S3 E15 - Paid vs Organic Media Strategy | Carl Ferreira & Kaylee Edmondson episode artwork

EPISODE · Jun 22, 2023 · 36 MIN

S3 E15 - Paid vs Organic Media Strategy | Carl Ferreira & Kaylee Edmondson

from Stacking Growth | The B2B Marketing Podcast · host Refine Labs

“Marketers like to differentiate, people like to compare” While Cassidy is away, Carl takes the wheel, joined by Kaylee Edmondson - VP of Revenue R&D at Refine Labs! They go head to head about paid versus organic media - they cover myths, uncover truths, and dig into the ways to leverage each strategy to build the best brand presence. Then they switch gears to customer research, providing 6 insightful questions to ask customers while interviewing.

“Marketers like to differentiate, people like to compare” While Cassidy is away, Carl takes the wheel, joined by Kaylee Edmondson - VP of Revenue R&D at Refine Labs! They go head to head about paid versus organic media - they cover myths, uncover truths, and dig into the ways to leverage each strategy to build the best brand presence. Then they switch gears to customer research, providing 6 insightful questions to ask customers while interviewing.

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S3 E15 - Paid vs Organic Media Strategy | Carl Ferreira & Kaylee Edmondson

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TRANSCRIPT · AUTO-GENERATED

Welcome everyone to Stacking Growth. If you're confused by why I'm introing Stacking Growth is because Cassidy is a little too fancy for us. Kaylee, he's a South of France right now. So enjoying some of his unlimited PTO.

We're excited for him. Guests today are very own Kaylee Edmondson. Kaylee, how are you? Lovely.

I'm really pumped to be here. I feel like you have a really great radio voice. So I'll do my best to try and keep up. I've gotten that before.

I got that as far back as high school where it's like, Carl, I keep being a really good radio host. And I'm like, yeah, well, you know, I'm in sales. Radio doesn't really pay the bills. So here I am.

It's totally bad. Radio pays really bad. So I think you definitely lucked up on the career choice. But you've got to find ways.

I guess this is your way to like live both lives, where you have the announcement of your voice that can channel it through your sales role. This is my way, for sure. Anyways, topic for today. So a lot of people know this, but there's a lot of fighting and arguing and wrestling.

Let's say wrestling that happens, intellectual wrestling, of course, not physical wrestling. That would be weird. Intellectual wrestling on like paid versus organic, right? Obviously, refined lives just cemented themselves like from a services perspective.

We primarily, I would say, execute paid media for our customers. Even though for our own company, we do a lot, mostly, right? Organic. And we do do organic as well for our customers.

But I would say it's like a 70, 30 split paid organic. And you've got some pretty sharp opinions on organic. And you're kind of a voice, I think you said it in a recent LinkedIn post where you were like 20, 23 paid media as the anti-hero in marketing, or will be cemented as the anti-hero in marketing. It's pretty bold claim, especially for being a refined lab producer.

So can you like unpack a little bit to kick us off? Like what you mean, like in action context? Yeah, I almost feel like I'm like on a stand for like trial instead of being interviewed on a podcast with that intro. But yeah.

So I think I look at it. Kaylee, maybe this is an exit interview. Like if you get a little too wild, like this may be an exit interview, I even know. OK, no matter what.

I'm going to try and come off a little unhinged, I guess. But I think so my career has been interesting in that I have always had a demand gen title. But for every role that I've held at any given company, demand gen has been described completely differently because it's ultimately dependent on what can marketing do to drive growth for this business. And for every business, it's looked different.

So my scope of what demand gen is or looks like is bias, to the fact that my frameworks and playbooks have been different. For every company I've joined, different stages growth, marketing to different personas at a different time in an economic climate. So all of those variables go in to making my demand gen roles unique for every brand up and at. And I think that we're starting to see that bubble over, especially into 2023.

We all know this is the year, unfortunately, of doing more with less. We're tired of hearing it. But that's what it is. I feel like every year these last couple years has had like a phrase.

And unfortunately, that's the phrase for this year. So that's where we're at. It's putting a lot of pressure on continuing to make a case to your CFO or your board or your CEO or whoever the heck you report up to on continuing to invest substantial percentages of whatever your marketing budget is into paid. So it's putting a lot of pressure on paid, putting a lot of pressure for paid to perform.

Meanwhile, paid isn't getting any cheaper. It's not getting any cheaper to pay to play on these platforms like LinkedIn, meta, et cetera, which I think creates the path if it hasn't already been created for your brand or your business. Now more than ever, that path is more obvious as a choice that you should be making as a company to invest in an organic strategy. So that's kind of my preamble.

But I'm sure you have pushbacks. So go ahead. For whatever it's worth, this is normally how Carl and I have conversations internally. We don't always agree, which is great.

I think that we push each other's buttons a little bit to form more solid conclusions or hypotheses, depending on what we're chatting about for our own brand or for our clients. So feel free to bring that energy here and just poke and broaden. Well, I mean, you just shared something that is a little upsetting in that you don't push my buttons. So I'm assuming that now we all know that I push your buttons.

Oh, whatever. You could have shared that feedback privately before you. Too late now. No, I think like I'm with you.

I think that obviously organic is super powerful and it makes sense for most companies to be playing there. And I think historically like paid has been the route. I think like dispel a myth for me, OK? Because my big beef with organic and maybe this is a myth.

This is something certainly that we talk about. Customers talk about with us, right? Like just as priority that most companies have with like balancing short-term wins with middle-to-long-term wins and gains, right? And I think the myth is that like, well, organic.

I mean, even Chris has said this, right? Like to build up his LinkedIn presence like took years, literally. So how does a company leverage organic? But how can they leverage it in a way that helps them to maximize short-term gains and wins and put some numbers on the board and also be building kind of that long-term brand presence?

Because again, a lot of execs are skeptical. They want to see ROI. So it's easier said than done to be like, you've got to build an organic audience. I think everybody would agree with that.

I think that's easier said than done. So that's my push back for you. How would you sort of tackle that? Well, I think it's easier said than done for both scenarios depending on what your objectives are and what you're actually trying to tackle.

So like, let's play out some scenarios. Like if we're, let me try and think of a real scenario in real time, if we're an SMB, like a startup, an SMB startup that's going after, I don't know, companies where their ACV is roughly six to 10K, let's say that, we're in that range of the ballpark. And so we've got minimal marketing spend that is variable today because we're starting up. We're getting started.

We don't have a ton of customers under our belt. Our margins are healthy, but we aren't willing to like really invest in Pay Media. So but we know that Pay Media is the silver bullet, right? I think that's what most founders or CEOs think of when they think of Pay Media is quick wins.

Okay, cool. But all those things being said, we're not a small customer base, which means that we might know our ICP, we might not. We might be building audiences for Pay Media in confidence. We might not, meaning that you might put, let's say you have, we've had somebody come recently that's been chatting, they have $1,000 a month that they're willing to allocate to Pay Media, but they don't really have a level of confidence in who their ICP is, if they're in market, where they spend time, or even what messaging is gonna get them to convert, to come in to even have a conversation, not even saying like qualified like just to have a conversation.

These are all variables that need to be figured out before you can successfully deploy a Pay Media program. We'll have a heck of a figure this out. Organic is a great avenue to do that. So I think like that's one avenue for what I would like recommend, I think that back to your question of like, is organic the long game, I think, when most people think about organic, I think that traditionally they think purely about SEO.

When people say organic they hear SEO, SEO yes can take years, can, or depending on the game and industry you're in, and how much volume, search volume there is, how intense search volume there is out there, you can start seeing qualified pipeline within 30 days. If that's the industry you're in, I think it goes back to like my understanding that demand gen should be driving growth, whatever that looks like for your business, and you need to figure out what those wins are. For companies that are set up to deploy and start winning organically, for me today that obviously means more than just SEO, that could mean building an audience and growing a newsletter, building an audience and growing your social following on whatever channel your prospects or future customers spend time on. There are a lot of ways that organic can come to life today, and it doesn't have to be a three year investment in order for you to start seeing returns.

Let me try and like quantify this with a real life example. So although Carl said at the beginning of the call that we do spend most of our efforts on the services side of the team, working on executing Pay Media programs for our clients, we are also executing organic content strategies as well. And in that, we've got one example, has started deploying organic social to build an audience for them on their profile choice where their audience spend time just two weeks ago. And already they've got a really qualified meeting.

This is an enterprise type of company where one meeting can make or break goals for the quarter, have already gotten two weeks in, a really prominent meeting booked on the calendar. That's a physical meeting, they're going to meet up in person, all off of growing an organic strategy, and that's two weeks. So when people think that it's gonna take three years of investment, I think it's because years ago, organic meant SEO, SEO for most industries is a time intensive effort. So that's a pretty awesome case study there.

A little mini case study or at least, or like a strong positive signal. I mean, you use your leverage to organic and we got pipeline. Okay, let's, we could probably call that S0 or S1 pipeline. What, I guess looks like, okay, so I'm a company that's now listening to you.

And I'm like, all right, cool, I'm gonna start with organic. I know this customer. And so I know that you've done a lot of work on the background to make sure that organic is starting off on the right foot. Can you walk me through then, if I'm looking for quick wins, but also looking to build over the long haul, leveraging organic first, what is good, what do I need to do?

Like, what do I need to, like, what are some of the things I need to be thinking of? What's the concrete I need to pour first? Before I like go make that first LinkedIn post. What's some of the work that you've done kind of behind the scenes to prep for that quote unquote launch?

Yeah, so, and you're saying in a scenario that we already know who our ideal customer is, yeah. Well, if there's, I mean, if for anyone listening, maybe they know, we've got some customers that come to us, right, Kaylee, we've got it with more potential today that doesn't really have their ICP mail. They historically sold to lots of kind of different verticals. So maybe start from the beginning, I'm a founder and I've got some customers, I've got some money, but I'm not niched.

I don't know my ICP, it could be a lot of things. I hire Kaylee or whatever, you're their head of marketing. What do you do? What are first three things you're thinking about?

Yeah, so I think I'm gonna start with modeling what their existing wedge should be. For me, when I think about a wedge, it could be, to your point, like it could be wedging into an industry that you're seeing more success in than others, it could be wedging into a specific persona that you're seeing more success in than others. It could be, you know, a certain company segment size, there are all types of things, right? You need to do some type of deep dive through the existing database that you have today to really understand where you're seeing greater success.

That could be stronger win rates, that could be higher ACVs, that could be, I mean, if you're early on, you probably won't know lifetime value yet, but every company is different. So maybe you could assume with some level of certainty lifetime value if you're that far in, to your journey as a business, to understand like what your wedge is. And those wedges can come about in multiple ways, but that would be step one. From there, I would really focus on like getting connected to your existing customers and having qualitative conversations with them.

Some companies might already have like gone calls or like a phone calls or whatever that they could go back through to pick up on some qualitative research for who these people are, where they spend time, how they talk, right? Languageing is gonna be a huge part of it, because you need to be able to resonate with these people, wherever they are with their pain points, et cetera. And if you can't talk their language, then you're already like off base. So at Circle High, like quantitative and qualitative data research has to come first.

That can come to life in a series of different ways. It can be phone calls, it can be gone, it can be like Google Forms, whatever, like you can get strappy, it doesn't have to be, I think when I think of research, I think of, you know, like traditional, like old school marketing research. Yeah, and it's like a minimum $50,000 investment that's like handled by a third party firm, do get me wrong, if you're like a massive organization, those are great too. I've definitely been at companies that do have the cash flow to validate that type of investment, and they are definitely much more statistically significant and go a lot deeper, because obviously these people are professional researchers, so that's, I'm not knocking that, it's fine.

But scrappy approach works great too, to identify the swedge, so that's right there. My mind next goes, can I use a word, double tack? I know that's like, disgusting. I know it's a complete thing.

It's got one of those passwords, but like, okay, let's talk about research for a second, because I think companies like it's wrong. And tell me if I'm right or wrong here, because then I'll have to say totally different stuff in the sales process. So when companies do this research, Kaylee, and they're trying to figure out like their wedge and they're talking to their customers, what I find is a lot of companies, they sort of like when they're interrogating their customers, or interviewing them, they're really asking a lot of questions and I don't think are relevant. They'll ask them, they're relevant, but not core relevancy, let me explain.

They'll ask questions like, hey, like, why did you choose me, right? It's kind of like them focus, like why us, like how did you go through your evaluation? And I think customers that basically just validates probably stuff you already knew. And the person is gonna tell you things that you wanna hear, right?

They're like, well, I don't know you're the best. And you ran like a great sales process and you were really customer centric and your price was the best. And oh, I went to college with you because I'm an early stage founder, and I've probably closed all of my buddies and board of director connections, right? Well, Frank from the board told me to interview.

I think like that's actually, this is helpful, right? Like we should ask some of those questions, but I think questions that get missed, maybe they don't, but questions that get missed that would actually better inform a wedge or different content pillars are, why are you evaluating in the first place? What's changed in your world? And so asking more questions around their role, and but also like the broader market around what risks are you identifying?

What major questions are you asking? That really has nothing to do with my product, but I'm trying to understand your world better because then that's like, okay, you're asking these five questions about your role or you're facing these challenges or you're facing these risks or these three things have changed in the market. Interest rates, blah, blah, blah, right? We're margin sensitive now.

And I think customer companies miss that, which really is that's actually the better informant information for our content heard. Would you agree? And if you disagree, like what should the line of questioning be focused on to actually get the best results from these? It's a good question.

Actually, it was on a different panel recently where a similar topic got brought up. I think that one of the new like buzzy things in marketing is talking about like getting close to your customers or like chatting with your customers. Like everybody is saying it. And so there's a definite like wedge between how people think you should approach it.

And I'll just speak on my behalf or how I have done it. I think that it was Emily Kramer who was on the panel with me. She's a former CMO for some very reputable companies that had a slightly different take. And I honestly kind of agree with her take too.

So I'll maybe share both just because it's relevant. But when I have done this before in previous roles, either in industries that I feel I understand really well or I've done it once before in an industry, I guess now twice, twice before an industry I know literally nothing about, I have taken a very similar approach to all of those scenarios in that my mind, I'm going to be interviewing the number of customers that I'm interviewing were talking with in each instance is a little different depending on the size of the company and the depth in which I can get access to these customers to actually get them on a call. So they're very different. But what I know that I want is a baseline to be able to actually establish a trend in the qualitative answers I get back.

So normally I'll join a call with at least 30 minutes of an Outlook open, but only six questions. So that leaves some buffer time for me to step into their world in whatever way that is, whether it's just a phone call, like here and pick up on the background or the chaos of their environment. Maybe they'll have some opening statements about what they're doing today or what they've just come from or whatever. So you want to leave some buffer room for off the record feedback so that you can stand shoulder to shoulder with your customers in some way.

If for whatever reason that means you can actually stand shoulder to shoulder with them and spend time with them in person, like volunteering with them or helping them for a day, that's even better. And you can weave these questions in. But for most of us, like you're going to get on a call, you're going to have X amount of time, you're going to need some baseline of questions to be able to establish a rhythm so that when you step back with all this qualitative information you can actually weave it together into some cohesive story to say, yeah, we have enough data to say X, Y, D. For me, like these are the questions that I normally run down and poke holes in them if you have holes.

But why did you buy? None of these questions are about me or the brand or the product specifically. But in this type of question, you're really looking to pattern match specifically on the value prop. This helps you identify what types of value props are standing out for this customer base that you are getting on the phone with.

I'll say too, taking a step back. If you do have the opportunity in your customer base to maybe you've already identified the wedge and you know that SMB in XYZ industry is your place and that's where you're going to go in depth and that's great. If you're going to use these calls to try and help further identify or solidify, maybe you've got two industries that are kind of neck and neck, you want to use these calls to figure out really which wedge you're going to offer first and make sure that when you're selecting the customers are going to call, that's equally represented in the data set that you're going to gather. So I'll say that.

Second is what problem were you hoping to solve? So what you want to hear them say is problem based language and questions that help them discover the pain in their own words because I think that'll be far more important and impactful than anything that you might say or have a preconceived understanding of. What were you afraid of before buying? This gets at any unspoken objections that they might have that maybe they didn't vocalize upfront in the sales process or that you've just never heard of before.

Prospects don't always tell you their concerns but customers always will. Once they're paying you, I feel like they are much more open to sharing upfront objections. That's a good tip. What is your favorite part of the product?

Obviously you want to understand what features or functionality are actually the most impactful because that can come out in your future content strategy and overall narrative as well. How about outreach, things to highlight on your website, et cetera? You ask any clarifying questions? Like if you ask like what's your favorite part of the product and they're like, oh, I love, I don't know if I'm at HubSpot.

I'm like, yeah, I love how the deal board in HubSpot sales pro makes it easy for me to see all the deals and apply planning to horizontal way. It's like, well, that's not very specific. You ask deeper questions. Well, tell me how that kind of helps you out or what impact has that had on the workflow of your team?

Always. Or do you just add it? Almost all of these ebb and flow. So like my goal is to walk away with all six of these questions answered.

Doesn't necessarily mean we'll ask them in that order. Doesn't mean that we'll necessarily ask them exactly even as they're written, but the premise of all of them needs to be communicated. And almost all of them, especially when we're in industries that I don't personally feel like I'm the snee for, they all have follow ups because they have to, right? If I assume that your, you know, con-bond view and your pipeline is like, just, you know, changing your world, I can interpret that as something that's completely different than what you meant it.

Yeah, okay, that's good clarity. So we've got, why did you buy? What problem were you looking to solve? What is a risk question?

Or what were you most afraid of? What's your favorite part of the product? So we're at four, what are the last two? The last two are, what has changed the most since you bought the product?

Not necessarily with the product itself, but what has changed in terms of like micro examples or micro testimonials about the impact that our product or the product I'm representing in that moment has had on you personally and your business? So you're asking what you're really trying to get at there is like you maybe bought for reason A, but you're surprised actually that we're helping more with reason B and C than you originally found the product was more than you thought. And there's like a pleasantly surprised, larger impact than you initially anticipated. Is that what you're trying to offer there?

Exactly, exactly. It also helps as you're thinking about how you're gonna bring the story to life in multiple formats. It could be something that's you uncovering an additional value prop that maybe isn't obvious at first glance, right? Cause like, why did you buy?

It might reveal those initial to your point, those initial understood value props. Oh, it was gonna save time. I was gonna save money, whatever it is, right? But then once you're at this point in the interview, normally they're a little bit more open, hopefully being a little bit more candid with you and might be a little bit more susceptible to share some of these more niche edge case examples or scenarios that your product has impacted, either like them personally or for their business, which would be great to pick up on testimonials throughout and then also we'd throw out your content strategy.

And then last question. How would you describe the product to another persona? I think especially for industries that aren't naturally native to me, understanding how they are using their words or their language is extremely impactful. I think the phrase that I was associated with this question is that marketers like to differentiate, but people like to compare.

So we as marketers are unfortunate, like toxic trait, is that we always like to be like, we're different, we're different, we're different. Here's why, we make up all of these terms or phrases or whatever that explain why we're so different. But truthfully, when someone is getting ready to evaluate a product, think about yourself. Even if you're thinking about HubSpot, the first thing that you're gonna do as a buyer of that product is say, oh HubSpot, like Marketo, how's it different from Marketo?

It allows the user a quick compare contrast to move on to get deeper into the conversation using their own language. Yeah, that's interesting because you're right. I think as buyers, when we don't understand something, and this is like a tip for marketers, if your website is difficult to understand or whatever, what the buyer is gonna do psychologically is try to make sense of what you do by lumping you into something like a category that is familiar to them. That's the first thing that I do, whenever I'm evaluating, let's say I get an inbound lead, and I'm trying to do pre-call research.

If most websites that I go to, it's very difficult to make out what they actually do. So what do I do? I go to G2 and I try to be like, all right, well, who's a comparison to them so that I could better make sense of what they do? Oh, okay, you compete with Salesforce for this, or you compete with Looker, you're a BI tool.

Okay, now I get it. So that's an interesting psychological kind of like quirk that I think you articulated, that I haven't fully articulated or fleshed out before, and if you leave it up to your buyers to kind of define what you do, they're just gonna go lump you in. So don't leave it up to them, right? Make it super crystal clear, and I think that's kind of what you're getting at here.

And I guess with that question, you can kind of surface, like do people know what we do? Even our customers, right? Even our customers were, what's interesting though, and this has happened for me once in real time, that very happy, I would say power users, like customers that are power users, were feeding me answers that weren't obvious to me. They were obsessed with our product, they were no chance they were turning, they were adding users and licenses, they were creating functionality for this product, that truthfully, the people that built the product, myself, I identified at that point as a sme of that product, I had been an admin of that product several times, never thought to use it that way.

But it's interesting because they are actually showcasing to me ways in which they would describe our product to their peers that are completely different in the way that I would have assumed they would have communicated it. So actually they're like, in that way, helping build our product roadmap even, to help us go deeper on these use cases that help us create a moat as a brand to further create some distance between us and the functionality and feature set of our competitors, that we didn't even think of, which is like a hidden gem. Sometimes you get those too. Dang.

Well, this conversation went a totally different direction. Let's talk about organic and then we talked about customer research and interviewing. So I guess let's capstone this, right? So I've done good customer research now, I've uncovered some stuff, some wedges, et cetera, this, I guess talk about kind of our customer that you're working with on organic.

So I've got all this great intel. What now? What am I doing? So for this customer specifically, we, they didn't yet have a narrative for their company, basically just like an aligned talk track that was helping them in their marketing efforts with their sales calls, with their partnership pitches, with funding, nothing.

Like every person that we had chatted with was speaking, literally speaking a different language. So we were also trying to onboard ourselves into this client and also speaking a different language, which created a clear path that we need to work on forming a narrative, one cohesive story that identifies a path for who we're going after, what we're actually creating through our product or service with this brand for that hero in that journey. And then ultimately like what are the outcomes that they would see if they were to engage with us and use our product. It was super unclear, the storyline was like very misaligned, which meant that like we were gonna have a rough time with the engagement.

So we decided we needed a narrative to do this, we worked closely with the CEO and several other SMEs in the company to craft a narrative. We delivered a first version to them, they came back with some really great revisions for how we think we can make it stronger at the end of the day there the SME. We're creating the framework, but they're input super, super valuable and getting us to a really solid V1. This narrative is actually what we use to create their content strategy that has four content fillers within it.

And then also helping them immediately make step changes on their website because their internal talk track was disjointed, that was reflected on their website. So like to your point when you've got a new inbound demo and you're trying to go do customer research, maybe you're running the six second test, the phrase is always like, once you land on somebody's homepage within their hero, you should be able to look at it for six seconds and be able to tell someone else what they do. That's a good website for that kind of litmus test. We could look at their entire website and actually couldn't really articulate what they were doing.

But all of this framework and this process we just gone through helped us craft a really compelling webpage architect for them that they can now go and implement across their site. And it defined again, different four content pillars that now inform we're only gonna talk about these four things in our LinkedIn posts and our blogs and our newsletter, et cetera. So we started with no narrative, no clear wedge, no clear really anything. We're just kind of selling to the folks that we know.

And here we are, no one grow and scale and make this a little bit more structured and repeatable with an overarching strategy. You started with qualitative and quantitative research. You walked us through six questions that are great framework for cadetos interviews. That informed a narrative that then informs pillars and then there's execution and distribution, which is gonna depend on where your audience is and a few other things that you need to determine.

But it's pretty straightforward. I mean, once you kind of articulate it sounds easy. Like where do companies like fail, I guess? Like why does it feel so difficult to do?

I think there are a lot of holes that people can't easily poke in an organic strategy. If I had to summarize them, I would say that most CFOs, or I don't wanna blame it on CFOs. Let's say most fiscally responsible leaders, whatever your title might be, any fit that persona, are going to look at a marketing budget like this. If I hand you a dollar, I want three or $4 back.

That puts marketers into a wedge, or I feel like I've said wedge 14 times on this recording. It's definitely like, it's a key term for a trader. Let's pick another one. You said double click earlier and I was like, and now wedge is my.

I know, I think I can do a rhythm of cliched. I can Google cinemas for wedge. Yeah, yeah, we need that. Okay, so hold on.

That puts marketers into a box to say, okay, well, if I'm gonna need to lean on my historical data and my historical performance to be able to say, these people are gonna give me a dollar, and I need to be able to literally fall in the sword and say I'm gonna be able to give you at least $3 back if not four or more, depending on what the effort is that you're investing in. Well, naturally, okay, then you're putting these, put in the edges on your box, and that means that, what is the most trackable paid? We can get into the attribution argument all day, but like for whatever it's worth, the most trackable, whether right or wrong, is paid, which is why I think most people, marketing, revenue leaders, whatever, lean on paid first, and it's seen as a silver bullet because it is the most trackable. So I think that's part of why people don't explore it.

I think secondly, people don't explore building an organic audience because it's hard. The easy way is to use the tools and technology that we have at our fingertips, like LinkedIn, campaign manager, build an audience of people we think we wanna get and say go, and we just pay for the placement and move on. That's easier, air quote, easier. Let me think, now I'm sure there's a third reason.

I feel like, I think the other thing is that a lot of founders and leaders and executives are now coming around to the fact that building a brand, telling an individual personal story, building a personal brand, if we wanna call it that, is very impactful, but I do think there's still a lot of resistance to leading with a human versus leading with a brand. We know based on even research that we at Refine Labs have conducted that personal brands went out in terms of engagement and overall impact, 5X over company brands, but oftentimes, if you're gonna really invest in an organic brand, one of the most frequent or like most common ways to do it right now is to lead through personal brands. And I think there's a lot of hesitation for executives to invest in that. Yeah, I think you nailed it on your first one, right?

Where it all starts with measurement, and like it's difficult to measure, that direct attribution, again, we do this horn constantly for years, we go to the Refine Labs, but that really is like the underlying root cause. I feel like for most business challenges and problems and bottlenecks is just measure things incorrectly or don't measure them in a way that's aligned to the strategy and the way we measure dictates the way that we execute. So it's good stuff. Kaylee, thanks for coming on as a guest.

Hopefully we have you more often. Before I let you go, anything else you wanna cover and share? Oh my gosh, well, I don't know. I feel like we could just talk for a couple more hours, but neither of us have time for that.

We need to go back to our day jobs. No, this has been really good. Thank you for having me and interrogating me kindly. Sorry for the first of the bubble.

You're more than welcome. Come on, again, as a guest to your own podcast that you produce and strategize whenever you want. So thanks for being here. You're so kind.

Yeah, I'd love to join more often. We'll see if we can get maybe some cool guests on here and we can co-host together and see how that goes. Yeah, we can just fire Cassidy. Aw, well, we should keep Cassidy.

He's pretty good. I think it's good to watch all the heads. All right, well, let's go to heads more often than I, Kaylee. Thanks for coming, y'all.

That is stacking growth. That's a wrap. We'll see you next week.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long is this episode of Stacking Growth | The B2B Marketing Podcast?

This episode is 36 minutes long.

When was this Stacking Growth | The B2B Marketing Podcast episode published?

This episode was published on June 22, 2023.

What is this episode about?

“Marketers like to differentiate, people like to compare” While Cassidy is away, Carl takes the wheel, joined by Kaylee Edmondson - VP of Revenue R&D at Refine Labs! They go head to head about paid versus organic media - they cover myths, uncover...

Is there a transcript available for this episode?

Yes, a full transcript is available for this episode. You can read the complete transcript on the episode page.

Can I download this Stacking Growth | The B2B Marketing Podcast episode?

Yes, you can download this episode by clicking the download button on the episode player, or subscribe to the podcast in your preferred podcast app for automatic downloads.
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