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Hello, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a return guest this time: Darrell Alfonso, a global marketing operations manager at Amazon Web Services, martech instructor and speaker.
I interviewed Darrell back in 2020, about marketing automation and what makes it a must-have for modern marketers. Obviously, many things have changed in the past one and a half years. So I invited Darrell back, and we're going to have a little chat about marketing automation and some of his changes in both professional and personal life.
In this episode: What are the emerging B2B marketing automation trends and technologies during the pandemic? What are data unification platforms? How can marketers use CDP (customer data platform)? CDP suggestions and what makes them different for B2B marketing automation. How to achieve the delicate balance of standardization and personalization? What is the role of data in hyper-personalization and how to use it? Two strategies to personalize for people with multiple job functions and roles? How to use artificial intelligence and algorithms to identify customers' intentions? Quotes from the episode:"One thing that's important to explain is that the goal is to take the data from different sources. So your CRM, customer database, marketing automation platform, and advertising tools may be used."
"All the cool things that you want to do in marketing take a lot of work. And it takes a lot of things that aren't that glamorous. But the result is worth it."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected].
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. It's time for my monthly solo episode. Today I want to talk about the fundamentals of product positioning.
It's not a popular topic, but marketers need to understand what must be done to position their products. My product positioning tips will help you with content marketing, copywriting for social media, understanding your products, and overall marketing communications.
In this episode: What is product positioning? What is the difference between product positioning and the messaging framework? How to position the products? Quotes from the episode:"Segmentation can get complicated quickly when you constantly add new product lines or serve different sets of customers. When your company is growing, you offer more products. Over time your segmentation would get messy. You will need to reevaluate your segmentations. "
"The purpose of a name is to evoke a visual in a person's mind. Therefore naming or not naming your product is a strategic decision. However, you should always have a short and differentiated description to explain your product."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Fehlende Folgen?
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A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More.
Today I have a special guest - Kayla Graham. Kayla is the Operations Manager, wears multiple hats and is responsible for a company called Content Callout. She also does a lot of day-to-day internal operations, covering external-facing operations at the same time.
Our key focus in this episode is on startups, marketing and sales alignment, and how to optimize it for startup companies.
In this episode: Who should startups with limited budgets decide who to hire first? When building a marketing team, is it better to outsource or have it in-house? How to build brand awareness with a limited budget? What are the must-have tools for marketing and sales to achieve business goals? What makes marketing and sales alignment difficult in a startup? How can marketing and sales achieve long-term collaboration or process? How to plan, prioritize and de-prioritize tasks? What are the most common sales and marketing alignment challenges, and how should startups address them? How to integrate necessary tools? Quotes from the episode:"When we're doing B2B, people don't want to connect with the machine. They still want to connect with a story. Yes, they want a solution that works. Still, ultimately they want to connect with the story behind that and the authenticity. "
"I think that marketing, especially in a small company, is split up over so many tasks that it becomes hard to support their own internal sales team when a lot of their efforts are focused on external factors."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam!
Meet my guest, Vidhya Ravi, a UX Design Researcher at Cash App who transitioned into UX research from marketing several years ago.
In this episode, Vidhya is going to share how her diverse background in marketing and strategy helps her shape perspective and work in UX research.
In this episode: What UX stands for and what do UX designers do at Cash App? How to work with the product development team to develop features and user requirements? How to bring personal experience to the front and the whole product life cycle? What are the most common and effective approaches to design? How does a group of UX designers work together and share the insights with the product team? What tools do UX designers use to drive the brainstorming? Best practices for marketing people to work with and get to know UX designers? How can marketing and UX designers improve their collaboration? What are the key design elements sales and marketing people should be aware of? Quotes from the episode:"We spend time using different research methodologies to better understand our customers and our users. So that includes an understanding of them, attitudinally, understanding their mindset, understanding their behaviors. "
"One thing that marketers can do that would be really helpful is building relationships with people on the UX side. Even if they're not working together, understand what they do, their work, the design challenges they're facing. Because they have this in-depth understanding often driven by UX research of the customer currently using the product and many things regarding value proposition or what features are working well for customers. "
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More.
My guest is a sales professional, Ryan Staley, the CEO and the founder of Whale Boss. Ryan is a fantastic and high-performance salesperson, he helps founders and revenue leaders implement 7 and 8 Figure sales operating systems in less than 3 months.
Today, we talk about the essential characteristics of effective salespeople.
In this episode: What are the tips and tricks to capturing big clients? How to understand your customer and focus on the company's needs? Cold calling tips: how to reach out to the prospects you don't know and get them interested in having a conversation? In what ways sales engagement was changed by pandemic? How can salespeople adapt to the new circumstances? What is the best way to start a conversation with a prospect? How can B2B marketers better support sales? What are the characteristics of effective salespeople? What are some of the salespeople's pet peeves that marketers should be aware of? Quotes from the episode:"Cold calling could fit in a lot of different buckets. That could be social interaction that can be picking up a phone, that could be texting, that could be emailed, that could be direct messaging. And so there's a lot of different channels that you do to make that a reality."
"One of the cool things that you could do is try and connect with that person emotionally about something, every single call you have with them. What I look at is a bit like layering in finding a little more about the person, a little deeper, every single communication touchpoint that you talk to them live."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. We are going to talk about innovation today. My guest today is Carla Johnson. She is a marketing and innovation strategist, keynote speaker, and author of ten books.
In her latest book RE:Think Innovation, Carla breaks down the exact process that the world's most prolific innovators use to consistently come up with great ideas.
In this episode: Definition of innovation. How is innovation different from creativity? What is perpetual innovation? What are the five steps of innovation? In which step of innovation do people spend the most time and why? What are the different types of innovators? How can people regularly work on enhancing their innovation skills? What is the best way to encourage innovation in B2B business? Quotes from the episode:"I define innovation as the ability to consistently come up with new, great and reliable ideas. It sounds like a very simple definition, but each of those words is important."
"Our attention gets narrowed into these very small tasks or digital devices all day long. Still, creative, especially innovative people, are highly observant of the world around them."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected].
You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Hi, a big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Today I answer the question that we often don't discuss openly. How to break the bad news in business with a proper presentation deck.
A young marketing manager asked me how to share the results of paid social media campaigns with her management that didn't go well and put a deck together. So here are three approaches to use to help you maintain that respect you have as a subject matter expert.
In this episode: No Sugar Coating approach Everything is Relative approach Mixed News approach Presentation flow tips Key elements of a good presentation Quotes from the episode:"You need to explain the logic surrounding the initiative's benefit and tell the backstory. But when you are talking about the outcomes, you should also explain the root causes of the outcomes."
"There are usually bits of good news and bad news to pull from. Can you identify three good news examples and three bad news examples? I guarantee you can do that."
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You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I had fantastic conversation with Steve Kearns, Head of Blog and Social Media Marketing for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. He shares a lot of his experience, including lessons learned in a blog migration and I captured a big chunk of it in Part 1. And now hereβs Part 2 and we're going to talk about social media marketing and also blog writing and more so stick around.
Pam Didner: So what social media channels are you using in addition to LinkedIn, of course?
Steve Kearns: We've had a, a bit of like a story journey in terms of figuring out what social media platforms we should leverage, especially organically. Because my team handles organic social media; we're currently across LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. So those are really the four platforms that we want to take advantage of.
Pam Didner: Facebook is not one of your options. Can you tell us why?
Steve Kearns: Yeah. And this is, this is a conversation that we've gone back and forth on internally quite a bit. So, there's two things here. The first is looking at the context of different platforms and what those platforms are going to do for us. So right now, our channel mix, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube are all vastly different content platforms.
Pam Didner: Completely. I'm actually on all platforms and many people would tell me, βPam, you should focus on one,β but the thing is, I'm a consultant. And the B2B marketing consultant, I need to know old platforms. So I test the waters all the time. And, uh, I also know that doing the video platform is very different than say writing blog.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. Yeah, so you know, one of the things that, that we've, we've tried to really focus in on is making sure that we can communicate in very different contexts in each of, on each of those platforms--so video on YouTube, obviously. We do a lot of graphic content on Instagram. That's really top of funnel. Uh, on Twitter, we have an opportunity to have a little more of a conversation with our audiences and, and have that news style programming. And then on LinkedIn, you know, that's really our bread and butter channel when it comes to showing that we can be a best in class use case for marketing on the platform.
So, you know, in terms of your question, Pam around, why not FaceBook, I think there's so much overlap on Facebook between the use cases on Twitter, the use cases on LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera, that we didn't feel that we needed to add another platform to the mix. Um, you know, there was also a, a kind of a conscious decision around, we want to make sure we're investing primarily in LinkedIn.
Like Facebook, Facebook, Google, Twitter, I mean, they're all key advertising competitors of ours. We want to make sure that--not so much that we don't see the value in marketing on Facebook; we absolutely do. It's more of, βokay, my team has 40 hours a week to spend on doing social marketing.
Pam Didner: Yeah, you want to prioritize.
Steve Kearns: I want them to be spending 30 of those hours thinking about, uh, you know, how we market on LinkedIn.
Pam Didner: On these four channels.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, I would say one of the, the interesting things about my journey at LinkedIn is looking at how much more robust LinkedIn and our LinkedIn Pages experience has been over the last five years. So when I first joined the social marketing team five years ago, we were primarily using Twitter because our platform didn't have the capabilities that now has to be as dynamic, you know, in terms of capability to have events, streaming capabilities--you know, just the, the page manager experience to be able to have those two-way conversations as a brand. Now you can do all of that on LinkedIn.
So it gives us a really clear mandate to say, we now have all of the tools we need to build a brand on LinkedIn first. And you know, now my team is taking advantage of that, which is a really, I would say, positive, exciting transition that we've made away from doing marketing first on another platform. So now we're doing marketing first on our own platform. And that for obvious reasons makes a ton of sense.
Pam Didner: That, strategically, that makes a lot of sense to me, give me that on the corporate world for a long time. And so another question I would like to ask you, given that the four channels that you mentioned--LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube--do you have a set frequency in terms of publishing for each channel?
Steve Kearns: Yes. So for each channel, each has its own set of frequencies. So I would say on Instagram, it's about three times a week. Uh, Twitter is I believe about once a day and then LinkedIn is going to be two to three times a day.
YouTube is more, as needed, as we have new video series that come out in a future state, we would get much more advanced with YouTube where there's actually a ton of SEO value you can drive with YouTube.
Pam Didner: This is just another monster that you have to master.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. Like there could be a whole full-time job dedicated to the sort of suggested like the linking and back-linking you can do and YouTube videos, like next, your content suggestions, et cetera. We don't have the bandwidth to do that currently, so we're more uploading. I'm kind of saying, here you go. But I think that's definitely a future goal of mine, if the team continues to grow.
Pam Didner: So you touched this a little bit and I have to come to that realization myself, as well, the copywriting or even script writingβI call script writing for YouTube, especially on the video--they are all very, very different. You cannot do one-size-fits-all type up a publishing anymore. Even you write one blog post the way that you write copy needs to be very different for different channels.
So talk to us in terms of, uh, how do you manage that in terms of like for one blog that you have to write a different copies for different channel, how do you manage that? Itβs so massive from time to time. Given that I do it myself and I know how much work that is. Is it any tips and tricks to make that easy?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, I will say it's incredibly time-consuming. I mean, I can talk about how I've done it in the past, that was scalable and then how we do it now as a much larger company. So, you know, what we've done in the past is I think even going into this role many, many years ago, it was well-known that you need to play into the context of each social platform when you're creating content. So you don't want to, I mean, you're physically unable to write an essay on Twitter. You can't, you, you know, there's a character limit on LinkedIn.
There's context limitations on Instagram--you know, Instagram is primarily a visual platform. So what I focused on in the past is taking the, I would say most valuable components of let's say a blog post that we have to offer--so if that's things like compelling statistics, compelling quotes, several bullet points of information in terms of key takeaways--and then it's taking those, um, and then kind of fitting them into the character counts or character limits for each platform. So that's, if you are a one-person show, what I would typically do is I would take like a paragraph of the most valuable information. I'd start with that text paragraph.
Pam Didner: Pare it down.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. And then you start highlighting parts, pieces, and parts of it. And then that is a message that ends up across your different platforms. It's not the same exact message, but it is very similar. So now what we do at LinkedIn and we're, we're fortunate that we were able to have access to the resources and the size of the team that we do have to be able to, to go a layer deeper is that we will actually take those--you know, it's the same concept in theory, or you take those tidbits and pieces of information from the blog that are most valuable--but what we're doing now is we're actually going and we're working with our design teams, our copywriting teams to create bespoke assets for each channel.
Pam Didner: That is wonderful. Isn't nice to actually have budget? (laughs)
Steve Kearns: Oh yes. Well that was going to be my follow-up as I was like, it's very expensive to do that. Um, you know, even like, and we have pretty big budgets at LinkedIn when I see the amount of hours it takes to design something specifically for, you know, if you look at a design statement of work, you'll have previously used to just be okay, your blog assets and your infographic, and then you would drop the link into social. Now, if you look at one of my campaigns, you haveβ
Pam Didner: You customize everything.
Steve Kearns: You have, you know, LinkedIn asset 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, same with Twitter asset 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Instagram. And then your bill is, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.
Pam Didner: Yeah (laughs). You can do on a smaller budget, but still it's very, time-consuming.
Steve Kearns: Absolutely. So it's really looking at, and I think what we're really excited by now is we have that ability to take, uh, I'll give you a really quick example: so we have a content piece that's live on our blog right now that looks at the engagement trends of Generation Z. So we've recognized that Gen Z is one of the largest buying cohorts or will be one of the largest buying cohorts in B2B moving forward, because they're entering the workforce. They're now going to have influence on buying decisions.
Pam Didner: In 10 years, they're going to be on management staff.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. So the question is how do you market to them? How do they like to be marketed to in a way that's different than Millennials? And the answer is they're very different than Millennials in terms of their value set--. What they believe. So we have all of that data, you know, that's proprietary data to LinkedIn--their behaviors on the platform, how brands are messaging to them, are they doing it successfully? Whatnot.
So we've taken all of that data. We've put that across our blog. And then I'll just give you the LinkedIn example, we've then taken that data or snippets of that data and we've launched flipbooks. So it's literally like PDFs that you can flip through, like a book on LinkedIn. They're directly uploaded into the feed. And, you know, instead of just saying, βHey, go to the blog to read all about this,β people are actually getting that experience in the social feed--which, you know, again, if they're only spending three seconds looking at it or giving three seconds of their attention, which would even be generous in this kind of climate, they're still able to understand what we're talking about. They develop an understanding of what it is we care about, or we're trying to say at LinkedIn, and, you know, it deepens the relationship with the brand. It deepens their understanding of our campaign, our message, even if they don't get the chance to go to the blog.
So we hope that we're providing like unique kind of content consumption experiences on our blog, on our social media handles. And then within our social media handles on each platform specifically.
Pam Didner: So that leads me to my next question: how do you measure your team's success?
Steve Kearns: There's a couple of core KPIs we look at. The first bucket I would categorize these into is around engagement. The second bucket we'd categorize these into is around performance. So let's talk a little bit about the engagement bucket first. So we're fortunate that at LinkedIn, even though we are a B2B marketing team, we market on behalf of a very large brand. So one of our core KPIs is making sure that we're inspiring the kind of trust, the kind of brand love, the kind of bonds that people need to have with a social media brand the size of LinkedIn. We know that like that that's good Brand Marketing 101 is to build those trusted relationships with our audiences. So what is the KPI that we track there? Um, we're looking primarily at our engagement data. So we like to benchmark against number one, industry standards--so B2B marketing industry standards-- then also looking at like competitive benchmarks.
So what is the benchmark? If we can source that data? Our key competitors like Google and Facebook, Twitter, whatnot. Yep. And then it's looking at very granular metrics, like for our blog time on page, page views, sessions, unique sessions, unique page views; on our social platforms is looking at engagement rate. All of those to us are indicators, you know, even though you can't put a direct revenue goal against any of those metricsβ
Pam Didner: Thatβs the thing I want you- I'm so happy you brought that up. So you cannot put in a direct revenue goal associated with it. And I'm so happy you acknowledge it because a lot of times the content marketing effort, unless you have the backend integrated deeply--like for example, somebody comment on something and then you can link back to your CRM and show that this is a LinkedIn customers and then the salespeople can actually go talk to them or whatnot; unless you have a backing integrated like that. It's almost impossible to track the content marketing's effort directly linked to a revenue generation.
So if you cannot link it directly to it, and a lot of the data that you are tracking, it's kind of like a secondary data, how do you communicate that with the management?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, so it's, um, it's a good question. And it's an ongoing conversation that we are having with our leadership. It's really a lot of education and I imagine this is easier at a large brand than it is at a smaller brand.
Pam Didner: Yes, very true by the way.
Steve Kearns: Just by the nature of the resources we have access to. And I think the, the long-term thinking that we have to have as a market leader versus being focused on those short term KPIs, um, which are like, hey, if I need to make payroll the next month and I need to, you know, meet the demands of my customersβ
Pam Didner: You have to bring the leads.
Steve Kearns: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, luckily we've gotten to a stage where that is equally as important, but, um, you know, we also need to make sure that we're sustaining trust and, you know, bonds with our customers.
Pam Didner: I will say your key objective, if you will--and correct me, if I'm totally off--is really you focused on top of funnel. You tried to build that brand awareness. You tried to build that trust that the B2B companies that can associate with LinkedIn. To me itβs the brand equity and also the trust and the thought leadership. Itβs not necessarily focusing on the bottom of the funnel, if you will.
Steve Kearns: Absolutely. In terms of the way we communicate that to our leadership. It's again, that education journey around what is the importance of brand? and what is the importance of building these connective bonds and this connective tissue with our customers? Because at the end of the day, you have to--and this is the beauty of being a content marketer--is you should be a good storyteller if you're a content marketer, is that you need to go and tell a story to your leadership team to say, βeven though this is not giving you a lead--and you know, there is some content and there's some content marketing efforts. And I'll talk about that second bucket in a second that are delivering leads and generating demand, but for this engagement bucket, when someone picks up the phone and calls your customer, one of your sales reps, calls your customer, are they going to pick up? are they going to trust what they're hearing from your brand? And if the answer is no, like chances are, you don't have a very strong brand and you don't have a very strong reputation with your customers. And a lot of what that, you know, a lot of how you establish that trust, that reputation, those, you know, those connective bonds is through some of this top of funnel.
So, you know, to relate that back to the metrics we're looking at, goes back to that, that old phrase and I'll probably butcher it, but it's like if a tree falls in the forest and you know, no, one's around to hear it does it really make a sound? Yeah, we can publish posts all day--we have the resources, we have the people-- but if we're not getting the engagement?
Pam Didner: It doesn't matter.
Steve Kearns: Yeah, it doesn't matter. So we're just wasting our time. We're spinning our wheels and we're adding more noise into an already crowded social media landscape. So, what we've done in in the past couple of years is really look at how do we actually reduce our publishing cadence so that we can put more energy behind one or two posts a day that are going to really resonate. Um, because you know, I don't have to explain the network effect of social media to anybody, I'm sure, who's listeningβ
Pam Didner: Quality over quantity.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. In the same way that it's really hard to get someone to answer the phone or to book a meeting with someone, it's also really hard to get someone to engage on social media and say, you know, especially when your cohort of, of, uh, of, of target audience is marketers; We're curmudgeonly people as marketers are trying to likeβ
Pam Didner: (laughs) Itβs very hard to market to us!
Steve Kearns: That's our world. And, what we try to tell our stakeholders too, is like, look for someone to stop what they're doing and to comment, or to add value and kind of create this two-way conversation with the brand, that is just as valuable in some way, shape or form as them picking up the phone or the answering the phone call and then, you know, further engaging or responding to an email from a rep because again, it's them taking their time and them electing to say, βHey, this struck a chord with me and I am going to engage with the brand.β
And over time, you know, again, everybody in B2B marketing knows about the seven touch points it takesβ
Pam Didner: Yeah, itβs a long play, a long play.
Steve Kearns: Yup. And especially when you look at SaaS marketing-- ads marketing is a little bit more cyclical and a little bit more immediate--but in a lot of B2B marketing, the buying cycles are so long that you do need to create that long-term play.
Pam Didner: I do agree. So I know that there is a LinkedIn Sales Solutions. Do you work closely with them?
Steve Kearns: Yes we do. So we actually used to be organized in conjunction with them, as well. So my previous role before I stepped into this role was leading blog and social marketing on behalf of our marketing solutions business and our sales solutions business. So I know that that side of the business very well, as well.
Pam Didner: So do you provide content to them or you are primarily just a marketing solution? Do they actually try to take advantage of some of the content that you created?
Steve Kearns: So we're primarily focused on creating content for our core audience, which are going to be marketers and our core revenue stream, which is going to be marketing solutions, but you know what we've done in the past and what we continue to do is, you know, we meet with them pretty regularly to figure out what are those cross crossover stories that we can tell? So for example, one of the stories that we've found a lot of pickup with is the storytelling around diversity, equity and inclusion. So, you know, we have very different worlds or revenue streams at LinkedIn.
We have our talent solutions business, which also encompasses our learning solutions business. When we said from a B2B perspective at LinkedIn, let's think about equity and let's think about diversity, equity and inclusion as a topic--as a business topic is something that we want to invest in more heavily and invest in content creation on behalf of--the talent story is very different from the sales and marketing story.
Pam Didner: 100% agree. It's because recruiter is a completely different persona if you will, than just sales and marketing.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. So that's where we found a lot of pickup, you know, in terms of crossover stories. The sales and marketing conversation for DE&I is actually very similar because, you know, then it focuses on your practices. So, you know, it goes beyond hiring and it looks at what are inclusive sales practices? inclusive language you could leverage on sales calls? How does that translate to marketing? Uh, you know, what does that mean for marketing creative? In the B2B space, how do you work equity into the buying cycle and the buying process to make sure that you are not alienating people because your organization is kind of not up to snuff when it comes to really being progressive in terms of looking at making equity a priority?
So we've partnered with them on, you know, a number of different research pieces, core narratives, uh, to make sure that we're saying, βHey, we understand that sales and marketing sit in a very similar wheelhouse-- they all, they also diverged quite a bitβbut we want to make sure that if there are stories that do have that crossover that we tell them in a, in a cohesive makes sense.
Pam Didner: Makes sense. So I actually have two personal questions I would like to ask you. Obviously, in terms of career development, you have a fairly solid career path, right. Um, uh, Viacom to Sony to actually LinkedIn. Do you have any advice for young and aspiring marketing professionals?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say, do the things you say you're going to do. It's very simple, but you'd be surprised--you know, this is specifically for folks kind of just getting started or wanting to break into marketing--you'd be surprised how few people do that.
Pam Didner: Don't be a talker. Be a doer. And keep your promise.
Steve Kearns: Right. Exactly. Because if you look at one of the phrases that we use at LinkedIn is βtrust is consistency over time.β So I think that applies to business that applies to your career. And, you know, when you think about like, I'll give you the example of the, the blog migration which we, we talked about earlier, that was a project that was passed over probably several times until they gave it to me. And they gave it to me because they knew that even if it was going to be stressful, I had a track record at LinkedIn to do the things that I said I was going to do on the timelines I said, I was going to do, them.
Pam Didner: People know you will get that done.
Steve Kearns: Exactly. And that is worth its weight in gold. That is why, you know, if people move on in their careers, they're going to call you to hire you. They're going to consider you for projects and promotions. And it's really simple advice. Don't over-commit yourself and be sure to follow through on your commitments.
Pam Didner: I love that. I absolutely loved that. That's also one of the advice I do. I mean, it's for me to be independent consultant, right and for clients to continuously come to me for advice, same thing: I have to, I have to deliver what I said. I'm going to deliver. This is not going to work. So, yeah.
And uh, the other question I would like to ask you is, so what show are you binge-watching right now. And what do you recommend it?
Steve Kearns: Yeah. So I am actually on the final episode of βSuccession.β
Pam Didner: (gasps) You know what, Bryan Collins, who I interviewed earlier mentioned βSuccession.β as well. My son got me into it. The writing is fantastic. I mean, they swear like a drunken sailor and, uh, but the writing is incredibly snappy and short. The conversation is so short and you somehow have to really pay attention and listen to it. Would you agree?
Steve Kearns: Oh absolutely. And for, and for those of us in business, I think it's just, uh, it's, it's a really fun show to watch because, you know, we're fortunate at LinkedIn that, that's not how we work (Pam laughs) in any way, shape or form, but you know, it's like that old boys' club corporation of years past. It's really good television.
Pam Didner: Yeah, I think so too. I think how they shot the scenes and it's incredible. I love it too, but I, I really, I hate every single one of them. They are awful people, but just the way they interact with each other, the writing, and also how they shot the whole film, that really, really got me into it.
Steve Kearns: Well, it's, it's interesting, Pam, you mentioned that because I've done a little bit of reading--and this goes back to kind of storytelling and in the importance of storytelling and how many things you have to think about--is that they've actually designed the show through set design, costume design, their scripts, whatnot to intentionally make those characters, unlikable, to make their lives seem awful. You know, even though they have all this money and access to all this power, their wardrobes, aren't very, you know, exciting or colorful. They're the homes they live in aren't super decorated, or they don't feel homey and familial. And you know, all of that is supposed to signal to the audience that, you know, βHey, it's not actually that great being this wealthy, this power. " So it's just interesting, the like levers they've pulled to get that message across.
Pam Didner: And get that experience. And also the visual cues, you know, to actually help us to make that connection in our mind in addition to what they said.
Steve its wonderful, wonderful talking to you. You have so much to share. And I mean, I enjoy every single guest, but I enjoyed this episode, uh, substantially more because I was a content marketer and I was doing the global role for a long period of time. So everything that you share with me just resonates with me. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and insight. Itβs wonderful, wonderful to have you.
Steve Kearns: Thank you for having. So he's great to have these conversations and connect with other really brilliant B2B marketers. So really appreciate your time and for having me on.
Pam Didner: Awesome.
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I had a great time talking to Steve Kearns, Head of Blog And Social Media for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Our conversation lasted well over an hour, so I split it into several episodes. Part 1 explored how to consolidate country-specific blog sites into a global one. If you are working on global content marketing, you should definitely check it out. Part 2 is about social media marketing and how he goes about doing it.
In this bonus episode, Steve shares how his team evaluates internal and external blog submissions and he also creates content that will rank higher on SEO, and more. Letβs get started.
Pam Didner: How do you manage your writing staff? Are they in-house or outsourced? And do you have any suggestions to the listeners in terms of how to manage the writing staff for enterprises and also for small businesses?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I'll give you a quick overview as to how my team is structured. So I'm focused on leading the strategy kind of cross-functional relationships dot-connecting across, you know, the blog function, social media marketing function, and the web content marketing function. And then within my team, we have dedicated subject matter experts for each of those channels, so to speak. So I have a blog editor-in-chief whose sole job is to focus on running the day-to-day and really setting the vision for the topics we're going to talk about--the content strategy on the blog specifically.
So that is her name's Tequia Burt and she's been working in the B2B marketing space. She's incredible. Incredible. Um, so Tequia is now focused full-time on, uh, delivering sort of that day-to-day operations, but also content strategy and vision for the blog. And she works with a number of different partners across our business, both internally to source internal submissions --so where you'll have different stakeholders across the business, submitting content to her saying, βHey, I want to write about X, Y, and Z. Is this a fit for the blog?β And we've actually pre-empted those submissions with what we're calling a style guide, because otherwise you, you get into a situation where the tail is wagging the dog with stakeholder submissions. We say, βHey, here are the six things--six is an arbitrary number--but here are the six things that we talk about. And here are the six things that our audience wants to hear about. Here's a breakdown of what our audience demographics look like. Here's who visits the blog. Here are the here's the traffic data, here is the volume of subscribers we have access toβ just so we give our partners a full picture of what it is theyβre writing for, who it is they're speaking to et cetera, to make sure that we're actually getting productive submissions. So that's one lens.
Pam Didner: The submission is that external submission or a combination of internal and external submissions?
Steve Kearns: A little bit of both, I would say more toward internal, but that can also account for external as well. So really anything that's coming through other marketers in our organization or folks externally, that's going to go through that like style guide or submissionesque process where we inform folks who are writing for the blog. βHey, this is what we're looking for. This is what good looks like, provide them examples, give them like image guidelinesβ; just like make it a really easy experience for them to be able to submit something that's optimized for the blog.
And then I would say the other lens that we look at is Tequia works specifically with an agency to produce all of our SEO-driven content. So, you know, we, you know, again are working with, with experts in the B2B marketing field to look at what are the keywords that our business wants to go after? And then also, you know, what topics among our target audience have the highest search volume?
So it's kind of triangulating between those two topics to figure out well, the other 50% of our blog content is going to be focused specifically on making sure we're ranking in Google effectively. Um, you know, one of the things when I first took over the blog that I was shocked by was that we weren't actually ranking for some things that we really should be ranking for, like on page one. So things like, um, like βhow to market on LinkedIn?β
Pam Didner: Yeah, you should own that (laughs)
Steve Kearns: Exactly. So that was one of the mandates as we went into the migration, we said, well, part of the problem is that we've created ten different content pieces about how to market on LinkedIn that are all diluting the search volume and the search traffic. So what we need to actually start doing, and this is something that I say over and over and over again, to, to our cross-functional stakeholders is you need to take one blog post that you turn into like a power page and you update that periodically, so you continue to remind Google that that is the page that deserves the authority, and that becomes your primary page for which you funnel the majority of your traffic.
You can always link them off to sub pages, to microsites, to webinars, to, to advertising platform directly, but it's, again, consolidating that information, updating that information regularly and, um, you know, really making sure that we're, we're giving the search engine, the roadmap to prioritize our content effectively. So that is the other 50% of the content is focused on that like more. search engine optimization-focused content.
Pam Didner: So let me summarize very quickly. It sounds like your whole editorial in terms of managing your content there are two buckets, if you will. One is on internal, external submission, obviously that needs to align with the four pillars and 21 topics. And then the other one is you really, really honing on some of the things that say LinkedIn Marketing Solution well need to own, or some of the content that from your perspective, that really needs to rank on the first page of Google. And for that, you will be very, very specific and, um, you customize the content. Granted is still very much relevant to users' needs, but you will write a specifically for SEO, but the writing that kind of posts is you'll have to hone in in terms of SEO optimized type of content.
Another thing I would like to ask specifically is in terms of the updating and refreshing the blog post, given that you have so many blog posts right over thousands of them, how do you manage that? How do you determine which one to refresh and update and to do you look, what kind of data do you look at?
Steve Kearns: Yeah. So we've just, we've actually just started our like refresh and SEO optimization workflow, um, because we wanted to do the migration first and then once we had the infrastructure in place, we said, okay, let's turn our attention to SEO. So the direction that I gave my team was--and this is a lot of guidance that, that came from, from our agency partners, as well as like--well, let's focus on the stuff that's on fire right now. So what is on fire posts from 2016 or 2017 that talk about how to advertise on LinkedIn. That is where the majority of our search traffic is going to, and they show outdated screenshots, they talk about products that don't exist anymore, a complete mess. So we wanted to make sure that we dealt with those posts first.
So in this first wave of optimizations, which you'll actually see re-publishing across our blog in the next couple of months, you're going to be seeing a lot of posts that focused on how to advertise on LinkedIn, uh, posts that are focused on key search terms like demand generation, lead generation, content marketing, social media marketing. Etc. And those are going to be us taking our highest traffic posts and bringing them into the modern age. That is top priority because you know, again, you have to look at like, what is the most critical thing to prioritize. Then once we get past that wave of posts and there's probably say top, top priority, about a hundred posts, you know, secondary priority, maybe 250 out of all of them.
Pam Didner: That makes a lot of sense to me too. I mean, it's in general, you really follow that 90-10 rule or 20-80 rule, like 3000, 10% of them. Yeah. How many of them? Yeah.
Steve Kearns: And then you can get to a point where, you know, right now we're being reactive, but then we're going to move into a phase where we become proactive. So once we get to a place where our highest performing content, you know, over X number of page views is all recent, i.e.has been updated in 2021 or 2022, then we can move to, okay, you know, it's like similar to what we talked about of our, um, you know, topic tagging structure on the blog, you know, looking at specific pain points and then looking at specific advertising products and creating a power page for each of those needs.
Pam Didner: When you say power page, can you be a little bit specific? Is that mean that you actually had the landing page of its own or a power is still a blog page, but it's a long form. How do you define that?
Steve Kearns: Yeah, so the latter, definitely. You hit the nail on the head, Pam. Really just, it's a longer blog post that's going to be updated periodically. So that's like a phrase we use at LinkedIn, but I'm glad you asked me to define it because that could totally be, be confusing for someone who doesn't work in the context of, of the LinkedIn corporation.
So, you know, we really look at these long form blog posts that we're going to be updating periodically time over time--usually it's going to be on a quarterly or a bi-annual basis. And you know, what we want to do there is we want to make sure that every single time someone is searching for a B2B marketing keyword or a B2B marketing pain point or objective, or if they're searching for one of our products specifically--if they don't necessarily know that you know what their objective is, but they know they want to use LinkedIn sponsored content--in either of those unique instances, they're going to have one microsite page they land on, and one blog post that they land on. So that you, again, you know, are like, uh, coalescing that organic search traffic around one page on the microsite one page on the blog. And what that allows us to also do is say, okay, maybe that's only a hundred pages and we have to make sure that those 100 pages are near perfect.
Pam Didner: They are solid. Yeah.
Steve Kearns: And we have to make sure that the reporting and tracking is right on those pages. We have to make sure that they're updated consistently and that's a much easier charter for my team and for cross-functional teams than, okay you have 6,000 blog posts that are sort of updated.
Pam Didner: Yeah, you are fantastic. I love it. Very, very useful. And you go down to kind of like the detail part of it, to tell people how to do that. I think that's very critical. A lot of people tend to focus on high level, but really the B2B marketers or people who listen to my channels, they kind of want to know the know-hows.
Steve Kearns: Right. 'cause I, you know, a lot of the folks I imagine are probably sitting there and, and, you know, in a similar position that I would be in to say, βokay, you've just been tasked with doing this thing. So how do I do it? How do you, what do you think about what are the dependencies?β
Pam Didner: Very good. Thatβs a wrap! Iβm so glad for Steve to share his knowledge and insights of managing global content. It is not easy. I hope you enjoy the 10-minute bonus episode. Again, if you havenβt checked out part 1 itβs about global marketing through and through. Look for Part 2 about LinkedIn Marketing Solutionβs social media outreach. I highly recommend having a listen. Take care. Bye!
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Hello, from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Steve Kearns, Head of Blog and Social Media Marketing for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions.
Today's episode is about scaling global business with a centralized content strategy. We had such a great conversation while recording the show, so I decided to break it into two parts. So, if you want to scale your content across regions, stay tuned for Part 2, to hear more of the business nuggets.
In this episode: How does LinkedIn make money? How can a brand consolidate several regional marketing blogs to a global marketing solution destination. Why should a business centralize global content? What does the centralized content strategy look like? How to balance global efforts with content specifically tailored for cultural and language differences? What is the right way to do the migration and what are the important steps to make it efficient and successful? How to perform a proper content audit? How to level centralized content strategy with SEO? What is the role of a local content team in regional initiatives? How to use content hub? What content metrics to use and track content performance? Quotes from the episode:"One of the challenges we have, especially at a large company, is that when we migrate from one platform to another, that then throws off the tracking on everything. You essentially lose visibility for a given time."
"We tended to give priority to the visual appearance, the user experience of the blog, because at the end of the day if that's a mess, it doesn't matter what we're tracking."
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You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Hi, a big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. This episode is rather special. Itβs episode 200, and I canβt believe that I have published 200 episodes of the B2B Marketing & More podcast. All without any sponsorshipsβ¦ If you are a regular listener, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I donβt always hear from you, but I know you are out there working hard. Keep up the good work.
Speaking of keeping up the good work, some of you reached out to me in January and asked me if I have any recommendations on how to ensure new job success. So, in today's episode, I share three things that you must-do if you start a new job.
In this episode: How to be opened minded and remain curious. Why it's important to set up as many 1:1's as possible and how to do that. How to understand AND use processes, workflows, and dashboards. Quotes from the episode:"When you meet, introduce yourself, have a list of questions to ask them. Have them share their challenges and issues, and then you can see what you can do for them."
"There isnβt a huge difference between a new job and an existing job. What matters is how you view your job and how you go about your day. Your attitude counts."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Hi, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest today is Bryan Collins. He was a full-time copywriter at Sage, and now he's a nonfiction writer, and host and director of Become a Writer Today podcast.
Today, we talk about copywriting, keywords, technology and how all those elements influence content marketing and modern business writing.
In this episode: How to strive to be a better copywriter if you cannot afford to hire someone? Which website should the small business owners or anybody looking for good copywriters go to? How to fit different content formats into your content marketing strategy, and why does it matter? Where does SEO fit into the writing process and modern business writing? What prep work needs to be done before someone starts writing? What is the role of Artificial intelligence in content writing, and what are the experiences with the tools. How to create content that will stand out or breakthrough the crowd? Which approach is better for writers, focus on one channel or have that omnipresence on multiple channels? How well should digital marketers and writers know SEO? What are some of the KPIs to measure the success of a copywriter or content? How to use lead measure and lag measure to analyze your goals? Quotes from the episode:"Even if AI could produce a great article for you, it's not going to tell you where it fits in the customer journey and all the supplementary content or the call to action. So that's where hopefully you fit in, or I fit in. "
"Marrying copywriting with SEO is a match made in heaven because you can see exactly what people are searching for and the real words they use and put that into your copy, which every copywriter should do. "
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Hello from Portland, Oregon. For my first episode of 2022, I want to do something slightly different. I invited my team to be part of the podcast and the video. Yay!
Meet Gretchen Kilby, she's a podcast editor and Iva Ignjatovic, my social media manager. Both of them are the invisible hands that put my podcast together. Today we talk about our content creation process, and how to start a B2B podcast. Gretchen and Iva, welcome. Glad to have you!
In this episode: What are the essentials for starting a B2B podcast? How to choose a podcast format? How to get a sound quality? What is a strategic process before starting a podcast? How to find a good podcast editor? What are the B2B podcast branding basics? How to do podcast rebranding? How to maintain quality for listeners and for SEO? Quotes from the episode:"And a big thing I will say is that not everybody can edit content. It's a skill that takes a lot of time. Also, I've seen many relationships break up because it wasn't clear either what the editor could do and was capable of or what the host wanted. So I think that's an important conversation to have." - Gretchen Kilby
"We looked at data. I don't get the sense that people often look at data. They go with their guts, you know, like, "oh, I have a feeling that this is going to work." We looked at that and made that composition of what you wanted to pursue in the next stage and what the data told you to pursue." - Iva Ignjatovic
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More.
It's hard to believe we're almost at the end of the year. So much has happened. I thought it would be helpful to identify some of the business growth trends and the marketing topics that stood out and that will definitely keep on trending. That also gives me a chance to revisit some of the wonderful conversations on this podcast with my guests.
In this episode: Felix Krueger is the CEO of Krueger Marketing. His company focuses on sales enablement and Account-Based Marketing for B2B enterprises. Felix talked about the changes in sales and marketing content that have been necessary to meet a more virtual world, and how we can find the balance between the hybrid, which is face-to-face communication and the virtual. Many of you know Ann Handley from her work as a Chief Content Officer of Marketing Profs and her book, Everybody Writes. When we were talking about writing, we extended our conversation to email marketing because she was able to capture over 25,000 email subscribers in less than one year. Ann suggests that we should use our newsletter a little bit differently. Lee Odden is the CEO of Top Rank Marketing, and he helps B2B brands with influencer marketing. Lee has a very specific point of view when brands want to be perceived as thought leaders and show their expertise and why it doesn't hurt to partner with an influencer in that specific area. Paul Roetzer is the founder and CEO of PR 20/20 and the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. Paul talks about Artificial Intelligence and what will AI do for sales and marketing. Quotes from the episode:"The whole experience of sitting in a room with a salesperson for one hour, going through 30 slides, having a face-to-face discussion and back and forth involving other stakeholders - that experience has gone. And I think it's gone for good. What happens now is that one experience that you used to have, is more decentralized now." - Felix Krueger
"As much as I love social media, I also think it's not the best way to nurture relationships. A far more effective, especially in B2B, is through the email newsletter. Many B2B companies are afraid. They have this sense of a template, a templatized approach to their email newsletter versus just blowing the whole thing up and rethinking it." - Ann Handley
"Creating a great experience obviously is a theme in B2B marketing for customers, but creating a great experience, not just for customers, but for influencers as well, is super, super important, because if they're inspired to share, it's just going to be that much more successful." - Lee Odden
I would argue that most marketers will never know nor care what unsupervised and supervised learning is. Nor will they care about the eight common machine learning models of clustering and linear regression. What they need to know is what is AI capable of doing to identify and prioritize use cases internally. They need to know who the go-to experts are, the data scientists who can help them prepare the data properly and ensure that there's no bias built-in." - Paul Roetzer
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Hey, big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and more.
Today, we talk about ABM and how to scale Account-Based Marketing with my guest Danny Nail, Account-Based Engagement Manager at Microsoft.
In this episode: What is account-based marketing Is ABM successful and effective if we need to do a more one-to-one approach or one-to-many? How to choose the right marketing tactics for ABM outreach? Who do ABM activities should belong to? How customized content can support account-based marketing? How to scale account-based marketing across different verticals? What are the challenges, and how to resolve them? How to scale account-based marketing on a small budget? What is a sales responsibility during the ABM planning and implementation? What are common success metrics or KPIs for ABM? Quotes from the episode:"There's nothing wrong with having some kind of template guidance. But it needs to be guided, and it shouldn't be something that's set in stone."
"Your budget needs to last at least the sales cycle, whatever your sales cycle is. And then, you need to make sure that that budget can cover the number of accounts you're trying to cover. So if you're only trying to cover one account for a quarter, you may have enough budget to do that."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More.
Today's episode features some of my previous guests and a topic that comes up in almost all my podcast conversations: How can sales and marketing teams work together? The answer isn't that simple because so much has changed with the pandemic in the past two years. At the same time, there were also many changes in digital marketing and the corporate culture within the businesses is different from company to company, from industry to industry.
In this episode: John Nee is the Principal and President of Act1 Partners and has worked many years helping marketers and salespeople better collaborate and support each other. John shares expert tips on what marketing departments can do to better support sales. Alex Low is a Managing Consultant at PA Consulting in London and an advisor for the social media management platform Lately. He does a lot of work around business development and sales transformation. Our conversation was focused on expert tips for social selling, and how to align marketing and sales. The reality is both sales and marketing need to work together - on the top, middle and bottom of the funnel. Mark Emond is a revenue marketing expert and the President of Demand Spring, and he shares insights that will help you sync marketing and sales collaboration. Quotes from the episode:"The single greatest thing they can do is try to put themselves in the shoes of the sales force. I don't think there's any better way to do that than to go on sales calls. Do some ride-along sales calls, get on conference calls in this virtual world that we now live in and engage as much as possible with the customer and the prospect to learn how that sale happens." - John Nee
"So you have a marketing person, a Demand Gen person, a content person, and you need to achieve that number by the end of the year. Go do it work together as a team, and figure out the best way to generate those conversations." - Alex Low
"If you don't have motivation coming from above to drive a new way of doing things, the desire to change the behavior is not going to be there." - Mark Emond
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Paul Cowan, CMO of FreshBooks, a SaaS-based platform, accounting software used by many small businesses and freelancers.
Today we talk about how to bridge the gap between marketing and product experience.
In this episode: Why is there a gap between marketing and product experience? What happens when the user experience doesn't live up to the marketing hype? How to provide value for the customers? How can businesses ensure that the product experience addresses their target audience's biggest painpoint? What does it take to bring features into a product in real-time? How to gather feedback and perform testing? How to differentiate from the competition What defines a good customer support process? How can a business carve out a unique market area? What is the role of the marketing team in product experience? Quotes from the episode:"I think the last thing within the tech world is the return to the creative messaging. I think in this kind of race for features and promoting features, we've lost sight of what a brand represents and making sure that's articulated to customers."
"One of the guys on our web team went and helped daycare-hang drywall in his local area. It's things like this that we have focused on as an organization. Focus on these grassroots ways to help owners, whether through those initiatives or the philanthropic type of activity or just core-support services. "
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Yes. I moved to Raleigh from Portland a couple of weeks ago. So now I'm doing my recording in Raleigh. So if you are ever in Raleigh, reach out to me. Let's have a cup of coffee.
My guest is Jharry Guevara, a Business Development Manager, Marketing Director at VOIPRIng Network and Zoho Business Software Platform Architect.
Today, we are going to talk about what does it take to make a successful career transition.
In this episode: What is the right way to make a career transition? How to break into an industry with a high barrier of entry? What are actionable tips people can follow when deciding on a career change? What are the most important things to consider when changing careers? How can you diversify the skillset you have within your field of choice? How should you introduce yourself when seeking new employment after changing careers? What are the challenging aspects of making a career transition? What is the hardest thing about switching careers? How can people make better decisions about their careers? Quotes from the episode:"The more I kept those 10,000 hours in mind, the more hours I put in, the more I started growing as a person. So, that was a very complicated transition. But after I made up my mind, I started looking for side jobs and side gigs."
"One analogy I like to look at is almost like playing an instrument. You learn how to play the instrument by copying somebody else's notes. But after a while, you understand what a good note is and what is a bad note. And you'll be so good that you could be able to mix the notes based on your flavor. So that's the same thing with this whole journey."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today, I have an exceptional guest, Amy Higgins. Amy is a Director of Content Strategy at Salesforce.
Today, we are going to talk about planning and creating an editorial calendar and editorial strategy for an enterprise.
In this episode: What makes the content management and editorial strategy process different in an enterprise? How to ensure feedback from everyone involved in planning and creating an editorial calendar and editorial strategy? How does the team size impacts editorial planning? What s the best way to learn about what the audience wants and how much content they can consume? How to manage a mix of content topics, and how to get feedback from everybody? What is a good pace of editorial management, creation and how often to refresh content? How to do proper research for content editorial? When collecting data, why it's important to observe both the aggregate level and individual content pieces? What are the planning stages and step-by-step processes before creating an editorial? If you have a lot of content to manage, what is the best way to track every piece of it? What kind of tool should be used for SEO, and how? When and how should businesses optimize their current and past content? Quotes from the episode:"You need to understand what you currently have in the market: What's resonating with people, what are people clicking through, what are they engaging with, what do they like, and most importantly, what do they not like?"
"I'll give you something that many people go wrong where they target, going to write this article, and it's going to target this keyword and only this keyword, and you have to think about natural language."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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Hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest is Melissa Romo, a global head of content, social media, and customer efficacy at Sage. Today, we are going to talk about how to build a strong brand community, and how to use it to drive organic traffic. Melissa, welcome, so happy to have you.
In this episode: Find out more about the Sage community and how did the company got started? What is the role of a third-party platform in community management? What are the benefits of the invitation-only brand community? How can brands grow strong communities organically? What does a strong brand community look like? When a community is invitation-only, what are the selection criteria? Should communities use paid media to drive awareness and membership or stick with organic growth? How does that paid media impact the quality of the users or the audience? What are some of the challenges brands encounter while trying to grow their communities? Once established, how can a strong brand community be used as marketing and sales channels? How to leverage content for the community? How to customize and localize content for the global community? What is the role of gamification, and how can brands use it to engage customers and community members? How to launch a community within the enterprise or a fast-growing SaaS space platform company? What kind of budget and resources do companies need to get started? How should marketing professionals prepare for the future of community management? Quotes from the episode:"When people trust you, they don't see you as a roadblock. And once you've built that trust, then you can come in and be a little more prescriptive about what you think is the right thing to do. The relationship building is just what you have to do. And you will get nowhere if you're in an essential leadership role and don't build the right relationships."
"There are all kinds of tech that enables us. But we have to remember the human side of marketing. It doesn't matter what tech is introduced. You're you still go back to the person. At the end of the day, [marketing] has to involve some kind of human connection."
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If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me at [email protected]. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.
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