Championing Owned Media Experiences for Brands
Anthony Kennada, Co-Founder & CEO at AudiencePlus, is championing owned media experiences for brands.
(upbeat music)
Anthony, welcome to the Pipeline Summit,
Pipeline Visionaries Live at the MoMA.
- It's awesome.
- San Francisco, we were just chatting
for a while before this.
I'm so excited to finally have you on the show
and get to talk with you live in person.
- Yes.
- So many Zoom calls over the years.
But so excited to chat content, chat audience plus,
you go to market, how you think about all that stuff.
And so let's get into it.
- Let's do it.
- First, how did you get started in marketing?
- Oh man, so it was never my intention, to be honest.
Like I found myself working in tech,
came up as an SDR at Box back in 2009
and kind of pivoted to like business development
and the partnerships team moved my way over
to product management.
I don't know how or why someone gave me a shot on product,
but I actually really enjoyed it.
Thought I would actually keep pursuing product.
And then my CEO at GainSight,
who I'd worked with at LiveOffice called me
and said I'm doing this thing,
this company called GainSight
or would be called GainSight over time.
Do you wanna do an interview?
Or do you wanna talk about it?
And this was one of the leaders that
I would follow blindly into the dark, right?
He is like values driven, a cultural kind of leader.
And so whatever he was going to lead me towards,
I was gonna say yes.
And he asked, and I put together this like plan
of how I'd run products for this company.
And he said, what do you think about marketing?
I'm like, I've never done marketing before.
And so I, you know, wanted the job,
wanted to work with him.
So I go on Wikipedia and I'm searching demand-gen
so I can just sound smart and drop words like MQL
and kind of know what I'm talking about.
Thankfully, he gave me the job.
But, you know, I think what I found, like a couple of things.
One is the lesson I learned is that sometimes people
see things in you that you don't see in yourself.
And he saw a marketer in me.
I think he says there was like a presentation I gave
like several years prior that stuck with him
or something to that end.
So thankfully, I think I landed somewhere that,
very unprofessional that I just love.
You know, so I'm glad he pushed me.
And so a few stops being, had a marketing being a CMO
and now you're a CEO, which is the path we always love
for marketers to make it into the CEO role.
But you started the company Audience Plus
and you've had a fascinating sort of buildup
to launching the company and a lot of, you know,
early customers, really cool customers.
Take us back to why did you start Audience Plus?
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things.
So I mean, it starts with the origin story, right?
Like I got dropped into the head of marketing job
and I didn't have a lot of bias.
I had a lot, all I had was first principles
for how we can build, gain sight into a company.
And so I didn't think about paid search.
I didn't think about SEO.
I didn't think about these things that you might be trained
to as a kind of marketer coming up
through the different kinds of parts of the org.
And so I looked to like late night television, Airbnb,
like what are the consumer media,
how are consumer marketers doing?
That's really interesting.
And that was sort of the thesis
for gain size marketing approach.
It was, okay, let's just serve this persona
with education and entertainment,
doing like interesting ways.
We did events just like this one.
We hosted podcasts, all these types of things,
which in 2013, when we started was sort of deemed
as brand or corporate marketing.
You can't measure it.
It sits outside the growth equation,
but you know, we think there's some like benefit to it.
I found that that was actually,
like maybe we put a call it thought leadership
or something in general.
I found that thought leadership was actually like
the number one driver for gain size success,
not just from the lens of brand awareness or whatever,
but from a pipeline perspective,
like it actually helped us generate sustainable pipeline,
people that weren't just coming in
through a transactional channel,
but wanted to stay with us.
So that kind of became part of my playbook.
And I took it to front and I took it to hop in
in the CMO kind of role there.
And it was that hopping that I was trying to build
sort of the interface digitally
that is between our brand,
you know, is the company and our audience,
which historically is the blog.
That's kind of where we send traffic to on our website
to kind of get people to engage with our thought leadership.
And at each company, I've sort of tried to kind of supercharge
our blog in a way, like make it about more than just written
content, add video and live events and podcasts
and those types of things.
And I want people to subscribe or opt in or convert
into our thought leadership.
And that was kind of like the leading indicator we used
to measure thought leadership.
We're like, okay, if they're not subscribing,
asking for a demo request,
are they at least subscribing to our content in some way?
And so I built something internally against site.
It was kind of ugly, kind of, you know,
use like Zapier hooks to plug it into Marketo
to kind of try to make it work.
At front, I used an expensive agency and it cost a lot.
And when they hand it to us, we couldn't maintain it.
'Cause we needed like engineers to basically upload content.
So at Hopden, this was sort of like under the shadows
of Salesforce Plus that had just come out
and HubSpot doing some interesting things.
And like gosh, there's gotta be by now,
like a Salesforce Plus as a service,
something where we can distribute content on our own domain,
we can build subscriber, an owned audience of subscribers.
Then we can look at the data and understand
how is all of this engagement actually driving revenue?
And there wasn't.
So it's a long answer to your question,
but that was sort of the prompt was,
this needs to exist as trend is happening.
And there wasn't sort of an underlying platform
to take the blog into the modern era
and turn it into more of a,
we call it own media platform.
- It's so interesting because I had a very similar journey
at the exact same time.
And this was like before Salesforce Plus had launched
where I had made five of Salesforce podcasts
and I was starring in three of them,
starring in quotes,
hosting them.
And I was thinking at the exact same time,
like there's this massive organization
that has that were at Dreamforce,
this creates $4 for every $1 that they make
for the ecosystem, this massive ecosystem,
all these people.
And I interviewed probably like a thousand people
on across their shows over the course of about two years.
And what struck me so much was every single relationship
and conversation that I would have with these people,
they had this affinity and love for Salesforce
and they had all these unique stories and perspectives
and the way that they use it
and the way that they do this stuff
and this like long form information was so helpful.
And then at the same time,
all these conversations led to business for my business.
And I was like, wait a second.
It's like, all of this thought leadership stuff,
this brand stuff is like propelling my business forward
and also propelling Salesforce's business forward
and we would go to events and they'd talk about like,
oh, we saw you at this podcast.
And it became extremely clear to me too
that when I would write a blog post
after I would do a bunch of podcasts
and video content and events,
that then that would get way more received
and they wouldn't reference the blog post
and say like, hey, I read your post.
They'd be like, oh, I heard you talking about Blake.
And so it was like, what was sticking
was the conversations that we were having
on podcasts and video series, not writing stuff.
And then also I would talk to these guests
and the guests would tell these stories.
Now remember, specifically one guest who was a CIO,
five times CIO, very influential IT leader.
And he told me a story about what happened to him on 9/11
and the IT problems that he dealt with that day in New York.
And he was like, I've never told that story in 20 years.
And I really, it kind of makes me realize,
I think I want to write a book
and I want that to be part of it.
And he was like, it's just so,
thank you for being able to tell the story.
So then I kind of had that realization
that we're unearthing stories that people want to tell
but they don't have the ability to sit down
and write it out and we're giving it to them.
And that is creating value for that person too.
And then I looked at companies,
like does any company have any way
to like cultivate these stories?
Not customer stories,
not just talking about products and services,
but to do that.
And I was like, no, they don't have that.
They don't have like a muscle in the organization
that tells stories that are not just
about their products and services
but are about their community in a way.
And like Sales Services is like the best one.
And I was sitting there like,
hey, we're making all these shows.
And so I came to the same conclusion that you did
and sort of the opposite way through content
that content is pipeline.
- Absolutely.
- Like it drives pipeline, it accelerates pipeline,
it does all that stuff.
And so few companies ever looked at it that way.
Why do you think that that was?
Why do you think that the investment into content
and how the organization was structured
is sort of been an afterthought?
- Yeah, I think there's maybe two different trends
versus like how we define content.
Because this is not universal,
but if you look at maybe most B2B kind of marketing teams,
do you have a content person or content team?
They're like, yeah, they're pumping out SEO articles,
anchor pages, we're writing it for Google
and that's, we're doing sort of the inbound marketing
kind of thing.
But again, I'm not trying to like diminish that.
I think that's important.
It's just, it's getting more like,
we're all competing for the same keywords
and there's only so much attention to capture.
So I think-
- This is zero sub game, right?
- Yeah.
- There's 10 spots on Google.
- If you want to be in the top couple.
- Exactly.
- And we know that it works.
But I mean, even Rayan Fishkin,
who like wrote the book on SEO,
is like now like, hey, this stuff is not a good thing
to invest. - Exactly right.
And I think that's actually a super interesting point.
And very timely, we've spent the last two decades
trying to automate marketing.
Marketing automation is the language that we've used.
And it's timely because literally yesterday,
John Miller, just saw his face up there a second ago,
co-founder of Marketo just released a post
that literally was like vulnerable, I'd say for him to write.
It was like the playbook that I wrote for marketing,
no longer works.
And so even Marketo is saying up here,
saying like the old way of thinking about content
as a function of maybe driving traffic
to potentially drive inbound conversions
to sort of like run that play,
it's just not working in this modern world.
And so I think your point on storytelling
is super interesting because
there's only so much attention that we can capture.
And I think what it's like a cheesy thing to say,
but we're realizing that even B2B buyers are human beings
that want to be entertained and educated.
And that's what pierces through the noise
is if we can tell stories in a compelling way
that will fundamentally drive more pipeline,
more affinity, more sustainable relationship
than trying to sort of like trick someone
into filling out an ebook form
so we can like spam them kind of a thing, right?
That's kind of like the historical context oversimplified,
but this is a much more authentic, real thing.
And I think we're just as an industry like hungry
for authenticity now.
- Yeah, I think that there's a lot of words
that sort of needed redefinition.
Brand is one, content is one.
And I heard brand describing recently
is like brand is your buying experience
and your customer experience.
So if that's the case and you're investing
in like customer experience and how they go through the funnel,
then and part of your buying experience is your website
and how quickly someone can go to your website.
Obviously the great people are qualified
who put this whole thing on that,
Craig, when I talked to his CEO years ago
and they were starting qualified, he was like,
if the CEO of their biggest prospect walked into the door
to your headquarters, which in my cases,
by my office, my actual house,
but if that kept, even better,
you would roll out the red carpet,
you'd go get them a drink, you'd have, you know,
do all this stuff.
If that person comes to your website, nobody cares.
- Yeah. - Right.
And then you just get treated like anyone else
who comes to your website.
And so again, that's about your buying experience.
What is the like to go through that?
Well, that buying experience happens with 5% of the people
that are going through buying a product
and the other 95% of the time,
you're not buying stuff.
And we have very little time, money and energy invested
in the 95% of times that people are pre-buying, pre-research.
And so like we know that 67% of the time
that people do research before talking to sales.
But what about before they're doing research?
And like it seems like inception
and it seems like kind of silly to even like talk
about this stuff, but it's true.
Like 13 impressions equal as a sale.
Well, if you have someone on your podcast series, for example,
and you have the reaching out to them, the prep call,
the having them on the recording,
following up with them afterwards, you know,
people then you posting it on social,
them posting on social people from their company commenting
and all that sort of stuff, people, you know,
months later reaching out.
So you get just from one podcast episode, for example,
you get all of that.
And if that content then is getting resurfaced
on a platform like Audience Plus on your website
over and over and over again to new buyers.
And then they see that piece of content to,
hey, by the way, did you, I'd listened to this episode
that you did like four months ago,
and like you and AK were talking about this stuff,
like that's pretty cool.
Like it lives on and like that is super important.
And then the final piece here on sort of like
we could go into the whole AI conversation.
The idea is like what Anthony is doing right now
for his marketing strategy, like today, this quarter,
what he's gonna do for Q4 is really, really interesting
to me personally, right?
Like that's not something that you can shove into chat
TPT and like crank out and put a blog post on your blog.
You need to have Anthony give his insights in real time
about what he's doing for next quarter
'cause that's what people are looking for.
Like pure driven insights is the thing that like
I realize and I unlocked of like we have to unearth
the peer driven insights, which people are historically
bad at giving and then share those
and disseminate those with people
and then put it in the right place at the right time
with platforms like Audience Plus on the website
when people do that.
And so this, it just changes the fundamental way that
to think about how we're serving the right information
of the right people and using their peers as a proxy
for a writer sitting there like with a blank Google doc,
which I think is just the wrong way of thinking about it.
- Oh, absolutely, no.
The other thing I mean is you're talking about
just like all the touch points that you're doing
as you're bringing guests on the show and everything.
You're building a relationship, right?
And I think that's part of this.
We're chatting before we came up here.
There's almost like a renaissance happening in B2B marketing
where we're going back to like our basis where what do we do?
We understand the channels and the ability to create content
or to scale the ability to build a relationship
to establish trust behind a brand.
Nick used to say like, you know,
if you get me in front of a customer, like,
you know, we used to think against,
I've put Nick in front of a customer, things are good.
So we got to get him in front of a million customers.
And we can't do that because of space and time.
So through our content, we're able to scale Nick
and the trust that he can build to the world
through things like podcasts and live streams
and all these types of things.
So I think the common kind of point here
and not in the connection to pipeline
is that through this new, not new approach,
but this renewed sense of re-imagining our content marketing,
we're building relationship
and we're helping ultimately drive business through that.
- Yeah, I tell our team this,
but I'm like, I should be doing five things.
Should we talk to someone on our team,
talking to a potential, you know, a prospect or a partner,
talking to a customer, talking into a microphone,
you know, somewhere that goes out there
or talking to a customer.
And it's like, as a CEO, like,
that's what I want to be doing.
And that's what every CEO should be doing.
I mean, they have to talk to their board too.
And people like that.
But generally speaking, like, talking to a microphone
is something that they haven't invested in.
We do Snowflake series and Frank Slubin
is like one of the most brilliant people as a technologist.
But we've worked on that series
and they are methodical with how they think
about Frank's thought leadership.
And everyone you talk to is like, oh, I've read "Amped Up."
And you're like, oh, so I guess writing a book still does work
and they have this really good series.
And you just start to look at that
and like how your executives perform
and not just executives, other people on your team,
your CMO, if you're selling to engineers,
your head of engineering, like those perspectives matter too
and you need to create vehicles for them as well
to share thought leadership.
Like it matters.
And the term thought leadership is just a stupid term anyways.
Like it's loaded to people buy from people ultimately.
And so I think that's sort of the thing.
We can kind of put them in a position to, you know,
to people to get to know us, our leadership team,
our extended team.
Like I think that's the core kind of premise.
Switching gears to your go-to-market.
So Audience Plus, you officially launched the company when?
- May officially.
- And then previous to that, you were in the lab working on stuff.
I remember you showed me the deck, we were on site too.
I was like, dude, I already get it.
Audience Plus, I'm 100% in.
I don't even need to see the rest of the deck.
I know exactly where you're going.
So how long did you work building up before you launched?
- Yeah, so we raised our seed round in March of 22.
I think we talked probably like April of 22,
something on those lines.
And we've been building the product kind of ever since
in October of that year.
We started launching our own content, right?
'Cause we're like, we gotta walk in the shoes of our customer.
We gotta evangelize this kind of concept.
We're kind of calling it own the media for now.
It's not obviously our language.
It's in textbooks for generations.
But I think one that we sort of skipped over a little bit
in terms of modern B2B marketing.
So we've been trying to educate and inspire
around this idea of own media.
And then we launched the company and May announced it,
talked about the product and have been kind of selling
and kind of marketing ever since.
But we're a seed stage company.
So we don't have, you know, hop in budget
or that's a whole other podcast.
But we don't have like the budget of, you know,
a traditional kind of ass scale business.
And so we believe that a lot of this stuff
we're talking about here doesn't have to be super, super expensive.
Like you can, you've got the stories, right?
Like that's ultimately the currency of what you need.
So a lot of what we've been doing is going all in
on content production events, like those types of things
as a function of building our subscriber base
for lack of a better term.
And then using our subscriber base to kind of monetize
that into revenue.
So, you know, one of the big kind of hallmarks
of that was our launch event that we did.
So we hosted this like four hour LinkedIn takeover event.
We had a celebrity.
So hopefully we can talk about this a little bit,
but the power of celebrity and B2B marketing.
But we had Topanga from Boy Meets World.
There's any 90s sitcom fans here hosted it for us.
Nostalgia is this weird thing where it's not like super expensive,
but also it hits like, you know, it's very effective.
And we drew some inspiration from like space X launches
where they're counting down in this pre show to this big reveal,
which was this keynote.
And then we took inspiration from The Bachelor, which I know,
but it was basically like the after the rose ceremony
where we brought people up to react to the keynote
and kind of the implications.
And so it was this beautiful kind of, you know,
moment that we tried to engineer.
And that really kind of kicked things off for us, I think,
because we were sort of like in the lab to use your language,
kind of talking about this thing.
But we wanted to create this sort of like cataclysmic kind
of moment for the industry to gather.
And since then, you know, we've been trying to kind of,
you know, find ways to one up that kind of, you know, going forward.
Yeah, I would say that, you know, obviously every,
every, you know, great technology company sort of is
you're heading this movement and this whole like,
any raskin sort of, you know, create the change that is happening.
Company like qualified, where, you know, you look at
conversational marketing, you look at someone turning your website
into a selling machine.
Yeah.
And how just how few people think about that?
Yet when you talk to marketers, like I've asked what 150 marketers,
how do they think about their website?
They're like, oh my God, it's the storefront.
It's the most important thing.
It's so important.
Like how much do you invest in like turning that into selling machines?
Like, oh, well, you know, we're, we're a value.
And you're like, what are you talking about?
You just said it's the most important thing.
But so, you know, like qualified, obviously,
spearheading that movement, you obviously spearheading this own
content movement.
And it's so important.
And I think the reason why that your event was so well received
in your launch was so well received was because
of the fact that people are looking for this like crystallization
of what they see around them.
They see Salesforce Plus, they see the HubSpot Podcast Network.
They see companies like Paddle and Qualified with Qualified Plus
and all these things that are like, wait a second, the best marketers
are building out this own content portfolio of shows and events
and really cool, interesting content that's very persona driven.
It's like hyper specific.
It's like multi-channel, it's multi-format.
Like all of the best folks are doing this.
And I'm kind of sitting here like banging out another blog post
that like is going to get six views for a term that like do we even
know if we need or not?
Yeah.
And so I think that there was some of that happen.
Did you feel like after the event that that you got that type of feedback
from people?
Totally, totally.
I think that was the, you know, if you're a content professional
and you're hearing kind of this message, this is hopefully really encouraging
and exciting because this is the type of stuff content folks wanted to work on.
At least in my, the folks that I had worked with, I think the other piece
that's interesting is taking it, you know, further down funnel because we've
had,
you know, we talked about this a little bit, like the traditional tactics
to generating pipeline just aren't working anymore.
Right.
And so we've, you know, the message that we've been kind of trying to
articulate
is a big part of that is because we've been either paying for access to our
audience through digital advertising or renting it through these third party
platforms.
So this idea of like, you know, that again, this fits into the broader kind
of audience acquisition bundle.
So I'm not suggesting like stay away from this, but like, you know, doing an
expensive like video project, putting it on YouTube and your CEO asking you,
how did that go?
Right.
I don't know.
We got like 100 views on it.
I think it was okay.
There might have been a bump in traffic and we're like telling that story.
So I think the feedback that kind of helped affirm and validate like this, this
broader idea of own audience building or whatever we want to refer to it as is
there's
an appetite for new ideas in the demand team and the pipeline generation team.
I think qualifies to be such a great job of that and kind of advocating for the
owned experience and how do we kind of make that a storefront?
I love that, that kind of analogy.
But I think that's why this is really resonating a lot is this feels like an
opportunity for us to do something that's authentic, to have access to the data
that's
proving that it's working.
And ultimately we're seeing signal of like higher conversions and better
connection to outcomes.
So it's no longer a brand thing.
Like we kind of opened up the conversation talking about it could be and it's
important, but it actually is fundamentally now a driver to revenue.
And I think that's what people have been really excited about.
That's something that can take to their CFO in 2023 and say this isn't just we
're
not going to write this off.
Like this is fundamentally like how we're going to hit our number this year.
And we weren't able to really put a lot of language around that until recently.
Well, yeah, I mean, and I think like for us, you know, we work with 65 plus,
you
know, B2B technology companies.
And for us, like if you're talking to someone who has a poor attribution
strategy, like you will not get good information.
Yeah.
Like you're saying, hey, we do last touch app attribution.
You're like, yeah, I mean, sure.
Yeah.
But you're you're that's you're juking your own stats.
Right.
Like that at the end of the day, like, so like, let's just use webinars.
So they've been to 17 webinars, but then they got a cold email and like you
attribute the deal to the cold email.
Right.
Like, I don't think that that's a super good plan.
But that's a lot of the conversations that we have is just a marketer being
like,
Hey, this is how attribution is done here.
And like, I don't even know how to tag this.
Yeah.
Right.
But like we cast me and we source 21% of the revenue for our business from our
series, from our own original content of like 100% sourced.
Wow.
So I mean, you're just looking at like, if we turn it off, that's 20% less.
And I would imagine it would be a lot higher than that.
Yeah.
But that's like cold sourced.
Yep.
Right.
So I think it's just tricky for people to try to figure out how to, how content
drives ROI and drives by porn.
And I think that what we're working on is trying to develop those plays
so you can put it into your playbook of like, OK, this is how you use a video
podcast for, you know, for cold.
This is how you use it for pipeline acceleration.
Right.
This is how you use it for customer story, like evangelism.
This is how you use it for the leadership executive play.
This is how you use, oh, you have, you know, a revived account or a
able by next quarter account.
Like this is how you use it.
This is how you position it.
Um, and those plays just like no one is running those people who are running
them
are not sort of sharing those.
And those are directly pipeline driven plays.
And like, when is content ever running pipeline plays?
Like, when is the content person even ever sitting with the demand person?
Shut up, Sarah.
Um, but you know what I mean?
Like, it's just not very common.
Totally.
I think that's right.
I was thinking, you know, the other piece of it is, you know, I think
attribution in general, such a sticky, you know, to your point, kind of complex
topic.
I think just the point of view that we're starting to develop is it's not that
it's not fundamentally working today.
It's just that it's a lot easier if the data is first party.
Right.
We know that here's what they're, you know, they like we can attribute a
multi touch model, but we have the touch points that we can cue off of, right?
That's the value.
And so like there's no, there's no question.
You have to put your podcast on Spotify, Apple music.
You have to be where your audience is.
You have to put your videos on YouTube from like an organic discovery,
perspective,
paid media.
So none of this is sort of like saying like, hey, run away from all of these,
like
these platforms.
But I think for a brand to send traffic to YouTube through an email post,
through
a email, a social post, it's like, why?
Like if we can send that traffic instead to our website, to the storefronts, to
the
revenue sales machine that we're building, we have a higher propensity to get a
conversion and at, or not, or best case, or if not that, at least we can
understand
that someone from this company is actually engaging with this topic or this
format.
And that might be interesting as we're thinking about kind of monetization down
down funnels.
So, um, so again, it's a sticky topic, but I think we're seeing this kind of
pull toward first party data.
And I think that's really kind of at the heart of proving impact of content.
Yeah.
I mean, I think another piece on that is people are just dumping
money into Google ads, Facebook ads and LinkedIn.
And like, if you cord on off a little bit of that and create original series,
then
you can see like, Hey, this is, we're running these plays and we're doing this
stuff and start to measure the impact with the idea of like, to get to that
point.
Yeah.
Is, you know, that's the sacred cow for a lot of people.
And like for a lot of people we talked to, I'm kind of a budget items, which we
're
going to do here in a second is, you know, Google ads are still, you know, one
of
things like, of course, it should be, but at the same time, like that is a very
high intent situation.
Right.
How do we get ahead of that?
Right.
Before they're searching for something, they're when they're not in market,
when
it's, you know, Q one and they're not going to budget again.
So another nine months, how are you, what's your plan of engagement and Q work?
Yep.
Cause it can't be Google ads.
Like it can't be faced or Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads.
Right.
Unless you're running the same copy at them all year long.
Yep.
Of like by now, by now, like that makes no sense.
That's right.
That's right.
So what are your uncuttable budget items for audience plus?
Oh man.
What is budget for a seed stage company?
Everything, everything is just like for crafts.
Um, you know, very tactically, I hope it's not too revealing, but like, you
know, we spend very, we've tried to just for a company of our size and budget
candidly is like we tried to in house some of our content production.
Um, and so I think over time we want to work with great partners to help us
really scale and take the production quality up and really kind of go to that
next level.
So our, our cost to produce is very little.
Um, we're spending money on, um, LinkedIn organic, which is kind of random.
Um, this gentleman named Alex Lieberman at Morning Brew.
I'm not sure if he's kind of a thought leader in the kind of audience building
space, he started this agency around ghost writing for execs.
Yeah.
Have you seen that story?
Are you?
Yeah.
Um, so we're one of his first customers.
Uh, and so the spoiler is like, uh, hopefully again, not revealing too much.
Like I'm not writing like what I'm, what's going on on LinkedIn.
This agency is actually doing it for me.
They'll interview me back to the idea of storytelling and produce, uh, a post
every day and, uh, so we've literally tried to cut almost everything, but
that's the one that we can't get rid of.
Yeah.
Because like we were doing the, like Chris Walker, um, you know, self-reported
attribution or a lead forms and like literally almost everyone that we're
getting that's not true, but like 50 to 60% of our form fills are like, saw you
on LinkedIn, saw you on LinkedIn.
I walked in today and two people were like, Oh, I think I saw you on LinkedIn,
like saying something.
So, uh, an important driver towards building traffic to send to your site, to
convert into subscriber is how we sort of engage on these rented spaces.
And for me to be at least, LinkedIn is, I think, like the predominant
surface for us to really, um, figure out.
I was just so bad at it.
Like I'd write like paragraphs and like you get like no impressions and then
they were really kind of helped coach me on how to, um, do better in terms of
content distribution in that channel as well as just building relationship.
Um, and so far that's actually working quite well for us.
Yeah.
It's interesting to hear you say content development, yeah, executive
thought leadership, um, as like, you know, the main two drivers there and then
LinkedIn organic, which is again, that's still a content play, but it's your
distribution channel being linked in zero paid.
We don't have any budget for paid media whatsoever.
We're not doing it for now.
Like I'm not saying that's forever.
Yeah.
But, um, at if we're kind of putting the efficiency hat on, like we're like,
all right, so how can we leverage these channels that we're talking about today
and actually do the thing that we're going to ask our customers to do?
Um, so sorry, I'm catching off, but yeah.
And how many shows do you have right now?
Um, four different shows and then a monthly kind of event series.
Um, yeah.
How many of those do you host personally?
Well, that's actually been, it's actually a good question for you because, um,
I've in the earliest days, I've hosted like almost all of them except for one,
but that's not my ambition.
Like I, I, I think about our media brand or I refer to it as like, I think,
I think, I think this is good advice for other companies, but love your,
your thoughts on it is to make it feel more like a network.
Yeah.
Where it's not me as like the voice, but, and it's not even audience plus
employees
that are delivering this content, but that we're almost building this like
creator network of sorts of subject matter experts in the domain that we're
talking about and almost like commissioning them to produce content for us.
Um, and what that gives us is a couple of things.
Scale for content cadence, making sure we're dropping kind of new episodes all
the time to their, bringing their brand equity into our network.
And so it's not just this like self-serving thing anymore, but it's like,
this is for the community by the community.
Um, but also there's built in distribution.
If you choose your, your creators the right way, they're promoting each
episode to their audience and it's helping kind of create more viewership.
So I don't like what we're doing today because it's very me driven and I want
to get out of that.
Um, and again, very small team, very small budgets, but our hope is to like
have
ambition to do more of the network type thing where we have a diversity of
voices and perspectives that are contributing to the conversation.
Yeah.
I think it's, I think both are a winning strategy.
Well, we see, um, uh, and if you take it, look like an example of this
qualified,
so with qualified, uh, plus you have, uh, three different shows.
So, uh, I host pipeline visionaries.
I host rise of rise of RobOps and then Dan Darcy hosts and said the Oana.
And if you look at the way that those three shows, there is three different
separate personas.
Um, it's the way that we, the way that we have developed those over time is
very
specific in the way that we do it. Um, and, and that works really well.
Um, for, for some of our other customers, we go and source external hosts, like
train them, coach them, whatever.
Sometimes those are people who are just experts in the space for no media
training.
So we coach them up.
Other times there are people who do have a little bit more of that.
That works really well.
Um, and what I think the best way to do it, and we talk with the CMO, um, of
click up and she, and yes, she's, oh, yeah, you know, Melissa.
Yeah.
Uh, she's awesome.
Their strategy is creating thought leaderships of their executive team at
click up.
That is like quarter of their strategy.
And it's absolutely a winning strategy.
We have a bunch of customers that do that too.
So I think the answer is actually it's all of the above.
Yeah.
It's you want to source external speakers.
You want friendlies, you want internal employees and you, and you want to do
that.
And the thing that I think is so funny is like people treat like
shows specifically like they're a one size fits all.
Well, some people like to watch the news.
So people don't some tea.
Some people like to watch Marvel movies.
Yeah.
Some people don't.
Some people like to watch like one, one of the CEOs of one of our customers is
like, Lowe's Rogan, Lowe's like super long form, two hour.
It's like, I really want our podcast to be that way.
Like totally.
Yeah.
But there's also a massive, you know, percentage of the population that wants a
10 to 20 minute, easy lesson, easy drink and beer that they can, that they can,
you know, watch or listen to when they're walking their dog.
And so the answer isn't that one is right or wrong.
It's that people have different preferences and how they consume that.
So one of the most popular episodes I ever did was with the CMO Spotify.
And we did, we did like two and a half hours.
Yeah.
And it was amazing.
The entire time.
But that doesn't mean that like every one of your shows needs to be the exact
same.
So in a variety of the spice of life and you need to think about things of like
people consume things in different ways.
And some people might listen, like listening to AK and some people might, you
know, can't stand you as a vote.
And like that's totally fine.
So let them opt into the types of content that they want.
What's interesting about that and qualified in particular is the optimization
is around the persona or the audience in terms of format, in terms of who they
are,
the problems they're solving, not keywords, right?
And that's what we're coming from.
Like, and that's what's changing.
And, you know, I think we're still in the early days, candidly, because we're
still creating content ideas based on what we think is going to generate more
organic search traffic to the site, which is again, table stakes and good.
And someone should probably do something there.
But this is that next chapter where it's content that is authentic for a
specific subset of your audience that is told in story, delivers value and
builds
relationship.
Um, and the second piece I was going to say is like, you know, we, we,
we think about our content, like calendar, like network TV a little bit,
where there's like a fall slate, summer slate, a winter slate.
So we're coming out of our summer slate now with like a new set of shows.
And so, um, and again, I don't know how much of this is like a good, best
practice,
but the spice, the variety being the spice of life thing, like we can mix it up
Where in the fall, we're targeting these personas with these formats.
It might be audio or video or, or it might be like a show that's like a teard
own
show as opposed to an interview or something to that, an entertainment
murder mystery.
And we're able to kind of go, you know, into different seasons and introduce
new
value in new formats for the same audience.
Um, so I think as we're thinking about a content strategy, there's a lot of
like
cool analogies from Hollywood, from the consumer world that we can, you know,
we're going to talk about that soon here, um, that, that I think can be, um,
that can really up level kind of how we're thinking about production today.
Yeah. So the R for tenants of, of our framework are, uh, so peer driven
insights.
So it's got to be peer led.
It's got to be persona based.
It's got to be multi-channel, multi-format.
So you have to have an own content piece of this and then understand your
distribution
strategies.
And then, uh, it's got to be serialized.
So like serialized content is eating the world.
Yes.
This is like, if you look at every type of media right now, like Mattel is
investing
hugely in serialized content, creating franchises that have a brand.
And doing that stuff.
If you look at Barbie and all that stuff, like Lego happened a decade ago and
they
rolled out Barbie and it's like the biggest smash it ever 10 years later.
So this is how slow Mattel was to figure out like, Hey, we made this like a
marketing
thing that made us $450 million.
Like we should probably start doing this again.
And now they have an entire slate of programming.
That's franchise.
So I think like with those four tenants for B2B, that's the way that we think
about
it.
And you're talking about our, the murder mystery that we do with your past
murder
and murder and HR.
And like that is a core piece of this thing is like nobody in B2B does fiction.
And because it's hard and because like getting Hollywood talent and doing that
stuff is way harder.
There's no traffic on the extra mile, but we've seen with that show, like the
number
one fiction show in all of Apple right now, you know, we did 140,000 downloads
for
us. Like two weeks.
Yeah.
And the reason why is because HR people who we made it for love it, but also
other
people like it.
Yeah.
So it's just another like, again,
it's an easy drink and beer.
It's the 5%, you know, summer lager that you're just like, hey, I can throw
this
on on my walk.
This is super cool.
And then you become a fan of it.
And like some people might love that format.
Some people might love interview style, but you're giving people different
types
of options.
And then they engage with you in different ways.
Here's a fun fact.
So Jim Pass had a prospect of theirs, like a, a semi warm prospect reach out to
their
sales team because they wanted a private screening of murder and HR.
Whoa.
Like when do you ever, when do your ads ever get you to get private meetings
with your prospects, right?
And it's like because the levels of engagement are so different, right?
That's right.
And it opens questions like, how did you get Camara to do this?
How did you get break out?
And that sort of stuff I think is like what's missing from B2B is that like
spontaneity and like variety and edutainment and something interesting that
just is not really commonly invested in because it's like, well, that doesn't
try to pipe points.
Like, no, actually it does.
And we can prove that now.
And it feeds fandom to which I think is an interesting language that we haven't
used too much in B2B.
But also you can build like a whole marketing thing around that.
Like what if there was like a private event or a live recording with, with
Mara and Brett, is it like that you have all your key prospects in?
It's like high touch kind of ABM campaign.
So I mean, there's all of this stuff can be integrated into the fabric of your
go-to market to help drive sales.
Ultimately, it's not just this like, you know, I mean, hitting the top of the
charts
is incredible, by the way, like maybe the first B2B marketing.
I think it's got to be the first that's even close.
Right.
But now like you've proven that hypothesis and now we can take that and turn
into an entire kind of program really that drives more revenue, which is great.
And like Jim Pass's strategy, their core marketing strategy and content
strategy is about providing value to their community that's value added.
Like they love HR people.
They're trying to make the employee experience better for all of their
customers.
And that's what HR people are trying to do.
And so like when you, when you take that premise and then you say, well, what,
what
content can we make for HR people to surprise and delight them in a way that
serves them?
Like, and one of the conversations early on was like, what does a love letter
to HR
look like? How do we show them that they are seen and appreciated and heard
and that we understand what they're going through?
I was in HR.
So I knew what that was like.
And part of the reason why we wrote it in the way that we did was to put a
shine on HR to put their name in lights in a way that had never, ever been done
And if you look at the Hollywoodization of HR has been extremely negative, I
think
I think for tech, it's the same way.
And like nobody can tell authentic business stories.
And so that stuff, I think there's a, there's a like real understanding and
longing for to be seen like that.
Right.
I, I, when I was in Scotland, when I was a kid, and I remember getting a tour,
and they were talking about the movie Braveheart and the, the guy was like,
this
was wrong, this was wrong, this was wrong, this was wrong.
And so all that said, it's an 11 out of 10 and we love it.
You know, like, and like that's how it is like, you know, long.
Yeah.
You feel like they're a part of it.
Yeah.
That's so cool.
So what are you seeing when you're talking to CMOs?
Yeah.
And how they're investing in content, how they're connecting it to pipeline.
Obviously, you know, on pipeline visionaries, it's all we think about here.
And, and we know that it's working, but it seems like it's a pretty uphill
battle
to try to go to your CFO and say, hey, we're going to invest in content.
And then they come back and go, yeah, but, but, but where's the number?
Yeah.
I mean, certainly, I think that the, again, the conversation being had between
CFOs
and CMOs today is all that efficient growth.
Like that's kind of the parent umbrella.
Because the only thing we know for sure that we can't do this year with the
resources
that we have, with the expectations that are on us is the same thing that we've
done for the last several years.
So there's in a way, you know, an optimistic way to think about that, that
there's
appetite for new ideas within the CMO or the executive team.
Now, I think for the majority of the conversations we have, we're still in the
early, early adopter innovator phase of this belief and this new kind of
mentality.
So we're trying to do our job of evangelizing it and talking through it as much
as we can.
But for companies that really get it, you know, qualified being one, there's
sort
of like a, you know, you hit this earlier, taking a slice out of your paid
budget,
which is traditionally for most marketing teams, the largest line item on the
program
budget for market marketers, just a little slice out of that could produce
enough
content to prove the hypothesis.
So that's sort of the step one.
It's like, all right, we're not saying we're going to step into like a brand
new
budgetary ask, we're going to take something off of search marketing, let's say
, like
keep the LinkedIn spend or whatever, the amplification budget, but like, let's
take
search and invest in producing one show or something to that end.
So that sort of starts the conversation.
And we're hearing actually some pretty interesting appetite there.
And I think the piece that that is resonating with our message is we're saying,
hey, if you can use those content assets in a way where you can distribute in
those
rented channels to drive attention, but then do it in service of driving owned
audience, we can actually start to measure the impact of this in a pretty
material way.
We're not going to have to wait for Google to maybe index the post, which might
take a while and then we'll have this like anonymous web visit that we think
could potentially like that sort of feedback loop that is long and kind of hard
to justify to a CFO candidly.
Isn't necessarily the case when you have a subscriber, we have someone that is
opted into your content where we see if they're coming back, what they're
watching, what topics they're interested in.
And so, you know, I think part of the value proposition of what we're trying to
offer is you could get a pretty close, a pretty fast feedback loop on content
you're producing today, if you're able to have the data to prove the connection
to do something else.
So if I were to extrapolate that, I would say the MQL of the past is being
challenged.
And I think what people are starting to kind of get around to is this idea of
audience engagement as a leading indicator to pipeline.
Yeah.
So if I know that back to the Jim Pass example, people are consuming this,
they're coming back for the second episode and the third or they're binging
the whole series, like, and we have that context.
That is super interesting for us for a, you know, how this deal is trending to
potentially being, you know, being a real opportunity for us.
So I think we're seeing this, like the language change internally as well
around
audience and around this idea of how we measure engagement as a leading
indicator
to, to pipeline creation.
It's sometimes it's just seems so obvious and simple to me, where you, where
you
look at someone that's a cold account that you have emailed.
Well, so we did a test.
I know I've never told you this.
So we did a test.
So we ran a cold, we get, we ran cold emails to, I think it was 250 accounts,
sales emails.
Yeah.
Hey, like that still very well written.
We have a pretty good response.
Um, basically like, Hey, you buy, buy stuff from cast.
I mean, it's great.
Yeah.
And then we ran the same emails to the same people with, Hey, do you want to
come on our show and we went from a 1% response rate to 25%.
Oh, really?
Wow.
And so, and like, again, I told you we close 21% of the people coming our show.
So you're like, you do the math there and you're like, that is an extremely,
yeah, extremely cheap channel to send a bunch of, you know, cold outreach.
And, and we set up with our marketing team.
It was like, why would we ever email anyone ever again?
Yeah.
That's not just inviting them on socials.
Totally.
Like, why would you ever do that?
That's the front door.
Yeah.
Out of it to the funnel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And even still, like there's, there's, there's accounts that, you know, we run,
we run
some other, you know, cold campaigns that we're still sort of doing based off
of,
like, very specific triggers and all that.
And, and it still just doesn't perform as well, even if that person is ready to
buy.
Cause once they see who you are and you're coming, they're like, Oh, by the way
I was looking for a solution like this.
Hey, what do you all do?
So that sales conversation is either going to happen or it's not anyway.
Right.
So you may as well invite them to something that actually is value added to
them
and, and puts their name in lights and helps them tell a story that they were
unable to rather than just like just by our stuff.
And like, it's so simple.
And you're like, yeah, why is this not like a more common play?
But then you talk to people and you're like, Hey, we have six hundred and
seventy
named accounts that we're going after.
And you're like, well, so then why would you be dumping in paid
into Google ads for six hundred and seventy accounts where you could just
have a targeted strategy to go after the people in those accounts in a value
added
way.
Like you already know the accounts.
Yeah.
You know the people.
They're in your sales force.
Like you want them to come to you.
And so I think that there's just like a little bit of a knowledge to say, like,
do you know that there's a better way?
Do you know there's a more efficient way to spend your money?
Yeah.
And then like that hasn't, you know, certain people get it and other folks are
still sort of like, yeah, but I got to convince my CFO.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I think we're on the right side of history, right?
I think this is sort of, you know, this is where the market is headed.
And I think it's starting to pick up.
We're seeing kind of, you know, a lot of companies moving from the 20 year old
marketing automation playbook to this new one.
And it's exciting.
Like I think honestly, it's like, it's so cheesy to say this, but it's like
never been a better time to be like a B2B marketer.
Yeah.
Because our whole practice is in reinvention.
And if you like storytelling relationships and people and all these
types of things, it's a good time.
You know, I think it's a good time for a profession.
Yeah, I'll add one more, one more thing that I thought was pretty interesting.
So I was talking to, so one of our customers had this, we did a pilot.
Everybody wants some pilots, right?
Cause budgets are tight.
So we're going to do a pilot.
It's going to be a 14 episode pilot.
And, uh, and, and they gave us the name to list accounts.
We went after there was one huge account massive, massive, like, you know,
four to 100 company and closed the deal for like 800 K cold from that.
So like, I think it's like nine plus X ROI on just that one episode, right?
Wow.
And so we're going back to their team.
They're like, yeah, I'm this renewal should be pretty easy.
But like, why don't you make five more shows?
Like if you could see this type of ROI and it's like, oh, yeah, I don't know.
That might be tough.
And it was just like, what are we talking about?
Yeah.
Right.
It's like this type of thing works.
And so I think that even still just investing in content, take peeling money
away from paid into content, even when you can show the ROI is still a tricky
proposition.
And so I think that like we have a lot of work to do to, uh, to showcase
like how content drives pipeline and how you should be connecting those a lot
better.
But like you said, it's exciting time.
Yeah.
Totally.
Totally.
Anthony, great having you on the show.
Any final thoughts, anything, well, everyone should check out good audience
plus.
com obviously.
Um, yeah.
And final thoughts.
No, this is great.
I'm excited to be here in the dream force and qualified.
And so looking forward to the day and I appreciate being on the show.
Yeah.
Thanks so much.
I'll take care.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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