doing PowerPoint presentations at the foot of the table or taking their customers to golf or whatever it is. And what the report said was basically that companies have really found success with that. They've really found that it's better, in many ways. And so I think that's one of the things that's changed post-pandemic that will continue to be there, which is a real press on the need to create digital experiences that are video-based, that are sales-enablement oriented. And so I think there's a real opportunity for marketers and sales people to really work together to start to create these very interesting, engaging, and thoughtful video experiences that are really sales enablement practices over and over again. And I think a lot of that has to do with the real move here to create so much more digital content in a world, where the physical aspects of this, our attendance at conferences and our attendance at being able to see people in restaurants and being able to go and fly there and do all those things, right now is really limited. And so this move for a more direct to customer digital experience is such an important part of this. And so that means that content marketers, the thought leadership, the resources, all of those kinds of things, are starting to merge a lot with other elements of content that are more sales oriented. And so I think that expansion and that importance of that as a strategy is probably the biggest thing to come out for content out of the pandemic.   Pam Didner: When I was speaking, actually, at private events and they asked me a specific trends that they need to pay attention to, especially looking ahead for next two or three years, I say something similar, but use a slightly different term. It's the increased digital touchpoint. In the past, you can take care of that through any kind of physical interaction, but that is not just replaced, but also there's increased number of digital touchpoint that you have to add as a part of the purchase journey.   Robert Rose: That's a great point.   Pam Didner: And I agree with you. I have seen that as well. And I also have encouraged a lot of sales professionals. It's very interesting about sales people. When you put a salesperson in front of a prospect, they are charming, they know what to say, they know how to do it. But if you put the salesperson in front of a camera, they freeze. They're like, "I don't know what to say."   Robert Rose: That's such a great point. Yeah.   Pam Didner: And so one thing I feel that the sales professional that needs to possess in the future is the ability to look at a green dot, like green dot on that digital camera, and still feel incredibly comfortable in talking, just like you are talking to prospects.   Robert Rose: That's such a great point.   Pam Didner: Do you know there is a tool called Loom, L-O-O-M?   Robert Rose: I've heard of it. Yes.   Pam Didner: Loom. Yeah. Basically, it's a SaaS-based platform that you can download to your laptop and you can click on Loom and then you can do recording like this. You can say, "Hey. Hey, this is Pam. It's so good talking to you, blah, blah, blah," and then you can hit done. And then you can do a very quick trim in and you can trim the front, you can trim the end, and then once that's done, they give you a video link, very similar to YouTube. So you can just add that link or you can add that video directly to your email, a very quick download and it's readily available and if you don't want to add that video into your email, you can just add a video link and that people can watch it. It's wonderful. And it's also very, very good at doing a live demo. For example, I say, "Hey, Robert, you know what? I know you are interested about this. Let me show you how to do it." And then you do it and recording yourself. It was actually wonderful tool. Yeah.   Robert Rose: Yeah. I've seen a couple of it. Yeah. It's great for email. Yeah.   Pam Didner: Yeah, exactly. No, I 100% understand. And I do encourage a lot of sales professional. I say, "You know what? You look gorgeous. You know you are, so now you just get yourself comfortable in front of camera. Okay? Then you are perfect. All right?" Am I crazy?   Robert Rose: Yes, but we knew that already.   Pam Didner: All right. So this is wonderful and I actually have one last question. So what show are you binge watching right now?   Robert Rose: It's hard to binge watch anymore because they're all dropping once a week now, instead of dropping the whole season at a time.   Pam Didner: I know. That really just annoys the heck out of me. Yeah.   Robert Rose: Yeah. The last binge watch where we watched two seasons' worth of shows in two weeks was “Yellowstone.” I just finished all four seasons.   Pam Didner: Oh my God.   Robert Rose: It's so great.   Pam Didner: Is it by Kevin Costner? Yeah. I think that show is. Is it?   Robert Rose: Well, first of all, he's dreamy, but ...   Pam Didner: I know. That's why I say. He age so well. Oh my God. I love him. I love him. I have not watched that show. It's on my list.   Robert Rose: Oh, you should watch it. It's “The Sopranos” as cowboys is what it is. It's just so great.   Pam Didner: Really? Oh my God. What about the scenery? The Yellowstone, Grand Teton ...     Robert Rose: Oh, it's beautiful. It's beautiful to watch. And it's great. If you like cowboys and westerns it's really fun. And then of course, what I'm watching right now is all this new Star Trek stuff because, of course, I'm a nerd that way.   Pam Didner: “Picard,” are you watching the ...   Robert Rose: Oh yeah. I watched all of it. I watched all of “Picard.” I'm in the “Strange New World.” Anything Star Trek, I'm all over, so that's my favorite thing at the moment.   Pam Didner: Very good. Excellent. You know what, Robert? It's so good talking to you and I'm so happy that you finally came to my show and we talk about what empower buyers, how to be helpful to them. And also we talk about some of the digital touch points that is going to probably continue to increase post-pandemic and how to use video as a means to actually engage with your prospect. Very, very good. So happy to see you, Robert.   Robert Rose: Great to see you.   Pam Didner: Take care. Bye.  

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. In today's episode of B2B Marketing & More, I explain how to set up an efficient and cohesive martech stack. I'll guide your thinking approach and break down key steps that you can take to tackle this hairy issue. In this episode: What makes martech Stack complicated What is the best way to navigate the martech stack How to plan your martech budget How to build a martech stack Why and how to include paid media in your marketing Quotes from the episode: "Knowing your business objectives and the marketing channels you want to use, and the success metrics you're looking for will all go a long way on Martech Stack building. " "You can grow your business organically to some extent. However, at some point, you will hit the ceiling. If you need to grow, you need to do paid advertising, which means paid search, paid ads, or even paid sponsors." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a special guest today: Erica Heald. She's a founder and the lead consultant at Erica Heald Marketing Consulting, where she helps a lot of SaaS startups. Today we are going to talk about B2B thought leadership, in the context of the B2B marketing specifically. What makes it important for marketers and companies and why do they need to be aware of generating thought leadership. In this episode: What is the biggest misconception about thought leadership? How should marketers start to craft B2B thought leadership strategy for their company? What are the challenges for big enterprises? How to find the right B2B thought leadership opportunities within the company? How can B2B marketers and subject matter experts create thought leadership content? What is the best way to position a thought leadership pitch to the management? Quotes from the episode: "You start by thinking about who in your organization is not afraid to speak their mind, even if it might ruffle some feathers. You want to find those who are okay with sometimes being the one who says the not so popular opinion out loud in public and is willing to talk about it." "If you're willing to put in the time with your Legal and Compliance partners and share why you want to change something or where you're coming from, a lot of times, they will figure out how to help you get towards where you wanted to go." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Welcome to another episode, B2B Marketing & More. I have a very special guest today: Janet Driscoll Miller. Janet is the author of Data-First Marketing. She is the President and CEO of Marketing Mojo, specializing in digital ads, SEO and analytics. Today Janet shares data-first marketing tips, and how to put data at the beginning of what businesses need to do. In this episode: What is data-first marketing and how it is different from data-driven? How can marketers become data-first focused? How to create multiple personas? Basic data-first marketing tips for marketing and sales How to plan the process to track data during a marketing campaign? How to assess the effectiveness of the data-first marketing effort? Data-First marketing book templates. What are some of the common mistakes encountered when harnessing the data? How should marketers consolidate and analyze data in a holistic way? Quotes from the episode: "In data-first, we're talking about how you make sure that you have accurate reporting from the very beginning. That you're tracking everything correctly to understand how you're impacting those business goals throughout the lifecycle of a campaign." "You want to make sure that everything is consistent. So come up with a plan for your organization to approach tagging and have a standard. And then, when you do that, that makes it a little bit easier to ensure that the tagging is done consistently across the whole organization" ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. In today's B2B Marketing & More episode, I'll answer the following question: What's the best way to integrate sales and marketing efforts within a large company? After this episode, you will think about alignment differently, and you'll have some actionable ideas as to how you should approach this challenge. In this episode: What makes sales and marketing alignment difficult. How to resolve sales and marketing integration challenges in a large enterprise. Two approaches to aligning sales and marketing in an enterprise. How to establish clear and open communication. Quotes from the episode: "Sales and marketing integration is always hard. It's even harder in a large enterprise because there are too many cooks in the kitchen." "Close and clear communication is essential, and be prepared to be nimble when you work with sales." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Raleigh North Carolina. It's time for another solo episode. Today's topic is all about how to clearly and effectively communicate with sales. And after listening to this episode, you'll know exactly what you need to do to navigate the process with ease. But, again, you have any questions, please reach out hello@pamdidner.com.   Supporting sales is tricky and delicate. For example, when I do sales enablement presentations at conferences or training sessions, I often get questions such as:   One common question: “Sales change their minds a lot, so it's hard to know what they really want. How can I support them if they change directions all the time?”   Here is another one: “Sales ask me to send the same content all the time because they don't stay on top of what's been published. How can I help them get in the loop?”   Ok, one more: “Sales don't want to do their own research or create templates, and they ask Marketing to do it for them. But it's not my job, so how do I tell them No and still maintain a good relationship?”   For today, I want to address one question:  How can you better communicate with Sales and set up clear expectations?   I understand your pain because I have supported sales for a long time. However, even though every company has a sales organization and faces similar challenges across the board, there is no cookie-cutter solution - remedies will vary from company to company.   I've never recommended a one-size-fits-all solution TO a company, even if the challenge they're facing resembles similar case studies     because you need to take into account sales corporate culture, salespeople seniority, organizational structure, processes, and even the tools that sales use.   For example, many sales organizations struggle with the quality of leads from marketing. We need to find a potential cause or causes for that first. Do we have a clear definition of marketing leads that sales can accept? Is the quality really not on par? Do we need more vetting before we pass leads to sales?   How can we change the definition if we need to? How should we modify the processes, and who should vet them? Once you determine some plausible causes, the solutions will also depend on the organizational structures, resources shared between sales and marketing, etc.   So, one big key takeaway for today's video is that there is no blanket solution for working with sales.   You can look for best practices, but it's usually hard to implement best practices as is. You need to know what nuggets you can take from best practices and apply to you and your team.   Here are some steps I'd take to communicate with sales clearly and set up concrete expectations:   1.  Interview and talk to several sales team members about their challenges and how they ideally want to be supported moving forward.   Bear in mind: at this point, you are just gathering information. You don't necessarily need to implement everything they suggest, and you're not committing to anything just yet.   2.  Go through the list and prioritize. Here's what you need to consider at this stage: -  List: If you interview 10-20 salespeople, the resulting list will be long. You'll need to comb through everything and group similar requests together. That takes time. -  Prioritization approach: Prioritize what you will do based on their needs and business imperatives, some of which may be low-hanging fruit, while others require resources and a budget. Identify 3 low-hanging fruit and 3 that require more intensive resources and budgeting that you need to work on. -  Create a service level agreement (SLA): Create a document to explain what you will and will not do and/or specify something sales need to do to move things forward collectively.   If you like how I explain things, please subscribe on your favorite listening platforms.   3.  Get buy-in from sales and management Create a presentation and show what you will do and get buy-in. Sales like to see what you can do for them NOW. So you need to have a couple of things to show that you will jump right in. For example, you might refresh the sales pitch deck, update a pricing guide, or even just commit to attending their weekly sales huddle meetings to listen in.   4.  Once you get buy-in, it's all about execution, execution, execution. Start working and show them what you can deliver. Knock their socks off.   5.  Stay close and provide timely updates Always let them know what you have done, what you are doing, and what you will do. This can be in the form of an update at the weekly huddle meetings. Have a standing agenda item such as Marketing Updates and take a couple of minutes during each meeting to provide status updates. Or, you can incorporate what you accomplish as part of the quarterly updates that your team provides to Sales.   6.  Update SLA as you go As time goes by, sales always have additional asks which fall outside of the scope you've proposed. I KNOW, I've been there. Address these head-on. It's kinda like if you are a restaurant owner, and you see a bad Yelp review - address it, explain your point of view, and apologize if necessary. When sales team members ask about something which is not part of the Service Level Agreement, address their concerns right away and discuss what needs to be done, then update the SLA accordingly.   Both you and sales will learn to make the appropriate adjustments over time through close communication and collaboration.  And there you have it!   We covered a lot, so don't hesitate to pop any questions you have down into the comments. And if you liked how I explained things, feel free to subscribe the podcast! And I always love to hear from you.   Take care, and see you next time!

Hello, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a return guest this time: Darrell Alfonso, a global marketing operations manager at Amazon Web Services, martech instructor and speaker. I interviewed Darrell back in 2020, about marketing automation and what makes it a must-have for modern marketers. Obviously, many things have changed in the past one and a half years. So I invited Darrell back, and we're going to have a little chat about marketing automation and some of his changes in both professional and personal life. In this episode: What are the emerging B2B marketing automation trends and technologies during the pandemic? What are data unification platforms? How can marketers use CDP (customer data platform)? CDP suggestions and what makes them different for B2B marketing automation. How to achieve the delicate balance of standardization and personalization? What is the role of data in hyper-personalization and how to use it? Two strategies to personalize for people with multiple job functions and roles? How to use artificial intelligence and algorithms to identify customers' intentions? Quotes from the episode: "One thing that's important to explain is that the goal is to take the data from different sources. So your CRM, customer database, marketing automation platform, and advertising tools may be used." "All the cool things that you want to do in marketing take a lot of work. And it takes a lot of things that aren't that glamorous. But the result is worth it." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. It's time for my monthly solo episode. Today I want to talk about the fundamentals of product positioning. It's not a popular topic, but marketers need to understand what must be done to position their products. My product positioning tips will help you with content marketing, copywriting for social media, understanding your products, and overall marketing communications. In this episode: What is product positioning? What is the difference between product positioning and the messaging framework? How to position the products? Quotes from the episode: "Segmentation can get complicated quickly when you constantly add new product lines or serve different sets of customers. When your company is growing, you offer more products. Over time your segmentation would get messy. You will need to reevaluate your segmentations. " "The purpose of a name is to evoke a visual in a person's mind. Therefore naming or not naming your product is a strategic decision. However, you should always have a short and differentiated description to explain your product." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today I have a special guest - Kayla Graham. Kayla is the Operations Manager, wears multiple hats and is responsible for a company called Content Callout. She also does a lot of day-to-day internal operations, covering external-facing operations at the same time. Our key focus in this episode is on startups, marketing and sales alignment, and how to optimize it for startup companies. In this episode: Who should startups with limited budgets decide who to hire first? When building a marketing team, is it better to outsource or have it in-house? How to build brand awareness with a limited budget? What are the must-have tools for marketing and sales to achieve business goals? What makes marketing and sales alignment difficult in a startup? How can marketing and sales achieve long-term collaboration or process? How to plan, prioritize and de-prioritize tasks? What are the most common sales and marketing alignment challenges, and how should startups address them? How to integrate necessary tools? Quotes from the episode: "When we're doing B2B, people don't want to connect with the machine. They still want to connect with a story. Yes, they want a solution that works. Still, ultimately they want to connect with the story behind that and the authenticity. " "I think that marketing, especially in a small company, is split up over so many tasks that it becomes hard to support their own internal sales team when a lot of their efforts are focused on external factors." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam! Meet my guest, Vidhya Ravi, a UX Design Researcher at Cash App who transitioned into UX research from marketing several years ago. In this episode, Vidhya is going to share how her diverse background in marketing and strategy helps her shape perspective and work in UX research. In this episode: What UX stands for and what do UX designers do at Cash App? How to work with the product development team to develop features and user requirements? How to bring personal experience to the front and the whole product life cycle? What are the most common and effective approaches to design? How does a group of UX designers work together and share the insights with the product team? What tools do UX designers use to drive the brainstorming? Best practices for marketing people to work with and get to know UX designers? How can marketing and UX designers improve their collaboration? What are the key design elements sales and marketing people should be aware of? Quotes from the episode: "We spend time using different research methodologies to better understand our customers and our users. So that includes an understanding of them, attitudinally, understanding their mindset, understanding their behaviors. " "One thing that marketers can do that would be really helpful is building relationships with people on the UX side. Even if they're not working together, understand what they do, their work, the design challenges they're facing. Because they have this in-depth understanding often driven by UX research of the customer currently using the product and many things regarding value proposition or what features are working well for customers. " ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is a sales professional, Ryan Staley, the CEO and the founder of Whale Boss. Ryan is a fantastic and high-performance salesperson, he helps founders and revenue leaders implement 7 and 8 Figure sales operating systems in less than 3 months. Today, we talk about the essential characteristics of effective salespeople. In this episode: What are the tips and tricks to capturing big clients? How to understand your customer and focus on the company's needs? Cold calling tips: how to reach out to the prospects you don't know and get them interested in having a conversation? In what ways sales engagement was changed by pandemic? How can salespeople adapt to the new circumstances? What is the best way to start a conversation with a prospect? How can B2B marketers better support sales? What are the characteristics of effective salespeople? What are some of the salespeople's pet peeves that marketers should be aware of? Quotes from the episode: "Cold calling could fit in a lot of different buckets. That could be social interaction that can be picking up a phone, that could be texting, that could be emailed, that could be direct messaging. And so there's a lot of different channels that you do to make that a reality." "One of the cool things that you could do is try and connect with that person emotionally about something, every single call you have with them. What I look at is a bit like layering in finding a little more about the person, a little deeper, every single communication touchpoint that you talk to them live." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. We are going to talk about innovation today. My guest today is Carla Johnson. She is a marketing and innovation strategist, keynote speaker, and author of ten books. In her latest book RE:Think Innovation, Carla breaks down the exact process that the world's most prolific innovators use to consistently come up with great ideas. In this episode: Definition of innovation. How is innovation different from creativity? What is perpetual innovation? What are the five steps of innovation? In which step of innovation do people spend the most time and why? What are the different types of innovators? How can people regularly work on enhancing their innovation skills? What is the best way to encourage innovation in B2B business? Quotes from the episode: "I define innovation as the ability to consistently come up with new, great and reliable ideas. It sounds like a very simple definition, but each of those words is important." "Our attention gets narrowed into these very small tasks or digital devices all day long. Still, creative, especially innovative people, are highly observant of the world around them." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hi, a big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Today I answer the question that we often don't discuss openly. How to break the bad news in business with a proper presentation deck. A young marketing manager asked me how to share the results of paid social media campaigns with her management that didn't go well and put a deck together. So here are three approaches to use to help you maintain that respect you have as a subject matter expert. In this episode: No Sugar Coating approach Everything is Relative approach Mixed News approach Presentation flow tips Key elements of a good presentation Quotes from the episode: "You need to explain the logic surrounding the initiative's benefit and tell the backstory. But when you are talking about the outcomes, you should also explain the root causes of the outcomes." "There are usually bits of good news and bad news to pull from. Can you identify three good news examples and three bad news examples? I guarantee you can do that." ————— You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I had fantastic conversation with Steve Kearns, Head of Blog and Social Media Marketing for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. He shares a lot of his experience, including lessons learned in a blog migration and I captured a big chunk of it in Part 1. And now here's Part 2 and we're going to talk about social media marketing and also blog writing and more so stick around.   Pam Didner: So what social media channels are you using in addition to LinkedIn, of course?   Steve Kearns: We've had a, a bit of like a story journey in terms of figuring out what social media platforms we should leverage, especially organically. Because my team handles organic social media; we're currently across LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. So those are really the four platforms that we want to take advantage of.   Pam Didner: Facebook is not one of your options. Can you tell us why?   Steve Kearns: Yeah. And this is, this is a conversation that we've gone back and forth on internally quite a bit. So, there's two things here. The first is looking at the context of different platforms and what those platforms are going to do for us. So right now, our channel mix, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube are all vastly different content platforms.   Pam Didner: Completely. I'm actually on all platforms and many people would tell me, “Pam, you should focus on one,” but the thing is, I'm a consultant. And the B2B marketing consultant, I need to know old platforms. So I test the waters all the time. And, uh, I also know that doing the video platform is very different than say writing blog.   Steve Kearns: Exactly. Yeah, so you know, one of the things that, that we've, we've tried to really focus in on is making sure that we can communicate in very different contexts in each of, on each of those platforms--so video on YouTube, obviously. We do a lot of graphic content on Instagram. That's really top of funnel. Uh, on Twitter, we have an opportunity to have a little more of a conversation with our audiences and, and have that news style programming. And then on LinkedIn, you know, that's really our bread and butter channel when it comes to showing that we can be a best in class use case for marketing on the platform. So, you know, in terms of your question, Pam around, why not FaceBook, I think there's so much overlap on Facebook between the use cases on Twitter, the use cases on LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera, that we didn't feel that we needed to add another platform to the mix. Um, you know, there was also a, a kind of a conscious decision around, we want to make sure we're investing primarily in LinkedIn. Like Facebook, Facebook, Google, Twitter, I mean, they're all key advertising competitors of ours. We want to make sure that--not so much that we don't see the value in marketing on Facebook; we absolutely do. It's more of, “okay, my team has 40 hours a week to spend on doing social marketing.   Pam Didner: Yeah, you want to prioritize.   Steve Kearns: I want them to be spending 30 of those hours thinking about, uh, you know, how we market on LinkedIn.   Pam Didner: On these four channels.   Steve Kearns: Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, I would say one of the, the interesting things about my journey at LinkedIn is looking at how much more robust LinkedIn and our LinkedIn Pages experience has been over the last five years. So when I first joined the social marketing team five years ago, we were primarily using Twitter because our platform didn't have the capabilities that now has to be as dynamic, you know, in terms of capability to have events, streaming capabilities--you know, just the, the page manager experience to be able to have those two-way conversations as a brand. Now you can do all of that on LinkedIn. So it gives us a really clear mandate to say, we now have all of the tools we need to build a brand on LinkedIn first. And you know, now my team is taking advantage of that, which is a really, I would say, positive, exciting transition that we've made away from doing marketing first on another platform. So now we're doing marketing first on our own platform. And that for obvious reasons makes a ton of sense.   Pam Didner: That, strategically, that makes a lot of sense to me, give me that on the corporate world for a long time. And so another question I would like to ask you, given that the four channels that you mentioned--LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube--do you have a set frequency in terms of publishing for each channel?   Steve Kearns: Yes. So for each channel, each has its own set of frequencies. So I would say on Instagram, it's about three times a week. Uh, Twitter is I believe about once a day and then LinkedIn is going to be two to three times a day. YouTube is more, as needed, as we have new video series that come out in a future state, we would get much more advanced with YouTube where there's actually a ton of SEO value you can drive with YouTube.   Pam Didner: This is just another monster that you have to master.   Steve Kearns: Exactly. Like there could be a whole full-time job dedicated to the sort of suggested like the linking and back-linking you can do and YouTube videos, like next, your content suggestions, et cetera. We don't have the bandwidth to do that currently, so we're more uploading. I'm kind of saying, here you go. But I think that's definitely a future goal of mine, if the team continues to grow.   Pam Didner: So you touched this a little bit and I have to come to that realization myself, as well, the copywriting or even script writing—I call script writing for YouTube, especially on the video--they are all very, very different. You cannot do one-size-fits-all type up a publishing anymore. Even you write one blog post the way that you write copy needs to be very different for different channels. So talk to us in terms of, uh, how do you manage that in terms of like for one blog that you have to write a different copies for different channel, how do you manage that? It's so massive from time to time. Given that I do it myself and I know how much work that is. Is it any tips and tricks to make that easy?   Steve Kearns: Yeah, I will say it's incredibly time-consuming. I mean, I can talk about how I've done it in the past, that was scalable and then how we do it now as a much larger company. So, you know, what we've done in the past is I think even going into this role many, many years ago, it was well-known that you need to play into the context of each social platform when you're creating content. So you don't want to, I mean, you're physically unable to write an essay on Twitter. You can't, you, you know, there's a character limit on LinkedIn. There's context limitations on Instagram--you know, Instagram is primarily a visual platform. So what I focused on in the past is taking the, I would say most valuable components of let's say a blog post that we have to offer--so if that's things like compelling statistics, compelling quotes, several bullet points of information in terms of key takeaways--and then it's taking those, um, and then kind of fitting them into the character counts or character limits for each platform. So that's, if you are a one-person show, what I would typically do is I would take like a paragraph of the most valuable information. I'd start with that text paragraph.   Pam Didner: Pare it down.   Steve Kearns: Exactly. And then you start highlighting parts, pieces, and parts of it. And then that is a message that ends up across your different platforms. It's not the same exact message, but it is very similar. So now what we do at LinkedIn and we're, we're fortunate that we were able to have access to the resources and the size of the team that we do have to be able to, to go a layer deeper is that we will actually take those--you know, it's the same concept in theory, or you take those tidbits and pieces of information from the blog that are most valuable--but what we're doing now is we're actually going and we're working with our design teams, our copywriting teams to create bespoke assets for each channel.   Pam Didner: That is wonderful. Isn't nice to actually have budget? (laughs)   Steve Kearns: Oh yes. Well that was going to be my follow-up as I was like, it's very expensive to do that. Um, you know, even like, and we have pretty big budgets at LinkedIn when I see the amount of hours it takes to design something specifically for, you know, if you look at a design statement of work, you'll have previously used to just be okay, your blog assets and your infographic, and then you would drop the link into social. Now, if you look at one of my campaigns, you have—   Pam Didner: You customize everything.   Steve Kearns: You have, you know, LinkedIn asset 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, same with Twitter asset 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Instagram. And then your bill is, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.   Pam Didner: Yeah (laughs). You can do on a smaller budget, but still it's very, time-consuming.   Steve Kearns: Absolutely. So it's really looking at, and I think what we're really excited by now is we have that ability to take, uh, I'll give you a really quick example: so we have a content piece that's live on our blog right now that looks at the engagement trends of Generation Z. So we've recognized that Gen Z is one of the largest buying cohorts or will be one of the largest buying cohorts in B2B moving forward, because they're entering the workforce. They're now going to have influence on buying decisions.   Pam Didner: In 10 years, they're going to be on management staff.   Steve Kearns: Exactly. So the question is how do you market to them? How do they like to be marketed to in a way that's different than Millennials? And the answer is they're very different than Millennials in terms of their value set--. What they believe. So we have all of that data, you know, that's proprietary data to LinkedIn--their behaviors on the platform, how brands are messaging to them, are they doing it successfully? Whatnot. So we've taken all of that data. We've put that across our blog. And then I'll just give you the LinkedIn example, we've then taken that data or snippets of that data and we've launched flipbooks. So it's literally like PDFs that you can flip through, like a book on LinkedIn. They're directly uploaded into the feed. And, you know, instead of just saying, “Hey, go to the blog to read all about this,” people are actually getting that experience in the social feed--which, you know, again, if they're only spending three seconds looking at it or giving three seconds of their attention, which would even be generous in this kind of climate, they're still able to understand what we're talking about. They develop an understanding of what it is we care about, or we're trying to say at LinkedIn, and, you know, it deepens the relationship with the brand. It deepens their understanding of our campaign, our message, even if they don't get the chance to go to the blog. So we hope that we're providing like unique kind of content consumption experiences on our blog, on our social media handles. And then within our social media handles on each platform specifically.   Pam Didner: So that leads me to my next question: how do you measure your team's success?   Steve Kearns: There's a couple of core KPIs we look at. The first bucket I would categorize these into is around engagement. The second bucket we'd categorize these into is around performance. So let's talk a little bit about the engagement bucket first. So we're fortunate that at LinkedIn, even though we are a B2B marketing team, we market on behalf of a very large brand. So one of our core KPIs is making sure that we're inspiring the kind of trust, the kind of brand love, the kind of bonds that people need to have with a social media brand the size of LinkedIn. We know that like that that's good Brand Marketing 101 is to build those trusted relationships with our audiences. So what is the KPI that we track there? Um, we're looking primarily at our engagement data. So we like to benchmark against number one, industry standards--so B2B marketing industry standards-- then also looking at like competitive benchmarks. So what is the benchmark? If we can source that data? Our key competitors like Google and Facebook, Twitter, whatnot. Yep. And then it's looking at very granular metrics, like for our blog time on page, page views, sessions, unique sessions, unique page views; on our social platforms is looking at engagement rate. All of those to us are indicators, you know, even though you can't put a direct revenue goal against any of those metrics—   Pam Didner: That's the thing I want you- I'm so happy you brought that up. So you cannot put in a direct revenue goal associated with it. And I'm so happy you acknowledge it because a lot of times the content marketing effort, unless you have the backend integrated deeply--like for example, somebody comment on something and then you can link back to your CRM and show that this is a LinkedIn customers and then the salespeople can actually go talk to them or whatnot; unless you have a backing integrated like that. It's almost impossible to track the content marketing's effort directly linked to a revenue generation. So if you cannot link it directly to it, and a lot of the data that you are tracking, it's kind of like a secondary data, how do you communicate that with the management?   Steve Kearns: Yeah, so it's, um, it's a good question. And it's an ongoing conversation that we are having with our leadership. It's really a lot of education and I imagine this is easier at a large brand than it is at a smaller brand.   Pam Didner: Yes, very true by the way.   Steve Kearns: Just by the nature of the resources we have access to. And I think the, the long-term thinking that we have to have as a market leader versus being focused on those short term KPIs, um, which are like, hey, if I need to make payroll the next month and I need to, you know, meet the demands of my customers—   Pam Didner: You have to bring the leads.   Steve Kearns: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, luckily we've gotten to a stage where that is equally as important, but, um, you know, we also need to make sure that we're sustaining trust and, you know, bonds with our customers.   Pam Didner: I will say your key objective, if you will--and correct me, if I'm totally off--is really you focused on top of funnel. You tried to build that brand awareness. You tried to build that trust that the B2B companies that can associate with LinkedIn. To me it's the brand equity and also the trust and the thought leadership. It's not necessarily focusing on the bottom of the funnel, if you will.   Steve Kearns: Absolutely. In terms of the way we communicate that to our leadership. It's again, that education journey around what is the importance of brand? and what is the importance of building these connective bonds and this connective tissue with our customers? Because at the end of the day, you have to--and this is the beauty of being a content marketer--is you should be a good storyteller if you're a content marketer, is that you need to go and tell a story to your leadership team to say, “even though this is not giving you a lead--and you know, there is some content and there's some content marketing efforts. And I'll talk about that second bucket in a second that are delivering leads and generating demand, but for this engagement bucket, when someone picks up the phone and calls your customer, one of your sales reps, calls your customer, are they going to pick up? are they going to trust what they're hearing from your brand? And if the answer is no, like chances are, you don't have a very strong brand and you don't have a very strong reputation with your customers. And a lot of what that, you know, a lot of how you establish that trust, that reputation, those, you know, those connective bonds is through some of this top of funnel. So, you know, to relate that back to the metrics we're looking at, goes back to that, that old phrase and I'll probably butcher it, but it's like if a tree falls in the forest and you know, no, one's around to hear it does it really make a sound? Yeah, we can publish posts all day--we have the resources, we have the people-- but if we're not getting the engagement?   Pam Didner: It doesn't matter.   Steve Kearns: Yeah, it doesn't matter. So we're just wasting our time. We're spinning our wheels and we're adding more noise into an already crowded social media landscape. So, what we've done in in the past couple of years is really look at how do we actually reduce our publishing cadence so that we can put more energy behind one or two posts a day that are going to really resonate. Um, because you know, I don't have to explain the network effect of social media to anybody, I'm sure, who's listening—   Pam Didner: Quality over quantity.   Steve Kearns: Exactly. In the same way that it's really hard to get someone to answer the phone or to book a meeting with someone, it's also really hard to get someone to engage on social media and say, you know, especially when your cohort of, of, uh, of, of target audience is marketers; We're curmudgeonly people as marketers are trying to like—   Pam Didner: (laughs) It's very hard to market to us!   Steve Kearns: That's our world. And, what we try to tell our stakeholders too, is like, look for someone to stop what they're doing and to comment, or to add value and kind of create this two-way conversation with the brand, that is just as valuable in some way, shape or form as them picking up the phone or the answering the phone call and then, you know, further engaging or responding to an email from a rep because again, it's them taking their time and them electing to say, “Hey, this struck a chord with me and I am going to engage with the brand.” And over time, you know, again, everybody in B2B marketing knows about the seven touch points it takes—   Pam Didner: Yeah, it's a long play, a long play.   Steve Kearns: Yup. And especially when you look at SaaS marketing-- ads marketing is a little bit more cyclical and a little bit more immediate--but in a lot of B2B marketing, the buying cycles are so long that you do need to create that long-term play.   Pam Didner: I do agree. So I know that there is a LinkedIn Sales Solutions. Do you work closely with them?   Steve Kearns: Yes we do. So we actually used to be organized in conjunction with them, as well. So my previous role before I stepped into this role was leading blog and social marketing on behalf of our marketing solutions business and our sales solutions business. So I know that that side of the business very well, as well.   Pam Didner: So do you provide content to them or you are primarily just a marketing solution? Do they actually try to take advantage of some of the content that you created?   Steve Kearns: So we're primarily focused on creating content for our core audience, which are going to be marketers and our core revenue stream, which is going to be marketing solutions, but you know what we've done in the past and what we continue to do is, you know, we meet with them pretty regularly to figure out what are those cross crossover stories that we can tell? So for example, one of the stories that we've found a lot of pickup with is the storytelling around diversity, equity and inclusion. So, you know, we have very different worlds or revenue streams at LinkedIn. We have our talent solutions business, which also encompasses our learning solutions business. When we said from a B2B perspective at LinkedIn, let's think about equity and let's think about diversity, equity and inclusion as a topic--as a business topic is something that we want to invest in more heavily and invest in content creation on behalf of--the talent story is very different from the sales and marketing story.   Pam Didner: 100% agree. It's because recruiter is a completely different persona if you will, than just sales and marketing.   Steve Kearns: Exactly. So that's where we found a lot of pickup, you know, in terms of crossover stories. The sales and marketing conversation for DE&I is actually very similar because, you know, then it focuses on your practices. So, you know, it goes beyond hiring and it looks at what are inclusive sales practices? inclusive language you could leverage on sales calls? How does that translate to marketing? Uh, you know, what does that mean for marketing creative? In the B2B space, how do you work equity into the buying cycle and the buying process to make sure that you are not alienating people because your organization is kind of not up to snuff when it comes to really being progressive in terms of looking at making equity a priority? So we've partnered with them on, you know, a number of different research pieces, core narratives, uh, to make sure that we're saying, “Hey, we understand that sales and marketing sit in a very similar wheelhouse-- they all, they also diverged quite a bit—but we want to make sure that if there are stories that do have that crossover that we tell them in a, in a cohesive makes sense.   Pam Didner: Makes sense. So I actually have two personal questions I would like to ask you. Obviously, in terms of career development, you have a fairly solid career path, right. Um, uh, Viacom to Sony to actually LinkedIn. Do you have any advice for young and aspiring marketing professionals?   Steve Kearns: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say, do the things you say you're going to do. It's very simple, but you'd be surprised--you know, this is specifically for folks kind of just getting started or wanting to break into marketing--you'd be surprised how few people do that.   Pam Didner: Don't be a talker. Be a doer. And keep your promise.   Steve Kearns: Right. Exactly. Because if you look at one of the phrases that we use at LinkedIn is “trust is consistency over time.” So I think that applies to business that applies to your career. And, you know, when you think about like, I'll give you the example of the, the blog migration which we, we talked about earlier, that was a project that was passed over probably several times until they gave it to me. And they gave it to me because they knew that even if it was going to be stressful, I had a track record at LinkedIn to do the things that I said I was going to do on the timelines I said, I was going to do, them.   Pam Didner: People know you will get that done.   Steve Kearns: Exactly. And that is worth its weight in gold. That is why, you know, if people move on in their careers, they're going to call you to hire you. They're going to consider you for projects and promotions. And it's really simple advice. Don't over-commit yourself and be sure to follow through on your commitments.   Pam Didner: I love that. I absolutely loved that. That's also one of the advice I do. I mean, it's for me to be independent consultant, right and for clients to continuously come to me for advice, same thing: I have to, I have to deliver what I said. I'm going to deliver. This is not going to work. So, yeah.   And uh, the other question I would like to ask you is, so what show are you binge-watching right now. And what do you recommend it?   Steve Kearns: Yeah. So I am actually on the final episode of “Succession.”   Pam Didner: (gasps) You know what, Bryan Collins, who I interviewed earlier mentioned “Succession.” as well. My son got me into it. The writing is fantastic. I mean, they swear like a drunken sailor and, uh, but the writing is incredibly snappy and short. The conversation is so short and you somehow have to really pay attention and listen to it. Would you agree?   Steve Kearns: Oh absolutely. And for, and for those of us in business, I think it's just, uh, it's, it's a really fun show to watch because, you know, we're fortunate at LinkedIn that, that's not how we work (Pam laughs) in any way, shape or form, but you know, it's like that old boys' club corporation of years past. It's really good television.   Pam Didner: Yeah, I think so too. I think how they shot the scenes and it's incredible. I love it too, but I, I really, I hate every single one of them. They are awful people, but just the way they interact with each other, the writing, and also how they shot the whole film, that really, really got me into it.   Steve Kearns: Well, it's, it's interesting, Pam, you mentioned that because I've done a little bit of reading--and this goes back to kind of storytelling and in the importance of storytelling and how many things you have to think about--is that they've actually designed the show through set design, costume design, their scripts, whatnot to intentionally make those characters, unlikable, to make their lives seem awful. You know, even though they have all this money and access to all this power, their wardrobes, aren't very, you know, exciting or colorful. They're the homes they live in aren't super decorated, or they don't feel homey and familial. And you know, all of that is supposed to signal to the audience that, you know, “Hey, it's not actually that great being this wealthy, this power. " So it's just interesting, the like levers they've pulled to get that message across.   Pam Didner: And get that experience. And also the visual cues, you know, to actually help us to make that connection in our mind in addition to what they said. Steve its wonderful, wonderful talking to you. You have so much to share. And I mean, I enjoy every single guest, but I enjoyed this episode, uh, substantially more because I was a content marketer and I was doing the global role for a long period of time. So everything that you share with me just resonates with me. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and insight. It's wonderful, wonderful to have you.   Steve Kearns: Thank you for having. So he's great to have these conversations and connect with other really brilliant B2B marketers. So really appreciate your time and for having me on.   Pam Didner: Awesome.  

I had a great time talking to Steve Kearns, Head of Blog And Social Media for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Our conversation lasted well over an hour, so I split it into several episodes. Part 1 explored how to consolidate country-specific blog sites into a global one. If you are working on global content marketing, you should definitely check it out. Part 2 is about social media marketing and how he goes about doing it.   In this bonus episode, Steve shares how his team evaluates internal and external blog submissions and he also creates content that will rank higher on SEO, and more. Let's get started.   Pam Didner: How do you manage your writing staff? Are they in-house or outsourced? And do you have any suggestions to the listeners in terms of how to manage the writing staff for enterprises and also for small businesses?   Steve Kearns: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I'll give you a quick overview as to how my team is structured. So I'm focused on leading the strategy kind of cross-functional relationships dot-connecting across, you know, the blog function, social media marketing function, and the web content marketing function. And then within my team, we have dedicated subject matter experts for each of those channels, so to speak. So I have a blog editor-in-chief whose sole job is to focus on running the day-to-day and really setting the vision for the topics we're going to talk about--the content strategy on the blog specifically.   So that is her name's Tequia Burt and she's been working in the B2B marketing space. She's incredible. Incredible. Um, so Tequia is now focused full-time on, uh, delivering sort of that day-to-day operations, but also content strategy and vision for the blog. And she works with a number of different partners across our business, both internally to source internal submissions --so where you'll have different stakeholders across the business, submitting content to her saying, “Hey, I want to write about X, Y, and Z. Is this a fit for the blog?” And we've actually pre-empted those submissions with what we're calling a style guide, because otherwise you, you get into a situation where the tail is wagging the dog with stakeholder submissions. We say, “Hey, here are the six things--six is an arbitrary number--but here are the six things that we talk about. And here are the six things that our audience wants to hear about. Here's a breakdown of what our audience demographics look like. Here's who visits the blog. Here are the here's the traffic data, here is the volume of subscribers we have access to” just so we give our partners a full picture of what it is they're writing for, who it is they're speaking to et cetera, to make sure that we're actually getting productive submissions. So that's one lens.   Pam Didner: The submission is that external submission or a combination of internal and external submissions?   Steve Kearns: A little bit of both, I would say more toward internal, but that can also account for external as well. So really anything that's coming through other marketers in our organization or folks externally, that's going to go through that like style guide or submissionesque process where we inform folks who are writing for the blog. “Hey, this is what we're looking for. This is what good looks like, provide them examples, give them like image guidelines”; just like make it a really easy experience for them to be able to submit something that's optimized for the blog. And then I would say the other lens that we look at is Tequia works specifically with an agency to produce all of our SEO-driven content. So, you know, we, you know, again are working with, with experts in the B2B marketing field to look at what are the keywords that our business wants to go after? And then also, you know, what topics among our target audience have the highest search volume? So it's kind of triangulating between those two topics to figure out well, the other 50% of our blog content is going to be focused specifically on making sure we're ranking in Google effectively. Um, you know, one of the things when I first took over the blog that I was shocked by was that we weren't actually ranking for some things that we really should be ranking for, like on page one. So things like, um, like “how to market on LinkedIn?”   Pam Didner: Yeah, you should own that (laughs)   Steve Kearns: Exactly. So that was one of the mandates as we went into the migration, we said, well, part of the problem is that we've created ten different content pieces about how to market on LinkedIn that are all diluting the search volume and the search traffic. So what we need to actually start doing, and this is something that I say over and over and over again, to, to our cross-functional stakeholders is you need to take one blog post that you turn into like a power page and you update that periodically, so you continue to remind Google that that is the page that deserves the authority, and that becomes your primary page for which you funnel the majority of your traffic. You can always link them off to sub pages, to microsites, to webinars, to, to advertising platform directly, but it's, again, consolidating that information, updating that information regularly and, um, you know, really making sure that we're, we're giving the search engine, the roadmap to prioritize our content effectively. So that is the other 50% of the content is focused on that like more. search engine optimization-focused content.   Pam Didner: So let me summarize very quickly. It sounds like your whole editorial in terms of managing your content there are two buckets, if you will. One is on internal, external submission, obviously that needs to align with the four pillars and 21 topics. And then the other one is you really, really honing on some of the things that say LinkedIn Marketing Solution well need to own, or some of the content that from your perspective, that really needs to rank on the first page of Google. And for that, you will be very, very specific and, um, you customize the content. Granted is still very much relevant to users' needs, but you will write a specifically for SEO, but the writing that kind of posts is you'll have to hone in in terms of SEO optimized type of content. Another thing I would like to ask specifically is in terms of the updating and refreshing the blog post, given that you have so many blog posts right over thousands of them, how do you manage that? How do you determine which one to refresh and update and to do you look, what kind of data do you look at?   Steve Kearns: Yeah. So we've just, we've actually just started our like refresh and SEO optimization workflow, um, because we wanted to do the migration first and then once we had the infrastructure in place, we said, okay, let's turn our attention to SEO. So the direction that I gave my team was--and this is a lot of guidance that, that came from, from our agency partners, as well as like--well, let's focus on the stuff that's on fire right now. So what is on fire posts from 2016 or 2017 that talk about how to advertise on LinkedIn. That is where the majority of our search traffic is going to, and they show outdated screenshots, they talk about products that don't exist anymore, a complete mess. So we wanted to make sure that we dealt with those posts first. So in this first wave of optimizations, which you'll actually see re-publishing across our blog in the next couple of months, you're going to be seeing a lot of posts that focused on how to advertise on LinkedIn, uh, posts that are focused on key search terms like demand generation, lead generation, content marketing, social media marketing. Etc. And those are going to be us taking our highest traffic posts and bringing them into the modern age. That is top priority because you know, again, you have to look at like, what is the most critical thing to prioritize. Then once we get past that wave of posts and there's probably say top, top priority, about a hundred posts, you know, secondary priority, maybe 250 out of all of them.   Pam Didner: That makes a lot of sense to me too. I mean, it's in general, you really follow that 90-10 rule or 20-80 rule, like 3000, 10% of them. Yeah. How many of them? Yeah.   Steve Kearns: And then you can get to a point where, you know, right now we're being reactive, but then we're going to move into a phase where we become proactive. So once we get to a place where our highest performing content, you know, over X number of page views is all recent, i.e.has been updated in 2021 or 2022, then we can move to, okay, you know, it's like similar to what we talked about of our, um, you know, topic tagging structure on the blog, you know, looking at specific pain points and then looking at specific advertising products and creating a power page for each of those needs.   Pam Didner: When you say power page, can you be a little bit specific? Is that mean that you actually had the landing page of its own or a power is still a blog page, but it's a long form. How do you define that?   Steve Kearns: Yeah, so the latter, definitely. You hit the nail on the head, Pam. Really just, it's a longer blog post that's going to be updated periodically. So that's like a phrase we use at LinkedIn, but I'm glad you asked me to define it because that could totally be, be confusing for someone who doesn't work in the context of, of the LinkedIn corporation. So, you know, we really look at these long form blog posts that we're going to be updating periodically time over time--usually it's going to be on a quarterly or a bi-annual basis. And you know, what we want to do there is we want to make sure that every single time someone is searching for a B2B marketing keyword or a B2B marketing pain point or objective, or if they're searching for one of our products specifically--if they don't necessarily know that you know what their objective is, but they know they want to use LinkedIn sponsored content--in either of those unique instances, they're going to have one microsite page they land on, and one blog post that they land on. So that you, again, you know, are like, uh, coalescing that organic search traffic around one page on the microsite one page on the blog. And what that allows us to also do is say, okay, maybe that's only a hundred pages and we have to make sure that those 100 pages are near perfect.   Pam Didner: They are solid. Yeah.   Steve Kearns: And we have to make sure that the reporting and tracking is right on those pages. We have to make sure that they're updated consistently and that's a much easier charter for my team and for cross-functional teams than, okay you have 6,000 blog posts that are sort of updated.   Pam Didner: Yeah, you are fantastic. I love it. Very, very useful. And you go down to kind of like the detail part of it, to tell people how to do that. I think that's very critical. A lot of people tend to focus on high level, but really the B2B marketers or people who listen to my channels, they kind of want to know the know-hows.   Steve Kearns: Right. 'cause I, you know, a lot of the folks I imagine are probably sitting there and, and, you know, in a similar position that I would be in to say, “okay, you've just been tasked with doing this thing. So how do I do it? How do you, what do you think about what are the dependencies?”   Pam Didner: Very good. That's a wrap! I'm so glad for Steve to share his knowledge and insights of managing global content. It is not easy. I hope you enjoy the 10-minute bonus episode. Again, if you haven't checked out part 1 it's about global marketing through and through.   Look for Part 2 about LinkedIn Marketing Solution's social media outreach. I highly recommend having a listen. Take care. Bye!

Hello, from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Steve Kearns, Head of Blog and Social Media Marketing for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Today's episode is about scaling global business with a centralized content strategy. We had such a great conversation while recording the show, so I decided to break it into two parts. So, if you want to scale your content across regions, stay tuned for Part 2, to hear more of the business nuggets. In this episode: How does LinkedIn make money? How can a brand consolidate several regional marketing blogs to a global marketing solution destination. Why should a business centralize global content? What does the centralized content strategy look like? How to balance global efforts with content specifically tailored for cultural and language differences? What is the right way to do the migration and what are the important steps to make it efficient and successful? How to perform a proper content audit? How to level centralized content strategy with SEO? What is the role of a local content team in regional initiatives? How to use content hub? What content metrics to use and track content performance? Quotes from the episode: "One of the challenges we have, especially at a large company, is that when we migrate from one platform to another, that then throws off the tracking on everything. You essentially lose visibility for a given time." "We tended to give priority to the visual appearance, the user experience of the blog, because at the end of the day if that's a mess, it doesn't matter what we're tracking." ————— You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hi, a big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. This episode is rather special. It's episode 200, and I can't believe that I have published 200 episodes of the B2B Marketing & More podcast. All without any sponsorships… If you are a regular listener, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I don't always hear from you, but I know you are out there working hard. Keep up the good work. Speaking of keeping up the good work, some of you reached out to me in January and asked me if I have any recommendations on how to ensure new job success. So, in today's episode, I share three things that you must-do if you start a new job. In this episode: How to be opened minded and remain curious. Why it's important to set up as many 1:1's as possible and how to do that. How to understand AND use processes, workflows, and dashboards. Quotes from the episode: "When you meet, introduce yourself, have a list of questions to ask them. Have them share their challenges and issues, and then you can see what you can do for them." "There isn't a huge difference between a new job and an existing job. What matters is how you view your job and how you go about your day. Your attitude counts." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest today is Bryan Collins. He was a full-time copywriter at Sage, and now he's a nonfiction writer, and host and director of Become a Writer Today podcast. Today, we talk about copywriting, keywords, technology and how all those elements influence content marketing and modern business writing. In this episode: How to strive to be a better copywriter if you cannot afford to hire someone? Which website should the small business owners or anybody looking for good copywriters go to? How to fit different content formats into your content marketing strategy, and why does it matter? Where does SEO fit into the writing process and modern business writing? What prep work needs to be done before someone starts writing? What is the role of Artificial intelligence in content writing, and what are the experiences with the tools. How to create content that will stand out or breakthrough the crowd? Which approach is better for writers, focus on one channel or have that omnipresence on multiple channels? How well should digital marketers and writers know SEO? What are some of the KPIs to measure the success of a copywriter or content? How to use lead measure and lag measure to analyze your goals? Quotes from the episode: "Even if AI could produce a great article for you, it's not going to tell you where it fits in the customer journey and all the supplementary content or the call to action. So that's where hopefully you fit in, or I fit in. " "Marrying copywriting with SEO is a match made in heaven because you can see exactly what people are searching for and the real words they use and put that into your copy, which every copywriter should do. " ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hello from Portland, Oregon. For my first episode of 2022, I want to do something slightly different. I invited my team to be part of the podcast and the video. Yay!  Meet Gretchen Kilby, she's a podcast editor and Iva Ignjatovic, my social media manager. Both of them are the invisible hands that put my podcast together. Today we talk about our content creation process, and how to start a B2B podcast. Gretchen and Iva, welcome. Glad to have you! In this episode: What are the essentials for starting a B2B podcast? How to choose a podcast format? How to get a sound quality? What is a strategic process before starting a podcast? How to find a good podcast editor? What are the B2B podcast branding basics? How to do podcast rebranding? How to maintain quality for listeners and for SEO? Quotes from the episode: "And a big thing I will say is that not everybody can edit content. It's a skill that takes a lot of time. Also, I've seen many relationships break up because it wasn't clear either what the editor could do and was capable of or what the host wanted. So I think that's an important conversation to have." - Gretchen Kilby "We looked at data. I don't get the sense that people often look at data. They go with their guts, you know, like, "oh, I have a feeling that this is going to work." We looked at that and made that composition of what you wanted to pursue in the next stage and what the data told you to pursue." - Iva Ignjatovic ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. It's hard to believe we're almost at the end of the year. So much has happened. I thought it would be helpful to identify some of the business growth trends and the marketing topics that stood out and that will definitely keep on trending. That also gives me a chance to revisit some of the wonderful conversations on this podcast with my guests. In this episode: Felix Krueger is the CEO of Krueger Marketing. His company focuses on sales enablement and Account-Based Marketing for B2B enterprises. Felix talked about the changes in sales and marketing content that have been necessary to meet a more virtual world, and how we can find the balance between the hybrid, which is face-to-face communication and the virtual. Many of you know Ann Handley from her work as a Chief Content Officer of Marketing Profs and her book, Everybody Writes. When we were talking about writing, we extended our conversation to email marketing because she was able to capture over 25,000 email subscribers in less than one year. Ann suggests that we should use our newsletter a little bit differently. Lee Odden is the CEO of Top Rank Marketing, and he helps B2B brands with influencer marketing. Lee has a very specific point of view when brands want to be perceived as thought leaders and show their expertise and why it doesn't hurt to partner with an influencer in that specific area. Paul Roetzer is the founder and CEO of PR 20/20 and the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. Paul talks about Artificial Intelligence and what will AI do for sales and marketing. Quotes from the episode: "The whole experience of sitting in a room with a salesperson for one hour, going through 30 slides, having a face-to-face discussion and back and forth involving other stakeholders - that experience has gone. And I think it's gone for good. What happens now is that one experience that you used to have, is more decentralized now." -  Felix Krueger "As much as I love social media, I also think it's not the best way to nurture relationships. A far more effective, especially in B2B, is through the email newsletter. Many B2B companies are afraid. They have this sense of a template, a templatized approach to their email newsletter versus just blowing the whole thing up and rethinking it." - Ann Handley "Creating a great experience obviously is a theme in B2B marketing for customers, but creating a great experience, not just for customers, but for influencers as well, is super, super important, because if they're inspired to share, it's just going to be that much more successful." - Lee Odden I would argue that most marketers will never know nor care what unsupervised and supervised learning is. Nor will they care about the eight common machine learning models of clustering and linear regression. What they need to know is what is AI capable of doing to identify and prioritize use cases internally. They need to know who the go-to experts are, the data scientists who can help them prepare the data properly and ensure that there's no bias built-in." - Paul Roetzer ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hey, big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and more. Today, we talk about ABM and how to scale Account-Based Marketing with my guest Danny Nail, Account-Based Engagement Manager at Microsoft. In this episode: What is account-based marketing Is ABM successful and effective if we need to do a more one-to-one approach or one-to-many? How to choose the right marketing tactics for ABM outreach? Where do ABM activities should belong to? How customized content can support account-based marketing? How to scale account-based marketing across different verticals? What are the challenges, and how to resolve them? How to scale account-based marketing on a small budget? What is a sales responsibility during the ABM planning and implementation? What are common success metrics or KPIs for ABM? Quotes from the episode: "There's nothing wrong with having some kind of template guidance. But it needs to be guided, and it shouldn't be something that's set in stone." "Your budget needs to last at least the sales cycle, whatever your sales cycle is. And then, you need to make sure that that budget can cover the number of accounts you're trying to cover. So if you're only trying to cover one account for a quarter, you may have enough budget to do that." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today's episode features some of my previous guests and a topic that comes up in almost all my podcast conversations: How can sales and marketing teams work together? The answer isn't that simple because so much has changed with the pandemic in the past two years. At the same time, there were also many changes in digital marketing and the corporate culture within the businesses is different from company to company, from industry to industry. In this episode: John Nee is the Principal and President of Act1 Partners and has worked many years helping marketers and salespeople better collaborate and support each other. John shares expert tips on what marketing departments can do to better support sales. Alex Low is a Managing Consultant at PA Consulting in London and an advisor for the social media management platform Lately. He does a lot of work around business development and sales transformation. Our conversation was focused on expert tips for social selling, and how to align marketing and sales. The reality is both sales and marketing need to work together - on the top, middle and bottom of the funnel. Mark Emond is a revenue marketing expert and the President of Demand Spring, and he shares insights that will help you sync marketing and sales collaboration. Quotes from the episode: "The single greatest thing they can do is try to put themselves in the shoes of the sales force. I don't think there's any better way to do that than to go on sales calls. Do some ride-along sales calls, get on conference calls in this virtual world that we now live in and engage as much as possible with the customer and the prospect to learn how that sale happens." - John Nee "So you have a marketing person, a Demand Gen person, a content person, and you need to achieve that number by the end of the year. Go do it work together as a team, and figure out the best way to generate those conversations." - Alex Low "If you don't have motivation coming from above to drive a new way of doing things, the desire to change the behavior is not going to be there." - Mark Emond ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Paul Cowan, CMO of FreshBooks, a SaaS-based platform, accounting software used by many small businesses and freelancers. Today we talk about how to bridge the gap between marketing and product experience. In this episode: Why is there a gap between marketing and product experience? What happens when the user experience doesn't live up to the marketing hype? How to provide value for the customers? How can businesses ensure that the product experience addresses their target audience's biggest painpoint? What does it take to bring features into a product in real-time? How to gather feedback and perform testing? How to differentiate from the competition What defines a good customer support process? How can a business carve out a unique market area? What is the role of the marketing team in product experience? Quotes from the episode: "I think the last thing within the tech world is the return to the creative messaging. I think in this kind of race for features and promoting features, we've lost sight of what a brand represents and making sure that's articulated to customers." "One of the guys on our web team went and helped daycare-hang drywall in his local area. It's things like this that we have focused on as an organization. Focus on these grassroots ways to help owners, whether through those initiatives or the philanthropic type of activity or just core-support services. " ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Yes. I moved to Raleigh from Portland a couple of weeks ago. So now I'm doing my recording in Raleigh. So if you are ever in Raleigh, reach out to me. Let's have a cup of coffee. My guest is Jharry Guevara, a Business Development Manager, Marketing Director at VOIPRIng Network and Zoho Business Software Platform Architect. Today, we are going to talk about what does it take to make a successful career transition. In this episode: What is the right way to make a career transition? How to break into an industry with a high barrier of entry? What are actionable tips people can follow when deciding on a career change? What are the most important things to consider when changing careers? How can you diversify the skillset you have within your field of choice? How should you introduce yourself when seeking new employment after changing careers? What are the challenging aspects of making a career transition? What is the hardest thing about switching careers? How can people make better decisions about their careers? Quotes from the episode: "The more I kept those 10,000 hours in mind, the more hours I put in, the more I started growing as a person. So, that was a very complicated transition. But after I made up my mind, I started looking for side jobs and side gigs." "One analogy I like to look at is almost like playing an instrument. You learn how to play the instrument by copying somebody else's notes. But after a while, you understand what a good note is and what is a bad note. And you'll be so good that you could be able to mix the notes based on your flavor. So that's the same thing with this whole journey." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today, I have an exceptional guest, Amy Higgins. Amy is a Director of Content Strategy at Salesforce. Today, we are going to talk about planning and creating an editorial calendar and editorial strategy for an enterprise. In this episode: What makes the content management and editorial strategy process different in an enterprise? How to ensure feedback from everyone involved in planning and creating an editorial calendar and editorial strategy? How does the team size impacts editorial planning? What s the best way to learn about what the audience wants and how much content they can consume? How to manage a mix of content topics, and how to get feedback from everybody? What is a good pace of editorial management, creation and how often to refresh content? How to do proper research for content editorial? When collecting data, why it's important to observe both the aggregate level and individual content pieces? What are the planning stages and step-by-step processes before creating an editorial? If you have a lot of content to manage, what is the best way to track every piece of it? What kind of tool should be used for SEO, and how? When and how should businesses optimize their current and past content? Quotes from the episode: "You need to understand what you currently have in the market: What's resonating with people, what are people clicking through, what are they engaging with, what do they like, and most importantly, what do they not like?" "I'll give you something that many people go wrong where they target, going to write this article, and it's going to target this keyword and only this keyword, and you have to think about natural language." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Melissa Romo, a global head of content, social media, and customer efficacy at Sage. Today, we are going to talk about how to build a strong brand community, and how to use it to drive organic traffic. Melissa, welcome, so happy to have you. In this episode: Find out more about the Sage community and how did the company got started? What is the role of a third-party platform in community management? What are the benefits of the invitation-only brand community? How can brands grow strong communities organically? What does a strong brand community look like? When a community is invitation-only, what are the selection criteria? Should communities use paid media to drive awareness and membership or stick with organic growth? How does that paid media impact the quality of the users or the audience? What are some of the challenges brands encounter while trying to grow their communities? Once established, how can a strong brand community be used as marketing and sales channels? How to leverage content for the community? How to customize and localize content for the global community? What is the role of gamification, and how can brands use it to engage customers and community members? How to launch a community within the enterprise or a fast-growing SaaS space platform company? What kind of budget and resources do companies need to get started? How should marketing professionals prepare for the future of community management? Quotes from the episode: "When people trust you, they don't see you as a roadblock. And once you've built that trust, then you can come in and be a little more prescriptive about what you think is the right thing to do. The relationship building is just what you have to do. And you will get nowhere if you're in an essential leadership role and don't build the right relationships." "There are all kinds of tech that enables us. But we have to remember the human side of marketing. It doesn't matter what tech is introduced. You're you still go back to the person. At the end of the day, [marketing] has to involve some kind of human connection." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Portland, Oregon! Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. I have a fantastic guest today - Kristina Jaramillo, and she is the president of Personal ABM. Kristina is also the co-host of the Stop The Sales Drop podcast. Today we talk about where marketers can better help sales boost revenue. In this episode: What are some of the biggest challenges when working with sales? How can marketers help sales define the problems at hand? Regarding trends, what can marketers do to help the sales in the middle of the purchase funnel? What is the course of action if companies want to be incredibly successful with ABM implementation? Why is it important for sales reps to have their social media presence in order, and how can marketing help? How to get to know the sales team better and how can marketing help sales boost revenue. How should marketers structure their impact? What should success metrics look like on the marketing side? How should marketers quantify the marketing's contribution to sales and sales revenue? What is the number one thing marketers need to do if they want to start or initiate ABM with the sales team? Quotes from the episode: "There has to be a stage check-in all the time on their top tier accounts. The middle of the funnel and the end of the funnel focus should be on the top tier accounts. And whoever owns it just needs to be a team player with everyone else." "Sales needs more help in the middle to the bottom of the funnel. I think the marketing's got top of the funnel nailed. It's marketing's job and their duty to create content, create case studies, create an article, whatever it is, to push that further so that they can have that very personalized approach." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a very exciting guest: Ramon Ray. I actually met Ramon like literally four or five years ago at South by Southwest. And then we got connected on social media channels, but we never met in person until, well, now we are still not meeting in person! Ramon's with me on Zoom and he's a founder of a SmartHustle.com. And I'm going to ask him how to hustle intelligently. He's an author, writer and even producers. By the way, he started four companies and sold two of them. All right! So he deserves to have a conversation with us. So Ramon, welcome to my show.   Ramon Ray: Hey Pam, thanks for having me here and good to reconnect with you after so many years. But I'm so glad you're still in the flow and groove of what you do and I am, as well. So it's an honor to be here and share this time with you and your community. So thank you, Pam. I appreciate it.   Pam Didner: Thank you so much. And you talking about smart hustle and I would like to ask you, and personally, I need that as well: how do we hustle smartly? I know that's probably not right adjective but can you give us a definition of that?   Ramon Ray: Everybody, Pam, I think that we get it's a given except for a few people are in the hustle. They work hard. All of us try to wake up early. We do everything we can, we're always working, working, working. But I think the concept of smart hustle, you know, what do they say? Work smarter not harder. Yeah. We've heard that many times before, but I think it's just the aspect of the strategy. How can I connect the dots? You and I had a conversation offline before we came on. That's part of the smart hustle. Okay. I do this; somebody does that; how can we either work together or how can I support them? How can I add value to them? You know, I have a spoon, they have a teabag, huh? Let's find somebody that has water.   Pam Didner: Or a cup, for that matter (both laugh).   Ramon Ray: I think we should do the cup first before we find the water yet. Let's find the cup first. But my point being, that's the smart, smart hustle where my passion is inspiring and educating because owners to grow their businesses. And of course, as you know, working with B2B brands. So that's what it means. It means to not just work harder, but kind of look for opportunities, create your own serendipity. It means to have an attitude of service to others and knowing that by me serving others and adding value to them, the same will be done to me.   Pam Didner: Yes. So I really liked that in terms of connecting the dots, especially that when you network with someone or you are meeting someone or even just, you know, ex-colleagues and then see what you can do to actually help them or help each other. I think that's really the bottom line that way you are talking about is that.   Ramon Ray: Correct. And that's networking. Right? I found that the big part of my smart hustle has been the power of networking. And networking is not always “here's my business card. Give me your business card.” No, that that's, that's transactional idioticy. But it's more so, “okay, let me listen.” Going back to our example: “Pam said spoon, she said teabag, she said water, but she didn't mention cup yet. You know what? I have three cups.” It's silly, but you people understand that's the listening. How can I add value? And then, you know what, maybe we can work together or loosely, whatever that may mean.   Pam Didner: Yeah. And the way I look at hustle, I tend to look at from a different perspective in terms of how can I be productive? For example, um, you know, Tim Ferris has a book, like what four work hours per week, something to that extent. And, um, even with that, I read that book, you know, years ago, even with that, smart hustle requires a lot of thinking. Like I work all the time, 24-7, but if I really want to scale back, I need to think through what are the things I don't want to do. And I have to prioritize like a hard core prioritization. And then I also have to think through like how I can get other people to help me. So from my perspective, small hustling is actually not that easy to do. And if you want to be productive, what is your thought on that?   Ramon Ray: No. I agree with you a hundred percent and I think that it's, it's a key thing that it does take, especially depends on where you're at. It's that aspect of being scrappy. Yes. Being scrappy. But if you're just a scrappy, you'll always be kind of low level. You'll always be fighting for survival.   Pam Didner: You only focus on technical.   Ramon Ray: Yes. And fighting, fighting. You want to be scrappy. You want to be nimble, but you want to be that scrappiness where it's always a 10x, always a plus one. A scrappiness, but with thought. And I think you said that best and that's really the key. Let me consider how I can do something. Yes. But always understand leverage. And not leverage in a bad way. I think, to your point, you're right. Let me think. “Okay. I need to do this action today. Is it worth me spending time with this?” And to underline what you said, Pam, saying no to things is important, as well. You can't, I mean, I I'm pulled--I'm sure you are--a thousand different ways. I'm asked to do free things, fee things or not. So every moment is an evaluation. “Okay. Is this the best use of my time? Or should I just do this? Because this person's awesome and I want to just serve them.” That's fine too. But at least that you went into it thinking. It's kind of like them, as I tell when I'm out with my friends, I'll just say, when my wife and were like “Honey, where do you want to eat at?” “Well, you know, I don't know. I don't know.” And we're driving and I'm like, “Sweetheart, we need to decide soon because in two minutes there's no more restaurants.” So by not deciding the decision is made for us. That was a lot packed in there, but being thoughtful, learning how to say no, and also as best we can making some decision, uh, proactive about it so you can have some control of that.   Pam Didner: Yeah, I do agree. I do agree with that specifically. And, um, you know, I've been hustling just like you, both of us are working for ourselves and, uh, we have our own company. In every single moment, we have to make a decision in terms of how we want to use that specific hour or the time. And. I always feel like I'm trying to do too much, you know. As a content marketer, for example, I started writing blog and then I will like, “oh, I need to try a different format.” So I launched my YouTube channel. And I was like, “oh my God, I need to understand a little bit about podcasts and launch a podcast. All of a sudden I have three different formats of content I need to produce. And I think over a period of time, I end up overwhelmed myself. (And I started a webinar, as well). When 2021 started, I kind of gave myself a goal that what are the things can I pare down that I should not do it. And I also take into account in terms of, okay, what is the business impact if I'm not doing that. Right? Webinar was actually very good for me to gather a lot of leads, but I was not able to spend time to nurture those leads. Right. So I decided, you know what, maybe I should not get more leads. Maybe I should just focus on the existing pipelines that I have and continue to grow that. So a couple of months ago, I decided not to do webinars anymore. So I totally understand.   Ramon Ray: What I like about that Pam was the aspect of deciding--Seth Godin says this quite a bit--to what extent do you want to scale? Which I think is important because I think as the small business owners we are, I've been on a similar journey to learn what can I do? Now, I have a team of five, but I also have to think what do I want people to do at my size that's revenue generating because both of us doing content for ourselves, ironically, Pam, I've taken back a lot of the content doing that I do for editorial. Now for our clients, I've expanded enough that I can have other people do it. But for myself, I realized, you know what, me paying somebody even 500 a month, a thousand a month to promote Ramon, since I don't have a clear dot to the revenue.   Pam Didner: To connect to the revenue or the next stage! How are you going to nurture it? Does that make sense doing it?   Ramon Ray: Correct. I'm like, you know what? I think this is, even though I'm the cheapest person, for this stage, it's better that I just do a lot of that from that's my own brand myself, unless I can prove, “oh, every time Ramon does a silly video, it generates $10,000.” That's another story; but I don't have that proof yet. So I agree with your journey and I think that's the smartness of it. What should I be doing? What should I delegate to others? Or what should I not do at this time? Or never? Smart.   Pam Didner: So, you know, speaking of growing revenue, do you actually have a framework that you can help either small business owners or the marketing professional in terms of what they should do to grow revenue--either, you know, through marketing efforts or working with sales or working stuff on their own?   Ramon Ray: Yeah, for sure. And it's probably not as smart as a framework as you can do. However, from my limited experience, I think, and I would talk to the small business owners, but also talk to many of your audience--those were the B2B marketers leveraging the power of content. Here's what I've seen in my experience. I think that a) What is it that your audience really wants? That's one that's important.   Pam Didner: So you have to understand your audience well, and you have to define your audience. I, 100% agree with that. Do you know how many small business owners I talk to from time to time or they come to me and ask specific questions? I always ask “who is your target audience?” And, uh, I would say 85% of them cannot articulate that very well. They try to serve everybody.   Ramon Ray: Something like “we're targeting female founders” is a favorite one I hear. And I get it. I understand it. But female founders, can you at least tell me, are they South American? Are they US-based? Are they in retail or are they in manufacturing? At least that, so I think who are you serving? But I think also Pam, the hard thing is to break through the noise because everybody is doing content. Pam's doing it. Ramon is doing it. New York Times is doing it. Inc Magazine is doing it. So I think that that's point number two, really which is where are you going to hone in on that you do best; that's two. And I think three Pam now what's that funnel that nurturing that you can do to educate them until going directly to sales until they're ready to make a purchase? And I think that's the best we can do to build up that fan base--to build up that funnel of people who see you as a thought leader. Of course direct sales is important, but I think those were in the content game--oh, and I must say Pam as well—please, content should be interesting. I'm not saying if you're, if you're dealing with children who have cancer, there, you may not want to have it “ha ha ha.” But for our tech people, right, sometimes they're so straight-laced, they're so serious. They're so on brand it's boring!   Pam Didner: It's hard for us B2B marketers to break out of that mold. I'm the guilty one as well, but I always advise my client if you cannot make it interesting, of course you need a good writer to make that happen. And the one thing is make it relevant, make it useful. At minimal, you know, don't do self-serving content, but make it relevant to your target audience. Even you just do a show and tell about your product. Well, you know what? You don't actually have a creative or funny way to say it, but at least tailor that communication or the contents to address the audience's pain points and challenges.   Ramon Ray: Yes. And Pam remember the customer. So many of the brands I work with, they have amazing customers, but I think they have a challenge either finding them, identifying them, getting permission to use their stuff.   Pam Didner: Yeah. Getting the permission to actually use the logo or even have a case study created.   Ramon Ray: And in the case study, even that, have it a little loose it's okay to say, you know, to have fun with it. But you're right. I think the customers, that's the story, shine a light on them. And then we as businesses, we look less at the product to some degree we do, but oh, I'm an accountant, they're an accountant. They use their product to grow 10%. Let me have a look at it. So I think that's kind of some way to consider that as well.   Pam Didner: Yeah. So creating interesting content is always incredibly challenging. And another thing that comes to play in terms of content is the creative. And I also have come to realize on the B2B side, if you want to create a campaign that's creative and also try to break through the clutter. It does take time. It does take time to plan in it, to also execute it. And the problem is marketers. We don't have. Like we are always under the press deadline. “We need to get the blog done. What? We need to turn in around in 24 hours so legal can review it and approve it. Goddammit!”   Ramon Ray: Legal! Pam, legal! Always slowing us down, Pam! Continue on, but I just have to say legal people (sighs). Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.   Pam Didner: Yeah, but because of that, I think a lot of time on the B2B side, our hand are tied. Like there's so many review process that you have to go through. You know, even you have a creative idea, sometimes you have to pare that down whole lot more, just in reality that your management might have an issue, your salespeople might have issue, your PR team definitely. Or the legal team might actually have something to say. So I understand where you're coming from, at the same time, I also understand the reality on the B2B side, especially enterprise. There's just a lot of factors they have to take into account before they can actually finalize the content. And by the time that so many people approved it, all of a sudden the content is not fun anymore (laughs).   Ramon Ray: Yeah. So, but I dunno, Pam, there seems like a business opportunity for you, Pam. What we, you know, fun. We use that word of course liberally, you know, it didn't have to be a comedian. But Pam, I think that is one thing I'm, you're on the marketing end as I am of all these things-- telephone services, cable services, computer services, all the stuff that we use as consumers or B2B, even airlines, whatever. And a lot of it is just. Blah. So at the same, so that's one, I think, way there is anybody willing to kind of break through the clutter. Is anybody willing to kind of, uh, you know, I, I, they have to be cautious. There's so many ways to offend people nowadays, you know, but it's just, that is a key point.   Pam Didner: I totally agree. Yeah, exactly to me is just like, there's a fine line that B2B marketers, they have to walk. Yeah. And trying to find that fine line. From my perspective, I always tell my clients at minimal, can you address your target audience's pain point and challenges? Start it from that. That should be the very beginning, you know? And then from there, how far can you take it? That's a creative discussion. So, um, working with marketing in terms of creating the content and also grow revenue is actually very hard for marketing--especially when you do top of the funnel marketing outreach--to quantify or determine what is the conversion, or how does that impact, you know, your sales contribution. Do you have any suggestion in terms of what we should do? If the marketing people all focus on top of the funnel, how do they quantify in terms of their contribution to sales?   Ramon Ray: It's very tough, Pam, extremely tough. But I think the best thing that could be done--any many people try this--is to have the tightest tracking you can. I think that's what I've learned from some of the best companies, a webinar just by itself is okay. But I mean, and it's a pain because influencers like me, right? we don't want to use your tracking all the time. We just throw up and say, “go to grass.com” and you're like, “no, Ramon go to grass.com/question mark slash this.” So it's hard, but that's really the best way. Because if you're able to track every piece of content you put out, your smart analytics team can then say, oh, this went to it. But here's the other thing that happens. And I'm getting a little out of my comfort zone, but I know you can help me with this. The thing about last attribution, I worked for a software company once and it made me so pissed off Pam, because I'd be like metaphorically. I'd be like, “wait a minute. I went to the webinar and what the appetite I did Ramon does, but then six months ago—“   Pam Didner: --at the last attribution. But you are the first attribution that people come in to and you're not getting credit for that.   Ramon Ray: Yes! “You're giving it to Don because he closed the sale, but you forgot what we did six months ago, three months ago, two years ago.” And I know who can say. So I think that's the thing with these campaigns. Payment's hard, but I do know one thing, I think for sure, we know, year to year, quarter to quarter if you see your social engagement higher; year to year, quarter to quarter, you see more fans, more followers, more Facebook, more watch time. I know marketers won't like it; you want to see direct proof. But that is some indicator that clearly people are paying attention, if that makes sense. And I'll give credit--again if I have competing clients, forgive me, but credit where credit is due--HubSpot years ago, they were the leaders in marketing automation. I think many of us even, I hadn't even know they were a software company, Pam, because they were the leaders in the SEO website tracking and things like this. So giving them credit, HubSpot is an example of using a massive amount of content for that. So I got to give them great.   Pam Didner: Yes. I agree with you. And, um, I think the couple of things that you said resonate with me tremendously and I've been preaching, but I'm using a slightly different terminology. So you mentioned about that if you want to try and get, especially top of the funnel and also the purchasing cycle is very long, you need to make sure that you have a very tight tracking methods or the process. The terms I've been using is “backend integration.” Basically, if you really want to track it from the top, you know, from the very beginning when people come to your website or even from the time that they register for your webinar, if you want to have the tracking mechanism in place, you need to make sure your marketing automation tools are very much connected with a CRM or any other tools that you are using for different marketing channels; those tools needs to be somehow connected otherwise, it has no way to track it. And that's actually very, very hard. I think a lot of marketers they feel sure is that they cannot do that very tight tracking. In order to do that, their back end needs to be integrated. And at the end of the day it's about MarTech stack—how you build that stack and how they are all talking to each other.   Ramon Ray: For sure. And Pam, can I add one more thing? I just wanna add the value of things looking good. Another thing that I see some marketers make is the mistake of, and I want to be careful calling out tools here cause I know there's a lot of competing people who listen, but I'll just call out a tool because it's so famous, Zoom. Many marketers use Zoom for their webinars and things, but I noticed they leave the default. So one tip is when people go there, put images, put graphics, put your logo, make it look pretty. Sounds weird, but I've been to many webinars, Pam, where they just kind of they say “we're having a webinar with our executive,” but they don't put the guy or the gal's face. They don't take the time to make it look good. So I just wanted to add that, that when you're doing something like that, make it look legit, make it look good.   Pam Didner: Yeah. You need to, when you create a registration page--doesn't matter if it's on the Zoom on the landing page, attention to detail. Right? Use the opportunity to promote your brand and use the opportunity to have a logo there, you know, to get people's attention or even have the image of your events. I got it. Yeah, you're totally right.   Ramon Ray: When people have me and Pam for the next webinar, we charged them what Pam, a hundred thousand dollars or so? (Pam laughs)   Pam Didner: You charge them $100,000. I charged them, I don't know, 50 bucks.   Ramon Ray: Have our faces there to cause human face. So that's just a small tip, but I've seen too many times, people either afraid or too cautious of that. But GAP does it; Nike does it. Yeah. It's the face.   Pam Didner: So, you know, what you are talking about, I think there's another term that I use on the B2B world is your “customer experience.” Right. If you actually going to promote your webinar and, uh, when you are promoting on social media channel and make sure your copy is very compelling, make sure your image is great; but when they register, come to your website, make sure they get exactly the coherent, seamless experience, and then you'll have exactly the similar logo and image and the, when they log in to listen to your webinar, provide a similar as seamless experience, as well. Yeah, I hear you. So there's a couple of things I want to just summarize, uh, before I let you go. There's one thing that you mentioned, I really like in terms of like what B2B marketers, especially for long purchasing cycle, they can leverage the content to drive traffic to the website. Once you do that, you need to find a way to nurture them. Right. Not just like, okay, get them and get them into your database and you let it go. And then you move on to the next campaigns. Really try to understand your audience and then find a weight and a very single focus in terms of building your nurturing campaign to nurture them to the point that they can be qualified as a lead. And I liked that a lot. And I think that is one thing that marketers tend to overlook, including myself. We like to get a lot of leads, but we are not necessarily spending time to actually try to make an effort to nurture them. So I really liked that. And that's one of my biggest takeaway by talking with you. And also, uh, deliver that seamless customer experience--   it doesn't matter what kind of promotion that you aren't doing, just make sure you pay attention entrance of a customer experience. Awesome. Awesome. Anything that you want to add?   Ramon Ray: Yeah. Just to say, Pam, it's, it's been a delight to meet you and see you soar and work with you. I'm so excited and I'm so excited we can get reconnected today. And I just encourage my specialty of course, is the small business. B2B is a big category, but for the smaller businesses is my region. So I encourage the marketers listening to you, small business is very. It's different than of course the enterprise--you sell one thing and you get money. We're very fragmented, but I think it's a, it's a great market and we, small business owners need you. We need the products and services you're providing. So Pam, it's been great being on your podcast and thanks for letting me shine with you today. Thank you.   Pam Didner: Yes. Yes. So how can people find you?   Ramon Ray: Best way is Ramon ray.com R A M O N R A Y.com. Let me know how I can serve you or team up with Pam and do something together. We're here to serve you.   Pam Didner: I would love that. So, this is fantastic. It's wonderful talking to you, Ramon. I hope that we will see each other soon, like in person.   Ramon Ray: I hope so, indeed. Let's make it happen.   Pam Didner: All right. Take care.

Hello from Portland, Oregon! Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today I have another fantastic guest - Kevan Lee. Kevan is a product-led growth and SaaS leader and the head of marketing at Oyster, a distributor HR platform helping companies take care of the global teams. Today we are going to talk about growth hack strategies for startups. In this episode: How did Buffer ramp up its marketing and increased the number of users, readers and visitors? What is the system behind the high content production? What is the role of proper keyword research and optimization in content success? How can high-pace growth hack strategies keep the momentum over a more extended period? What tools should startups use, and business in general, to optimize their content? What are some growth hack strategies for startups and SaaS companies in the different business stages? How should sales and marketing work together in a startup? Is your business sales-led or product-led, and why should businesses care? How should marketers make a transition to support different business models? What tools should startups use for marketing automation and CRM, and should they integrate them? How can marketers measure the success and also a contribution to sales when it closes the deal? What is a daily routine of an effective leader, and why does it matter for business? What are the two books that marketers must read, primarily when they work in a startup environment? Quotes from the episode: "The strategy we took is to pitch something as if it was already written. And so we'd say we have written three things on these topics. Would you like them? And if they say "yes," then we go and write them real fast and get them over." "We have a couple of different ways that we do [to measure the success and also a contribution to sales when it closes the deal]. We have different pipeline targets that we measure at the top and then through the different stages. From lead to meeting to the opportunity to closed one, we have insight into each of those stages and how well we're moving people along." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. Today I have a very special guest, Mark Emond. Mark is a long time IBMer, Founder and President of Demand Spring – a B2B revenue marketing consultancy. Today we are going to talk about sales and marketing alignment. In this episode: What does Demand Spring do, and what is the company about? Based on the current stage of sales and marketing (and how they work together), what are some of the challenges B2B marketers tend to encounter? What processes and tools should a CMO use to align sales and marketing? In what ways a suitable platform can improve and influence sales and marketing alignment strategy? What's next for marketers when they reach the MQL target? What does it take to create a seamless sales and marketing alignment strategy? Can marketers do sales and marketing alignment bottom up and without top management support? What is the critical role of sales and marketing alignment? What is it that salespeople and marketers still control in the world of empowered buyers? Quotes from the episode: “The buyers using digital channels, using the content available through digital channels, are self-educating through the buyer journey. They're engaging interdependently in a non-linear manner with marketing and sales. They're the ones calling the shots.” “To me, the heart of a good sales rep or a good marketer is solving people's problems. It's finding solutions to people's problems. I think having people who are more educated about what they're buying is a good thing. Because then you can have a true dialogue and discussion.” ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest today is Tim Hughes. I met him when I was in London, probably four or five years ago. Tim is a CEO and Co Founder of DLA ignite, and author of two books about social selling and sales-marketing alignment - you can check them out on Amazon. He is also #1 Global social selling pioneer and innovator, and a speaker. Today we talk about social selling as the new business necessity. In this episode: How has the buying process changed? In what ways buyers' behaviors have changed? What are some of the specific changes that marketers and sales professionals need to make? In what ways is being on social is different from doing social? How can content help with social selling? What is humanizing content, and how to use it? How can a business pick the right social media channel? How can brands use their networks without abusing them? What is the role of employees in social selling, and how can companies empower them? What makes social selling challenging for corporations, and how can they overcome those difficulties? How to share and use corporate content on social media? Quotes from the episode: "First and foremost, social selling doesn't take as much time as cold calling does. And it doesn't take as much time as email. So for a start, you have efficiency savings. Some people think that somehow social selling is some sort of shortcut. It's not. But the problem with cold calling is that nobody answers the phone, and nobody responds to emails with email. With social, you can connect to people, have conversations." "We often see that people don't have a strategy in place. So understanding, why are we doing this and for what reason? Also, we can be empowering people in human resources. We can be empowering the CEO, but what we need to be doing is having a voice on social and empowering our people to be part of that conversation." ————— You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today, my guest is Amanda Milligan. Amanda is Marketing Director at Fractl, a marketing agency that helps brands build high-quality backlinks and brand authority through content marketing. Amanda is also a host of Fractl's Cashing in on Content Marketing podcast, and Head of Marketing at Stacker. Today we talk about content marketing and brand authority through earned media coverage. In this episode: What is earned media, and why should B2B brands care about earned media coverage? What makes publishers care about non paid content, and what makes them pick up the specific article and give it earned media coverage? How can B2B brands approach writers and pitch the idea of the content that could be beneficial for both sides? What is Tangential content, and what makes it different from usual content? What is the role of data focus on decision making and creating the perfect pitch? Fund Rocket Case Study: The complete process What are the benefits of earned media coverage? How to utilize visual assets to boost results? What are the best practices in pitching and promoting content for earner media efforts? What is the role of personalization and automation for a successful earned media coverage? How can small businesses utilize earned media efforts and stay on the budget? Quotes from the episode: "There are a lot of tools you can use to find writers. You can use tools to help you, and some will give you templates. But we are all about personalization. Even if you're sending the same project to multiple people, you're leading into it differently based on who they are." "Subscribe to everything that writer does, follow them on social, get a sense of their beat, and ask yourself how you can contribute to that. How can you contribute to those conversations? Offer something different and have those writers in mind that you're going to customize something for." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. Today, I have an incredibly special guest - Scott Brinker. Scott is the VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, Editor at chiefmartec.com, and Program Chair of MarTech Conference. Today we talk about Martech in practice - MarTech trends, opportunities and challenges. In this episode: What are the biggest trends of 2021 in terms of marketing technology development? What makes the digital marketing side so fragmented, and how can marketers navigate the landscape? How should marketers evaluate MarTech as a whole for a company without getting overwhelmed? What makes change and martech implementation difficult and slow? What can marketers do to pitch to management to invest in MarTech? Why should marketers evaluate their MarTech stack regularly, and how to do so? What are the marketing technology predictions for the second half of 2021 or even 2022? What kind of no-code platforms or tools can marketers use in their work? Quotes from the episode: "I'm very excited about this whole movement that people call 'no code.' And when I think about no code, I don't just mean things that don't require code anymore. I think of that category much more broadly as a new generation of tools. Tools that use a great UX and great AI engines to make it easy for ordinary people to build things without waiting for someone in IT or an agency to build it." "The fact that marketing is continually evolving in what it needs to execute and how it needs to reach people is tough because of the pace at which that evolution is happening; it's really hard to keep up with." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. My guest today is Matt Brodie from Brodie Agency, a digital marketer, and he does all paid advertising. In 2020 he decided to branch out on his own, and that's when he started his agency. Today we talk about paid media, and what does it take to run successful Facebook ads. In this episode: What are the most common misconceptions about Facebook ads and paid ads in general? How can businesses, including small businesses, achieve their goals with paid Facebook ads? How can marketers leverage different optimizing objectives to run Facebook ads? What makes running successful Facebook ads difficult? What is the proper approach to Facebook ads, and what is the hidden reality businesses should pay attention to? How can businesses and marketing departments use Facebook ads to perform research and testing? What is the role of the copy and design in terms of running successful Facebook ads? What are the benefits of hiring a professional to do paid ads? How important is the budget size for successful Facebook ads, and how should businesses advertise on a small or limited budget? What is the optimal time for running a Facebook ad? How can Facebook ads be used for sales, and how for awareness campaigns? How can marketers learn about pay media, and where should they start their journey? Quotes from the episode: “If you're not selling something in demand, no ad will magically make it work if people don't want what you have to sell. People have to want what you have to offer.” “It's not necessarily so much that you require a large budget as you require the acquisition of data. There is a correlation inherently with that, between how much budget you need versus time. If you're working with a small budget, it's going to take longer to build data, and then it's going to take you longer to optimize.” If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! Today I welcome a very special guest, Kyle Roof, the founder and Lead SEO of High Voltage SEO, co-founder and SEO instructor at Internet Marketing Gold, and inventor of PageOptimizer Pro. Kyle is joining me today to share expert tips that will help you increase your organic page ranking. In this episode: - Why is SEO important, especially in the realm of digital marketing? - What is the difference between adding keywords and content optimization - How to connect SEO to keywords, pages, and personas - What are the minimal requirements that anybody managing a website needs to consider in terms of search engine optimization? - What are the specific areas on the page that Google likes? - Basics of changing and not changing URLs - What are the basic requirements for marketers to do SEO? - What is the biggest problem with SEO? - How to choose the right SEO agency? - What is a good relationship between a client and an SEO agency? - How to do SEO for the content that is not text-driven? - What are some common KPIs that clients should track? - How to broaden the number of keywords? - How often should businesses update, refresh or add new content to your website? Quotes from the episode: "It comes down to understanding that SEO is a probabilities game. Put yourself into the position for the best opportunity for success. No SEO professional will be right 100% of the time, but the idea is that the most successful ones are 70 to 80% of the time." "One thing that I do is that I run tests on Google's algorithm, and I'm continually running tests on the algorithm to see what is or is not a ranking factor and which factors are the strongest. And what's interesting is that SEO basics stay relatively the same, and they are still also the strongest factors." ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! Marketing leaders and managers often ask me how to lead a marketing team, especially new first-line managers. However, even very experienced marketing directors ask for advice when they have to respond to unfamiliar marketing disciplines. That's why in today's episode, I talk about leading a marketing team and making that team efficient and motivated. In this episode: What are the tangible and intangible elements of leadership? What makes leadership challenging and demanding? How to set clear goals and objectives, and how to use them to lead the marketing team? How creating a statement helps managers to lead effective marketing teams? What is the role of collaboration and what makes it efficient? How to clarify roles and responsibilities? How to define performance indicators on both individual and project levels? What should leaders do to motivate, encourage, and inspire their teams? Quotes from the episode: “Org structure, roles and responsibilities minimize confusion and avoid duplication, as well as stepping on each other's feet.” “Marketing is hard. Encourage your teams to learn from the mistakes, share the mistakes, and you will all grow together as a result. ” -------------------------------------------------- If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! My guest today is Tommy Walker and he started Shopify Plus blog and after that, he became the Global Editor-in-Chief will QuickBooks. Now, he's a consultant and is sharing his knowledge that he gained over the past 15 years with other brands. Oh my God, Tommy. So happy to have you!   Tommy Walker: Thanks so much for having me, Pam. It's great to be on here.   Pam Didner: All right. Talk to us. Talk to us about your experience in Shopify. I mean, obviously it was a small mom and pop shop and to start with and you were employee number 14 and you got handed their blog post or whatever you want to call it. And became a content marketing machine. Can you share that experience with us in terms of the journey that you went through and, you know, the knowledge that you gain and the insight that you can share with our listeners.   Tommy Walker: For sure. Absolutely. So, um, I was employee number 14 at Shopify Plus, um, and when I had…   Pam Didner: OK. What are the differences between the two?   Tommy Walker: So that was a great, that's a great question. At the time, there really wasn't too much of a difference. Um, and we had to figure that out. The difference now is very clear. Uh, Shopify Plus is basically Shopify plus a whole bunch of other stuff, right? For enterprises and high growth startups, which is great. Shopify is a little bit more of the standard merchant, right. People who are looking to get into e-commerce and we were looking at the more experienced e-commerce side of the house. So, yeah. How did I get there? I was the editor in chief at a website called Conversion XL at the time and was recruited over into Shopify. Craig Miller their CMO at the time had asked, “Hey, would you be interested in running the Shopify plus blog?” And I said, “yeah, that's great.” So I got over there and I was asking people, “Hey, what is the difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus? And they were like, “well, from a feature set, there's not really a huge difference. We have, you know, dedicated customer service and a more customizable checkout.” And that was pretty much it. And I said, “well, what about from a voice and tone perspective?” And they were like, “Well, we don't really know.” And this was at the time I was running the blog, which was the most frequent publishing arm of the entire company. We were the putting most stuff out into the market.   Pam Didner: So how often do you guys publish at that time?   Tommy Walker: Uh, at the time we were publishing three times a week. So every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And the way that that calendar worked every Friday, we were publishing a new case study. I tried to leverage the size of the part of the company to our advantage because we had much more direct access to our customers. So we were able to kind of tell these stories and make these case studies every week, which was really great. It was a great part of the calendar.   Pam Didner: So how do you determine the editorial in general? What topics did you chose and also, do you actually have editorial meetings with your writers? How does that collaboration and communication go?   Tommy Walker: With the picking the subjects it was kind of a combination of a few different things. Obviously you look at the search side of things, but that wasn't really a huge concern of mine, to be honest with you. The main thing that I was looking at at the time, and I still kind of look at this depending on where I am, what I'm looking at is taking an observation as I'm going through my own e-commerce experience, as I'm like buying stuff and kind of realizing like, “Hey, what part of this process, where is the friction here? Where am I seeing opportunities that these particular sites can do be better?” Making note of that and continuing to go about that. As I'm looking at a broader calendar though, uh, I'm starting to look at the year, right? I come from an acting background. I was an actor for 10 years. A lot of what we had done there was about learning subtext and creating story structure and looking at all of these different things to make a good performance. And the way I look at this computer screen that you and I are talking on right now, it's not very different than TV screens or movie screens of the past. Right? All of this is performance to a certain extent. So when I was looking at structuring my content calendar, I would break the year up into a four-act structure, right. Where we can say we're all heading into the very end of the year, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, like that's the big, that's the biggest…   Pam Didner: That's a big deal for Shopify and how I build up that momentum to that specific month or that season.   Tommy Walker: Right. So that's kind of how I was looking at the calendar, was telling the story over the course of four quarters and then breaking that down by each month to basically say here is how we can make the perfect website all the way up until the end, and then really get that story, make it really pop.   Pam Didner: So do you followed that four act structure every single year? I mean, would the story kind of repeat itself or you are kind of talking about it from a different approach. Um, that is a story. Does the story, uh, , stall, you know, because it's exactly the same four acts?   Tommy Walker: Uh, it can, it can, but the way I think about it is you've got one year and you've got that first sort of origin story, if you will. Right. And this was what I was looking at when we were there, cause at the time Shopify Plus primarily for people who felt like they were outgrowing Shopify as a product. Right? So what we were looking at at that time was like, you know, if to use a video game reference, it's what happens when Mario gets the power up mushroom for the first time, right? The world is completely different. People are moving out of their garages to do shifts. Into 3PLs so third-party logistics. They are starting to bring on employees, all sorts of new things like that. So we're dealing with that. And then knowing that that stuff is going to get picked up by Google or have its own natural discovery process, the next year, we can start to look at that as more of the sequel, if you will. And then start thinking about it like that year over year.   Pam Didner: You're constantly going back to evaluate your past content? So it's not like you finish writing a blog post, you just like publish it, then you move on to the next one. You publish it and you move on to the next one. I think you constantly go back evaluating what has been published. And they either try to create a SQL or possibly, maybe I'm just like—maybe I'm putting words in your mouth--like go back and update and refresh it.   Tommy Walker: I'm, actually I'll give you an example. So, at the beginning of the month, we would write a piece that would say, you know, “how to build the perfect webpage.” Right. And we'd go, here's navigation, here's a hero image. Here's a, you know how to write a great headline, right? And we'd break down the entire page in that. The following week, we would follow that up “How to make the perfect navigation” and then just focus specifically on that.   Pam Didner: So very, very specific--I hate using the one narrow--but very specific topic. One very specific topic at a time, but it is a narrative it's very intentional in terms of what specific topic that you want to talk about. So how long did you plan your editorial? Did you plan that one quarter ahead or did you play in that whole year or how does that work?   Tommy Walker: So I would plan it for the whole year, right. At least the loose themes that we would want to do for the full year. So, you know, uh, first quarter is this, second quarter, is that so forth and so, on. And we always have to build in room for flexibility, but yeah, we would try to plan loosely the entire year and then kind of break it down quarter to quarter and then month to month and then eventually week to week.   Pam Didner: Yeah. So you do actually have something at a very high level, but like you said, very loosely, but you have some ideas and then every single quarter, every single month you hone into that. So how often do you change that news structure of your annual. editorial narrative? I mean, did you set it up and then you kind of just follow that or do you change it like in the middle of the year and then completely, sometimes you have to restructure it due to the new product launches or new features that's being added, you know, Shopify went IPO, I don't know, you know, something big things happened. So what is, how do you make that balance?   Tommy Walker: So the way that I try to think about it and the try the way I think about it now, even now that I'm not at Shopify is that yeah. You have to anticipate that product marketing is going to come up with something that they want and they're going to want it two weeks before they, it comes out and yeah, yeah,   Pam Didner: Yeah, all the time it was like, “oh, are we going to have a product launch? You know, but this has got to be a secret.” You will not know that product launch until like two days before.   Tommy Walker: “Can we have a blog post?” (laughs) So, so knowing that that's gonna happen, try to have, you know, when I build out my freelance team have somebody that can write quickly. And have somebody who's really good at that. Um, but to answer the question yeah it's, it's about building in knowing that things are going to go sideways or, you know, things are going to change in the industry or things like that. There are always going to be constants, but then you have to also think about where that flexibility needs to be. So not always so rigid, but you try your best to stay on topic, um, and hit those points that you already know are gonna come up.   Pam Didner: Got it. So how big is your freelance team if you will?   Tommy Walker: Sure. So I always had to 2-10 people and the reason for that is, uh, I wanted to plan my calendar out. I always want to have at least a month worth of articles in the hopper, just in case product marketing comes up or there's a drought and somebody gets sick or any of that. Right. So I always have at least one week planned out and I want to have at least two people for each rotating week. So the more people you have, obviously the, the better you can go about it.   Pam Didner: Does that mean you need a huge amount of money to budget this?   Tommy Walker: Fortunately at Shopify, I wasn't restricted by budget. (Pam laughs)   Pam Didner: Aha! (laughs)   Tommy Walker: It's just, yeah. Uh, you know, throwing dollar bills out there. Um, but at QuickBooks I had a very strict budget that I had to follow. Um, and fortunately I had to, I got to make my own budget. So I would get to break it down by technology and authors and promotion and all of that. And, and yeah, I mean, that's something I consult on now too, is how you make that budgeting work and have the right amount of people. And the way that I like to think about this is the more money you're willing to spend--and this is going to be true across the board, right--but the more money you're willing to spend, the less time you're going to have to spend in revision. However, if you have the right deputy editor, which I've always had included with this stuff, they're going to have a more consistent salary and they'll be able to do some of those more consistent edits so you can balance it out. And you'll always have your lead writer. And this happens with a lot of editorial staff on, you know, newspapers and magazines. You have your lead author, and then you have other people that you work with that might need a little bit more massaging. But the idea is if you really get solid with the edit, you can help those people who need more, attention need a little bit more love to bring them up to a certain point where your not having to spend so much time in editorial. And what's always been important to me is making it so they become more valuable out to the rest of the market. Right. So I might not have to pay them as much, they're getting paid more, but there's a lot other places. But there's still loyalty internally because that relationship between author and editor is, I believe like it's, it's a very close bond and it has to be respected because as an editor, you're the first person that sees any of this work. Right.   Pam Didner: So Tommy, did you do any other formats of content, such as a case study or podcast or a video?   Tommy Walker: Yeah. Um, so we did case studies. We did the case study every week. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in a second, um, how we approach that, but we definitely did a lot of video, too.   Pam Didner: You do write a video script yourself, or you have someone else to do?   Tommy Walker: I was more in the creative development side of the script. If that makes sense more concepting. Now, because a lot of the, the video stuff we did was more live capturing--like it was more. With the merchant. There wasn't a lot of scripting that had to happen, but I did have to work with the people over in the agencies that I was working. To pull out certain narratives that we wanted to kind of talk about. So yeah.   Pam Didner: What are some of the key objectives? What are some of the key messages that needs to come out and also is the closing? I think that very important, any kind of the video, or even podcasts from my perspective tend to be the opening and closing.   Tommy Walker: Yeah. And like, what do we want to get for B roll? And, you know, let's like that type of thing where what's the, what's the background that's going on here? And with our case study, case studies were really important to me, especially in those early days, because we had access to customers, which as I started working for larger companies realized there are way more layers between you and the customer.   Pam Didner: Oh yes.   Tommy Walker: There was a whole team that I had to go through, uh, at, at one of the other positions to gain access to customers. It was a crazy process.   Pam Didner: I am not surprised. (both laugh) Been there, done it, seen it. Yeah, all of it!   Tommy Walker: Yeah, but fortunately, because Shopify Plus at the time was so small, we had direct access to our customers. And one of the things I noticed when I was doing my market research, before we, before we even wrote a single line of text was a lot of the competitors out there--and this isn't just in this space, this is any company really--it was always this problem solution. Results right. Company X works with company Y and see Z results. And that has its place. But at the time we were trying to differentiate. So what I was always looking at, and I, and I worked with this excellent author, Nick Winkler, give him a shout out. He was an Emmy award winner, which was great. He was able to pull out these really excellent stories from people. But what we did is instead of looking at problem solution results, I said what led to the problem? Obviously we know that you're a customer because we're doing a case study here and we know that you're going to have some amazing results because we have a bias, right? We're only going to show you the excellent results. But what led to the problem and what we found when we started to dig into some of these more personal stories, I wanted to treat them more like Rolling Stone interviews. So we would find out from one of my favorite cases was the problem was, was that the guy's server room was on fire and that meant he needed to go to a cloud-based solution and because he went to the cloud-based solution, didn't have to worry about server rooms catching on fire. (Pam laughs) Cool. But what was interesting about this guy's story is how he found out his server room was on fire. So he was at his bachelor party and it was about three o'clock in the morning, which already gives you the sort of frame of mind that somebody at a bachelor party at three o'clock in the morning would be in, when they find out that their server room is on fire. Right. So there's like there, that adds a little bit of extra color. There adds some context.   Pam Didner: Yeah. It does add a little drama to it and the peak people's interest.   Tommy Walker: Yeah. Right. And like, in some of the other stories, they got really emotional because we wanted to learn their origins, right? What led them to become this entrepreneur? And we wanted to speak to that entrepreneurial spark. So there are some people who were bullied their entire life and their business was almost a direct response to being bold. Some of these came from visits across the world and seeing completely different cultures and bad situations, and then finding ways to really help in that area. So there was some really excellent stories that came out of this and they're very human stories. And at the end of the day, like that's what we, as people really want to see is that the companies that we work with are invested in the humanity of, of you, right? We want to know that you care about what's going on in my life, not to like a creepy extent, but we want to know that the product that we're putting out there is going to help in some aspects, some real aspect and not just be another number. Right.   Pam Didner: Speaking of number. I mean, all those are great content. How did you measure success?   Tommy Walker: That was very difficult at the time.   Pam Didner: Yeah, as a B2B marketer or being in the enterprise for a long period of time, we always want to quantify the marketing success. And sometimes it's very, very hard, especially your marketing campaigns or marketing tactic is a focus on top of the funnel, because you are building that brain awareness. You try to build that emotional connection, but it's very hard to quantify that. So how do you suggest for the brands would like to do something similar to quantify the success? Because ultimately they need to have a Come to Jesus meeting with the VP of marketing, VP of sales, even the, a CEO.   Tommy Walker: Um, so it's been different depending on the company that I've worked. Shopify was a very different situation because it was just getting off the ground. There wasn't a ton for attribution modeling in place. We weren't able to look at that. So the metrics that I was really looking at at the time, because I did have access to this was returned visitors. Right. Um, and return visitors have always been sort of my true north metric that I, I try to look at because in a B2B context specifically, the more return visitors you have, the more return visits you have. That corresponds really well with the consideration area. Right. I want people to spend a lot more time with me. New visitors are cool. I love new visitors, but return visitors that's really where it's at. I want to know that I'm retaining people. So that was part of it at Shopify Plus moving over to QuickBooks, I got to work with this really excellent data scientist who helped model a number of different things. Like how many visits does it take for a person to actually convert to a customer? Right.   Pam Didner: What is the magic number, according to QuickBooks?   Tommy Walker: Um, that's proprietary.   Pam Didner: Can you give me a range?   Tommy Walker: I will tell you this, when we were able to double the amounts of, uh, return visits we had from individuals within a 90 day period, we were able to half the time it took to make a sale. That's about as much as I can say, uh, when it came to that, but it's a decent amount of visits, right. You know, maybe anywhere between 15 to 30. We'll kind of give, we'll kind of give that sort of a range.   Pam Didner: You were like, okay, I'm going to give you a very wide range. Why don't you guys just do a test yourself? And I agree (both laugh).   Tommy Walker: Yeah, 1 and 100. Um, no, it was really between 15 and 30 is what we would find it, especially in the 90-day period. And what we found was that, when you can increase the amount of return visits for a single user, um, and increase the amount of page views per session, then you're able to reduce that time to sale, um, really in half, which is incredible. And it makes total sense when you look at it beyond the numbers perspective, right? If I'm going to spend more time with you, that's time that I'm not spending with somebody else. And that makes me far more likely to like your stuff and trust you.   Pam Didner: Yeah. The next question I have is in terms of the content that you created over a period of time, do you go back and repurpose some of the content or do you reuse some of the content? Can you share some of the examples with us?   Tommy Walker: Sure. So, um, I didn't mention this earlier, but when we did at, uh, one of the different formats that we had explored when I was at Shopify Plus where a series of industry reports. Right.   Pam Didner: So you guys do primary research?   Tommy Walker: We would compile research from other outside sources.   Pam Didner: Ah, I see. So is the base, uh, it's a, is the industry report that you compile based on the secondary resources that you have?   Tommy Walker: Okay. Right. And what we did with these, because Shopify plus was not going to compete on features. Purposefully, we're not going to compete on features primarily because we couldn't, but we also decided that. We weren't going to, I had said we're going to compete on knowledge, right? So we would do these industry reports, which is a strategy they still use today, which makes me very happy with this. What would happen is we'd have all of that data and information, and then we could repurpose some of that into a blog post, you know, bring some of that stuff in. But the other thing that we would do is we would merchandise, if you will. We'd create trailers for the industry reports. So you have video going into that and now you're repurposing it over into a blog post. And then with the trailer, you can have these little gifts that come out of it. So there are a number of different ways that you can splice up this information. And with the industry reports themselves, there were, I think some of them had over a hundred pages worth of just pure information. And they were like—   Pam Didner: How long did it take to create the industry report?   Tommy Walker: Forever! Uh, several months, several months,   Pam Didner: I would not be surprised.   Tommy Walker: No. And we were projecting out for the next five years.   Pam Didner: So the industry information. You gather, you projected the trends for the next five years?   Tommy Walker: Correct. Yeah. And that was the depth that we were going into. And we were able to take our own internal knowledge, even though we weren't publishing that at the time and sort of apply that to what was going on here in, and really say that we were at the ground level on some of this stuff and bring in, you know, merchant quotes and stuff like that. And then we were able to repurpose a lot of that into other forms of content.   Pam Didner: Definitely. But that requires a lot of planning and intentional effort. I want people to understand that repurposing a piece of content, it's not very simple, like, oh, okay. You pull, uh, several paragraphs from one white paper and you write a blog post. It's a very intentional effort. As of you creating a, not a piece of content, even though you are using existing content that you have.   Tommy Walker: Right. And the way to think about it really is making it modular. Right. Like when you're thinking about the big piece, what are the smaller things that you can create that are modular and put that out there? Something I learned years ago is create soundbites within your content, right? Like in this is, this is totally different, but like, what are, what are some tweetables that you can put out there? And it's the same thing as like PR and you know, all of that is you get the, you put the little soundbites out there. What's the news going to pick up on? And when you're able to put that stuff in, then it becomes infinitely more shareable, but it's also, you can use it to repurpose in a number of different areas, especially if you're planning that ahead of time. Pam Didner: Being a content marketer myself, where a good period of time, especially in enterprise, it's a lot of work. And I think from editorial planning down to the content creation, or even once you create content, you have to repurpose the content is there's a lot of coordination that needs to happen within the company. And if you have a one lesson for enterprise marketers that actually trying to manage the content, what is that one lesson that you want to share?   Tommy Walker: Ooh, that's a good question. Um, Content marketing is not a solo sports. It is very much a team sport and it's not just on the content team. So if you need to work with other parts of the company to get what you need done, try to understand their working cadence and how it is that you can fit into their day, so you're not bashing heads when it comes to getting stuff created.   Pam Didner: I hear you. I hear try to understand how they work and their process and work with that.   Tommy Walker: Exactly.   Pam Didner: Very good. Hey, before I end our podcast, I would like to ask you to answer one silly question and you can pick one out of two. Number one: What is the most useless talent that you possess? The second one is, did you have a ridiculous goal in your life?   Tommy Walker: (laughs) Um, yeah, the, the most useless I have a few use those talents. Um, the, the most useless talent I would say that I have is an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel movies and movies in general, coming from the filmmaking background.   Pam Didner: What about, uh, DC? You are more into the Marvel universe. Okay.   Tommy Walker: The Marvel Universe. Um, but movies in general, that's just from my acting background. So, um, my wife hates watching movies with me sometimes because I'm like, did you know?   Pam Didner: And you're like, shut up. Can I just enjoy the movie? Don't tell me!   Tommy Walker: She, she wonders how I enjoy the movie. I'm like, “this is exactly how I enjoy the movie!”   Pam Didner: Thank you so much, Tommy. So happy to have you on my show and you share a lot of insight with us and I enjoy our conversation.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! I've been reading many books about writing screenplays lately because there are many talks about bringing storytelling into content marketing. I thought I might also go to the sources and dig in on how to write a screenplay and how to tell stories effectively. The three books I was reading are: Story by Robert McKee, Screenplay Writing 434 from Lew Hunger, and Save the Cat from Blake Snyder. In this episode: Content must have a good sense of what it's about and who it's for The importance of structure Know your characters, and dig deep into your character development How screenplay writing relates to B2B marketing writing? How to apply screenplay structure to B2B Marketing? What is the best way for marketers to focus on what they want to say and how to say it? What can screenplays teach us about creating a customer journey? How to create a one-liner to express the essence of your brand? Quotes from the episode: “Another thing I've discovered is that every scene, every movement, and every word matters. Everything in a movie is intentional and purposeful.” “The structure of a screenplay is your foundation before you can create scenes and dialogues. The structure of your marketing is your marketing plan, processes and tools.” ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam! My guest today is Lee Judge. Lee is the co-founder and CMO of Content Monsta, specialized in digital content marketing and production. Lee is also a fellow speaker. I've often seen him at a different speaking circuit, talking passionately about content and content marketing. Today we talk about social media video content. In this episode: How to overcome the fear of being on camera and live video? How to get started with Linkedin videos, and what are some of the best practices? The list of tools to make good video content, from recording to editing. When to use scripts and how to use them. What is a cam link, and how to use it? Learn more about Wirecast and OBS and what are the differences. How to become and appear more natural on camera? What are some business benefits of TikTok video content? What if businesses need to create video content for multiple platforms – benefits and drawbacks When to use a teleprompter, and what are the benefits? How to set up the workspace for creating video content?   Quotes from the episode: “I've practiced over time, learned how to read a script, and you wouldn't know that I'm reading a script. When I first tried to do video reading a script, and I watched myself, I realized there are specific little nuances – that make a difference – that I wasn't doing. So I had to learn, watch them on video, and make sure that I smiled and raised my eyebrows and be natural.” “If you're going to be a digital marketer and present yourself well on camera, you need to present yourself just as you would dress up to go somewhere. Whether you're at home or in your office, how you sound and how you look, not just how you look physically, but how you show up on camera, it's going to be very critical moving forward.” ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.