B2B Content Marketing Leaders

(http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Erika_Heald_1.jpg)Erika Heald (@sferika (https://twitter.com/sferika)) is Head of Social Media and Content Marketing for Anaplan (https://www.anaplan.com/?utm_source=b2bpodcast&utm_medium=erikaheald&utm_campaign=triblio), a SaaS modeling and planning platform for sales, operations, HR, and finance. Anaplan just last week hosted the Hub conference which featured 27 industry leaders and more than 40 educational sessions delivered by actual Anaplan users. The company is on fire and clocked 230% bookings growth in 2014 with even more growth expected ahead. (http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Anaplan-Logo-300x147.png)   Prior to heading up content at Anaplan, Erika spent the past 15 years helping startups and Fortune 500 organizations like Charles Schwab and United Health Group define content processes to drive lead generation and customer loyalty by leveraging compelling, shareable, targeted content. Erika has seen a lot of changes in content marketing but the biggest difference she notes is the formalization of the "content marketing" industry. In this conversation we talk about content curation best practices, how content can help companies grow and Erika shares the biggest mistakes that B2B companies are making with their content marketing and lots more. Press play and get ready for a heaping serving of valuable B2B content marketing nuggets : What are best practices for doing B2B content curation? Companies should use tools to make their content curation work smarter. Instead of doing content curation ad hoc learn how to leverage tools like Zapier (http://www.triblio.com/zapier/?utm_source=b2bpodcast&utm_medium=erikaheald&utm_campaign=b2bpodcast) of IFTT to become more efficient and effective with content curation. One recipe/zap that Erika uses automatically puts tweet favorites onto a spreadsheet that she can go back and repurpose and reuse. Below is Erika's presentation from last year's Content Marketing World conference. The deck covers a practical approach for creating a content curation road map, to streamline your curation process. Building Your Content Curation Road Map: 5 Steps to a More Efficient Content Curation Process (//www.slideshare.net/Erika_Heald/building-your-content-curation-road-map-5-steps-to-a-more-efficient-content-curation-process-38913547) from Erika Heald (//www.slideshare.net/Erika_Heald)   What was the most innovative content idea that you executed this past year? To drum up buzz for Anaplan's Dreamforce appearance they did a Buzzfeed article titled "21 Problems Only Dreamforce Attendees Will Understand (http://www.buzzfeed.com/anaplan/21-problems-only-dreamforce-attendees-will-underst-10lqd)" which turned out to be a great success and was even tweeted by Tony Robbins. LOL 21 Problems Only Dreamforce Attendees Will Understand http://t.co/1TSotH6TRk (http://t.co/1TSotH6TRk) Yes, I'm the Keynote speaker opening day Monday Oct 13th. — Tony Robbins (@TonyRobbins) October 7, 2014 (https://twitter.com/TonyRobbins/status/519598476703698944) They also found that during the holiday season it's a great time to socially interact with your audience something that many B2B organizations weren't doing at the time.   What are the biggest content marketing mistakes that you've seen B2B companies make? One of the biggest and most frequently made mistakes that Erika see is when brands try to newsjack a hashtag or jump on a trend that's not relevant to their brand. Sometimes it can be cute but it's more likely to backfire. [Tweet ""Too many marketers get caught up in the zeitgeist of chasing after a hashtag without it being relevant." - @sferika"] Do not use holidays like Memorial Day, Veterans Day, 9/11 and others to further your marketing goals. There are ways to talk about these holidays and Erika covers an example of how she did it when working at Charles Schwab.

This is episode #2 of Season 2 for The B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast. Today we talk with Tom Treanor. Tom is the Director of Content Marketing and Social Media at Wrike. Wrike (https://www.wrike.com/?utm_source=Triblio&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_campaign=B2Bmarketing) is an online project management software that competes against products like Slack, Asana, and HipChat, it's even been called the "The Anti-Slack" by Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/05/06/with-new-series-b-wrike-aims-to-be-the-anti-slack-or-box/). Wrike was founded in 2007 and has been growing steadily and acquiring clients like Paypal, Salesforce, Adobe, MTV and even celebrities like Redfoo (https://www.wrike.com/blog/wrike-it-down-with-redfoo/) (from LMFAO), they now have 8,000 organizations using its paid product. On May 6, 2015 Wrike's CEO, Andrew Filev announced (https://www.wrike.com/blog/wrike-raises-15m-series-b-funding/) that they raised $15 million in Series B funding from investors Scale Venture Partners and DCM Ventures. (http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/wrike-logo-300x106.png) Prior to Wrike, Tom Treanor was the Head of Digital Marketing at the Meltwater Group, ran his own marketing agency, and has worked at HP as well as at PwC Consulting. He has been featured on Copyblogger (http://www.copyblogger.com/author/tomtreanor/), Social Media Today and several other industry sites. You can find him writing today on the Wrike blog (https://www.wrike.com/blog/?utm_source=Triblio&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_campaign=B2Bmarketing). How important is content? Content is extremely important and is the fuel that you need today to get the word out about your company. Aim to be helpful by providing guides and useful content. Tom believes that content is a principal way of building trust with the prospective buyer. How do you manage your content marketing team? Tom manages a small team of content marketers at Wrike. Having team members and a leader with great project management skills is essential for modern marketing. Content marketing involves many multi step processes and people. You need to be organized and know who's getting what done? when are the deadlines? What are the goals? and so much much. Tom recommends the following management tips: * Set Goals Quarterly - Decide what are the big pieces of content that you'll be producing, who you'll be targeting? What marketing experiments are you going to run? * Attach Goals to OKRs - OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results . This is where you get to know the granular detail of the plan for how you're going to hit your goals. * Create a Content Calendar - Tie in the calendar to your quarterly goals and OKRs * Execute The work has got to get done. Time to do it. * Meet & Discuss Make the time to review details of your team's content projects twice a week in a short stand up meeting style. * Publish & Promote Besides regular content promotion make sure to involve other departments outside of marketing. * Always Optimize Go back and review ask yourself what you could have improved.   What channels are working best for Wrike? For Wrike the blog has been a foundational element and working very well. Their content has also helped with search and visibility on social media. Retargeting was also an effective channel for Wrike.   How do marketing and sales work together? At Wrike; Sales, Content Marketing and Product Marketing work very closely together. Together they dig into the profile of the ideal customer, their main pain points and how Wrike can solve their problem. Tom also communicates often with his sales team to find out about the type of content they would love to provide their prospects with and then proceeds to create it. Recently, a Wrike Sales Executive came up to Tom and mentioned how content helped him close two new accounts. Wrike has developed a very strong content marketing and sales synergy. Â

(http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Matt-Heinz-683x1024.jpg)Welcome to Season 2 of The B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast! Season 1 (http://theb2bpodcast.com/episode-list/page/3/) was a great success and we're putting together a case st...

Meet Renee Teeley Renee (https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneeteeley) is a content marketing strategist, speaker, blogger, video host, and aspiring author. As the Global Director of Digital Marketing Solutions at Brightcove (https://www.brightcove.com/en/solutions/marketing) she is dedicated to helping companies get more value out of their video marketing investments. She created and launched the Video Marketing Academy (http://videomarketingacademy.brightcove.com/) as an industry resource for learning how to make your video marketing more effective and drive real business results. B2B marketers take note of this fantastic resource for you to take advantage of. (http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Video-Marketing-Academy-300x273.png) Renee has presented at top marketing events, such as ReelSummit (http://reelsummit.com/speakers/renee-teeley/), CEB, & CMI’s Content Marketing Master Class (http://www.contentmarketingconf.com/agenda/print). Today's episode is the grand finale for Season 1 of our podcast. Season 2 launches in a couple of weeks, get the latest updates & exclusive content by becoming a VIP Fan (http://theb2bpodcast.comvip-fans-only/) Hit play and get started listening to Renee's video marketing wisdom: Why does video marketing matter for B2B marketers? "Well, the easy answer is because it works obviously..." - Renee Teeley Numerous studies (http://www.digitalsherpa.com/blog/25-amazing-video-marketing-statistics/) show the power of video. For example: * Click-through rates increase 2-3 times when a video is included in email. * Videos help your prospects better understand your offering by 74% * Videos on your site impact your Google ranking. Renee believes including video as part of your integrated marketing activities.  "Given the choice between a whitepaper or watching a 2 minute video, people will often choose the video." - Renee Teeley Video is an excellent medium to engage your customers and prospects at every step of the buyer's journey. Also, video gives you great data to analyze around the way that people are consuming the content, this is especially useful for the data driven marketer and something that you aren't able to do at such a granular level as an ebook or a white paper. [Tweet ""Video is important for B2B marketers because it works." - @rteeley #videomarketing"]   How is video evolving?   "Our tolerance for low quality content & subpar technology is diminishing" - Renee Teeley Renee believes that storytelling is still the core of video, to be effective you're going to have to tell your story in an interesting and compelling way. Consumers are expecting to be able to watch your video on any device, anywhere and if it doesn’t load fast enough or if they're not instantly engaged, they move on. Video should also be produced and edited with your target distribution channels in mind. What works for Facebook might not work for YouTube or for your website.   What video analytics should I pay the most attention to?  What you pay the most attention to will depend on your purpose and goals. A teaser video that converts people to watch a full video focuses more on conversions rather than engagement. Ask yourself: * What’s the intent of the video? * How are we using this data to better inform our marketing decisions? In general some of the important video analytics to look at are: Video views Want more views? Small changes, like updating your thumbnail image, could potentially help drive more views. [Tweet ""Thumbnail images are one of the most overlooked and underrated aspects of video." - @rteeley #videomarketing"] Engagement rates How much of the video are people watching? If people are dropping off early in the video, why are they dropping off? Is the title of the video misleading? Is the intro too long? Did someone say something offensive in the video? Is the video just plain boring?

Gerry Moran is the Head of Social & Global Content at Cognizant Gerry started his marketing career at HBO, where he worked at for 16 years. He then transitioned to the agency world before joining SAP in 2011 and helped them build their social media team and sales enablement programs. Currently, Gerry is responsible for social media and the global content strategy for Cognizant (http://www.cognizant.com/). Gerry has over 80K followers on Twitter (https://twitter.com/GerryMoran) and is considered a top B2B marketer and social selling influencer. Click play to hear Gerry Moran share his MarketingThink (http://marketingthink.com/) wisdom in today's B2B podcast: How do you balance your full-time job along with your own personal brand? Gerry says that luckily for him the two overlap, his hobby has become his job. Gerry admits that because he's just starting a new role at Cognizant he hasn't been able to blog as often as he would want to. He does plan on starting again once he gets settled in. After all he says: "A personal brand is to really help me tell the story of the company I work for. This is for Cognizant." - Gerry Moran (http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/cognizant-287x300.png) To develop an "eye for content" Gerry recommends doing a lot of reading and using Feedly (https://feedly.com) to stay informed. Ask yourself these three questions when consuming content. * How can I learn? * How can I learn from the research that’s out there? * How can I learn from the techniques? [Tweet ""I wake up every morning eating social media for breakfast" - @GerryMoran"]   What are the best B2B brands doing? People are looking for insight and smart content. They don't want to see chest-pounding content that only talks about you. The best B2B brands are instead seeking to better understand the particular problems that their target companies are going through and then see it through the lens of their executives. The best B2B brands also understand how to deliver personalized content and know how to leverage each individual channel but can still provide an integrated experience.   How do you see the marketing/sales alignment working? Gerry believes that companies should be hiring more sales people that truly get the social selling culture and understand the marketing process. "There’s a lot of real time interaction that needs to be done." - Gerry Moran Gerry recommends that the marketing team get more involved in listening to what’s going on in the sales trenches and to use a feedback system to inform content creators of the type of content the market wants. You need to think as a team of "smarketers" if you want to hit quotas at record speed. [Tweet ""Sales can’t do it alone, marketing can’t do it alone. -@GerryMoran" "]   What makes content standout? All the research (http://www.triblio.com/content-personalization-statistics-2015/) says that customers are looking for a personalized approach.  Customers want to get the information that they’re looking for at the right time and in the right context.  This personalized approach at a regular cadence will deliver consistency in your voice and message, thereby instilling trust in your brand.   What content marketing trends do you see? * Content Personalization (see Triblio (http://www.triblio.com/)) * More visual and audio content. * Better understanding of marketing and sales triggers. Connect with Gerry Moran Gerry on Twitter (https://twitter.com/gerrymoran) Gerry on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerrymoran) Gerry's Blog (http://marketingthink.com/)

(http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Anthony-Kennada-Gainsight-VP-of-Marketing-224x300.png) Meet Anthony Kennada Anthony Kennada (https://www.linkedin.com/in/akennada) is a very savvy and talented B2B marketer. He was an early employee at Box and now leads the marketing team at Gainsight (http://www.gainsight.com) (which last year grew revenue 357% (http://pando.com/2015/02/05/gainsight-grows-revenue-357-percent-as-customer-success-becomes-a-key-focus-across-the-enterprise/)and acquired clients like Adobe, Angie’s  List, Citrix, Eloqua, EMC, GoToMeeting  Marketo, WorkDay and many more). Anthony and the Gainsight team have generated demand from an essentially new "Customer Success" category of software. Anthony's work has been published in Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2013/10/24/what-justin-timberlake-can-teach-b2b-marketers/), Fast Company, Entrepreneur (http://www.entrepreneur.com/author/anthony-kennada). He's a LA Lakers fan, enjoys pick-up games, photography and is happily married to the former Miss Arizona, Brittany Dawn (https://twitter.com/BrittanyDawnCo). Press play and get ready to learn from a top B2B marketing leader: Anthony Kennada   Can you describe the #StartupLife? Gainsight's CEO Nick Mehta (https://twitter.com/nrmehta) often reminds Anthony: "You don't get too many opportunities like this one in the lifetime of your career." The people you work with are more than just your co-workers and the early startup culture really becomes part of who you are. The lines between work and life balance seem to go away but you’re OK with it. Then as you get older you realize that there is more risk and you typically have more at stake. (http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Gainsight-Logo-300x120.png) How did marketing contribute to Gainsight's 357% growth in 2014? Thought leadership. Thought leadership has been tightly-integrated into Gainsight's content marketing strategy. Events. Gainsight hosts an annual conference for the customer success industry called Pulse. The conference brings the "Customer Success" community together every year to exchange best practices, success stories, case studies and of course, networking. Gainsight started Pulse in 2013 with 300 people and tripled attendees in 2014. This year they're expecting over 2,000 attendees and will have speakers like: Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball), Keith Krach (CEO of Docusign), Mikkel Svane (CEO of Zendesk), Lew Cirne (CEO of New Relic) and many more. Click here to learn more about Pulse 2015. (http://www.gainsight.com/pulse) Gainsight also hosts summits and VIP events for chief customer officers, customers, prospects and partners. Anthony says that these programs have contributed significantly to Gainsight's pipeline generation and brand lift. Webinars. Gainsight does an average of 5 to 8 webinars (http://www.gainsight.com/customer-success-resources/) per month.  They create webinars that are product specific, buyer stage specific and educational webinars for existing customers. Creative Channels. These is what Anthony refers to as "new ways to get your content across". The launch of "Customer Success University (http://www.gainsight.com/press/gainsight-launches-customer-success-university-and-career-hub-to-invest-in-future-leaders/)" is one example  of a creative channel. Gainsight's marketing team was able to repurpose their own content to provide a different type of value similar to the content pillar strategy (http://www.triblio.com/premium-content-pillars/). [Tweet ""We really want people to get value from @Gainsight before they ever become a customer" - @akennada"]   How do you generate leads from an event? First make sure you know your attendee profile. Pulse for example has a 60% prospects and 40% customers mix which is ideal because chances are that your happy customers will be talking to your prospects throughout your event.

Adam Dince is the Director of Earned Media for Deluxe Corporation. Adam's (https://twitter.com/adamdince) a proud US Navy Veteran, a digital agency alum (MRM McCann and iCrossing), an author, speaker, pianist, drummer, dog fanatic and has over 14 years of internet marketing experience with specialities in SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media and Analytics.(http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Deluxe-Corporation-Logo-300x300.jpg) Currently at Deluxe (https://ww.deluxe.com/), Adam leads earned media and works with a talented team of marketers like Julie Gordon (https://twitter.com/JulieG_Deluxe), Trevor Rasmussen (https://twitter.com/TrevorR77) and many others. The Deluxe team is leading the way in B2B marketing and has done some great things recently. In this interview hear Adam share practical SEO and content marketing advice that you can put to use right away.     How does working for an agency compare working  in-house? Adam loved working on the agency side and especially enjoyed the whole pitch process, and constantly speaking and meeting with clients. However, he does confess that working in-house the hours are better and you get a chance to actually execute rather than just plan, consult and report. Adam also shared that he has the best of both worlds at Deluxe. Because Deluxe was very successful with their own marketing, they started packaging up these marketing and SEO services (https://ww.deluxe.com/small-business/search-engine-marketing/product) and offering them to small businesses. Instead of just selling checks, Deluxe is now acting as an agency for small businesses and helps business owners develop and run their SEO, social media and various marketing campaigns.   What's the process of launching a new blog like?(http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Deluxe_Small_Business_Blog-279x300.png) The most important thing is to have a content strategy and get the executive leadership to buy in. You also have to make sure you pick the right content platform for your need and goals. Because Deluxe has been around for a while they have been able to build very well-defined segments of their customers. They Deluxe team has the data to know exactly what type of content to create. Adam also recommends having a quarterly content calendar that lays out deadlines, themes and content ideas.   Click here to check out the Deluxe Corporation Blog (https://ww.deluxe.com/blog/)   How do you incorporate keywords into your content? [Tweet "You don't write for search engines. You write for people - @AdamDince"] If you do a really good job writing for people the search engines will work in your favor. That's why you should write about things that are interesting to your target audience. Ask yourself: * What do they want to read? * What's going to keep their attention? * What's going to get them to take action? You first write great content for your audience. This great content will help you earn Google’s trust and in return, top position for your content.     Why is social media important to the overall strategy of a small business? Social media is top of funnel for small businesses. Social media is a great channel to use to get your loyal customers talking about you and getting them to become advocates of your small business. Social media doesn't have a tremendous ROI for most small businesses but it is very important to still test.   What are some of the tools that in your toolbox? * Google Analytics * Adobe Analytics * SEOmoz * SEMrush * An Optimized Content Management System * TweetDeck Adam also adds that it's essential to hire really good people that are creative & intelligent.  Your team will help you choose the right set of tools. Adam also adds: "Triblio is a fantastic tool for content!" - Adam Dince (We agree Adam! Request a demo here (http://www.triblio.com/request-demo/))

Amanda Maksymiw is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Lattice Engines Amanda (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandamaks)(http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Amanda_Maksymiw_Content-Marketing-Tactian-of-the-Year-2012-270x300.png) leads the Lattice Engines content marketing strategy. Her savvy content marketing strategies have helped establish Lattice Engines (http://www.lattice-engines.com/) as an authority in predictive, data driven marketing. (http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Lattice-300x120.jpg) Amanda was awarded the 2012 Content Marketing Tactician of the Year (http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/09/orange-award-winners/) alongside Joe Chernov from Eloqua. More recently, Michael Brenner, Mark Schaefer, Joe Pulizzi called her out (http://www.businessesgrow.com/2014/06/02/rising-social-media-stars/) as one of the top rising social media marketing professionals. Press play and get started listening to Amanda Maksymiw share valuable B2B content marketing tips and check out the highlights and tweetable quotes below: What does it take to be an award-winning content marketing tactician? Doer: You have to be able to get things done! Curiosity: You have to be willing to experiment and try out new ideas. Drive: Always be hungry for a great idea and constantly optimize. Organization: Lots of projects, but you always need to know next step and deadlines Assertiveness: Learn how to nicely harass people to get things done according to your workflow Communication Style: Being able to tell a great story is essential for content marketers.   Can you share with us what it took to make your #MarketingNerds campaign successful? Amanda shared that for this campaign to be successful it needed everyone at Lattice to be aligned and (http://theb2bpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Marketing-Nerd-300x238.png)focused around one goal. Next, they were able to find a great idea that resonated very well with their target buyer personas and then started working on building out the marketing campaigns. They strategically leveraged influencer marketing by highlighting a variety of "Marketing Nerds (http://www.lattice-engines.com/blog/youre-mktgnerd-top-list-marketing-nerds)" like David Meerman Scott, Scott Brinker, Ann Handley and a past guest of our podcast: Meagen Eisenberg (http://www.triblio.com/docusign-meagen-eisenberg/) Lattice created a lot of content to support this strategy like infographics, eBooks, blog posts, articles etc... They also extended the theme over longer period of time which resulted in multiple touch points all coming together. And last but not least, the team had to work really damn hard! [Tweet "Successful content starts with a goal and purpose. - @amandamarks"] The hard work paid off,  the "Marketing Nerd" campaign (http://www.heinzmarketing.com/2014/01/anatomy-great-marketing-campaign/) increased Lattice's awareness and exposure to a new target market in a really cool and creative way that captivated the audience.   What platforms do you rely on as a B2B marketer for maximum results? Amanda says that a B2B content program should be looked at as a hub and spoke. The main hub in the center is your blog where you post all of your content including: articles, stories, videos, infographics, eBooks, research, case studies and more. Then the social channels act as spokes on the wheel to expand the reach, increase awareness and distribute the content. Lattice counts on tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Edgar (http://meetedgar.com/) for content distribution. Vidyard (http://www.vidyard.com/)for videos, Visually (http://visual.ly/) for infographics and is testing SnapApp (http://www.snapapp.com/) to incorporate fun interactive quizzes into their content program.   How are you using all that data to execute future campaigns? Lattice collects data via surveys and uses the information to better understand their audience,

Megan is the Director of Marketing at QuotaFactory As the Director of Marketing at QuotaFactory (http://www.quotafactory.com) she's responsible for the startup's marketing strategy, which includes: content marketing, social media, sales enablement and demand generation. Megan is a marketing/sales alignment and social selling thought leader and prolific blogger. Her work has been featured by Hubspot (http://blog.hubspot.com/sales/author/megan-tonzi), AG Saleswork (http://www.agsalesworks.com/blog-sales-prospecting-perspectives/author/megan-tonzi), Salesforce.com, (http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2014/09/how-keep-your-marketing-machine-in-line-with-sales-gp.html) RingLead (https://www.ringlead.com/blog/author/megan-tonzi/) among many others. Press Play! Start listening to Megan Tonzi share her sales & marketing wisdom for FREE! 20 minutes of pure gold and if you want preview some of her best nuggets from this podcast just check out: QuotaFactory Podcast Summary (http://www.triblio.com/blog/quotafactory) Beginning of Transcript Megan Tonzi: Yeah. So I’m the director of marketing at QuotaFactory. I oversee the marketing strategy. I execute on strategy and I also manage sales enablement responsibilities. QuotaFactory is a sales acceleration platform and methodology. It was formed due to success in technological advancements from its sister company AG Salesworks, and I’ve been working with QuotaFactory and AG Salesworks for about 1-1/2 year now. So it’s been pretty exciting to fill these advancements we’ve made, and for 2015, I’m really optimistic. I think this is going to be a really big year for both sales and marketing.   Jeff Zelaya: Now Megan, over the past few years, I would say that the sales environment has been changing dramatically. I mean we’re seeing more talk about social selling, about sales enablement, and just the buyer has fundamentally changed as well, the way the people are making buying decisions. How have you seen it change, and you know, what kind of advice would you have to organizations that are trying to adapt to these changes that are happening in the sales culture?   Megan Tonzi: You know Jeff, I think this is a great question, and without taking up the whole time, I’ll try to be brief in answering this. It seems that sales is not only the department that’s been in transition, but also group marketing into that question and ask how has sales marketing changed and how have those two impacted each department. I believe that sales and marketing are just in terms of segmenting and prospecting and they’re diving deeper into buyer personas so they’re getting better insight on how to really help our prospects out with their challenges. And I mean in addition to that, we know more information around each contact gathered from social, from behaviors on websites, so it’s making the prospecting efforts more personable and impactful as well. So I think you’re going to see the segmentation in sales and marketing, and you’re also going to see that the more personable approach within that prospecting efforts whether it’s from the top sales and marketing down to sales.   Jeff Zelaya: I agree. I mean the personal approach for me has worked very well, and then you did a blog post about that recently, about you know, a lot of sales people are very sometimes generic with their cold calling efforts and those folks are not sending out their noise, but the ones that take the time to be personal and really are targeted for who they’re reaching out to, those are the ones that stand out and the ones that you respond to. So totally agree on that point. And another kind of trend that we see a lot of talk about, very, it’s emerging, and I think this is a huge year for sales enablement and what... You know, first of all, for the people that don’t know, what is sales enablement and how does it tie in to your job, and why is that important at all in the B2B space?   Me

Jim Williams is the VP of Marketing at Influitive Jim (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimcwilliams) is a strategic executive, growth hacker and advocate marketing thought leader. He's had a successful track record of leading and growing, early stage technology companies. At Influitive, he oversees marketing automation, including lead nurturing, scoring, website personalization, sales enablement. advocacy, social and everything marketing. His most important work at Influitive is in mobilizing hundreds of fans, influencers and customers to refer leads, build brand affinity and accelerate the sales pipeline.  Jim Williams is considered a thought leader in strategies to acquire engaged advocates (customers, partners, fans and evangelists) that support the growth of referral leads, dozens of product reviews and thousands of content and social shares. Prior to his work at Influitive, Jim was a marketing leader at Eloqua and worked alongside Triblio's CEO, Andre Yee (http://www.triblio.com/blog/andre-yee-interview/). Press play and hear advocate marketing expert, Jim Williams, share his valuable B2B marketing insights. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/Influitive (http://www.triblio.com/blog/Influitive)   Beginning of Transcript   Jeff Zelaya: Welcome to B2B Content Marketing Leaders. I’m here with Jim Williams, a VP of Marketing at Influitive. Welcome, Jim.   Jim Williams: Hi. Thanks a lot, Jeff. I appreciate the opportunity.   Jeff Zelaya: So Jim, I know a lot of people that are listening already know you. They know Influitive, but for those that this is a new name to them, start off by giving us just a bit of background on who you are and your role at Influitive.   Jim Williams: Thanks, Jeff. Yes, so Jim Williams. I’m the vice president of marketing at Influitive. I have been in B2B marketing for my entire career, and usually, at either startup or growth-oriented, growth-stage companies. So prior to Influitive, I spent 7 years at Eloqua where I worked with Triblo's co-founder (http://www.triblio.com/blog/andre-yee-interview/) to help build that company and bring it eventually to IPO when I left, and prior to that, there was a number of different startups, some successful, some not successful, but you know, that’s how I kind of cut my deal with marketing.   Jeff Zelaya: Influitive is on the right track. I mean I hear tons of buzz about the company, and one recent marketing strategy tactic that you guys used was the BAM!TV, and wow, I was amazed. If you guys haven’t watched it yet, make sure you check it out, BAM!TV. It was a talk show, late-night talk show style video interviewing B2B marketers and sharing insight about Influitive, and really focused on the B2B marketer. And I want to just ask you like where did that come from because that was so outside of the box, so new, so refreshing. How did that start and how’s that been working out for you guys?   Jim Williams: Sure. I’ll definitely address that. Before I do, let me just give you a quick introduction to Influitive because I think that helps set some of the contacts. We’re an advocate marketing company, consider ourselves the advocate marketing experts, and advocate marketing is essentially using your fans, supporters, evangelists, promoters, the people that had a non-financial investment in your company, using them to help generate their low brand recognition and affinity, more leads, and using them to help accelerate revenue in pipeline. That’s what our platform does. While people in B2B world are generally familiar with terms like, you know, referral marketing and references and word-of-mouth marketing, there really isn’t... there has not been today a scalable way to actually execute on those various programs. There’s been no way to systematically manufacture buzz, right, and I think that’s what a lot of companies want to do. They want to manufacture buzz because, yo

Lisa Fugere is the Content Marketing Manager at Radius As the Senior Content Manager at Radius, Lisa is in charge of running all content marketing operations and for building the Radius Marketing Intelligence brand. Radius recently raised $54.7 Million in funding and content marketing is a priority for the growing team. Prior to Radius Lisa worked at InsideView where she was able to increase the monthly traffic to the InsideView’s blog by 225% in 6 months. Hear Lisa Fugere share valuable data driven content marketing insights and press play now. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/Radius Beginning of Transcript Lisa Fugere: So I’m the Senior Content Manager at Radius and my team is responsible for all the brand and thought leadership content that we make. So that includes the Radius blog, marketing videos and ebooks and cheat sheets, et cetera and social media as well.   Jeff Zelaya: Lisa, over the past year or so, your company has grown. I mean I saw the announcement of the funding and you guys are adding people and more clients and happy experiences with your platform. I know – I could almost bet that your awesome job of content has a lot to do with that. So can you give us some examples of how content is helping fuel the growth that Radius is experiencing right now?   Lisa Fugere Lisa Fugere: When I joined the team almost two years ago, we had like 10 blog articles and no content strategy, no ebooks. It was like a start of a blog and a website and no audience or anything. So as we’ve grown every part of our marketing department, content has been a part of it. So you can’t really grow an events marketing program without ebooks or case studies or data sheets to hand out at events. You can’t go grow a customer marketing program without customer success guides and case studies and the same goes for demand generation and [0:01:45] [Indiscernible]. So as we’ve developed all these different areas of our marketing team, we’ve needed content and very different types of content with different goals and the biggest one I think is just growing our brand and content has been a crucial part of helping the market understand who Radius is, what we’re all about and helping our customers.   Jeff Zelaya: I noticed that you’re a leader in the space Lisa. You seem to be ahead of most of the other marketers that are out there and I’m just wondering. How do you stay up-to-date with this ever-changing field of content marketing? How do you stay almost above and beyond what other marketers are doing? What’s your secret to being on the edge?   Lisa Fugere: Read a lot of better marketers’ content. So I’m just looking at all the – there are so many content marketers that are doing a great job. The great thing about content marketing is that we’re all out there writing about what we’re doing and it’s such a transparent field, because everything is online in the B to B space. So the examples of good content are really easy to find and that’s kind of how I learned what other people are doing and how some of the leaders are guiding the rest of the field.   Jeff Zelaya: And it’s a recurring advice that we get on the show where the leaders are saying, “We read. We read,” and you’re right. Readers are leaders. They consume that content and are able to get those ideas and see things that others don’t and make those assessments and make the right moves that put them as leaders in their field. So that’s a great, great advice for anyone that’s listening. Read. Become a reader and a connoisseur of content and you will become better in the space. Speaking of good stuff, there’s also some bad stuff out there, like companies that are making mistakes and that aren’t really doing marketing as well as they could be doing. What are some of the most obvious or the most common mistakes that you see organizations in the B to B space doing with their marketing?   Lisa Fugere: I think the biggest mistake I see is that people produce bad content, bad writing, cheap videos, and bad design. I think that this has – I’ve seen this trend for the entire span of my career in content marketing and it really grew when around two years ago HubSpot perpetuated the, I guess, content marketing truth that the more content you’ve had, the more traffic you got to your site and the more your audience would grow. They released this article that talked about how they never really reached the point of diminishing returns where they were creating too much content. So everybody started creating all of this content and it was just this trend and now there’s just so much content and you start doing the math and when you’re starting to grow a brand, you think, “OK. I only have so much time and I need more content. So I’m just going to like really quickly write a bunch of articles, and they’re probably going to get seen by 50 or so people.” Now you just end up with hordes of poorly-crafted content and I think you lose a lot of brand value when people associate your brand with bad content. I think there are ways to create good content quickly and what we learned at Radius is that creating scalable formulas and having some kind of a system really helps prevent bad content from being created and the need to have more and more out there, so that you can just have some kind of an outline premade. You don’t have to do all of the fore thinking that goes into the creation of a piece of content. So you can say I have this campaign or this project and it’s the same format, just a different topics or a different thought leader or a different idea that you’re talking about and that helps to alleviate the issue of bad content.   Jeff Zelaya: You hit it on the head. I’ve seen such a misnomer with folks just trying to crank out quantity content instead of quality content and I think we’re at the point now – there’s so much noise out there that just quantity is not enough. But quality is what really makes it stand out and of course you guys have been doing a really good job of that. So when you’re looking at your content and trying to figure out what is quality, like what performed, what did well, what are the metrics that you’re zoning in on and keeping track of to really figure out your – how successful this content is?   Lisa Fugere: So we track different metrics for different types of content. So currently, one of our main goals for the entire marketing team is to drive a lot of traffic back to the Radius website and then convert users from there, because our brand is growing and it’s not like every single person in the world knows who Radius is or what our product is. So if we were to create a bunch of Facebook ads and encourage people to sign up for demos and trials, they would be like, “Who’s Radius and why would I do that?” So we need to get them to come back to our site, learn about us and then sign up for a trial or a demo. So we track traffic for a lot of stuff currently, time on page, bounce rate. We’re also going to launch a newsletter for – well, we’re starting in 2015. So we’re going to be tracking sign-ups for that. Then on social media, we track conversation rate, amplification rate and engagement rate pretty much mostly.   Jeff Zelaya: Now Lisa, of course on your team, you’re not the only one – for a while, you were one of the only ones producing content for Radius and now you’re adding team members and growing. When you’re adding team members, what are the skills that you look for in the awesome content marketers? Are there skills that you see that they all share in common? What should I be looking for when bringing on and growing my content marketing team?   Lisa Fugere: The number one quality that I look for in content marketing candidates is an appreciation for marketing. A lot of times you get people that are really good writers, that think that content marketing is a great way to make some money in a field that’s very hard to make money in. So there’s the part about having writing skills being necessary. But it’s also not sufficient and so I just – I look for people that are interested in content marketing and in B to B marketing and that have a passion for marketing specifically.   Jeff Zelaya: You can’t fake passion. I mean that really shows through and you’re right. When they have enough passion and love for their field, they’re going to be in it all time. Maybe they lack a certain skill, right? But they will – with that passion, it will help grow them. They would be willing to practice more and write more and learn more because they love it so much. So you’re right. That’s one skill that I think really makes a good kind of marketer stand out.   Lisa Fugere: If you’re a great writer, it’s like you can write about anything but you’re going to get bored eventually and all you’re going to do is write and hope it gets out there. But somebody that understands marketing a little better is going to be able to say, “OK. I also want to play around with different promotion tactics and not just focus on the written part of content marketing.”   Jeff Zelaya: Lisa, the Radius product is really focused around marketing intelligence. For those marketers that are new or those that maybe know a little bit about it, can you explain more about what is marketing intelligence and how does that help marketers out in improving or executing their campaigns?   Lisa Fugere: So marketing intelligence is all about finding the right audience so that you can tailor your marketing messages and so that you can reach your total address of the market and it’s really important for content marketers because the world online is very large and as we all figure out, you have to find ways to segment your audience so that you’re writing something that’s tailored to the people that had – that you intend to read it. So marketing intelligence can help content marketers find the right audiences for their content.   Jeff Zelaya: Yeah, audience is key. I mean if you’re writing content and it’s not getting to the – it could be as awesome content as you could make it. If it’s not getting to the right people, it doesn’t really matter. So that’s always the focus, making sure that you’re speaking to the right group of people and Radius can help you accomplish that. The last question I have for you Lisa, as we go into this new year, 2015, and the content marketing game continues to change and the platform and industry evolves, what are the top trends that you think will emerge out of this year? So let’s think – let’s fast forward. Let’s pretend it’s the 31st of December 2015. What will we be talking about that was a hit for the year in terms of content marketing strategies or tactics and initiatives that were a success?   Lisa Fugere: I think a couple of things are likely to happen. I think one is that – as I was talking about, the perpetuation of bad content being a mistake content marketers are making. I think there’s going to be a bit of a reversal because of the volume that – of content that’s out there. Marketers have to stand out and be a little more creative. So I think we’re going to see better content, more videos, more thoughtful targeted content and I think also as organic reach on social networks continues to diminish, marketers are going to spend a lot more time advertising and they’re going to advertise their content because it’s a lot cheaper to do it on social media than anywhere else. So as marketers continue to grow their advertising programs, they’re also going to focus on better targeting and so that’s going to be I think a big trend because you have the opportunity on social media ad networks to specific exactly which audiences you want to reach. So better targeting kind of is a result of more advertising I think.   Jeff Zelaya: Yeah. So as advertising options expand and we are able to focus better in on our demographic, our target, there’s just so much more – so many possibilities open up and especially to make advertising, native advertising really powerful.   End of Transcript The post Lisa Fugere, Content Marketing Manager at Radius appeared first on B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast.

Jason Miller is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at LinkedIn Jason Miller leads global content for LinkedIn marketing solutions and was previously a Senior Manager at Marketo. He’s on every content marketing influencer list including Forbes, Online Marketing Institute, Onalytica and frequently keynotes at assorted conferences throughout the globe. We talk with Jason about B2B content marketing predictions, the best examples of LinkedIn Company Pages for B2B brands and lots more. Hear this Content Marketing Rockstar share valuable B2B content marketing insights and make sure to stay tuned through the end of the podcast for details on how to win a free copy of  Jason’s book: Welcome to the Funnel, the #1 Best Selling Content Marketing Book on Amazon. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/LinkedIn   Beginning of Transcript Jason Miller Jason Miller: Sure Jeff. Thanks for the kinds words there. So my name is Jason Miller. I lead global content for LinkedIn marketing solutions and previously I was running global content and social at Marketo, where I kind of really got my chops up on content, social and learned a tremendous amount about the demand generation. Just full integrated marketing strategy and I was lucky enough to bring those fields over here to LinkedIn.   Jeff Zelaya: And looking forward at 2015, we’re getting the year started. It’s an exciting time. For content marketing, what are your predictions? What are you imagining is going to happen this year in our industry?   Jason Miller: That’s a really good question. I mean I think the biggest thing is I think that B to B marketers are going to start taking mobile very seriously, right? So this three-screen experience, at LinkedIn we call it “from coffee to couch” and what we see from our own data is we see three screens that are the mobile, the tablet, and the desktop. They kind of all kick off in the morning while the desktop stays – kind of peaks in the afternoon as it should. It’s where it works and then the tablet kind of spikes in the evening as you get home and you settle down in front of your television or whatever with your tablet. But what remains constant is the mobile, the mobile device, right? Because we can’t put these things down. I think that – we’re checking our mobile device every six seconds now and I feel like B to B marketers may not have put a big focus on mobile and I think that’s – I think it’s going to be – there’s going to be a major shift in that, from a demand generation standpoint to content standpoint to – just B to B marketers actually taking their content and making sure that it has this cohesive experience for the user across all three of those screens. I think that’s going to be really big and beyond that, I think just full funnel marketing, I think it’s something that I’ve always thought was going to really take off. I think that’s the year for the marketers to actually – to really take – to really grasp the concept of full funnel marketing and actually put a value on their marketing departments [0:02:57] [Inaudible] think it is. But yeah, just marketers actually just refining their process around the funnel and actually tracking these campaigns to drive real pipeline and real revenue.   Jeff Zelaya: I agree. Mobile is huge, becoming such a big deal. Six seconds, wow! Checking your device every six seconds, that’s just – I’m trying to wrap my mind around that. That’s incredible and you’re right. I mean the funnel and paying more attention to that. I know your book does an amazing job of covering the funnel and how to really leverage that as a marketer. So I recommend you guys pick that up and read more about how to make sure you use that this upcoming year. I know LinkedIn has been – 2014 was a huge year for LinkedIn. I mean just more growth, more product launches, a lot of acquisitions, a lot of great stuff happening there and as content marketers, I am always trying to figure out more ways of how to leverage LinkedIn. Looking at this past year and even now, what are some of the ways that you feel B to B content marketers are really taking advantage of the whole platform and putting it to use to accomplish our content marketing goals?   Jason Miller: Sure. I think there’s a great opportunity for marketers on LinkedIn specifically B to B marketers and even more specifically content marketers. Where I see companies really having success are the ones that have a definitive company page or a showcase page and they’re posting updates. They’re sharing good content and they’re using the publishing platform, which we opened up to all members recently, to just get – it’s a content play but it’s a thought leadership play. It’s a lead gen play. It’s all this stuff kind of coming together, right? So if you would have asked me a couple of years ago, using social, what do I prefer, lead gen or brand awareness, I would have said lead gen all day long. But now we’re in this world of getting back to the full funnel marketing where you need that top of funnel awareness. You need that brand awareness before you go into the lead gen. So you have to find a good balance between lead gen, brand awareness and thought leadership. I think LinkedIn is a great spot for that, through company pages, through company updates, sharing content through the publishing platform, having your employees write and contribute original content to share with their networks. You can link that all back to your site, to your blog, et cetera and then take it a step up and using sponsored updates, paying to promote your own good content. I mean you could take that – I always say like doing inbound marketing alone is sort of like hanging out with the same group of high school kids your whole life. You’re very limited on your audience because you’re only reaching the people who you already connected to. If you want to break beyond that audience and get to the coveted second degree connections there and with some unprecedented targeting, you have to kind of pay to promote your own good content and [0:05:56] [Indiscernible]. It could be a PR play and again it could also fill in one of those two buckets between lead gen and brand awareness and also thought leadership. So I kind of – that’s where I see companies really having success on LinkedIn is sharing good content, amplifying that content with some paid promotions and then taking a visual approach in, so you could bring SlideShare into the loop there and even LinkedIn groups, but the whole suite of products there working together. If you have good content and you’re not sharing there, I think you’re just missing opportunities.   Jeff Zelaya: Well, LinkedIn Blog has tons of resources and I recommend anyone to check that out because there’s so much you could do as a B to B marketer with LinkedIn that most of us are just kind of touching that tip of the iceberg and there’s so much more that – very powerful stuff that LinkedIn offers. So look into the array of great resources that Jason and his team put out to take advantage of it all. Looking at some of the brands that you maybe are familiar with or names that pop on your radar, are there brands that you think are doing an effective job of really leveraging LinkedIn? Any names come to mind?   Jason Miller: Yeah. I mean there are always the usual suspects, right? The HubSpots and Marketos and Eloquas of the world. But Kapost I think does a really great job. They share great content. They have a great LinkedIn group which is basically their community, their own like external community of content marketers that they curate the conversation around. [0:07:25] [Indiscernible] resource on LinkedIn and I think you really get out of it what you put into it. So that’s one that comes to mind. Moz.com, if you look at their company page, they do a fantastic job of sharing great content. They just put up a great cover photo for 2015 predictions from Rand, which I thought was really cool. I mean there’s so many and a lot of the stuff is free to do. I’m thinking of a couple of other ones. I just wrote a post called Five B to C Companies Killing it on LinkedIn. People think that LinkedIn is always strictly B to B and that’s not the case. It works if you’re trying to connect, if you’re trying to market to a professional mindset, right? Because the audience on LinkedIn is much different than an audience on a different social network. We like to think of like as people spend time on other social networks. But when they’re on LinkedIn, they invest time. They invest time on LinkedIn. So it depends on what your goals are as a marketer. But I think there are some great companies that are doing remarkable things on LinkedIn and those are the ones that are – just kind of come off the top of my head. Copyblogger is another one with their Rainmaker Platform. They’re doing some really great stuff. MarketingProfs of course, Content Marketing Institute, as they should be, right? But yeah, there are companies from start-ups to enterprise. I could go on forever about that but yeah, that – we did – for a quick reference, we do – every year we do a thing called “the top company pages” where we showcase some of the top company pages in there, some of the results from there. So I would recommend taking a look at that as well for some inspiration.   Jeff Zelaya: Great examples and make sure that LinkedIn is on that list as well because you guys are obviously always the example of how to best leverage your own platform. You eat your own dog food. You practice what you preach and I love that. Now, Jason, I know this comes up a lot. Is more content the answer? Is that going to be our focus, creating more and more content every single year that passes by?   Jason Miller: That’s a good question. I think that – Mark Schaefer wrote about content shock last year and it was all the rage for a while. I think Mark is a very smart marketer and he brought up some good points. But at the same time, we’re in a world of – where we call it – we don’t need more content. We need more relevant content. So are you write just to be – are you creating content just to be creating content? Are you writing something because it’s a cool thing to write about or are you doing what Ann Handley calls “pathologically empathizing with your customers or prospects”? Are you in their shoes? Your job as a content marketer is to create content that answers a question or a pain point better than anyone else, right? And then optimize that content. Put a little spin on it. Make it interesting and then promote the hell out of it. So the answer is not more content. That’s not going to solve your problems. The answer is cutting through and getting to pure relevance, like answering the top questions in several formats. Optimize it to be found and then pay [0:10:34] [Phonetic] to promote that content yourself. Again, search engines have killed these content forms and for good reason, because they were providing a bunch of bad content. But now it has leveled the playing field. So you can make an impact starting this afternoon if you want to, but you have to start now. Getting to the core of what is the most important question on your customers’ minds, what’s keeping them up at night, your customers and prospects’ minds and just write it better than anyone else.   Jeff Zelaya: There are skeptical people out there, those non-believers that we’re trying to convince that content is important and just like you said, it’s not just creating more of it, but making sure it’s relevant, that it has context, that it’s awesome, that it’s really targeted. But how do you ultimately turn that content, that great post that you wrote, that article, that webinar maybe that you’re delivering, how do you turn that into a return on the investment that you’ve made? How do we get ROI from our content?   Jason Miller: That’s a really great question and I think as marketers, I think we’ve solved that. There’s no more question about the ROI of content or social for that matter. But let me take a step back at the really basic part of content marketing here and where I’ve seen success and where I think anyone can start and make an impact very quickly. When I first started Marketo, I had a story. I had to tell a story of marketing automation and a very complicated story, which I wasn’t an expert at, at the time either. So every time I would come across a problem, I would research it. I would ask some experts and I would write about it. If I found some solution to that problem, there has got to be more marketers out there who are my target audience, who are having the same problem. If I can write a quick and simple explanation of how I solved that problem and then put it on a blog, that’s content marketing at its core. You’re helping, not selling. Then who is going to be top of mind when that person is ready to buy your products or service? Well, of course you are. So where do you get the ROI up? Well, of course you can do referral traffic. You can track conversions of course. But where the real magic comes in and where I talk about this in the book is what we call “big rock content,” is we take – there are two approaches. Take these problems, these little blog posts and wrap them up into an ebook [0:12:53] [Indiscernible] ebook. Everything you want to know about this product or this topic, right? Big content is what I see is the answer moving forward. We had this mentality of – they always say, “Think like a publisher.” Well, I think we need to not only think like a publisher but publish like a publisher. The publisher wants to own a conversation. They release a book on that and they release a very well-written book and in this sense in content marketing, you could take all of these blog posts, roll them up into – with all these – solving all these pain points into a big rock piece of content and then repurpose it back out into info graphics, slideshows, webinars, events, et cetera, and that could fuel a demand gen and social strategy for up to a quarter, even up to a year in some cases if the topic is broad enough. When I first started at LinkedIn, the biggest question – I will give you a great example. The biggest question on our customers and prospects’ minds was, “How do I use LinkedIn for marketing?” but not only that. But how do I use it effectively? So we wrote – I wrote the book called The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn and that has been our biggest piece of content to date. It has driven millions of dollars in business and we track that with – through our different campaigns all the way back to pipeline to close revenue. But again, we wanted to own that conversation. So we wrote the definitive guideline literally and then gave it away for free and the benefits have been – it has been a very fruitful piece of content for us and it continues to.   Jeff Zelaya: Yeah, I see $5 million in revenue from that guide that Jason Miller and his team created. So if you have the right technology in place …   Jason Miller: I was going to say that was – it drove over five million and just …   Jeff Zelaya: In 2014, in one year or a couple of – wow! So I mean that’s just a little example of what – and this is just one guide. I mean there’s so much more that the team is producing. So if you’re using the right technology, you’re tracking it, there’s no doubt anymore. There’s an ROI to be had from content and from social media.   Jason Miller: Exactly. What’s even more important to note there is that not only did I want to show – own this conversation around how to be the best marketer on LinkedIn. We use LinkedIn marketing solutions to drive that result. We wanted to prove that this – that LinkedIn marketing solutions worked as an integrated marketing solution. Those results were – I mean on top of – of course we have email marketing, but everything else was driven strictly – almost strictly by LinkedIn marketing, LinkedIn’s own marketing solution, their own platform. Not LinkedIn proper, but not LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, our own showcase page, our own sponsored updates, et cetera. So it was a great experiment. It turned out well.   Jeff Zelaya: That’s incredible. I know you network and are always around some of the leaders in the content marketing space, of course you being one of them. What have you noticed that the top content marketers possess in terms of qualities or skills and what are some of the similarities you think between the elite in our field?   Jason Miller: So another great question. I think of this a little bit different, right? What I’ve learned over the past few years is that as a marketer, to really be successful in this day and age – it’s a very fast-moving industry, right? But I think you have – you don’t have to be an expert in any one thing. I talk about this in the book a lot too. It’s called the – like a hybrid marketer, if you will, like a renaissance marketer. You don’t have to be an expert in any one thing, right? But you do have to understand how lots of things work together. So I’m not an expert in SEO but I understand very well how SEO affects content, social and how to optimize for it, right? I’m not an expert in demand gen but I understand how demand gen and email marketing worked to promote my content and how to measure that success and tie it back to pipeline. So understanding all those things, even coding. I took some coding classes last year because I wanted to understand how the internet actually reads my webpages, how it interprets my content. The building blocks for the internet, I mean that’s important for marketers to understand when they’re delivering content and optimizing it. So what I see as some really forward thinking renaissance marketers, if you will, are these folks who are not an expert in any one thing. You don’t put your eggs all in one basket. But you diversify and you learn as much as you possibly can about demand gen, SEO, social, content, email marketing, basic coding, basic HTML, basic CSS, all that stuff. I think if you have an understanding of that, then you’re going to do very well moving forward.   Jeff Zelaya: I agree. Again, you’re hitting it right on the head. Having that diverse skill set, having a little bit of everything is going to make you very dangerous in the content marketing space and knowing those skills and that important information. How you stay up-to-date? It seems like you’re – you have your hands on the pulse of content marketing and you’re always getting on that edge of knowing what’s coming up and trends that are emerging. So what are your sources of staying up-to-date? How do you do it, Jason?   Jason Miller: Well, I have – I mean I have a list of – I mean I use the Pulse reader. LinkedIn bought a reader a few years ago called Pulse, a news tool. So I have my little list built in there with blogs I subscribe to. I wrote a blog post on LinkedIn called – it’s in the book as well, called – I think it’s 16 blogs that I read religiously. But I mean these are the blogs that I’ve read over the years. I mean there’s a virtual PhD in anything you want to learn out there. You just have to be willing to go find it and consume the content, from podcasts to blogs to slideshow decks, to just industry events of course. I just never stop, man. I mean I’m eternally curious and I know who to follow and I like to read their stuff. Moz.com is great for SEO. Copyblogger is some of the smartest folks in the planet, publishing great posts every day on content marketing. Of course MarketingProfs, Ann Handley is a friend of mine and she does – everything she does I think is brilliant. Content Marketing Institute. I mean the list goes on. I have Brian Solis to get some more futuristic look at analyzing the world, Rebecca Lieb who I love from Altimeter Group. But yeah, just reading those when I can and lots of experimentation. When I was at Marketo, this is interesting, when I was at Marketo, John Miller – no relation. I learned more at Marketo in two years than I did my entire life, because they have such a brilliant set of marketers and such a fast-moving industry. But John gave me a lot of leeway to do a lot of experimenting. He basically said, “You can do whatever you want. But you have to be able to track it back to some sort of ROI,” and with the marketing automation platform we use, we were able to do that. But experiment in trying new things and what I called the George Costanza approach, the exact opposite. When somebody calls you out and says social doesn’t work for B to B marketing, go out there and prove that it does. But yeah, I think just between reading and networking and experimentation and trying new things. That’s how I keep up on stuff.   Jeff Zelaya: You’ve got like endless energy and I feel it on this call and I could see it just in your history. You used to work at Sony Music. You’re a rock star. I mean real rock star. You’re a huge fan of rock music. So this is probably the most important question I’m going to ask you today. What are your top three favorite rock bands of all time, Jason?   Jason Miller: Easy question, easy question. So yes, I do – I write a music blog called Rock N Roll Cocktail and I’m out a couple of nights a week shooting rock photography although I just had a little baby. So I have to cut out [0:20:39] [Indiscernible] now. But top three bands, man, I will tell you what. Number one is The Cult. I love this band more than life itself. Maybe I’m overselling that a little bit. Cheap Trick is one of my all-time favorites. I got to [Indiscernible] those guys in November and then if I had to put a third in there, it would probably be – let’s select a good one. I would say the top two. I really like – there’s a band called The Tea Party from Canada that I worship, one of my favorite bands, and I can’t believe I’m drawing a blank on a question that I should know so well. I celebrate Kiss’s entire catalog and in fact my desk here at LinkedIn has got a bunch of pictures all over of Kiss that I took at various concerts and memorabilia from Kiss shows and people always send me Kiss stuff. I got a bunch of baby stuff. It’s all Kiss-related. So yeah, I love Kiss. End of Transcript   P.S: Follow us at @B2Bpodcast and tweet us if you want a free copy of Jason’s best selling book “Welcome to the Funnel“ The post Jason Miller, Senior Content Marketing Manager at LinkedIn appeared first on B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast.

Joey Hall is the VP of Content Marketing at EnVeritas Group As the VP of Content Marketing, Joey is in charge of developing and implementing customized content marketing strategies for clients in a variety of industries. Some of his client have included: Marriott, American Express, Land O’Lakes and AOL.com. Joey’s work has been published in 10Best.com, SouthernLiving.com, Clemson Tiger Insider, GSA Business, mMode Magazine, Tigernet.com and the Upstart Crow. Press play below and start listening to Joey Hall share his valuable content marketing strategy insights on this week’s episode of the B2B marketing podcast. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/EnVeritas-Group   Beginning of Transcript   Jeff Zelaya: Welcome to B2B Content Marketing Leaders. My name is Jeff and I’m her with Joey Hall from EnVeritas Group. Joey, welcome.   Joey Hall: Thank you Jeff. Glad to be here.   Jeff Zelaya: So Joey, before we begin, just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and your role at EnVeritas.   Joey Hall Joey Hall: Sure. I’m the VP of Content Marketing at EnVeritas Group. We’re located in Greenville, South Carolina. As the VP of Content Marketing, that means I essentially oversee the operations which is strategy, project execution, et cetera for our North-America-based clients. We have teams that work across all various industries, hospitality, higher education, manufacturing, healthcare, staffing, travel information, retail, just a variety of different things. Our project can vary from large scale website content production down to blog creation and management for multinational staffing firms and with many of our higher ed and B to B clients, we often get involved in doing some strategic planning with them and multichannel content production as natural parts of our relationships with them. I’m a Clemson University graduate and I’ve been working with EnVeritas Group since we were founded back in – well, that’s a little bit up for debate, around 2008.   Jeff Zelaya: Now Joey, since that time, I’ve seen a lot of growth at the agency. Just awards and a lot of recognition you guys have been receiving and something that’s always highlighted is how you guys really excel especially in building, like you were saying, that marketing strategy, creating it from scratch, or from just a basic strategy to a more advanced way of looking at content marketing. So could you walk us through your process of what is it like building a content strategy from scratch or someone bringing – a company bringing something to you and you review it and you’re like, hey, we got to build this out and start from a fresh, a new start? So can you walk us through that process of what it’s like to build that type of strategy?   Joey Hall: Sure. The first part or the last thing that you talked about there, the – having the wherewithal to essentially tell a client that they needed to throw the baby out with the bathwater, that’s something that came with our building our confidence level over the years as an agency. But it’s something that we definitely sit down and talk to our clients very candidly about now, because we want to make sure that whatever we work on for them is successful. For me professionally, and this is what I instruct our team to do, when we’re sitting down and working on producing a strategy for a client, I want to know who we’re producing that strategy for. It’s not the client. It’s the end user. I want to know as much about those people as I can. I want to know what their pain points are. I want to know what they’re looking for, what information they need, how they look for that information, what they do when they find it and what does the client ultimately want those end users to do. The more that we can understand the audience, their needs, their info consumption patterns, their online tendencies, then the chances are we could build a better and more informed content strategy that addresses those challenges. So for me, everything is audience-focused. It’s audience first, audience always. If we lose sight of that, then we’re not building a strategy.   Jeff Zelaya: Totally agree. I’ve interviewed some of the leading B to B content marketers and that’s something that is a recurring theme. Know as much about the audience as possible. Know them better than they know themselves and that’s how you could start generating that content strategy …   Joey Hall: Absolutely. The days of brands standing on the mountaintop and just shouting out, self-focused descriptions of this is who we are, this is what we are, that’s long past now. Those days are dead and gone. Now, you’ve got to communicate with the audience and communicating. In a lot of cases – I will probably talk about this later, but this is a big pet peeve of mine, but communicating means that we first have to listen and understand.   Jeff Zelaya: Excellent. Joey, there’s also a lot of communication that happens internally, especially with your client base, multinational organizations, a lot of moving part from social to content creation to website development and just so much stuff going on. How do you find that these companies stay organized and how – internally, how do you stay organized with all your team and all different pieces of the project that they’re working on? Any recommendations for staying organized or tools that you recommend these companies use to just make sure that they’re managing their process correctly?   Joey Hall: Sure. This is going to sound trite. But I think the most important tool that we use is our experience and our brain power. What we typically find is that the organization or the processes that we set up on our side to handle production of content are usually a vast improvement over what our clients have existing. That’s just a natural byproduct of we’ve been there and done that. We’ve done things the wrong way. We’ve done things the right way and we just have a good feel for how things need to be set up in order to handle production. As an agency that doesn’t exactly specialize in one industry or a singular type of content production, we can rely on any number of tools depending on the type of – and requirements of a given project. We developed our own CMS, which we call a “content life cycle management system” that allows us to scale up on projects as needed and involve as many contributors as needed across the world. Our development team can use that core system to build a customized CMS for every client, every project that we work on. So we have like a unique and customized environment for each project. With some engagements, we use tools like Basecamp and Dropbox to help facilitate file sharing and keep things organized with the client. We also find that that’s a really great method for delivering content to clients that aren’t ready to have us go direct to publishing for them and it’s so much better than trying to email things back and forth, because as you all know, email was never intended to be a document delivery system. We also utilize things like Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Moz Analytics. We use those things to help us stay informed and make smart, strategic decisions and report on our activities. Social-media-focused projects of course rely on whatever the network’s end suite analytics tools are as well as third party tools like HootSuite and we were increasingly with our clients working on social media projects, because we find that with a lot of larger organizations, social media is something that they just don’t have the bandwidth to take on themselves.   Jeff Zelaya: I’m very envious of the kind of clients that you work with because it seems to be a lot of hospitality, travel, tourism, and I think that’s always a fun industry to work in, because it’s – you’re talking about things that are fun, that are full of joy and relaxation. Are there any other clients that you would like to add to the EnVeritas list one day? Any clients that would be ideal for you guys to work with?   Joey Hall: Yeah, I love this question and I had a lot of fun trying to think about how I would answer it. Of course the company response is that I love all of our clients and would love to have more work from all of them.   Jeff Zelaya: Good answer.   Joey Hall: Our marketing director would have a good blurb to be able to pull out for us. That said, to be honest, I would love to work with a brand that’s not afraid to put itself out there and push the boundaries a bit even at the risk of failure or offending the public. Those are challenges, not problems for content marketers in my mind. Brands like Coca-Cola and BMW spring to mind. Secretly, I’ve always had a deep-rooted desire to be involved with something like those Terry Tate storylines from Reebok, if you remember those, and I have a great deal of respect for that Cadbury team 10 years ago or whenever it was, who decided to let a guy in a cheap gorilla suit sit down and bang the drum kit while In the Air Tonight played in the background. That’s still one of my favorite viral videos. That kind of stuff is unforgettable. It’s awesome and it would be an honor to be a part of something that’s unforgettable like that.   Jeff Zelaya: You mentioned a lot of great examples of content that really stood out, right? That made an impression on you. Even years later, you still remember these pieces of content. How do you do that in this day and age where there’s so much of it? Every single day, there are tons of content being produced. Are there any secrets or tips or strategies that we need to know in how to make sure that our content makes an impression on the people that are consuming it?   Joey Hall: Sure. I mean there’s – like you said, there’s a lot of content out there and a lot of it is good. A lot of it is bad. The water, the content water, is only getting deeper. I can’t imagine what things are going to be like five years from now or ten years from now. To be honest, the only way that you can make your content stand out is to make sure that the content is always audience-focused and truly authentic. Otherwise, people are going to sniff out the ruse or whatever agenda you’re trying to push at them and they’re going to bounce on to something better.   Jeff Zelaya: You can’t always make your content stand out with everyone, but you could make it stand out with the people that matter. That’s very valuable to a brand.   Joey Hall: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.   Jeff Zelaya: Impressions is something that I always think of when we’re measuring how successful a campaign or a content piece is. How do you guys look at the success for your content? How do you measure the success? Any specific metrics that you look at?   Joey Hall: I have kind of a unique perspective on that. So you can go into search rankings. You can focus on page view and purchase metrics and macro conversions and all of that. The issue is that those are just numbers. I’ve seen poor metrics thrown up in presentation slides before and cast in a way that when the dog and pony show was all over, you would think that you were looking at something that was award-winning. I think that’s kind of the trick with metrics. One company’s metric is not important to another company. So to me, the thing that’s most important is that you figure out what’s most important to your audience and whatever is most important to your audience should be most important to your brand. Your brand’s content should make it possible and easier for the brand to meet that need and then whatever that need is, however you measure it, those are the metrics that matter most to your company. So to me, the idea, the question of metric is, “What’s important to your audience? What’s important to your company? Then how do you measure it?” I think a good example of that – and it may be a little colloquial – is I help do our marketing campaigns at my church. At our church, our most important metric is people coming in the door on Sunday. So for us, the most important – the one metric that we have, the one that we can judge ourselves against is not something that we can track online. It’s tracked by the greeters with the littler clickers as people come in through the doors. That’s something that – that’s hard to record on. But it’s there and it’s an important metric.   Jeff Zelaya: A very unique answer to this question, but an answer that I really love, because you’re putting yourself in that person’s shoes, in understanding, OK, this is what matters. This is what really matters. Then as an agency, you’re working to impact what matters the most to them. So I absolutely adore your answer.   Joey Hall: Yeah. There’s not a cookie cutter answer. I mean every organization should be unique and every company should be unique. If you’re trying to judge yourself based on what competitor A, B and C are doing and how they measure stuff, then you might not be going on the right path. You might not be focused on what your audience is focused on.   Jeff Zelaya: And speaking of unique, I know over the time that you’ve been in EnVeritas, you’ve had the opportunity to work with really talented content marketers and marketers and mangers. You’ve seen a lot of successful, really successful people. Maybe they’re your clients or your colleagues. Are there any skills or attributes that the most successful content marketers seem to share and if so, could you share that with us? I’m interested in knowing …   Joey Hall: Yeah. Again, I hope that this is not too trite of an answer for you. But I think that we have to be able to listen first and if we can’t listen to what our clients have to say, if we’re an agency and we can’t listen to what our clients have to say, if we go in with our pre-established program of this is what we’re going to do for you, then I think that we are failing the clients right out of the gate. We’ve got to listen to the clients. We’ve got to listen to the client’s end users. We have to listen – if we’re marketing in-house for somebody, we’ve got to listen to our customers and to me, listening means not just that we’re seeing what they have to say. Listening means that we’re paying attention to what they say and that that information becomes important to us. We let that information recommend the actions that we take and how we are going to communicate with them going forward. So for me, it all starts with listening. My wife would be absolutely thrilled that I said that.   Jeff Zelaya: Yeah, I agree. It’s something that we talk a lot about. But yes, listening and listening and listening, such an important thing whether you’re in marketing, in sales. I think in any profession, having great listening skills is going to make you just that much more successful. Besides listening, how else do you stay up-to-date with all the changes that are happening in this fast-paced marketing world?   Joey Hall: Well, I am a recovering English major and part of the recovery that I’ve never been able to outlast is that I’m a voracious reader. So when I have time at work, when I have time at home, I’m always reading blogs, books, articles, things like that, just to try to stay abreast on everything, because things move so fast in this day and age that just because you’re up to speed today doesn’t mean that you’re going to be up to speed on Friday. I attend several conferences every year. I really like going to SMX for one. Our internal team here in the office in Greenville, we also designate one day per month for – assign people to present on different content-related topics. So it’s usually something breaking news-wise, like a Google algorithm change or something trending like the most recent social media disaster from airline X. For me, those meetings, they’re informal in format but they’re great times to catch up on news, because like I said, you can’t stay abreast of everything. There are good times. You just sit and talk with other people and hear what their takes are on things that are relevant to our field and hear what their perspectives are on the things that are important to us, because they’re the ones that are in the trenches. They have a really good feel for what works and what doesn’t. It’s great to have the entire team involved in meetings like that. I think – at one point, over the course of the year, everybody in our company presents at least one time at those monthly meetings. Like I said, it’s a great time. It’s a great learning environment.   End of Transcript The post Joey Hall, VP of Content Marketing at EnVeritas Group appeared first on B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast.

Geoff Livingston is the Founder of Tenacity5 Media An author, public speaker, photographer and communications strategist; Geoff Livingston is passionate about helping companies and nonprofits develop fantastic marketing programs that help them accomplish their goals. Geoff has worked with several Fortune 500 companies like: AT&T, Cox, eBay, Ford, Google, PayPal, and many others. He’s an advisor for several tech companies and is a consultant for various non-profit organizations. Prior to founding Tenacity5 Media he started and sold his social media boutique: Livingston Communications. Geoff’s been recognized by The Washington Post as a top blogger and Twitter personality. He’s also a popular keynote speaker and has presented at events like: Mashable, MarketingProfs,  TEDx, PRSA and the Social Media Club among many, many others. Geoff’s been able to build a huge following using rich visual media and awesome content, which he talks about in this podcast. Press play below and start listening to Geoff Livingston share his valuable content marketing insights on this week’s episode of the B2B marketing podcast. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/Tenacity5   Beginning of Transcript Jeff Zelaya: Welcome to B2B Content Marketing Leaders. My name is Jeff Zelaya and I’m here with another Geoff, Geoff Livingston, an author, a speaker, a social media influencer and the founder of Tenacity5 Media. Jeff, welcome.   Geoff Livingston: Hey, how is it going my friend? Geoff Livingston   Jeff Zelaya: It’s going great. Yes, it’s going fantastic and Jeff, for those people that are brand new that don’t know much about you, about what you’ve done, across your social media channels and just in the industry, can you start off by giving me a bit of background on who you are and also what you do?   Geoff Livingston: Sure. So my name is Geoff Livingston. I have been an online marketer, social media marketer since the beginning back in the mid 2000s and I sold an agency called Livingston Communications. It was a social media boutique in 2009. I started a second social media boutique called Zoetica which was social good oriented and is still in existence. But spun out of that and – I think that was 2011. Just last year, I started Tenacity5, which is more of a content marketing, digital marketing firm. We still do some social but more heavy duty content-oriented.   Jeff Zelaya: And one thing that you’re so well-known for Geoff, one of the reasons that I am such an avid follower of you is because of the visual content that you put out. Great photography, great visuals and we’re seeing I guess more focus around, especially in the B to B marketing space. It seems like companies – oh, OK, this could be something that we could leverage for our content marketing strategy. How important do you think visual content is becoming for that space? Are there any applications for B to B organizations using great photography and visual content?   Geoff Livingston: Yeah, I think it has become critical particularly smart phones and tablets. They have started to really dominate internet traffic. So I really feel like if you want to actually get noticed and at least have your links safe for later viewing on a larger device, you have to appeal to people visually. One thing that does not work well on smart phones is a ton of text. Nobody wants to read an essay on their phone. Some people do. But generally speaking, most people have no interest. So to stand out, you really have to have great visuals whether that’s data visualization, graphics, photos, videos. More often than not because there’s so much content being created now, that content needs to be somewhat entertaining. Now I anticipate that that’s even going to change too. I’ve been playing with a smart watch. I’ve been playing with the Gear S which is one of the first ones that actually has its own connectivity. I think that once we’ve moved to that, we’re going to start moving more towards audio and video content as opposed to strictly visual, because even looking at visual content on your phone or on your smart watch I mean, excuse me, or in your care, I mean that’s really hard to do.   Jeff Zelaya: Great insight. Even like with podcasting, we’re seeing an emergence of that or resurgence of people really interested with that serial podcast series and there’s just so much talk about it because it’s easier for people to consume while on the go. Aren’t we all on the go, busy professionals? And watching a video or listening to audio is sometimes the better method as opposed to reading like you said a long essay text on your – especially on the mobile device. I read one of your posts, Did Video Kill The Video Star? I was very intrigued by that. What did you mean by that question? What are you seeing as far as trends in the video, especially in the video focused content?   Geoff Livingston: Yeah. Well, in particular, we’re hearing a lot about traditional advertising dying and broadcast and TV dying and they say basically that video advertising is dying. We read this from Forrester, eMarketer. A whole bunch of different analysts are saying that. The traditional media is covering the story that way. But I think that what’s really happening is we’re seeing a move of video content from traditional mechanisms with a broadcasting cable to downloads. Small, independent programming, independent programs being created by Netflix, by AOL, by Cisco, Amazon, everybody, it has got significant internet following. Now there are even start-ups creating their own TV programs or video programs. Now the difference is that people can see this on YouTube or Vimeo or on a website and to me, that’s a huge differentiator. It’s not that video is going. It’s just that video on the internet is killing video on broadcast and cable. So I definitely beg to differ that when we see video advertising is going away, that’s not true. Just look at AOL’s advertising dollars and they’re saying that 50 percent of their growth is coming on their original programs, their original video programs. So it’s just moving and it’s becoming more fractured, just like traditional print content was.   Jeff Zelaya: And a great example of a start-up using video effectively is Influitive. So recently they did a series called BAM!TV where it’s a late night talk show meets B to B marketing and they had guests on the show. He had humor and it was really streamed online and it was just a hit. A lot of social media buzz around it and they’re using it effectively. So to you listening, maybe you’re looking for an example of how an organization could use video in the B to B space effectively. Check out Influitive. For you Geoff, and looking at 2014 and you’ve built your agency once again, building an agency from scratch and helping clients out. What have you seen and what have you leveraged as the most effective marketing tactics this past year?   Geoff Livingston: Well, I don’t know if I’ve leveraged it effectively but I’m working on getting my spin down on it, so to speak, or actually the value to help people out with this. It’s probably a better way to put it because one of the things that I see a great weakness is – it is something that actually you guys resolved. But it’s data in the form of you got all this data. We now have access to it. I’m not going to call it “big data”. I don’t really feel like that’s an accurate term for it. But people that are traditionally marketers don’t know how to analyze data and on top of that, it’s embarrassing for them. It’s embarrassing to them that they don’t know what’s going on in their marketing. It’s embarrassing for them to get their CMO and say that. So what we see is kind of like a – almost like a shame game where people are hiding their inability to understand how their content and their marketing and their online outreach is really impacting their bottom line and helping people through that I think is really the next front in marketing, and how to do it in a manner that allows people to save face is really the thing. So I don’t think it can be done in the traditional blogging. Hey, this is how the industry is messed up and here’s how you fix it kind of a thing. I think it has got to be really gentle, kind of soft, no shame, no game kind of a thing. Otherwise, it’s just not going to work. We’re going to be in the same place that we are now. I don’t think that the data problem is a big secret in the sense that we know it’s becoming – I still see a lot of marketers who just have no idea how things are impacting their bottom line.   Jeff Zelaya: I see the same thing here. There’s so much data and they’re collecting it and they have it. But it’s like OK, what’s next? How do we actually use this stuff, right? Hopefully we will see a change in that going into the new year.   Geoff Livingston: I’ve literally lost deals as soon as we get to that point, because we’re like hey, well, let us see the data. That’s when they really freak out.   Jeff Zelaya: Wow. This is a chance now. I want you to toot your own horn because you are a very humble guy and maybe you don’t get a chance to humble brag as much as you should.   Geoff Livingston: Well, I don’t do it. Yeah.   Jeff Zelaya: Well, I will point you in the – maybe this is for me personally one of the highlights I’ve seen of your marketing success this past years, the 365 Full Frame Project. I’m a big fan of that. I’m a follower of that. But you, looking back at all the stuff that you’ve done this past year, what would you say is your biggest content marketing success that you’re personally very proud of?   Geoff Livingston: For the past year?   Jeff Zelaya: Yes.   Geoff Livingston: That’s a good question. I really think that we did – we did an ebook with Brian Solis and Gaping Void for [0:09:17] [Indiscernible] which actually was put up on SlideShare. It’s free, but we had [Indiscernible] maybe on the 10th page. It was from a premium content creator. We hired him. We streamlined it to meet the audience needs and then we promoted it, specifically to the public relations sector and that – I know views is a [Indiscernible] metric but it has generated 300,000 views on SlideShare and on top of it, it has generated more than 1000 leads through the gate. I just think it was an incredibly successful piece of content and a nice campaign. We did an event at Google Headquarters around that and did a user-generated ad. What’s your future PR campaign online [0:10:00] [Indiscernible]? All that went down in October and November. I thought that was very, very successful.   Jeff Zelaya: Great. I’m a big fan of both of those guys and Gaping Void. I love his artwork and such a lot of thought in what he does and very meaningful to me personally. So that’s a great project to be involved in Geoff. I read a post that you did on this a while back about how you would do things differently if you had a chance to start over with social media. It really – that struck a cord with me because you’re right. Many times we don’t look at what we could have done differently. We just continue kind of marching towards the future, but it’s good to assess what you could have done differently. So those opportunities come up again. At least you learn from that past experience.   Geoff Livingston: A great topic, a heated debate these days and political concerns. Everybody has them. Just consider how crazy this could be if you started diving in each little issue that you have a perspective on.   Jeff Zelaya: A tweet that you put out when you were a teenager could come back and haunt you when you’re running for president, right? I mean you never know how those personal tweets that you put out and content that you put out could affect you professionally and there’s that concern even for me as I craft tweets. Sometimes I just end up deleting it and saying, you know what, this is not – even though this is something I want to get off my chest, will this look good for my brand? Will it turn off any potential prospects or clients? So I always edge on the side of being overly cautious. But you’re right. I mean kind of going back at something that I will know there’s a solution to that now in the future. But we will see where it goes. Speaking of the future, where do you like – looking at 2015, 2016 and beyond, what are some of the trends that you think will emerge as we move into these next couple of years Geoff?   Geoff Livingston: Yeah, that’s a good question. I really feel like Facebook is not going to become a very friendly medium for small businesses and we’re going to really see a departure of small businesses that are getting tired of the pay-to-play game because I’m sure if you’re a start-up listening to this podcast, you’re probably like me. I’m a start-up and I just paid like a couple hundred bucks to doing that campaign on Facebook. I don’t know where that got me. I know when I look at my analytics, it didn’t give me much traffic. So my feeling on Facebook is unless you have a lot of dollars to throw at that, it’s not really an effective medium because of the [0:12:47] [Indiscernible] of the algorithm. So what we’re going to see as a result of that – and also Twitter is starting to suffer quite a bit. Some of the other networks that are more visually-oriented like Instagram and Pinterest are going to really start having a lot more play. People have been calling for this for a long time but I think when you look at Instagram’s recent moves to clean up its spamming profile, authenticate business accounts, I think that’s a big red flag to business owners that Instagram is about to get much more professional, much more serious and perhaps charge you a lot more to get active on their site. So that’s one thing. Another thing, I really think like this Apple watch is going to fail this year. That’s the space that I’m playing with the watch right now. Not the Apple one but the Gear S. I don’t think that Apple is going to be that much more advantaged than the Samsung watch. My feeling on it is that it’s close but it’s not quite there yet and we’re going to continue to see people really try to push towards its wearable revolution because the technology is getting small enough to wear. But it’s just not there from a usability perspective or voice recognition standpoint. I feel the same way about Siri by the way. The other thing really is it’s going to get about – it’s going to become about data and what that really means is the CMO is going to start asking marketers, “So what? Great. You did that Facebook campaign and you got me 20,000 impressions, 50 likes, and 20 new eyeballs on the website. What did that do?” If you can’t answer that question, you’re going to lose power and if you’re repeatedly put in that position where you can’t answer that question, you’re going to lose your job, I think, and that’s going to cause marketers to become much more Machiavellian about their activities and precision-oriented. So if Facebook isn’t working, I’m not doing it. I’m just not going to invest in it. I’m going to invest in other areas where I can show throughput, meet my objectives. If I’m just branding for the sake of garnering attention, I’m going to show that this is actively attributed to gauge users as opposed to just a bunch of likes on Facebook. People are repeatedly coming back, that kind of thing. So whether it’s leads or branding, people are going to have to get much more precision-oriented.   End of Transcript       The post Geoff Livingston, Founder of Tenacity5 Media appeared first on B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast.

Kaitlin Stich is the Senior Marketing Manager at BrightTALK Kaitlin heads up content marketing at BrightTALK. She has six years of content marketing, demand gen and B2B marketing experience. She’s passionate about growing businesses and has quickly risen to become a  recognized leader in the marketing technology space. You can find dozens of her webinars and videos across the internet and she’s frequently speaking on the topic of webinars and their importance to the B2B marketer at industry events.  Her marketing leadership has resulted in the rapid growth of BrightTALK, which has recently doubled their sales people.   Press play below and start listening to Kaitlin Stich share her valuable B2B marketing insights on this week’s episode of the B2B marketing podcast. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/brightTalk   Beginning of Transcript Kaitlin Stich: Thank you so much for having me.   Jeff Zelaya: So Kaitlin, for those that are new to the new BrightTALK and don’t know too much about you, can you start it off by just sharing some of your background, who you are and your role at BrightTALK? What exactly is BrightTALK?   Kaitlin Stich Kaitlin Stich: Excellent. Well, just a little bit about me, I’m the head of content marketing here at BrightTALK. I’ve been in the digital marketing space for about six years now, so along the journey starting as a corporate marketer and refining more and more of the point that I’m doing content marketing for demand generation. BrightTALK is for people who are unfamiliar with BrightTALK, a platform for webinars and videos. We’re specifically optimized around creating demand for those webinars and videos and generating leads for our customers utilizing our technology. We’re also a platform, a destination for B to B professionals to educate on trends and best practices. So on BrightTALK, you will find of hundreds of thousands of webinars and videos on some of the latest trending topics like some of the following thought leaders on your podcast session here. So I hope people will go and check those out too. For the last 2.5 years at BrightTALK, I’ve been given the challenge of meeting some pretty aggressive new lead and sales qualified lead metrics through my content marketing programs. As a result, we’ve been able to more than double our sales organization, which has really led a lot of our success here at BrightTALK. So I’m marketing that organization.   Jeff Zelaya: Wow. I know one of the reasons that there’s more popularity, an increasing popularity around videos and webinars is because the buyer’s journey has changed and we’re very focused on becoming educated before we spend any kind of dollars or money or even consider purchasing a product or a service. So you personally, how have you seen the buyer’s journey change over the past few years?   Kaitlin Stich: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean really the quote that a lot of us modern marketers depend on is that serious decisions quote around 30 – not 30. Seventy or sixty-seven percent of buyers are into the education process before they even reach out. I think some brands have even got more aggressive and said that it’s up to 90 percent. That’s really thanks to the growth of mobile and social technologies. People are really more connected than they’ve ever been and they are less concerned about the way brands are interacting with them through their social applications and their email inboxes. Really we’re seeing that convergence of that paid, owned and earned media through those connection points with our audience. The result of this is a depreciation of value for contents that – or content that brands are sending to them. So brands are being challenged to send more and more quality content, but not only more quality content. Buyers are more influenced by their family and their friends and industry thought leaders than they’ve ever been before. So it’s really up to brands to figure out this magic equation between finding the right influencers to connect with, the right quality of content and then to place that content where buyers are consuming this content. So whether it’s recommendations from family and friends or in their social feeds or just through search online. They really need to diversify the way that they’re connecting with their buyers.   Jeff Zelaya: And one channel that I know a lot of B to B marketers are starting to leverage and have been leveraging out for a good while have been webinars and videos. I kind of know the answer to those questions but I want to get your answer and also maybe some examples. How important are webinars and videos to the modern B to B marketer?   Kaitlin Stich: That’s an excellent question. Of course I’m a little bit biased here, right? I mean webinars and videos are what BrightTALK does. But from my perspective and what I see as a modern marketer, webinars and videos are extremely important because they offer that mix that modern marketers are looking for. One, like I mentioned before, the quality of content is so important in the buyer’s journey that people are looking for those richer experiences and webinars and videos just provide that. You’ve got a way to influence the audience based on what they see and what they hear and how they interact with the presenter if it’s a live event. But also the data that rich media provides, so the data that webinars and videos are providing to marketing automation platforms, the things that marketers can use to help score their leads better, are more provided by webinars and videos that a text-based asset wouldn’t necessarily have. The great thing about webinars and videos is that they can really be used at every stage of the funnel and so you’ve got thought leadership webinars that are happening on a regular basis where people are educating on those trends and best practices down to case study webinar. The same is true for videos. So really, I mean they’re a wonderful asset. They’re used in many ways and they’re providing the right data that modern marketers need to close deals faster.   Jeff Zelaya: Excellent. I know you work with many marketers. You get to observe many different tactics and strategies and have conversations with a lot of folks that are in the B to B marketing space. What have you see as a trend or maybe as a characteristic of the B to B marketers that are really good at storytelling, how important telling a story is? What are the B to B marketers that are excelling in that department? What are they doing right? How are they telling a good story? What are some tips for our audience if they’re trying to improve the story that they’re telling? What could they be doing to go down the right path?   Kaitlin Stich: Storytelling has been how humans have chosen to communicate for – since the beginning of communication. People are looking for context and that’s the biggest part of storytelling is to put some kind of context around it. It’s a way for people to relate along the way. So the best advice that I can give is tell true stories. So Forrester Research actually just released an excellent paper this month that supports the case that B to B companies are failing to engage with their website visitors and therefore they are failing to connect the content on their site and to their buyers’ journeys, which is actually a huge challenge, right? Because the people coming to their site aren’t being met with the content that they need or expect to have as part of that journey. I think content is just a part of that. So I mean starting from your website out, how are you telling your story of your brand? What’s the messaging that you want to lead with? Technologies have gotten advanced in a way that personalization really can drive some of those conversations but the reality is, is you need to know more about where they are in that [0:07:16] [Inaudible] and that you’re telling a true story that’s more about a person listening to the story than it is you telling it. I think that’s really difficult for some brands to do in a meaningful way, absolutely.   Jeff Zelaya: Kaitlin, now you’ve been at BrightTALK I think close to three years now and you’ve climbed up the ladder and you’re getting more responsibility and are getting great results from your – a lot of the initiatives that you’re executing, I’m curious. Just this past year, looking at 2014, personally what has been the marketing success that you could point to and say, “I’m proud of this. This has made a highlight of my marketing career this year”?   Kaitlin Stich: Oh man. I don’t really want to toot my own horn. Thank you for saying all those nice things. As a marketer, it has never been a more exciting time to be in a marketing role. I mean more often than not, marketers are now being asked to be stakeholders, you know, at the – the table, the revenue table. That’s exciting and marketers are now making more decisions about the basic technologies that the company is using to move itself and that is so exciting just from a career perspective. I think that being able to be a marketer in that environment has just been so exciting and that’s my success I guess in seeing that shift, because content marketing is not so much about writing a fluffy story of blog posting more. But they’re really those marketing metrics that back up the hard work that we’re doing and we’re able, as content marketers – which maybe traditionally hasn’t been part of that stakeholdership, we’re now there. So I can be able to say at the end of the day, based on the content that I’ve created, I’ve generated this much revenue for the company at this amount of cost and this is why I need to increase my spend at the company or this is how we need to be setting our direction for next year and all those great things that content marketers haven’t been able to do previously. I think especially also gearing up towards that gap in terms of educating around marketing automation. I mean there’s a huge gap there and I think that one of the successes would be pulling some of that information that I’ve learned about marketing automation, to make my content marketing better. Am I making that kind of art and science build on my career and how can I use that to boost myself forward? That being said, I apply it to webinars and videos and it has really allowed me to create hundreds and hundreds of assets, all of which – sometimes they aren’t successful. But at the end of the day, I’m able to refine my annual calendar and content strategy for those successes, thanks to this technology, the fact that marketing has a greater stake hold in the business.   Jeff Zelaya: Kaitlin, I’ve been very impressed by one of your influencer marketing strategy and it’s not that – I don’t know if it’s something that is done consciously. But because so many influencers and I would say celebrities at least in my industry are using BrightTALK and they’re pushing out and promoting their webinars. You guys are always getting exposure from these folks. So can you talk more about how you leverage influencers and how that helps you in reaching some of your content marketing goals?   Kaitlin Stich: Yeah, absolutely. We couldn’t have gotten as far as we have without the influencers on our space and I think it just speaks to what you’re doing here today. There are so many people telling really excellent stories that have a lot of information that they can be sharing with audiences. It’s maybe not just audiences specific to BrightTALK or your organization, but really – and we’re not sharing this information in a silo. So the information that I’m sharing here might be interesting to people on our platform or your platform. So it’s being genuine with what your goals are in content marketing, but also inviting people to participate in that. I think the best thing that I can do when I reach out to influencers is I have a plan in mind. I know exactly what I’m asking of them and I’m OK giving those deliverables upfront. But also I tell them what I can do for them and I really lead with that. I think that there are so many people wanting to share their stories but it’s not a difficult conversation to have, all those stories together. So while you’re sharing information, inviting people to share that information as well, and finding a way to build that in to your annual content calendar. Think of it as a content pipeline. Constantly be reaching out and finding ways to work with more influencers within the business. There are some influencers that are – as marketers, we know that they like a little cash upfront to share their thought leadership. But true influencers of the business aren’t looking so much for those selfish needs but true influencers are the ones that are really out there just to share information, engage with others, and push that conversation forward, so that everyone does a better job at their jobs at the end of the day. I think that’s what makes a true influencer. So understanding what makes a true influencer and then going back and applying it to your content marketing strategy. I think it’s a win-win for everyone.   Jeff Zelaya: From my experience, the best influencers are the – the true influencers are the ones that believe in the mantra “Givers gain.” By them giving to you, they’re going to gain some – they’re going to have a return. There’s going to be a return to their effort and to the partnership and if you set it up in a win-win, it’s a must-do I think for any marketer to have an influencer strategy and to use those smart people, very knowledgeable folks who extend your message.   Kaitlin Stich: Well, even adding on to that is that whole story of social selling, right? So marketers have owned this idea of being an influencer in a space for I don’t know how long. We’re marketers. We’re constantly having our stories to tell. We have our brand stories to tell, our own stories, our partner stories. Then suddenly, the strategy, it’s not surprising that salespeople need to get on that level. It’s not that they’re pushing their products or their services but they’re genuinely starting conversations and starting those meaningful touch points with their customers in a way that benefits their customers, because it’s not something that pays off in the next week or at the end of that sales month, which is always what salespeople are looking for, right? But it’s this idea that you’re ready to have that conversation with them if they need that trusted resource, when their next budget comes out that you’re a resource to them. So really when you think about an influencer strategy, it’s not the short term. I think you and I can both agree on that. It’s something that’s definitely built over time and it’s definitely just about valuable conversations that you can have, either shorter form, social media, longer form, blogs or other discussions. But it’s definitely something that’s built over time and with this general idea or genuine idea of sharing true stories.   Jeff Zelaya: You nailed it. I think that’s one of the things that will not be going away anytime soon, being authentic, being genuine, making sure that you give and that you help others succeed and by doing that, the company, the brand, the individual will be successful. So I totally agree with you on those points Kaitlin. One last question and I’m very – this is probably the most important question I will ask you in this conversation today and I’m very curious to know how you feel about the future of content marketing. What do you see on the horizon? What changes? What evolution do you see for our industry, our content marketing industry? It’s a hard question to tackle because it changes so fast. But in your gut, in your – from your experience, what do you see next for us?   Kaitlin Stich: Man, I love and hate this question, one, because it opens up the opportunity to say a lot of exciting things or things that we’re particularly passionate about. But you’re right. I mean how do you predict the future when technology and marketing is such a heavy influence? But what I can say about what I’m most excited about for content marketing is that it’s going to continue to get richer regardless of whether it’s a webinar, a video. Video is going to be very popular in 2015 or some other mixed webinar video type asset or even something for virtual events. I can definitely say that content is going to continue to get richer and it’s going to be really exciting what technology offers us as part of that. The other thing that I can tell you that will be happening in content marketing is these channels, these separate applications that we have for social media, for our platforms, for our webinars and videos, platforms for sharing our white papers. They’re going to start converging together and maybe that’s not a 2015 prediction but that’s just the future in general that in order to truly run an integrated marketing campaign, it really doesn’t matter what channel that you’re picking. It just matters that your story is connected in a way that makes sense and I think that by trying to make that story more connected, that those platforms for sharing those stories are just going to become more and more integrated. I think one of the features – if I could just speak to BrightTALK for a second – that I’m most excited about is this idea that when you register for a webinar, you can see who else is registering to attend. I don’t know if that’s something that some of our other competitors are doing but I can say that it’s compelling to me because it’s allowing me to involve my other marketing pools, like my LinkedIns and my Twitters, with the people that I see directly, registered for that event. By tweeting at them or getting them involved via LinkedIn message or sending them an email that says, “Oh, I see you registered too. What’s going on with you?” That just becomes so much more valuable. So I’m excited to see features like that on all kinds of content marketing platforms converge. I think that’s really exciting.   End of Transcript The post Kaitlin Stich, Marketing Manager at BrightTALK appeared first on B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast.

Tami McQueen is the Director of Marketing at SalesLoft Tami leads content marketing and communications for the Atlanta based startup SalesLoft. Tami has nine years of marketing and communications experience. In only 9 months of starting at SalesLoft, she’s already made a huge impact at the growing startup. Tami’s published 66 blog posts, 12 videos, has grown SalesLoft’s Twitter following by 67% and most importantly she’s generated 7,171 leads via her content marketing…and she’s just getting warmed up. It’s no wonder that the Technology Association of Georgia recently named her as the 2014 B2B Marketing Innovator of the Year. We expect to see a lot more great B2B marketing from her in 2015. Press play below and start listening to Tami McQueen share her B2B content marketing insights with us, on this week’s podcast: The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/salesloft   Beginning of Transcript   Tami McQueen: Absolutely, Jeff. I am the Director of Marketing over at SalesLoft and we are the easiest and fastest way on the internet to build a targeted and accurate list of prospects. It is the biggest innovation to happen to the sales process. So sales development is absolutely changing the way a traditional sales team works. So what for example we do is we focus on the art of specialization. A team of sales development reps who use Prospector, our product, to prospect leads and then pass those over to the account executives who focus solely on closing the deal.   Tami McQueen Jeff Zelaya: Now Tami, I’ve seen you guys really leverage content extremely well and that’s how I’ve heard of you because all the social buzz, the blogs that you guys are putting out, the best practices, the tips, tricks techniques, your newsletter, so much awesome stuff coming from the SalesLoft team. How has content helped you grow? Do you attribute any of your success to the content that you guys are producing?   Tami McQueen: Yeah, Jeff. So content marketing is our second way, only behind outbound prospecting, that we generate leads. We use sales development for outbound prospecting to generate leads – sales development team and the go-to source for sales development. So when you think of sales development and you think of prospecting, you think of SalesLoft and we have focused specifically on doing that through our content. To give you an example is we try not to be salesy per se in our blogs or our white papers or our ebooks. We want to provide our users as well as our prospects with the most valuable piece of content to get their hands on. We released earlier this year and have updated on a month to month basis our very own internal sales development playbook. This is an outline strategy that we hand to every new sales development rep that started SalesLoft and we wanted to share that with all our clients, prospects, and perhaps people who could find it of use to their team as well. What we have done with this and to generate top of the funnel leads is to gate the content. We will create the landing page and share through a marketing mix to send folks to this landing page where they can download the playbook. It is free. We ask for their name and email address. That counts as a new unique lead independent of sales development outreach. It allows us to track and to understand the buyer’s process for our lead generation.   Jeff Zelaya: I am thrilled to see a lot of transparency this past year. A lot of the best B to B marketers are very transparent in their approach and they’re eating their dog food, much like SalesLoft is doing, and they’re sharing. Here’s how we use it. Here are the best practices and all that great content gets people really reeled in and they’re excited to see the results and to share and to talk about it.   Tami McQueen: Absolutely. We have really and truly found great traction in the blogs that we have shared that look at our compensation model. We are completely transparent with what we comp our reps. We are completely transparent on how many SDRs, sales development reps you need to the ratio of account executives you need. We are completely transparent in this and also in our hiring. We’re looking specifically for folks who punch above their weight loss, who are in the top one percent of all candidates out there. We are completely transparent with this and it’s funny you say that there has been a rise in this transparency. People are really eating their own dog food or drinking their own Kool-Aid and it really goes to show that that is what people resonate so well with. It’s that transparency. It’s almost like they can connect on the same level.   Jeff Zelaya: People like to see that and it really makes them I think more likely to do business with you. I think that’s a great marketing tactic and strategy. What else has been valuable to the SalesLoft team? Any other marketing tactics that you’ve used this past year that have been very well received? One of them in particular – I don’t know if this is the one that you’re going to talk about. But one of them that I did hear a lot of buzz around is – was how you guys did an amazing job of impersonating Marc Benioff at the Salesforce conference. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that. But in general, what has been your most valuable tactics this past year?   Tami McQueen: Jeff, you stole the words right out of my mouth. This is exactly what I was going to share with you and we were leading up to Dreamforce. We had no idea what we were going to do. We’re a first time sponsor, a rookie experience, at the ultimate conference in tech and we were looking at what we could do. We sat around the table, turning over every possible swag item. We thought about renting a hotdog cart and selling hotdogs and peddling through the streets, handing out flyers and giving demos on the back of a bicycle. We thought of it all. We thought it was impossible. It will never work. But we thought we would give it a shot anyway. We put out an ad on Craigslist, specifically in the Bay Area. Didn’t think much of it, but we were getting closer to the events and we still didn’t have our Benioff. He is a very specific-looking gentleman and there’s not a hundred Elvises running around or other impersonators that are easy to find. Eventually we found a guy that was recommended to us in Atlanta, called him up, told him we weren’t kidding and he needs to get on the plane with us to San Francisco. We choose. We saw – the shoes he was going to wear. I went off to the Hobby Lobby and Michaels and Costco and got some glitter and dulled up the shoes a little bit. We were getting ear pieces and we sat at breakfast one day and we were ready to go tackle the events and we had a few mimosas in us and off we went. We had our director of sales dress up like a bodyguard and I’m sure you’ve seen from the photos. It was quite an adventure. We were absolutely scared to death. We completely owned it. We eventually got into character and we were walking around and got a lot of buzz, a lot of traction and we thought it was a success the first day. We didn’t want to stay out there too long. The second day, we come back and I think we’ve got this. We walked past Marc giving an interview with our Marc and we thought, “Oh no! We’ve blown it.” So we walk back to our booth area and eventually we see a few hours later Marc with his whole crew chatting to some of the platinum level sponsors and we thought this is it. This is the only way we’re going to do this but we’re going to have to go after him and we’re going to have to introduce ourselves somehow or another. We have to do this. It turns out I – we spoke to his PR agent and a lot of these handlers and they had known about the Craigslist ad. They had been following us the past two days, what we were up to, what we were tweeting about, what we were sharing on social and we had an opportunity to meet face to face with Marc and he was great. He really received it really well. He laughed it off and said thanks for taking the weight off his shoulders, for attending some of the press events. So that generated a lot of buzz. We were at the SalesLoft booth as well and it was really greatly shared on social. So I can’t tie it directly and tell you what the ROI is. It’s one of those marketing campaigns that you can’t put a dollar amount on. But I will say that our website traffic that week shot up by 10,000 unique visitors.   Jeff Zelaya: Excellent. I mean that’s just an amazing story because you guys did really go outside of the box completely and that beats any type of swag that you will get at an event, being able to see that in action. So hats off to you guys for executing upon such a wonderful tactic. What are some of the ideas that you think will happen going into the new year that you guys are looking at? Maybe those – I know those are some of the like spur of the moment type of ideas. But what are some things that you definitely have implemented into your plan as a valuable tactic that you guys are going to execute in 2015?   Tami McQueen: Content, content, content. We are really focused on producing consistently on our blog, white papers, ebooks, and pieces that are of value, some case studies as well. I really think one of the trends – you asked this question – is that we will see for marketing, is really becoming more people-focused. We’re going to really gain a better understanding of our audience and this is going beyond just push, push, push of information out there. Gone are the days where you produce content and you throw it up on the blog or you put it on social media and people come. Those days are over. It’s about engagement. It’s about segmentation based on people’s interests and preferences. But really creating and delivering the right content for the right person at the right time every time and sharing videos. I think video for us is definitely going to be very impactful and with a lot more social platforms adopting video for engaging and user-generated content. We’re really going to try and leverage more of video to quickly create the content, to reach our audiences in real time. I think that will be very impactful. We will continue a lot of our marketing automation that we do through drip campaigns. We share a lot of our top blogs in this fashion as well as product updates, engagements as well, so not only in the prospect stage but also in the client’s satisfaction, client’s success and client’s engagement as well.   Jeff Zelaya: You guys have actually been using video. I love the way that – for example with the new product of SalesLoft, Cadence. Instead of giving me an entire email text of how this product works, you said, “Here’s a link for the video. Go watch it.” I watched it. I love it. The guy in the lab coat explaining how it works. It was very creative. Again, something that you guys are really good at and you were able to explain the product I think a lot better than a blog post would have given it justice. It was just way – very well-executed, well-done, and another – an example of how you guys are innovative and using video as a way of really interacting with people at a higher level.   Tami McQueen: Sure. Jeff, a lot of B to B companies in the tech space don’t have the luxury of being or having the impact of an Apple brand. Apple has the logo that they throw up and the date of a product launch. Very, very few companies have the luxury of doing that and being effective. What we wanted to do is to share a video that would be engaging but share very, very little content about it. Send them directly to the action that they needed to click on and engage in and see how that works. We really felt that it was something off the cuff, something very, very different having this go to market strategy of something that’s completely bizarre but the SalesLoft scientists and telling a story. What we have truly found to be most effective is telling a story well. Not just story telling but really telling a story that is engaging, that people want to hear more. That is almost as if you are encouraging to join a series. Think of your bloggers and mini series. Think of it as a pilot of a television series where people come back every single week to read it and that’s really and truly where an effective storytelling initiative comes into play.   Jeff Zelaya: Wow, I love that comparison and the analogy of making your content more like a really well-received – like Breaking Bad where you’re on the edge of your seat and you’re wondering what’s going to happen next. What’s going to happen on the next episode? You go online and you talk about it and you can’t wait. So yes …   Tami McQueen: Exactly. And the buzz around social media is electric when you have a season finale. That’s exactly what we want to create when we’re sharing and it’s tough. It’s not easy but that’s what your mindset truly needs to be.   Jeff Zelaya: Tami, besides of course your team, what are some other teams out there in the B to B space that you think are doing it really well, that are leaders, that are innovators, that are doing that type of approach where they’re keeping their audience very engaged and wondering, hey, what will they do next? What are some of the brands that come to mind?   Tami McQueen: Salesforce Pardot has an excellent content marketing strategy. Their blog is topnotch and also Salesforce.com’s blog is really strong in both the sales and marketing areas. They have a very strong niche market and our CEO Kyle Porter was the number one blogger on Salesforce last year, so a very impactful brand. I will also say DocuSign is really, really strong in their content. SaaStr has a great blog. Love to read that. The Funnelholic is one of my favorites. Those folks are really doing it well in content marketing and I’m an avid subscriber as well.   Jeff Zelaya: Tami, before we let you go, any last minute advice for directors of marketing that are in the same position that you were about a year ago, right? Starting a startup, very little maybe resources available right away and you just have to be different. Think outside the box and execute, execute, execute throughout the process. So any word of advice for someone that’s in that same role right now that’s listening to this? That’s wondering, wow, Tami is awesome. I want to do what she has been able to do. What would you give them as the best advice that you have to share?   Tami McQueen: The best advice I can give is to really understand who your market is. Understand their pain points and how you can help them. You want to be a pain reliever. You want to be able to show them how you can be of use to them and how they need you every single day, how you can share with them, understand what they are going through, understand how your product best aligns with their difficulties as well and how you can be a solution to them. End of Transcript        The post Tami McQueen, Director of Marketing at SalesLoft appeared first on B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast.

Amanda Nelson is the Director of Marketing at RingLead At RingLead, Amanda oversees the strategy and execution for their content marketing. Previously she’s worked at salesforce.com and Radian6, and has an extensive agency background. She’s an avid blogger, thought leader and speaker. Amanda’s presented at conferences like the Online Marketing Institute, Direct Marketing Association, Content Marketing Institute. She’s also an Adjunct Professor at Quinnipiac University, where she teaches graduate courses on Social Media, Community Management and Content Marketing. Press play below and start listening to Amanda Nelson share her unique marketing insights on this week’s episode of the B2B marketing podcast. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/ringlead/ Beginning of Transcript Amanda Nelson: Right. Well, thank you Jeff for having me today. Yes, my name is Amanda Nelson. I’ve been in content marketing for about four years. Prior to my current role, I worked at Radian6 and then Salesforce.com doing content marketing for both brands and today, I am at Amanda Nelson RingLead which is a Salesforce partner. We also work with Marketo and Eloqua and Pardot and other marketing automation CRM providers doing data quality. So my role is really leading marketing for RingLead and our major initiative is content marketing and really creating helpful thought leadership content for marketers and salespeople.   Jeff Zelaya: Now, Amanda, one of the things that I was very amazed by is that in the short amount of time that you’ve been at RingLead, you’ve made significant impact. You’re popping up all over my radar and I’m seeing the great work that you guys are doing and I’m very intrigued by that and want to know for other content marketing directors that are starting that, who are going to get into that role, to lead the growth of the marketing department. What are some important things that they should be doing? What have you done in your new role starting there that have made you guys get off to this great start and what advice would you have for others that are following in those same footsteps?   Amanda Nelson: Yeah, thank you. I mean you can’t do it right without a plan. You really need an action plan for what you’re going to be doing and so from day one, we sat down with other members of the team. I talked to and I interviewed almost everybody at the company to just get a sense of who the company is and who our customers are and where we want to go and just kind of really immersing myself in the people and the products and everything about the brand. Then from there, once we were able to really use our data to understand our customers and what their challenges are and how they use our product or how – where our product can go, from there, I was really able to craft a vision and tie goals and metrics to that vision and focus because at a start-up, you really can go in so many different directions and be pulled in so many different ways and wear a lot of different hats. It’s really important to have a focus and really dedicate all your time to that. So with everything that’s asked of me, I ask myself, “Does this align with the vision that I’ve set forth?” If it does, I do it and if it doesn’t, I don’t. That’s the only way I can really focus and get things done and when you focus and you know exactly who you’re targeting and how you can help them with your content, your expertise and ultimately your product, your services, at that point, you can really start to make a difference and see an uptick in your results.   Jeff Zelaya: Very true. I mean there are so many folks that are starting to do content marketing but the plan is not in place and if you don’t know what you’re aiming for, you don’t have that vision, chances are you’re not going to hit it. You’re not going to hit the goals that you had in your mind and writing it down and having a strategic plan I think is key. So thank you for giving us that insight on how important having a plan is. Now, with a plan comes a lot of different moving pieces and your team is growing. You’re doing a whole lot of different stuff. How do you manage it all? Is there a system that you have in place to make it easier managing all these different moving parts?   Amanda Nelson: Yeah. So in terms of team, it’s really me and one other marketer right now and he and I are really yin and yang where he’s marketing operations. So I have a lot of the ideas and I curate and create a lot of the content and he’s the one executing on all of it with our marketing automation, our email marketing, our paid media, all of that. So it’s a nice balance back and forth and we work together but as you said, our team is growing. We’re hiring actually. We’re looking for folks, but as part of that adjustments we made and scalability needs to occur as well. So overall, outside of just resources, it’s – a big important piece is the fact that content marketing is not always about new content. You don’t always have to be reinventing the wheel and so one thing that I’ve really taken in these past couple of years of being in the spaces, the idea of a content engine where you have one centralized piece of content, usually a gated piece, like an ebook or a webinar that’s meaty, that has a lot to it and then you break it apart and reuse it and recycle it to make it blog posts, additional ebooks, info graphics, future webinars. There’s so much you could do to kind of chop, slice and dice your content to reuse it. So you’re not always starting from scratch every day. A lot of times, you can find this content already existing in your case studies or in your FAQs or even in emails or on Chatter, on Salesforce, those kinds of things. All this content is already in existence. It just takes somebody to actually find it, curate it, organize it and then serve it up.   Jeff Zelaya: Yes. We can’t be afraid to repurpose content because chances are people maybe haven’t seen that piece of content you’ve been promoting. If you’re able to break it out in a variety of ways whether it’s a slide share or a new ebook or tweets or blog posts, you can make one piece of meaty content go really far and extend the life of that. I think that has been very efficient with your content marketing initiative. So that’s a great advice. Besides repurposing and repacking content, what are some other tactics that you’ve put into your strategy for the new year? What are some new initiatives that maybe you’re trying to execute or experiment with? What are some tactics that you’re implementing in your strategy? Can you walk us through maybe some of your checklists for 2015?   Amanda Nelson: Sure. So 2014 was a year of really ramping up. So we created over 15 ebooks. We did a number of webinars. We have – we blogged every day since the day that I started. So we have all of this content. So now it’s about going back and finding the content that worked and didn’t work and really re-sharing and service back up that content that did well and also keep breathing new life into the content that may not have. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to optimize and rework your existing content. The internet is all about what have you done for me lately and right now versus six months ago. So it’s always about kind of serving something relevant and timely in the moment and as I’ve mentioned, the existing content can really do that. The other thing we’re really working on is qualified leads. So not just looking – bringing in tons of leads from a quantity standpoint. But what is quality? What are the biggest opportunities? That’s really about working with sales and aligning and looking at what we’ve brought in and what we can do with that going forward and how that impacts future content that we create. A lot of the content just because it was top of funnel doesn’t mean it can’t be middle or bottom of the funnel either. What’s really interesting is a lot of our content not only brought in new eyeballs but it brought back the dead. It brought back leads that have gone cold or contacts that just kind of wither away. People started coming out of the woodwork to really be like, “Oh, what is this? This is happening.” It’s really exciting to see and so that means like – that we could take content that we already have and say, “Oh, you were interested in marketing automation. Well now, we have the newcomer’s guide to marketing automation. Check it out.” So really moving the content through the funnel and using it in different ways. I work closely with your sales guys and we call it content selling where it’s about if they need a piece of content, I can even blog about it that day. How can I be responsive and help them? And they also help us by bringing great people to our webinars and telling me the pain points. There’s definitely a give and take and the importance of alignment between the two teams.   Jeff Zelaya: Yes. Working in sales, I’ve seen that happen many times where you have a really good piece of content. You share it with the right prospect and it breathes new life into a deal that you thought was dying and they’re like, “Wow, this is awesome content,” or “I really like some of the ideas that you shared with me,” and again, they are interested in just having a further discussion about how we could partner up. So content definitely could save deals and having the right content or updated content at the right time and making sure the sales team is enabled and has that at their fingertips is very important in this day and age. Speaking – you talked earlier about this year for you in 2015 will be a lot about measuring and looking at what worked and what didn’t work and zoning in on those metrics. What metrics do you speak of Amanda? What are the key performing indicators that you’re looking at as you assess your marketing, your content marketing results and initiatives? What will you be tracking and measuring?   Amanda Nelson: Sure. Well, we look at total inbound leads and marketing qualified leads from that and seeing if the percentage of marketing qualified compared to the total that’s going up. On top of that, we look at cost per lead and cost per acquisition. You want to make sure that again, we’re – there’s a nice balance between what we’re pulling in and what’s actually working. Then in terms of our website and – our website is our leading driver. It’s our biggest salesperson. It’s a leading driver of revenue for us and our website – if we spend more time, more budget on it, what is going to be the payout, obviously we want to take care of that great salesperson that we have, being the website, but – so with the website, we definitely look at the traffic and what’s the main sources and how long are folks staying on the site and what are they doing and what are their – how are they getting there? How are they leaving? Organic traffic is our leading driver of traffic. So that’s huge for us. You want to keep the organic up and determining ways to do that. So those are some of the different metrics we look at. I mean I’m looking at our tracking of our website every day, multiple times a day, and then also reporting to our CEO and our investors every other week about how our performance is going and how we match up to our goals. We just finished our 2015 plan and one of the big things we looked at is, “OK, what are our goals for next year now that we met?” or didn’t meet. These specific goals from 2014 and being nine months into this company I’m learning a lot and figuring out, “OK. What’s the bench mark now that I’ve been here and we’ve been doing this huge initiative?”   Jeff Zelaya: One of the initiatives that I know you’ve executed very well this past year is with guest blogging and thought leadership. I think that’s how I initially started seeing RingLead pop up on my timeline because you guys were getting these awesome thought leaders to post on your blog and of course they were sharing that across their social network. How did – what are your thoughts on the whole thought leadership guest blogging thing?   Amanda Nelson: Yeah. So I started that initiative when I was at Salesforce and working with a team over there. The reason we started the guest blogger program there and the reason I’m doing it at RingLead as well is because I’m a marketer. I’m not an expert at sales or CRM or IT and when you’re talking to an audience that is, there’s a huge disconnect when you’re trying to – the author is not the expert in the topic that they’re blogging about. Not to mention that it’s actually really hard. If I’m never blogging about sales, the only way I feel comfortable doing it is if I’m recapping an event or I interviewed somebody or something like that. I could never speak from the heart about sales because I’ve never done sales. People see right through that and that content is not quality. So when I came over to Salesforce, there was a rallying cry to get sales experts in the room. Not just that but I recognized that those folks were actually the ones generating the most traffic because not only are they experts but they have their own audience and their own folks that they could bring to the table. So the guest blogger program was widely successful at Salesforce. We grew it from about five people to about 150 by the time I left and at RingLead, we started with about the same, about five and in nine months we’re now at 50. It has been really successful for us. So we have guest bloggers covering sales, marketing, data, data quality, IT, CRM, recruiting, different areas that have audiences of ours that are really interested in using CRM marketing, automation data, as best as possible. It has been great. It’s really – we do webinars with them, ebooks. It opens up a whole new world of content you can do with them and it has been really effective in growing our traffic and also obviously being able to blog every day since I’ve been here.   Jeff Zelaya: Yes. What a great advantage. You’ve been able to leverage it really effectively not only in getting awesome content because these are the experts in the field. But you’re also putting content on your site and they’re promoting the heck out of that. Usually they have a big following and a big network of people that align with your target audience. So it’s a win-win across the board, so congrats on really hitting the mark with your guest blogging initiatives. What do you see as the new trend or the – what’s emerging from content marketing? Where do you see this industry going? In 2015 and beyond, what are some of the first thoughts that you get around things that we should be on the lookout for or trends that will really dominate in our space?   Amanda Nelson: Yeah. It’s a good question because content marketing is new but it’s also really popular and so it’s one of those things where the bubble could burst. So I think we all as marketers and even salespeople and other – other departments that are getting into content marketing need to be careful of and really use it to the best of its advantage. I mean we see things on Facebook, all the click bait stuff. I mean there is definitely the dirty part of this and we need to be careful of that. Just focus – I think that if you continue to focus on what it’s all about and that’s delivering helpful quality information to help your audience do their job better, especially in B to B. I mean B to C was a little different. Maybe you’re helping somebody achieve a life goal or something like that. But when you focus on that, you can only do great things. But when you start to think about yourself and your brand and how it’s benefiting you, then you kind of forget where you came from and you go off track. I think the other metrics in data is really crucial in content marketing. We have the ability to in real time, you know, seconds after it launches, see how it’s performing and optimize in real time. The more we can do that as marketers, the better we’re going to be at executing content marketing. I think the other piece is that maybe folks will start to see that it’s not so much about the quantity as it is about the quality. You don’t have to be blogging five or ten times a day just to blog. You should really focus on what your audience needs and being there for them at the right time.   End of Transcript The post Amanda Nelson, Director of Marketing at RingLead appeared first on The B2B Marketing Podcast for Leaders.

Danny Schreiber is a Content Marketer at Zapier. Danny’s a Minnesota native, Creighton alum, the former Managing Editor at the Silicon Prairie News, a Omaha, Nebraska resident and someone that is deeply passionate about startups and business. At the startup, Zapier, Danny creates content focused on teaching people how to use “zaps” to increase productivity & efficiency. His work has been published in TheNextWeb.com, unbounce.com, GrowthHackers.com and of course on the Zapier Blog. Press play below and start listening to Danny share his content marketing  insight with us, on this week’s B2B marketing podcast. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/zapier Beginning of Transcript Danny Schreiber: Hey, thanks for having me Jeff and also thanks for pronouncing Zapier just as it’s Danny Schreiber intended. Jeff Zelaya: I know. Yes, you’re right. I’ve heard some people pronounce it in a lot of different ways. But Zapier makes me happier. So that’s how I tend to remember how to pronounce … Danny Schreiber: You got it. Jeff Zelaya: … the name. So tell me about yourself Danny. What exactly do you do at Zapier? What is Zapier for people that really haven’t heard about the company before? Danny Schreiber: Sure. Really, I actually like to say that if they’re saying it at all, I’m happy. So you can say it Zapier, Zapier, however you say it. I’m good. But Zapier is an easy way to connect the apps that you use, get them talking to each other. Really the best way to think about this is to think about to the apps you use. I think today professionals, 15, 20 apps isn’t uncommon. When I say “app” I really talk about these web apps, the project management tool, the email marketing system that you have or the form software. So let’s say you wanted to get two of those hooked up. like you have a Formstack form on your website and you’re using MailChimp. Natively they might not integrate or you might need a more robust integration than what’s offered. Typically before, you might go look for a developer. But instead this is where Zapier comes in with the self-service platform that within, I’m telling you, five minutes, you can give it a try. Five minutes, you can get this thing set up and have these new email addresses automatically sent over to your campaign – excuse me, campaign monitor. Well, you can do campaign monitor. We actually have about 15 different email marketing systems on Zapier. Mad Mimi is another one, AWeber. So you could take it from this form software, any kind of email marketing system you will have and take that same idea of connecting two apps and look at – we have over 360 apps today. The possibilities become almost limitless. So my job as a content marketing at Zapier is to really pull in people by telling them about how they can solve problems by using apps. Of course Zapier is one of the options that we often bring up in our blog post. But really, it’s about educating people about hey, here are some neat ways to get better at using Gmail or Google Docs. Then on top of that, if you want to go a little bit more advanced or if you have a problem that it doesn’t do itself, you should think about using Zapier. So that’s my main role at Zapier. I also help out with a couple of other items but for the purpose of this podcast really, it’s content marketing. Jeff Zelaya: Yes. Content marketing I think is one of the reasons that you guys have been so successful. I mean of course obviously your product is awesome and I use it and I’m very happy with what it does for me, the time it saves me. But I think another reason is that people love your content. Like I see it spread across social media, across the web. People are sharing a lot of the content you’re producing, the articles, the blog post, the handy guides. I mean you have just tons and tons of content. I want to know Danny like why do you think content is so important for marketers nowadays? How have you see it impact your organization? Danny Schreiber: Well, I think what you just hit on there is gets people talking. I’m not sure if I would be on this podcast today – well, actually I can guarantee. I don’t think you would have me on this podcast today to talk about Zapier, to introduce a new audience to Zapier if it wasn’t for our content. Really that’s why we started content marketing at Zapier. We had the referral or viral program as some companies call it. You can think of Dropbox or invite your friends to Dropbox. You get more space. We have something similar at Zapier. We also have other growth strategies that we’re working on. But we hadn’t yet done what is quite popular today for a number of SaaS companies. You think of Groove or Buffer, KISSmetrics. They’re provided a great blog that wasn’t talking about the company but was talking about problems the customers might face. They were making themselves available by really just dumping knowledge down. If somebody wanted to pick it up, that was very easy to do. Sometimes you have to do an email exchange. But that’s actually why we got into it is because we saw folks around us doing it. We saw that it was really working for them. So to be honest with you, we got to copy what they did well. So KISSmetrics talks about long form content. You find long form content on Zapier. Buffer talks about many of the things you can do with social media. Well, that works great because when you write an article about social media, you find that people often share it on social media. So there has been things that we kind of pull from different places and apply to Zapier and then give it our own personality. At Zapier, we have fun with our product. If you’re inside Zapier and trying to set something up, you get kind of a friendly message back. So we try to make this content friendly, not too staunchy or technical or complicated. But really no matter what level you’re at, beginner to advanced, you will be able to visit the Zapier blog and extract some value from it. Jeff Zelaya: The ideas that the blog post are focused on, where do those come from Danny? What’s your process in generating the ideas? I’m going to create a blog on this topic or I’m going to do an article that focuses on doing these things. Where do those ideas come from for your content creation? Danny Schreiber: Initially, it was really talking about the company itself. So, Zapier started at Startup Weekend three years ago by three cofounders, one of them [0:05:42] [Indiscernible] marketer who worked at a company and had an issue integrating two apps, believe it or not, and that’s where Zapier came about. So for the first year or so, it was about the company. But then when they said, “Let’s create a content marketing strategy,” it started to become about the customers and that’s where we looked first. We looked at the personas of the people that were signing up for Zapier, found that there’s quite a bit of marketers and small business owners, designers and developers and then we also saw that these people liked to do more with less. So if you set up a zap, you get more time back. It’s essentially one of the number one outputs of Zapier is you’re automating something. You get the time back that you would have spent doing that. So productivity was this natural fit for our blog and that’s what we started out doing actually really intently in November of 2013, at which point we said, “We’re going to put out two blog posts a week that are for marketers, that are for small business owners and they have something to do with productivity,” whether that was about productivity apps or here’s a productivity lesson we learned. Then from that, we started to say, “Wow, this article on apps that we did a really in-depth look at how you can use Gmail well, that did really well. What if we tried that with how to use Google Hangouts well?” and that also did well. So then we started to say, I think our audience which is coming to Zapier to connect a lot of apps, I think that they like learning about apps. So we’ve had a lot of app guides. So you started with, “Who is our customer?” and then it went to, “OK. What posts are doing well traffic-wise?” and then on top of that, it kind of goes with our gut. I see that for example that Google Hangouts, I personally have issues with Google Hangouts. So one day I said, “I’m going to research everything that has ever been written about Google Hangouts video and summarize it in one post,” and I’m going to call that the missing guide to Google Hangouts and that has actually been one of our most visited posts since because we’re actually not doing this interview on Google Hangouts. There might be a reason for that. It’s because sometimes it just is buggy. It’s an awesome product and in fact I often use it. But I need answers and sometimes Google didn’t give me that. So that’s why I created this guide, and other people like it. So sometimes the gut works as well. Jeff Zelaya: Yeah, listening to your gut and listening to your customers and being able to keep track of it, measure and analyze and figure out what content should I create based on what we’re succeeding at already. So I think you guys have a great tactic, a great strategy on creating and generating those ideas and I’m always looking forward to the next big idea and the next content piece that you guys are going to be putting out, which makes me wonder. For a startup, how touch was it for you? Because like now you’re I think in the area where people are really looking forward to what is Zapier going to put out next. What’s your next content piece? You have a subscriber base and you have fans and followers. How did you guys go about building that? Because I know in a startup environment, sometimes the starting part could be difficult, right? How is the content marketing for a startup different from the content marketing that you do at an established company? A Fortune 500 already has a brand and recognition. Can you speak on that subject Danny, how it started building up? Danny Schreiber: Yeah. So one piece of content that I haven’t talked too much about, it’s apps. But beyond that, it’s actually reviews of apps. The way we do this is we take a category. Recently we did CRMs. If you actually just search “CRM” on Twitter, you will find that more than half of those tweets are people asking, “What CRM should I use?” and so that’s what we deliver to people. We give them an extensive roundup of all 35 plus CRMs that we have on Zapier and we showed off what was best about all of them and we categorized them. We kind of made this [0:09:36] [Indiscernible] kind of. I think we succeeded in making this CRM landscape less intimidating. How can – if I need a CRM that tracks conversations, what are the CRMs that I should be using? So we tested that out. It worked and we actually are throwing a lot of resources into that. I think that’s what happens in an established company from my perspective is that you’ve tested something. You’ve got it. You see results. You see sign-ups because of that. We see people coming back to that post. We see people referring that post. We’re going to throw resources that hire another marketing person on the team, that’s working with more freelancers, that’s really keeping that as the top priority of the post that we [Indiscernible] this month. In a startup when we were – I would still say Zapier is still very much a startup and we’re testing different things. You fail quite a bit in content and you do that actually gladly because I want to put out something that if I know it doesn’t work, then you know that, I’m not going to dedicate any more resources to that. We’ve had some flops, I will tell you that much. I very much have put seven or eight hours into a post and when it got out there, it got about a tenth of the traffic as I thought it could have or other well-read posts do. So that’s where I see the difference between the startup and the established company. I guess at this point we’re fortunate where we have the ability to also throw some of our marketing budget at kind of testing still as a startup. So we haven’t really put all eggs in one basket and reviews. We’re still testing. Jeff Zelaya: Got it. You can’t be afraid to fail. I think that’s a valuable lesson in doing content marketing for a startup. You have that to your advantage. Danny Schreiber: Sometimes you should be happy you failed because when you’re at – when you know something doesn’t work, then you can get moving on to the next. There’s a great book that we’re kind of basing the next six months around, which is called Traction. It really actually – probably the most relevant to a founder of a startup because it’s trying to coach you through getting traction in order to take the next step, but for our marketing department it’s great. It’s talking about all the different channels you can reach your customers. So for us, it’s really about focusing on the channels that we’ve seen work so far and that means that the test that we run in the past on other channels, like going to a conference or starting up a video series aren’t worth our time right now with the limited resources we have. Jeff Zelaya: Speaking of limited resources, let’s say you have a B to B marketing team. They have limited time, limited resources. Where do they start? How should you focus your content marketing strategy and what are the first things that you should be doing if that’s a scenario that you’re in? Danny Schreiber: It’s a great question. I think there’s a temptation to try a lot of things. That’s actually going back to that traction book. That’s one of the things we talk about there. But you should really start with what you know. For me, I was hired on a little more than a year ago to lead this content marketing strategy at Zapier. I came from a news background where I was interviewing a lot of people every week. I wrote posts that were – articles that were around 700 words sometimes. So that’s what I did. I went and I interviewed people. I presented them as stories on our blog and some of those got traction and I think you asked the question earlier that I didn’t quite answer which is how do you start to kind of spread the word about posts or know that people are interested. There was a lot of leaning on people that were mentioned in the post. So just like – I’m going to share this interview with myself that you’re doing. I was expecting and hoping that people that I would interview would also share it. A good example of that might be when I interviewed the founder of Pocket, Pocket kind of shared it and that’s great because Pocket is this app that collects stories that people want to read. When they share an article of yours, it’s almost like this endorsement that you got to read it. You want to read it. So we saw some great traction on that early on where people got excited about that article in particular. The same goes for some of the other articles that we had that mentioned people. Of course I haven’t talked about that. That article has to be really good. So I put in maybe more time than I would on some articles and really had people check it over and make sure that it was – when it got out there, that Pocket would be happy with it, because they aren’t just going to go and share any article. They want to share what makes them look good, what makes – tells the whole Pocket story and that was something that I tried to deliver on. I think they were happy with it. So they shared it. Jeff Zelaya: Wow, congratulations on that feature. What are the publications that you tend to follow that you are a subscriber of and you’re always going back to that blog post or magazine or podcast because you love the kind of marketing insight that they share on that particular outlet? Danny Schreiber: I kind of have a smorgasbord of outlets that comes to me through following newsletters or Twitter. So I subscribe to Andrew Chen and what he puts out. I get Greg Ciotti. I think it’s Ciotti or Ciotti. I need to ask him how to pronounce that, his newsletter. I get a newsletter from Sean Blanda. I follow Belle Beth Cooper. She’s a freelancer of ours at Zapier and these folks put out great links to resources that they have read or they did themselves. Andrew Chen writes fantastic posts about marketing that he has either learned from somewhere else or learned him or has a guest poster. OkDork is another great resource that I’ve kept following and have enrolled in a couple of other courses that they’ve offered. So I kind of pick up what I think – if I read something, I likely will subscribe to the newsletter. In fact that’s what I want people to do with Zapier is subscriber to our newsletter. So I return the favor. I return the interest and see how they do their newsletters and read their content. Jeff Zelaya: OK. I just – while you were saying that, I just opened up some tabs and I subscribed to each of the ones that you named. So I will be following those guys. Thanks for the insight Danny! Danny Schreiber: Yeah. Jeff Zelaya: What are the companies, the brands that you would say are doing content marketing really well, that you look up to, that you say, “Hey, these guys are really innovative. They’ve had a great team. They’re posting out really awesome content”? Are there brands that come to mind that stand out from above and beyond the rest? Danny Schreiber: For me that is looking at brands that – earlier I mentioned we’re mimicking, copying, taking tips from people that are doing this long form content well. So a few of the companies that I would say that we’ve modeled ourselves after, that we’ve looked to for inspiration, you think of – I mentioned Greg Ciotti. He’s at Help Scout. Help Scout has this fantastic blog only once a week but every one of those blog posts is golden. Intercom, that blog is unique because there’s so much internal knowledge shared there. What’s also neat is that a cofounder writes several blog posts there. So you know that you’re getting this information from a cofounder which honestly is pretty tough to maintain after a while. Wade Foster who had cofounded Zapier, he wrote a majority of the blogs the first couple of years. Then after I got hired, he started to hand more of the reins over to me and focused his duties mainly on his CEO role. So it’s really neat to have a company blog that has somebody continuing to participate in it. Another one that is just like that is Groove. Groove has this blog where they have this focus. OK? We’re going to get to $100,000. We’re going to let you know everything that happens along the way. There, you know what you’re getting. You can sign up for that. You can follow the story. They really pull you in. I don’t know what they’re going to do after they hit 100K. In fact they might have already hit – I think last time I checked, they were like hitting 94. But I think they’ve already sucked me in enough that I want to kind of – going to want to keep following that story. Unbounce is another fantastic one. Again, you have a cofounder there who really blogged quiet a bit early on – well, two cofounders blogged quite a bit early on. They pull you in with this fantastic content. They hire this team of writers and they continue to do so on the site. In fact I mentioned Wade earlier. Wade writes all of our really remote team posts today, which is this great series we have that looks at how we work as a remote team. Those posts are really some of our best read posts because they’re just this great deep insight into OK, here’s how we hired as a remote team. Here’s how we hold a company retreat as a remote team. Here are the tools we use as a remote team and he provides a great perspective there. I know I’ve mentioned Buffer before but Buffer is also one that I keep on top of. How can you not? They seem to be everywhere. They have a fantastic PR strategy with their transparency, which is also a really neat internal company guideline that they follow. But I really admire what they do over there. Jeff Zelaya: Yes, I agree. I think Buffer along with Groove, those two examples, what makes them innovative is how transparent they are. I know Buffer really releases the salaries of their team, how they hire, how they’re structured, even recently how your fee, your Buffer monthly fee, how it’s allocated to different parts of their company, how much of it goes to salary, how much of it goes to profit, et cetera. So it’s really innovative to me how companies are taking that transparency and going at it all out, similar to the Groove story, how you’re getting to be part of their journey as they grow their revenue to 100K and it really brings you in, like you said. So those are great examples. Thanks for sharing that. What do you see as the next emerging trend, right? So transparency was one that we talked about and long form content and just really being helpful and useful with your content. What are some of the other trends that you think will emerge in 2015 and beyond? What’s next for content marketing? Danny Schreiber: I’m really starting to see I think a lot of content marketers themselves under the name of their company posting to the LinkedIn publishing platform of medium publishing platform with the same content. So syndication isn’t just happening on the fast company site or on the next web but it’s happening on people’s own personal channels. We’re going to I think see more of that as these blogging platforms start to carry a brand of themselves. I mean I never anticipated that a company that I consider almost – you look at it. They’re providing a similar service to WordPress. They’re allowing you to publish your thoughts online but way different approach. I mean you want the medium brand. It doesn’t quiet ensure quality but it certainly delivers on it and that’s something that’s neat. So I think when you take a post that you published first on your company blog, a week later you’re starting to see it disseminated elsewhere. Another part that is pretty much widespread now is images imposed are so much tailored to let’s make sure people can share that on Twitter or let’s make sure that looks good on Facebook. To me almost sometimes it’s done a bit too much. I’ve seen posts that have – every picture has somebody’s logo on it. I think that can be – it’s not – to me as a reader, I don’t enjoy that. But I understand. It’s because that if somebody shares that, they’re for sure going to get that logo out there. I personally don’t think that pays off as much as I think it does. I think it kind of becomes more annoying. But at the same time, I’m sure they’ve also felt like we’ve got great content. People are sharing it. But they’re forgetting about us. Let’s get ourselves more out there. So images within blog posts, the way people share posts today is no longer just a link. It’s really you’re able to give a teaser and so readily making people – giving people the tools to make a teaser is something that I see as a trend. Jeff Zelaya: You’re on track. I think people are now so visual and it’s like we want to give them that visual impact, but we don’t want our brand to get lost in the mix. So how do I balance the two? It’s something that marketers I think are still struggling to figure out. They want to do that without crossing the line and being annoying as you said. They’re being a little bit too much or too self-serving. So it’s always that balancing act of how do I help my audience, but how do I make sure that they know about me and my brand, so I could get known and get revenue and grow my company. So very interesting how that will unfold in the upcoming year. I’m excited to see what trends will emerge as well. So any last words? Danny Schreiber: Yeah. I mean I would definitely say that no matter what kind of strategy you take, what wins at the end of the day is a really great story and that makes the content compelling. So no matter the email newsletter list you have or how many people you tweet to or send the email to that says, “Hey, can you please help share?” when it comes down to it, compelling content gets surfaced. You get to see that by platforms like Prismatic or on – what’s the – the other one Zite. When you start to see your articles take off there, you know you’re doing something right because they want to deliver the best post to their audience. So I think that’s something to strive for is to strive for syndication in what I would call the best content places. If you post as well on GrowthHackers.com for example, you know you’ve written an extensive guide. You get on Hacker News. It might just be because it’s an opinionated piece and it’s not necessarily the best written piece. But look for places. Look to place content in places that give this stamp of, “This is worth your time,” and I think that’s a good way to measure that your content marketing strategy is also worth your time.   End of Transcript     The post Danny Schreiber, Content Marketer at Zapier appeared first on The B2B Marketing Podcast for Leaders.

Tara Meehan is the Head of Social Content at Guardian Life Insurance. Tara oversees Social Content at Guardian Life Insurance, a Fortune 300 company founded in 1860 and one of the largest mutual life insurance companies in the United States. In our interview Tara shares insights on B2B content marketing, sales enablement, social selling, social selling training and makes predictions on how content marketing will evolve in 2015. Press play below and start listening to Tara share her unique insights on this week’s B2B marketing podcast. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/guardian-life-insurance Tara Meehan Beginning of Transcript Tara Meehan: As it happens a lot especially in social media content strategy, I actually started as a copywriter, worked really alongside you. I remember you worked at MediaWhiz. I was there for several years. I was their copywriter there working on a lot of cross-channel campaigns, which is a really good intro into being able to craft certain brand messaging for different audiences. I really love that. I really got a kick out of doing that. Really my role into social, my intro into social on the business side really started there. I kind of morphed a little bit from copywriting into the social initiatives, mainly on the community management side. So I was working on their Facebook presence, their LinkedIn, their Twitter presence. It was really neat for me to see correlation between how writing a brand message as a copywriter can really translate into content on the social side. So when that ended – unfortunately when that ended, it actually opened up a new opportunity for me and that got me into contact with folks over at Guardian which is where I’ve been now for the past three years. In terms of the Guardian story, we’ve been around for about 154 years. So I think we’ve been around a pretty good amount of time. Our mutual fund company specializing the focus on life insurance, disability insurance and retirement planning and we – in terms of the content strategy which I know we will talk about a littler later on, it kind of morphs into what Guardian is about. We don’t really focus on this traditional need-based planning that a lot of life companies really focus on. We’re more about planning for the unexpected and that could be the not-so-great unexpected and it could be the really good unexpected. So it has been fun for me to go from a direct marketing and performance marketing space to what is really a traditional company that’s really exploring some really cool things in a digital world.   Jeff Zelaya: Going into that role, it’s great for the company because they’re going to benefit from your insight, your marketing knowledge and that wisdom that you’ve gained firsthand working in the industry. So I think they have definitely a great person to help them evolve because every company needs to evolve and expand especially when it comes to the marketing, the way that they do marketing. I know that has been one of the things that you’re leading there and you’re helping them with. I see more importance being given to content. Across other insurance companies in – across a country, is that something that’s happening at Guardian Life? Are you now placing more emphasis on content? Is it something that’s important to the organization?   Tara Meehan: Oh, yeah. No, it’s hugely important and we’re coming from a place at least in my role where we’re focused on helping our financial representatives, our FRs. So if I use FRs interchangeably, that’s what I’m talking about. Helping our financial representatives really be able to tell their brand story, their entrepreneurial story as well as the Guardian story to their prospects and their future clients. We really focus on two ways in doing that from a content perspective. One, it’s – I’m going to use the term traditional even though this is not exactly a traditional space, digital marketing, but the traditional way of going about it which would be sharing content on LinkedIn or Facebook. We do that two ways. Right now mainly through third party initiatives but we’re excited about our plans in 2015 to have more of our story, our own story come across. So we’re working on that, which I’m excited about. But another way we really focus in on content is from really a prospecting side. People don’t necessarily think of content as a LinkedIn profile. But for us, that’s a very important part of things. When you think about what happens when you share a piece of content on LinkedIn, right? You share something and you’re putting your face out there. So it’s very important for our FRs to understand that when they share something, ultimately one of the main goals that we want our content to do is not just get a conversion, not just get a click. But a click back to their profile. So we don’t want a profile that is just basically John Doe financial representative blank. We want our FRs to be able to tell a story with their profile, why they love what they do, why they got into what they do, how they can bring value to their clients. So it’s a content play as is – many people think of it in terms of sharing. But it’s also a content play with regards to profile optimization. Those two things are hugely important.   Jeff Zelaya: It’s an interesting approach and I think the right one, sales enablement, making sure that all your sales reps are prepared and know how to promote and market themselves, because in – many insurance companies, they’re the ones on the front line and they’re their own brand. But they’re representing a bigger brand. So it’s the marriage of those two things. I think your approach has been very effective. But another kind of issue that is in the sector of insurance that – it’s regulated just like any other financial company. There are things that you could do and you cannot do and other social media managers I spoke to, I know they’ve had their own challenges in creating the right campaign and executing on that campaign. Did you face any of those challenges? If you did, could you share tips with other people that are going to be in that same position, starting to bring new ideas to a traditional organization?   Tara Meehan: It’s a very highly regulated industry. Insurance is all about compliance and that does present its fair share of challenges. But I think that the real key for us – and I know the real key has been for me and the team that I’m on is really having an open and continuous dialog with compliance. We’re very fortunate here that our compliance department is very understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish for our field force. They understand that in this day and age, it’s extremely important to be able to leverage social and leverage it effectively to tell those stories from a profile perspective, from a content and sharing perspective. So we’re always mindful of their need to have us dot the Is and cross the Ts and do everything from a compliance and legal perspective that’s expected and needed. But they also know that we do have to have content that is not a snore-fest. You don’t want to fall asleep reading stuff that we share, reading stuff that we create, whether it’s a visual or a video or an article. It needs to have some personality. There needs to be some reason for people to read or watch or view an info graphic. So they’re very understanding about that from an in-house compliance perspective. Then we’re also – you have a very strong partnership with our compliance and relationship-building vendor. They’re – I mean in socialware and they’re very well-known in this space for helping financial reps be able to again tell their stories in a compliant manner. But also in a way that is going to help build relationships. So we’ve been very fortunate with our in-house compliance team and our partnership with our vendor in helping our force feel empowered and feel like they can do things on social without having the compliance police knocking on their door. We’ve been fortunate in that regard. I know that’s not always the case everywhere. But storytelling is really the key for us and we’ve been fortunate to be able to do that.   Jeff Zelaya: In general in the B2B space, what do you think are the benefits of using social media for content marketing and is it an important channel to leverage for you and for many others?   Tara Meehan: It’s very unique for us because we’re kind of like a hybrid. We do B to B and B to C. So from my role – I will break it down for you in terms of the B to B part. That would really be more of our internal client base and that would be our financial reps, our marketing directors, our recruiting directors, helping them understand the value of content in meeting their objectives of getting in front of more people, for soft recruiting on a Facebook business page, for building out company culture from a local marketing perspective on Facebook or LinkedIn. Right now, we haven’t opened up Twitter yet. That is the plan for 2015. But again in the compliance-regulated world, baby steps, right? So we’ve really kind of focused on LinkedIn and Facebook exclusively from a social perspective. So that’s the B to B side. But the B to C side is again providing that content for our reps to be able to share their networks and then build those relationships with consumers whether it be in the legal market or the medical market or the real estate market. Each FR has their own targeted market for their own segment that they work with. So B to B helping our internal folks with messaging, B to C being able to have content that resonates with the public in a way that is not so heavy-handed and definitely not product-driven. We don’t want high level terms that you would be scratching your head. We want to keep things as simple as humanly possible, so that people understand – not that – oh, go buy life insurance. But why – how can life insurance help you even pay for college or telling stories that resonate with the public in a simplified way.   Jeff Zelaya: One of the places I want to focus our conversation on is in the sales enablement because I think that’s something you’ve been doing really well and you’re leading that charge at Guardian Life. So how closely does marketing work with sales? What are some of the things besides helping them with LinkedIn profiles? Even the act of doing that, like can you walk us through your strategy and how you enable the salespeople with content, with the right advice so they could do a good job of marketing themselves and the company?   Tara Meehan: Our sales force that we work with are all there for us. So we have – we’ve been fortunate enough to have a really great partnership with LinkedIn in introducing LinkedIn Sales Navigator to our field force which has been a game-changer for us. It has really made some really great results for us from a sales perspective and just from a growth perspective with regard to even recruiting as a way to bring up ours in because we have – we’re the only mutual fund company with Sales Navigator as an approved resource for prospecting. So what we do is understanding that financial reps may not be as savvy with certain things as we would hope them to be. Training is very, very important. So again, it’s the same. We have that open dialog with compliance. We have an open dialog, an open communication with our reps. So I give trainings every week. We have a little series that we have here called Tuesdays with Tara Meehan where I have trainings with the field, with four different areas for them to really focus in on. One is profile optimization, why it’s important to have the profile that really tells a story, as we’ve discussed at length during this call here. Next WebEx would be on building your network, how to really have a solid network to really pull from, to be able to leverage those warm leads instead of cold calling which is just – we’re trying to get FRs away from as much as humanly possible. Next WebEx would be how to prospect on LinkedIn, how to use the search functionality, how to really leverage all the filters available in Sales Navigator, the importance of InMail. Really go step by step and provide these trainings over and over again because the turnover rates and the introduction of new FRs, it’s always happening. People are always new, always coming in to Guardian. So we always want to have these trainings pretty much on autopilot for them to be able to access. Then the fourth WebEx would be all about the importance of sharing content and social listening and how listening to your network can really open up opportunities for you to use from a prospecting and social selling perspective. Then anyone who has a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account, they get their own selective trainings directly from LinkedIn. So we’re really, really happy with the progress that we’ve been making in terms of our strategy with social.   Jeff Zelaya: I mean you guys are well ahead of the curve. I’m using LinkedIn Sales Navigator now as well and I love it. It is very effective if you use it in the right way. I’m glad that you guys are just not providing a tool, but you’re providing all the elements of a great training program to make sure the tool is being used effectively.   Tara Meehan: Yeah. I mean you have to. If people don’t know how to use it, it’s kind of like going to the gym and thinking, “Oh, I have a gym membership, so I’m going to lose 20 pounds.” Well, if you don’t know how to use the bike, you don’t know how to use the treadmill, you’re not going to really lose the weight. So it’s really putting it into action and that’s what the training is about.   Jeff Zelaya: If it was that easy, I would be super skinny. But it’s not that easy. It requires some work, right? And speaking of losing pounds and getting fit and measuring – kind of being able to measure the success …   Tara Meehan: Oh, nice segue.   Jeff Zelaya: Yeah.   Tara Meehan: Very good.   Jeff Zelaya: How do you do that with your role and the content that you’re producing and how you’re helping the sales team out? What are the benchmarks that you’re trying to reach and the metrics that you’re focused on hitting?   Tara Meehan: OK. Well, I mean that’s always the open question, right? Metrics is always one of those things where you’re always testing the waters and see what really works. For us, profile views for LinkedIn are really important. We like to correlate sharing with an increasing profile view and we’ve seen that with social selling indexes that have gone up from one month to the next. Why is that? Well, one of the reasons is people are sharing more. People are sharing the right things. People are sharing things that really enhance their story and tell their story effectively. When you do that, that leads back to profile views, so increases in views are one thing that we like to kind of look at. In terms of likes, it’s not something that we obsess about. I mean I know personally it’s always fun when you share something and you get likes. You kind of have that Sally Field moment like, “Oh, you like me,” right? But there’s only so much that you can get from a like if it doesn’t convert into something. So likes are good, but we kind of use that as a measuring stick just to show that people are seeing your content. We like to rely on – we actually direct FRs to the “Who has viewed your update?” section of LinkedIn to kind of just see that they are being seen. That’s one thing that we like to show. Shares are important. Obviously they’re one of the more important metrics because it increases reach. So if you share something and then their network sees it, that’s opening up many, many more opportunities and many doors for FRs to follow up with potential prospects and clients. But the thing that I actually really like to see more than anything, and this might be my own personal opinion or comment. When I’m tracking metrics using the social platform that we have, if I see that content being commented on a lot and I will see that a financial rep isn’t responding to a comment, I will pick up the phone and I will say, “Hey, John Doe. I saw that piece of content you shared a couple of weeks ago was getting a lot of comments. But you really weren’t engaging in any conversations. That’s a perfect opportunity for you to get past the digital realm and nervousness of what I can and can’t do on social and really start a personal dialog, a personal conversation.” I give a financial representative a whole lot of credit. I could never sell anything. I couldn’t sell my way out of a paper bag. But what they’re able to do is really sell a product that has such an emotional tie to it and so if something is being commented on, it’s a perfect opportunity to go and pick up the phone or send an email or respond to a comment on LinkedIn or Facebook and say, “Hey, thanks so much for engaging in this. I would love to sit down with you and have a cup of coffee and talk about this further,” or whatever it is. The comments for me is such an important part of taking what can be a very – taking the digital and making it much more personal.   Jeff Zelaya: I love that because likes are important. They make us feel nice. Comments, getting comments on stuff is good. If you get it shared, it’s great. But the thing that really matters are the conversations.   Tara Meehan: Right.   Jeff Zelaya: Because that is going to turn into business. That’s going to turn into that deeper relationship and the reason why you want to be social on social media. So that’s great. These are amazing insights. And besides socialware and LinkedIn navigator, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, are there any other tools that you use that are part of your toolbox in carrying out your strategy?   Tara Meehan: Yeah. Well, in terms of benders for content, we have – we’re working on an agreement with a provider. I can’t really go into details on that and the regulation compliance, all that. Sometimes I feel like I’m working at the CIA. But I can tell you that we are very excited in the direction that our content strategy is going. We really are focused much more on content that is proprietary in nature, that tells our unique story as opposed to just kind of leveraging third party stuff, just to fill a quota of content. That has been fine. But for us, it’s a tricky thing because you can have an article from a third party vendor that hits 90 percent of what we’re trying to convey and then that little 10 percent can send the message in a completely different direction that has nothing to do with what we do. So to be able to tell our own story to our own creation of content is something we’re very, very excited about and to incorporate this new vendor, but also in-house creatives who have also done a great job in helping us convey messaging internally. We’re really looking forward to where content is going for us in 2015.   Jeff Zelaya: And speaking of 2015, what are some of your predictions in general for content marketing? What do you think will happen in the upcoming year? Any new trends that you see on the horizon for content marketing?   Tara Meehan: Yeah. It’s funny. Every time I go on social or I go on Mashable or some like hub online, I’m seeing 2015 as the year of content marketing, which is cool. It’s great. I’m excited to be a part of. But sometimes I just think that the term marketing kind of gets lost in the mix. I think it’s maybe kind of a misnomer especially for the industry that I’m in. When it comes to marketing – and I’ve said this over and over again with regard to what we do at Guardian – it’s not about marketing because I think financial reps sometimes can lose sight of what marketing really is. For us it’s about telling stories and making our brands make sense to a public that may not really know why financial services or insurance services are a good thing, why they matter, why they’re important in their everyday lives. So telling stories that can convey that message in a way that’s easy for them to understand and tells our unique story is just something that I think we will really, really focus on. I think it’s the direction that many companies are going to in an out of the financial services segment. But really, I think that the big trend that’s going to happen in 2015. At least I hope this happens is really seeing the overlap between social selling and content relationship building as a way of marrying those two together to really get results. I really do think at least from our perspective when you’re sharing content, it has to lead back to something else. If you have a profile in LinkedIn, if you have a Facebook business page, if you have a Twitter, you need to be able to have your profile, your page convey exactly what you’re trying to convey when you share something. So to marry those two together I think is going to be a hugely important thing for 2015 and moving forward in the years to come.   End of Transcript   The post Tara Meehan, Head of Social Content at Guardian Life Insurance appeared first on The B2B Marketing Podcast for Leaders.

Rachel Balik Rachel Balik is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Demandbase. Based in San Francisco, Demandbase is a B2B marketing technology company focused on advertising and is a leader in B2B  target account marketing. At Demandbase, Rachel Balik manages the content marketing program and leverages a decade of experience in journalism, public relations and B2B technology to create and deliver meaningful and relevant content to prospects and customers. Rachel is a popular author and her articles have been published by MarketingLand.com, Forbes, VentureBeat, Slate and many others. You can follow her on twitter @wickedrb Press play below and listen Rachel drop some content marketing wisdom right on top of your head: The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/demand-base-podcast Beginning of Transcript Rachel Balik: Sure. I’m Rachel Balik. I’m Senior Manager of Content Marketing here at DemandBase. We have a great marketing team. So we’re a B to B marketing cloud, which means we really believe in marketing and it’s very exciting to work on that team. I get to work on a demand gen campaign. I get to work with our communications people and I work with products marketing to get the message out about everything that we’re doing. An exciting time to be a B to B marketer I think.   Jeff Zelaya: Yes. I know you’ve been in the field for a while and some people are just starting to get a hang of this whole content marketing thing. But why do you think it’s important? Why do businesses need to focus on content marketing?   Rachel Balik: Well, so I think most of us in B to B know that buying habits have changed, right? So now with digital content and just the digital era in general, as much as 67 to 90 percent of the buying cycle is taking place online. So what that means is that old model where we knew who we were talking to and salespeople to get involved right away has kind of disappeared. That means our buyers and our prospects are doing a lot of research on us online, when we don’t really know about it. So if we don’t provide them with material they’re looking for in advance, the likelihood is they will find it from one of our competitors. So I think that content is really – in a sense, I consider it a virtual salesperson for that long B to B buying cycle when people are doing research.   Jeff Zelaya: So you want to be visible. You want to make sure people have access to this information because chances are they’re going to consume a lot of that on their own. If your content is not out there and the competitor’s is, then they’re more likely to work with a competitor than they are with you. Great. I have this imaginary scenario for you Rachel. You’re a content marketer, the head of content marketing for a brand new startup out of Silicon Valley. It’s your first day today. Where do you start?   Rachel Balik: I think that there are a few things that happened and not necessarily from a tactical standpoint, from an information gathering standpoint. I want to talk to the top stakeholders at the company and let’s imagine this company is certainly going to have a CEO. But they probably have someone who’s doing private or technology. They may have someone who’s doing the other areas of marketing. I certainly want to talk to the salespeople. I really want to hear from all those people, not only what they think is the most significant thing that the company is doing and their description of the products. But also I want to hear what they’re hearing from customers, from prospects, from the market, right? So as a content marketing, my goal is to – I want to sort of blog post my site. Get on the friend zone with our customers and our prospects. So how do I make friends with this audience and how do I create content that supports an appealing brand as we start to educate the market? Not right about our products right away but about who we are and what the space is.   Jeff Zelaya: Yeah, that’s a great place to start Rachel. I think most of the best content marketers that I’ve see, one of the characteristic that they share in common is that they’re really good listeners. By listening, you will learn a lot and then are able to provide information that makes sense for that target audience. What are some other characteristics of top content marketers in your opinion?   Rachel Balik: I don’t know if this is a specific characteristic, but I think one thing is interesting about – content marketing is you will hear, “We need to do a tweet and we need to have a social media strategy. We need to have a blog and we need to have a webinar,” and people are throwing out these names of things and I think that really the characteristics of content marketers are pulling yourself out of that tactical arena and being really strategic. So I love talking to people and saying, “OK. What is the business goal? Who is the audience? After we do this piece of content, what will have changed?” and then being able to come back and saying, “You know what? I don’t think we need a blog. We need a video,” or “I don’t think we need an info graphic. We need a tweet,” or “Hey, this is so much bigger than one tweet. Let’s do a whole blog series,” or “This is so much bigger than us. Let’s actually start interviewing our customers and get them involved.” So being able to assess not necessarily what we’re putting out or the piece of content, but really how the message and the brand identity fits into the overall strategy.   Jeff Zelaya: Great advice. Too many content marketers treat content marketing like checkers. It’s a game of chess. Follow Rachel’s advice. Be strategic. Have a purpose in mind. Analyze your data and figure out what your next move will be of your content, so some great insight from you Rachel. You have tons of it. I’ve been following you now, @WickedRB, and you’re just full of awesome tidbits of information and you write for some of the leading publications in our field and I’m very curious. How do you stay ahead of the content marketing curve? This is a fast moving industry but you seem to manage, knowing kind of what’s upcoming. I’m very curious on how you do that.   Rachel Balik: I think it’s looking beyond just content marketing, right? We’ve got to be thinking out of the box. So I do – I have a circle of friends that are content marketers and I always catch up with them and see what they’re doing, events like Content Marketing World and other events. Not even just geared to content marketers but geared to B to B marketing. I like to go there, hear about what everyone is doing. Obviously read stuff that’s relevant on the web, but also making sure that I don’t get too stuck in my own field, so talking to people who are more in the technology area. Talking to like I said the sales team is really important and learning about what products and strategies are out there, because it’s like I said, you don’t want to be in that box of I just got a [0:06:10] [Inaudible] blog post. You really want to say, “I have a message and I will do whatever it takes to get it to the right people,” and sometimes that means learning about all the other great technology that’s evolving in the Bay Area and obviously all over the world.   Jeff Zelaya: Listen to Rachel. If you’re stuck behind a computer all day, that’s not going to help you become a topnotch content marketer. Get behind from your computer. Go to these events. Meet people. Shake hands. Kiss babies. Build your network and that will add value to your content marketing and help to keep you informed of how the industry is changing. So that’s the advice that I have to follow. I have to make sure to do that better as well. So thank you for that Rachel. I know DemandBase is producing great content on this topic and so are you personally. I see a lot of talk about this trend from many of the leaders in this industry and in our space. Content personalization, it’s a very hot topic recently. How does a company even get started doing something like that?   Rachel Balik: So I would give the prologue that content personalization is data and measurement, right? I think a lot of people are trying to do this and they’re taking guesses at who they need to personalize for or who might be on their website now and there’s a lot of opinions, not that there’s anything wrong with opinions, about what the content should say or what types you should have. I mean obviously data-driven is a huge topic in the days. But especially in content personalization, it’s important because just being perfectly frank, you’re not going to do everything all at once. So I think data is the prologue and I say that the first step really is prioritization. You know, depending on how big your team is, you may say this quarter, we really need to make a push against all of our financial services prospects. So we will start our personalization by just creating personalization content and personalized content for them. Then as we start to get a handle there, here’s how we’re going to roll out in Q2, Q3, Q4. So I think the data informs the message and the strategy and then the next step is prioritization. I like to focus on prioritization first because I think – as cliché as it sounds, personalization feels like an overwhelming topic for a lot of people. It’s not overwhelming. It’s extremely manageable once you set out your priorities. Then from there, you can start thinking about, “OK. Who do I talk to, to get the right insight on this segment? How can I support with content?”   Jeff Zelaya: So for anyone that’s listening and is thinking about venturing into content personalization, remember data comes first. Without data, content personalization is not going to be effective. Even when you begin down the path of personalizing content, pick your priorities. Make sure that you focus on the right areas first and if you do that effectively, then you can unroll it to other parts of your marketing programs. You take a very overwhelming or – where people think of as an overwhelming venture and you can make it very easy to manage if you take the right steps. I know some of our marketers, they’re doing a lot of content curation these days and they’re trying to figure out, “Who are the thought leaders? Let’s share what they’re writing and share what they’re sharing.” How do you execute on content curation for yourself and what are your tips for organizations that might be looking into doing some of this curation stuff?   Rachel Balik: I think it’s narrowing down but not getting too narrow. So you don’t to just focus on one specific thing just related to your products. But also you really want to say, “What is our company message and what would we like to be a thought leader in?” So it’s not just all marketing, right? I mean I do read a lot of stuff on all marketing. But from a content curation perspective and when I share out with people who are looking to us, it’s going to be something specific that supports our message. But also being open enough to say, “Yeah, we’re having an intelligent conversation.” There are tons of companies out there doing it and they don’t need you just regurgitating stuff. They want to see – people reading your content want to see an intelligent pattern emerging from your content curation.   Jeff Zelaya: So provide that pattern. Provide that context and your curation will excel and stand out from just being one of those parrot accounts that is just retweeting and sharing other content without really giving it much thought. So have a strategy for curation and you will get better results as Rachel mentioned. How important is search engine optimization for your content marketing strategy Rachel? Is it something that you put a primary focus on? Do you prioritize SEO as you’re writing your articles in your content marketing?   Rachel Balik: I think if you’ve established your target audience right and you’re doing your SEO right, there should be an overlap there. So I’ve worked with companies where I say, “Show me the SEO list and I will assess if these are the most important words. Let’s measure these against our content strategy. And is our content strategy including topics that overlap with our most important work?” because it should. Not necessarily all that really long tail stuff or being phrased exactly the right way. But if we have a list of – SEO is – you know, as we get into the semantic web, it’s really just what are you trying to be known for and your content should support the message of what you’re trying to be known for. So I wouldn’t say that for me it’s a primary focus when it comes to writing titles. I believe in quality writing above all. But we do include SEO in our metadata and try to map out the overall goal of our website to the content that we’re putting out there.   Jeff Zelaya: That’s a great way to look at it. Quality writing comes first. SEO is equally important but don’t force it. You want to make sure that it complements your writing. If you pick the right target audience, and have some really awesome content, then it should work to your advantage. I know DemandBase is a huge innovator in the content marketing realm, doing some really forward-thinking stuff. What are some other tech companies that you would consider when it comes to content marketing?   Rachel Balik: Well, I think it’s interesting. I think that there are two ways to look at innovative content marketing especially when it comes to B to B. New Relic comes up a lot. They just have really entertaining, great content. They’ve had a huge amount of success with promoted tweets and paid search and things like that. I think that there’s another angle to take which is not only creating entertaining content. But actually making sure that content gets to the right person. So DocuSign has really done an outstanding job of actually building a website that makes sure that the right content gets to the right audience among their business prospects. I think that’s – when I’m thinking about innovation especially [0:13:06] [Indiscernible] makes me so sad and I talk about it all the time. But I think 70 percent of content doesn’t get read. So to me, you can be as innovative with great ideas and really cool content as you want to be. If nobody reads it, it doesn’t really matter. So to me the most exciting innovation is happening with companies that are figuring out how to deliver their content to the right people. So DocuSign is an example of that. Brocade [Phonetic] is doing that. Concur has done a great job of breaking out content for their different business segments. It’s going to be something that really continues to grow and continues to be innovative in different ways. I think that advertising as a tool for promoting content is going to continue to grow. There are companies. Well, DemandBase is doing it. Bizo was doing it. Really thinking about how do you get advertising to the right person at the right time. I mean we segment differently but really using advertising throughout the entire life cycle I think will be a really meaningful way to use content to actually get pipeline opportunities and closed deals. So I think that will be interesting.   End of Transcript       The post Rachel Balik, Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Demandbase appeared first on The B2B Marketing Podcast for Leaders.