Creating a Total Social Strategy to Hype New Products
Learn from Katie Berg, VP of Marketing at Klue, about building high-quality content for your core audience.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries. I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today I'm joined by a special guest, Katie. How are you?
And the radio voice is next level. I'm great.
I didn't mean to go lower on the last. How are you?
I think I don't know. My tongue got in the way. I don't know.
Is that media training? Is that how you're supposed to end every sentence?
It's something like that. I think so.
And I think when you ask a question, you end on the question part.
Is that it?
So my son doesn't really know my son's when I have.
He doesn't really know how to ask questions. But he knows the intonation.
So he'll just look at me and he'll just, and I'll be eating a pair.
And he'll look at me and he'll be like, "Pair-dody?"
I'm like, "Yeah, I'm not gonna pair. Do you want some pear?"
And he's like, "Yes." I'm like, "Anywho."
It's not a bad strategy. It's like even when you're in a conversation with
someone,
if you just repeat the last couple words they say and shift it up at the end,
it's like a follow-up question that doesn't require brain power.
It's true. That's exactly right.
And of course you're listening to Katie Berg,
the wonderful marketing leader at Clue,
and we're going to get all into everything in your background today, Katie.
And our show has always brought to you by our friends at Qualified.
You can go to Qualified.com to learn more about the number one conversational
marketing
and sales platform for companies' revenue teams that use Salesforce.
Head over to Qualified.com to learn more.
Katie, first question, what was your first job marketing?
Oh, my gosh. My first job in marketing was,
I'm curious to learn yours, actually. Mine was in event production,
which was like a good place to cut your teeth, actually,
for marketers who have events as part of their portfolio,
because events are chaotic and events are,
things go wrong literally every single time you're trying to run in-person
events.
And my first job was working for a company that put on conferences
for all sorts of different communities.
And I did all the marketing for them.
So like marketing for a nursing conference,
marketing for an oil and gas conference,
marketing for every sort of type of conference.
So it was super hardcore project management,
which has come in really, really handy later in my life,
and also gave me a lot of really great experiences just around events
and how to handle when things go wrong, which happens all the time.
It's a good skill to learn how to stay calm when things go wrong.
Indeed, that is great.
Not my first role marketing, but I did found a conference
and I can tell you that I lived all the,
I did basically the revenue side of the business for the conference.
So I did basically sales all day in the marketing all night.
And it was a crazy, crazy thing.
But yeah, oh man, you learn so much about marketing to a conference
because you're getting someone to give you their money,
or their company's money, for their time.
And it was this particular one is for entrepreneurs.
And entrepreneurs, although very needy, also very cash-strapped.
So the flights, the time, everything.
So you got to be really, really clear with your value propositions.
Event marketing, definitely a great place to cut your teeth.
You know what's interesting actually about that and how it relates to media.
So the event company that I worked at got bought out by a media publication.
And I didn't obviously know this at first,
but like events, conferences and stuff can make, I mean, I don't know other
ones,
but the ones we are running, those could be earning like a quarter of a million
dollars,
half a million dollars.
So those are like really big money generators, events.
And it's interesting in the topic of creating owned media,
or like how we're as marketers pursuing like media and development around that
event.
So like a really interesting industry, in revenue generator,
if you wanted them to be, obviously the way that we approach it at Clue is
we're not trying to make money off our events, we're trying to grow a business.
But it's an interesting channel.
Well, everything changes when your business model is selling something
different.
And that's the thing that's so fascinating.
It's like, you know, all the shows that we create here at Caspian are, you know
a conduit to try to, you know, delight people's community and drive brandgen,
right?
So it's like these two simultaneous sort of goals of like make the audience
happy,
or make them delighted in some way, entertain them in some way.
And then also, you know, sell the software most of the time in software.
But when you're an event company and that's your only business or your media
company
and your only business is just monetizing the audience,
it makes it a lot, a lot harder and more confusing.
Because you're kind of trying to do everything.
And I find it actually is way easier to be focused and say,
hey, all drains lead to the ocean of buy clue, right?
Everything that we are doing leads to buy clue, right?
Yeah, it's exactly.
You know, it's an interesting tangent and kind of similar.
There's these two, you hear about like Mr. Beast a lot right now,
and this idea of content creators building an audience and then finding the
right ways
to monetize it, whether they create their own software,
whether they sort of are running events or like merging themselves.
And software companies like us are doing the exact opposite.
It's like we start with the product that we're trying to grow business around.
And as marketers, it's our job to build the audience that's going to follow
that
and grow that audience to be sort of, I mean, as valuable of an audience as
possible
as well targeted, but also as large.
So it's like attacking the problem from different sides.
Yeah, I mean, Seth Godin had a great post years ago at this point where he was,
someone had asked him sort of like, what business would you build if you were,
you know, building a business?
And he was basically like, I would start with a thousand people that really
wanted
the thing, like I could really delight sort of like those people with that
thing.
And I would just deliver, you know, sort of that to them.
And I mean, I use that for the way that we build,
do audience building for our shows so many times.
I cannot tell you someone comes in and they say, we want to build a show for C
IOs
and CDOs and like all these different people.
And I'm like, well, those people don't, they don't consume the same stuff like
ever, really.
So if you're trying to talk to all of them, you're going to talk to no one.
And that's why a lot of like BDB shows are very successful.
Whereas like if you were creating a piece of content for IT managers that are
at the
director level in Fortune 500 companies who are looking to go from IT into
security to
transition that, like that's where I would build a product.
That's where I would build an audience is like, what is that?
There's probably a thousand of those people that are looking to do that right
now.
And you could make the best podcast for them about transitioning from IT, you
know,
into into security in a, in a, in a Fortune 500.
Like that to me is where I would be focusing.
And so many other people do the exact opposite, whether it's with their product
and they're selling it to everyone or it's with their audience building,
where they're trying like everybody to like this.
And it's like, no, that's, that's just not how it is.
That's like the natural.
There's this natural pull sometimes to look at all the opportunities, all the
potential audience that you could reach with something.
We can, we can do this at Clue as well.
We just released like a win loss product in Q4.
And so it's like really easy to start talking about, Oh my gosh, this new
product
that we have, how many different roles within an organization could be buyers
of this.
Oh, okay.
So what do we do here?
What do we prioritize?
But to your point, focus is the only way to actually drive a meaningful impact,
meaningful growth to find something that's going to work and then evolve from
there.
I had a conversation the other day with Morgan Ingram around, around like media
content and strategy.
And he was telling me about, I think it was like the creator of the, I'm going
to mess this up, the DC universe or the Marvel universe.
Like, are they different?
Are they the same?
Anyways, you said whoever.
Yes.
Okay.
He said who, which is the bigger one?
Well, Marvel is way bigger now.
DC used to be bigger.
Okay.
So I think it's Marvel.
So he was telling me how the person who was creating the plan for the movies
they were
going to make built like a five phase, maybe you're familiar with this.
It was like, there's like a five phase plan.
Yeah.
Are you familiar?
You have to tell me about it.
Intimately familiar.
Really?
Yeah.
It's like five years, sort of, or five phase plan of we're going to start with,
I don't
know, this universe or these characters or their movies and they're going to
build over
time, Iron Man, and they're going to build towards Avengers.
You tell me some of the things.
Yeah.
What was interesting about that approach is start with focus, but also be
intentional
about trying to build a long term plan for where you're, where you want to get
in the
future.
And I think it's your point that you can't create content for everyone or you
can't authentically
reach every audience.
Certainly not at first.
We kind of took the same approach when we were building the compete network at
Clue.
I had a slide as part of our strategy document that said, here's like the world
that we're
going to start with when we're creating content.
We're starting with our core buyer today, like a product marketer, a
competitive intelligence
owner.
We're going to build content for that person around the topic of like competing
We're going to expand over time.
So we have like a phase plan of how we think we can reach more audiences over
time.
But if we don't start really effectively like creating valuable and high
quality content
with the core audience, it won't make sense in the market and it won't be
appetite or
like the ROI to prove that we should continue.
Yeah.
So there's a million things that I love about all that and we'll get to Clue a
little bit
more here in a second.
But I think it's worth discussing here, which is when I started looking at
Marvel as an
example or some of these sort of like world building type things and such as
Marvel, but
it's Indiana Jones or whoever it is, the idea of you make a sequel and it's
easier to market.
That's part of it.
And I think the pieces that like what Marvel was able to do is naturally there
are fans
of certain type of superheroes.
Like I'm a bigger fan of Iron Man or I'm a bigger fan of Dr. Strange or whoever
it is
and you bring all of these fan groups together for one like large sort of team
movie.
I think that where people in B2B sort of miss the boat is they're like, well, I
'm going
to make a podcast or I'm going to make a content series or whatever it is or an
event or whatever.
But in reality, it's like it might be seven.
So my thought was like back then was like every single company should have like
in the
whatever global 2000 like should have a podcast.
And I realized at that moment, I was like, no, it's not that everyone should
have one.
It's that many of them should have five or three or two or 10.
But what I realized is like you're selling to all these different personas, you
're selling
to all these different industries, certain industries only want to follow
manufacturing
and we want to know what other manufacturing are doing.
And if you can niche down far enough into these shows, yeah, the audience for
that show
might only be 750 total people on the planet.
But that show is going to drive a disproportionate amount of business for you.
But the point being is like what you did with the compete network was you said,
we're
going to make a bunch of different types of shows for a bunch of different
personas.
So any of you give the people what they want.
I have some like interesting learnings on this front.
So when we were building out the compete network, which is really just sort of
like a concept,
I don't I don't even think anyone was talking about like owned media as a term
before.
It's just like, here's this idea we have, let's build this thing.
And a part of that it was like a four week process to build and launch it.
We spun up four podcasts at one time.
This is like our little tiny team marketing team of, I don't know how big we
were at the
time, but on our content side, one content to a head of content community or
content
writer and then someone who was owning and running our like video production.
And we said, let's do four at once, which to your point is interesting because
who we
were leaning on four different voices within clues that all represented
different people
within our buying committee.
It was kind of cool conceptually, all different shows, all different concepts.
I think most of them were at the time in the interview style format.
So there wasn't a lot of variety in format, but they had slightly different
like topics.
I think the idea of that was awesome.
I think the reality of where our maturity was at as like a team that could
produce media
was probably not there to be able to operationalize four podcasts at once.
But we could do that now.
Like now we're in the world where we're able to produce at that level, but it
took a long
time to build the systems and the cadence and like the way that we manage our
production
and the logistics of that to be ready for it.
But the idea itself was is really cool.
Yeah.
And now you look at the shows that you have that you have a portfolio of
different types
of shows of different types of hosts of different formats of different flavors
that people can
choose their own adventure there.
And like the portfolio is returning the entire, you know, the ROI is for the
portfolio, not
for the single asset.
And like that is a very forward looking way of thinking about your marketing
spend, which
I think a lot of marketing teams are not doing.
It's also an extrapolation of what would be like a growth marketer's approach
to A/B testing,
which is that you should probably be testing like five to six variants of
something, not
necessarily just two because those two might not be like your best options.
You're better off to test five to six things at one time and one of them will
hopefully
be a home run.
And we kind of did that in this case where we built one short form video show,
the four
podcasts and we were running these for, I don't know, maybe like six months.
At the end of that six months, you have a pretty good picture of which of these
different
shows or like assets, which of them are growing an audience, which are the ones
that are like
really a banger, or lack of a better word, right?
Like which ones do you want to keep?
Which ones are you maybe not nailing in?
It becomes this sort of a different approach to A/B testing is now looking at
what are the
audience types, the formats of show, what are the show concepts we want to
invest in?
And now we have a quarterly process to review how they're performing and like
change our
investment strategy around what media we want to continue with.
We want to pause and keep on the library of like our network.
And what are the new shows that we want to test and the new creative ideas?
And like that process has been really awesome because some of the newer shows
that we're
creating like ready for launch, which was one that we just launched the other a
couple
of weeks ago with Tamara Grimsky and Jason Oakley and Andy Bikkater-Biknell,
who are
like really great names in the product marketing and competitive intelligence
world.
It's a cool format of a show.
So three people, there's no like external guests regularly.
Three people who come to a show, they each bring a different product launch to
tear down.
It's conversational in style.
So it's a switch up from what we've done a lot of before, which was like
interview-based
shows, which you know are take a huge commitment.
They take like the constant finding of new people to come on the show.
And so it was cool to test something else and to see how it was well received
in the
market, which is fine.
Let's go to the trust rate where you can feel honest and trusted and share
those deepest
darkest marketing secrets.
What does Clue do?
Who are your customers?
Clue is a competitive intelligence platform, competitive enablement platform.
So we help usually a product marketer or someone who's owning competitive
intelligence
at their company to collect, analyze, generate competitive insights about what
's happening
in their market and competitors to enable revenue teams to win in those
competitive deals.
So that's like, and there's a lot of things that you can do with competitive
insights
that those can be really impactful in terms of giving to your product team,
your executive
team, all sorts of teams across the organization, to your point of focus where
we've really
tried to focus the initial growth of our company has been around really
enabling those
revenue teams to have access to up to date competitive insights.
And in the last quarter, in Q4, we, as I said, before we launched our win loss
product, so
win loss huge overlap for the most part with our customer base with product
marketing teams
and competitive teams that are owning that program, but also opens up the
ability to
deliver value to a lot of other teams within the org that are looking to
understand what
can we learn from our buyers?
And that's really those sort of insights that should be driving our go-to-
market strategy
that maybe sometimes get lost when you have a team of leaders sitting in a
border making
decisions, it can be really easy to get away from what's actually happening
with our buyers
and our customers.
So that's, I guess, answers your question.
Yeah, and so tell me a little bit more about the buying committee.
Buying committee, so like I said before, typically working with a product
marketing team or a
competitive intelligence team that's going to really own the daily work, but
buying committee
is going to involve, usually, obviously, in this world, like executive within
the marketing
function, that's usually where it will land in enterprise companies.
There can be product teams that are owning that product marketing or
competitive function
within their org.
And a lot of influence from the revenue side of the business, obviously, like
sales people
are massively impacted by how up to date, how accurate, how useful their battle
cards
are competitive newsletter, the competitive insights are.
So we're typically also working with sales leadership as part of that buying
cycle.
What is your marketing team look like to go after those accounts?
Yeah, our marketing team has six different functions within it, six different
teams within
it.
The SDR group, SDR team is a part of marketing, but I don't know if that works
for every
single company, but like early days, I was directly managing the SDR team until
they
were about the size of 13.
So what I like as a marketer is owning a pipeline number, not owning like an M
QL target.
So we're accountable for hitting a pipeline number every on a quarterly basis.
We have a brand team that's super strong, web development, design, motion
graphic, super
strong brand team, a content and community team that sits as its own pillar
within our
marketing group.
I think it's pretty obvious for us if you've been to our site and stuff, but
content and
events and community and media are like a huge part of our marketing strategy.
Then we have a demand-jang group.
That's where performance marketing sits, demand-gen, event sits, and then more
recently, a product
marketing, of course.
So that's where we have product marketing.
We have our own competitive enablement manager, customer marketing, and then
finally partnerships
is newer within our group this year.
What's your marketing strategy?
Well, I might have kind of given it away with the first laid up at the
beginning of the
show today, but our strategy, and it was really actually driven by where the
market was at
when I first started at Clue, closest seven years ago, our strategy has always
been founded
on content education and different ways to educate our audience.
So when I first started at Clue, the product marketing, like the field of
product marketing
was really, it was smaller in the community spaces or smaller.
There's maybe one major community player in the space at the time, and over the
next
two or three years, when I joined it, exploded.
And it's been really exciting to be a part of that.
This field and this role within the organization has gotten a ton of awareness
and so many more
product marketers working across largely B2B tech companies.
But we sort of had to play a critical role in educating this function around
how do you
build a great battle card?
What does it mean to really enable sellers against the competition?
And so at first SEO content, written content, then we evolved to webinars and
then webinars
was like a highly performing channel for us.
And we sort of said webinars, let's expand the creativity and the thinking
around them.
So we took on bigger virtual events or a big multi-day conference, also had
great success
with that.
Then we extended to kind of where we got to when we developed the Compete
Network, which
was let's take this content to new formats, to podcasts, and now to serialize
video series.
And now let's extend it a further step this year in getting into in-person
events.
And a lot of these pieces that I think we've grown into, the evolution to more
entertaining
and creative forms of media and trying to also move into the in-person event
space, I
think helps also to build resilience against a lot of the challenges that I see
happening
to B2B marketing as a whole, the things that are going to be difficult in terms
of SEO traffic.
And like what AI might disrupt.
I think that the things that will give us a moat will be the stuff that's
really hard
to do.
And it's really hard to create like highly entertaining creative media.
It's really hard to do in person and in the virtual event programming in a way
that builds
relationships.
It's really hard to do community really well.
Lots of people can like say we have a community, but what does it mean?
So these are the things and the types of problems that we're trying to tackle
is what's lean
into the types of programs that will be hard to do that help us to build human
and authentic
relationships and really lean into brand.
Because I think brand is going to be a super important differentiator.
As Jenny I continues to evolve and as differentiation gets much more difficult,
even in terms of
product and companies being able to like catch up to each other at a faster
pace than they
have in the past.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And I think increasingly brand, we understand more now than ever before that
your buying
experience is your brand.
Your content experience is your brand.
How you teach them, how you help them throughout the process of buying from
when they're
like, you know, from before they know you through no like and trust, right?
It's like all that stuff does matter.
And if you put out crappy stuff and you show that you don't care, it's like,
you know,
if you're not investing in that stuff, then like people notice and it's just
how it is,
especially if you're selling to marketers, especially.
Oh my gosh, especially, you know what?
I think that the so obviously all the media and the content that we create is
really helpful
in deal cycles.
I think it helps us to close deals.
I think we have good like qualitative feedback to that point, but there's a
secret, which
is that I think we create deals when we have like ideal prospects participate
in creating
content with us.
I think this is like an advantage that we have.
And you've probably seen this actually.
You bring someone you'd love to work with onto a show that you're producing and
you're
producing at like a very top level, they're impressed with how you are
operating.
They're impressed how your company is operating and they're like, it sort of
raises eyebrows
to look a level deeper into what your product and your company's all about.
So it's, I think we've landed like a lot of different customers purely through
inviting
them to some of our media productions, which is kind of cool.
And then it gets you an extra touch, right?
It's like this is where you can look at in a year, how many meaningful
conversations
are you having with someone who's interested in buying with you?
It's like, if the only way you're doing it is that your sales rep has to ask
that person
like, hey, do you want to get catch up on a call?
Like that's really hard.
But if there's two events that that person has gone to, if they've listened to
a couple
episodes, people on their team, you know, maybe listen to some different
podcasts that you
have, like you're getting this halo effect of like everybody's keeping up with
your brand
in a way.
And it's like hugely, hugely impactful.
We started looking at our new shows just like we would any major like campaign
or lightning
strike moment on the marketing team that happens within a quarter.
Like our best research report, our best event of the year, our best product
release, like
a new show release is at the same level to me.
So we started looking at how we promote and build a marketing strategy behind
promoting
a new show kind of tied to what you're saying and ready for launch was a pretty
good example
of something we did recently.
We built teaser videos that were shared out by our own account by the creators
account
that we're working with.
And like teasers have done like awesome, awesome numbers for, for whatever
reason.
I think people love like a hook, right?
The mystery of what's coming out and have a total social strategy that we are
using leading
up to three weeks up to releasing a show.
Then we also leverage email.
We leverage all of our website traffic.
Like we really intentionally are trying to make noise.
I guess through all the channels we have access to and we're launching a show.
And I think that helps.
We, I think one of the things I posted out on LinkedIn recently before we even
launched
this latest show, we had we had 150 subscribers to it.
Oh, it's amazing.
It's nice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think the approach, like going back to the entertainment industry that I'm
sure you're
super familiar with, we're trying to take the approach of how do you pull from
how movies
are using their actors, right?
To promote what are their promotion strategies?
How do we launch trailers and teasers before something comes out?
How do we get the talent or the creators onto other podcasts leading up to a
new show release
or a new release of something?
So we're trying to pull from those sort of examples.
And I think just in general, the more inspiration that we can pull outside of
the B2B world
from B2C or from entertainment space, like that's where a lot of the leading
innovation
is happening.
So that's really fun to test.
I still think the launches is the first hundred meters of the marathon where it
's like, you
can't stumble and break your leg, but it's okay if you start a little bit
slower.
It would be great if you get out in front of everyone, but like you got to put
in the
work day in and day out for the rest of the marathon.
And if you do that, you're going to run a really fast race.
Like we've seen, you know, like we have all sorts of show people like Snowflake
and people
like that, that you know, you get to those and then know the shows that have a
hundred
episodes plus, you get to that level and like the air is different up there.
You're like, people come to us.
You know, we have to turn people away.
You know, listeners like grow and there's all sorts of stuff happening.
And I always try to paint that picture for people.
I'm like, imagine, close your eyes, five years from now, every single one of
your like biggest
personas you have a show for that has a hundred episodes that has, you know,
thousands and
thousands of listeners and all these sort of things that is achievable.
Like look at clue, look at qualified, look at, you know, look at these places.
Like there's a reason why there's a reason why other people have built these
networks
and why they're so powerful.
And then the final thing on that that I would say is we were like, well, there
's so much
content, et cetera, but it's very much the like Coca Cola marketing where it's
like they
don't want to convince people who already drink Coke to drink more Coke.
They just want to convince all the people who don't to drink one Coke a year.
And like my whole thing is if someone spends 45 minutes with you on their on
your podcast
once a year, twice a year, three times a year, that's awesome.
If they can also they come to an event.
Also they do a maybe a small batch event.
Also they do a webinar.
And it's like if I could get one meaningful hour with them a month, that's
really powerful.
But I don't need them to binge 100 episodes.
Like I really don't need to.
You might not need them to, but I want them to have the ability to.
So yeah, exactly.
Right.
Like I want because I know I want that sometimes I'm not always able to like
consume a bunch
of different things throughout the week.
But when I'm in a focus mode and I'm trying to dive deep into something, I am
ready to
binge.
And I watch like 35 YouTube videos of like whatever TV series I'm catching up
on like
all.
So that's what we're trying to trying to create.
And I agree with you on the point that you don't have to have a perfect launch.
And actually that's like a great nice to have that comes from a bunch of
different cycles
and learnings of running shows.
But the most important thing I think we ever did with our flagship podcast was
we started
it.
If you went back and listened to those first episodes, I'm sure they were trash
But every single time we would listen to them and we would take down notes on
what do
we need to improve for next time.
How do you ask better questions?
How do we cut this better?
How do we create better social clips and literally just the pure discipline of
constant
iteration and constant learning.
It is like the sure the sure thing to getting to excellence.
It just requires discipline of being open to learning and trying to improve a
single inch
every time.
And to your point like we started with a podcast we made up it was nothing.
You know, you grow a bigger following and all of a sudden you have people who
are reaching
out to you to be a part of it.
So I hope sort of the message there is that anyone can create something great
and it doesn't
have to start out perfect.
It just has to start with a commitment to learn.
I don't know how many shows I made at this point but somewhere around 100ish.
And when I made my show Remarkable, so the Remarkable was the first show that I
made
like 100% like just Ian's vision of like what I want to make.
We did the first 10 episodes and then we like changed the format.
And I'm sort of notorious for a very tinkery type of a person anyways.
But I usually try to put tons of thought into the creation of the show and then
try not
to change the format a bunch because I sort of believe in the format.
And for this show is like I realized that there was like something that was
sort of
missing there and we changed it.
I think that your Remarkable is way better off now because we made those
changes.
That's the thing, right?
It's like you just you have to figure out what is the utility for the listener.
Like what are we really trying to get at for this thing and like how is the
listener
using it?
How is the audience using this thing?
And if they're not using the thing the way that you thought they would, well it
doesn't
really matter.
You need to make it how they are using it.
It's like just you're taking the role of a product marketer almost and just
looking
at the media you're creating and trying to understand and do research around
your audience,
your customer.
It's kind of a cool.
100%.
That's why I think that you made the compete network because you understand
that these
are products.
And just like the whole thing that's like I understood from sort of the very
beginning
like this is my mantra is people should be building portfolios.
Yeah, of course because you're product people, right?
It's like because your product is product, right?
And so of course you would get it because you need to treat these things like
different
unique little things and all of your shows are different and you need, anyways,
kudos
on all that.
I do have one more question about this.
Well I have a million more but you built it on a different website and I'm
curious.
Do you think that's the right play and there's no right way but like I see both
sides?
I see both sides.
I see both sides.
I'll tell you I want to hear your opinion on it because it was something we
went back
and forth on at the time and I think where we landed was we wanted to free
ourselves
of maybe what would feel like the inherent bias of it being like a clue vendor
software
owned media space and I saw this future where it could just like have a
different level
of affinity for people if we built it on its own site and we built a brand sort
of behind
it.
The content there can live somewhat differently than the content that we're
building on the
clue site.
Now the honest truth in is like do we constantly live in this world of like
what is one and
what is the other and what have we done?
Yes.
All the time.
All the time.
But I don't know there was something that felt like it needed to live as its
own separate
thing and I'll actually say it like we also have content freedom in that.
So as an example we're creating a show a lot of product marketers last year
were laid
off like market budget cuts and you're super familiar with this.
That affected a lot of product marketers and so we're creating a show with an
influencer
who does a lot of coaching and education on landing a job and so we're creating
a show
around that it's like you know there's a through line maybe in competing as a
candidate
and there's a through line in like serving and enabling and helping like the
core audience
that we work with.
But like that topic can be difficult when it's like the clue brand and we're
teaching
people how to get another job like with our customer base it's like what that's
kind
of weird you know a VP of product marketing season is like why are you teaching
my whole
team on how to get other jobs.
So in some ways it has created freedom in the content that we create because
they can
live as two things and I wanted the compete network to be able to exist and
grow as a
content network and a community and like the community connection was also a
really integral
part of that strategy.
Ultimately I think the brand behind it and I think it works for us but it
certainly becomes
difficult to like parse the two sometimes.
Yeah I have many thoughts but none of them are necessarily like incredibly
organized because
each company is so different but the couple points that I think I'm pretty
clear on is
I think most companies should probably build their first couple shows just on
their website
because I think it's.
Yeah and that's what we did I agree.
Yeah yeah.
So that's like the first part.
The second part is I think the fact that you made it a network is what makes
sense because
I think that a lot of people try to make the media brand property thing and
they get that
wrong in the sense that people don't follow media brands they follow shows.
People have favorite shows they don't have favorite things but the exception of
like
Bravo because everybody Bravo is like a truly transcendent thing.
Like you might love HBO right HBO put something out that you're probably going
to be like
oh I'll check that out right.
That's actually true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
exception not the rule right.
Most other channels and those type of brands again who are just media companies
so this
is their entire business model that that's all they think about.
Most people just like shows and most people don't really care if it's on
Netflix or if
it's on Hulu or wherever it is that's just who's giving it to them right.
So I think the idea that people I would bet that if they were that if your
shows were
not on the compete network that people would not necessarily mind if they move
to another
network I don't know if they would necessarily care at all because the utility
is the show.
However from a from the standpoint of you and the company and all that sort of
stuff. I think that putting shows under your under the flagship under the website
easier to basically
just go like buy our stuff is easier under the under if it's hanging on your
website I
think that's that's generally just way easier.
But from the community building thing to me this is the would you wear the t-
shirt right.
And at the end of the day when your community building you don't want them to
wear the clue
t-shirt.
And whether that was marketing nation or that that's social is trailer laser or
that's like
all these other types of things that have been built in the past.
That that is where the community play is so important because like content is
like part
of community but it's like the entire other side of it where that's where I
think you get
at like having a network and the community piece living in its own having it be
a little
bit.
A part is is different because like your clue you still have your clue
customers that's
that's that's yeah I talk I talk about this like total addressable community.
There's communities within that customers advisory board.
No, I all these little things but like the bigger community the broader
community who
you serve broadly that lives somewhere else.
I don't so anyways that's my but that broader community was exactly who we were
trying to reach.
Exactly.
And and a core 10 years ago.
And and a core tenant and part of community is the sense of identity.
And that that was the question we were toying with is like people want to
identify by a
community not like a clue like a I'm part of this compete network community.
And I think that is exactly what works for us is yes, there's a portion of
people in
that community that are customers.
There's a there's a lot that are that are not they're passionate.
They're future customers right there are all these things but that's who we
want to reach.
And it's interesting you make the HBO connection because early days we had a
precedent slide
that was part of my legs pitch deck on this idea that that we were making up
that was
who are the like brand precedence of what we want to create.
And I think we had three different ones.
I don't think HBO was on there but HBO just says like a precedent for our
content as
a whole is definitely there we are trying to create a brand where you would
think, oh,
this is a show from the compete network.
I know the quality.
I know that I'm going to like it because I've had a consistent like consistent
experiences
of content that I find entertaining, interesting, well produced.
But the other three precedents we had at the time were brand I think brand vib
es like Red Bull
like Red Bull is so much beyond its drinks right like the events that they do
and just
like the experience that they create.
So like vibes kind of like Red Bull but intelligent like HBR and storytellers
like storytellers
like vice but you could probably swap in storytellers like HBO trying to find
this like really
creative through line between events and experiences and like entertaining and
intelligent media
was sort of the initial vision.
Yeah, I mean we obviously we build a lot of sort of like the edutainment type
stuff especially
like since we're making murder mysteries and stuff like that where it's like
farther
on the end to entertainment side which is not a lot of people in B2B or over
there.
And so I feel the same way about sort of like the fictional world and stuff the
cast
means building.
Yeah.
Or it's like I want you to know that you know something that we would create is
has a very
particular look and feel for our fiction offerings but you know it has to be
singular
right and it's tough.
You just know that like hey when they put something out but then it's like you
kind of
can't miss you know it's a little bit more pressure so then you're like do you
do more
do you do less do you do you know whatever but yeah it's an it's an ongoing
thing.
I think most companies having it live on a different website is you just got to
make
sure that you're thinking community.
I think that that's my final thoughts.
It would not be if you're starting out and you have one or two sort of
different shows
or assets is probably not the time.
If you're looking to build out all the content with every influencer in your
entire category
and be like this number one place for all of the best content to be bingeable
like maybe
you're at a place where it could exist on its own.
So I agree with you.
It's like deeper thought needed.
All right let's get to the playbook where you talk about the tactics that help
you win.
What are your three channels of tactics that your uncuttable budget items and I
'd imagine
the content is number one.
I mean yeah exactly.
Like when we look at where our revenues coming from and where we look where our
pipeline is
coming from a lot of it is going to show up as coming in direct or coming in
organic.
Is that all from our dimension programs or is that floated through a lot of the
brand
and content and education events like it's all the media stuff that I believe
is driving
it so that the things that for us are uncuttable for sure like our own own
events.
Super strong driver of revenue for us.
The media the social and the content like the content is super attributable.
It's just a belief for me when I look at our in-vam demand and how that stayed
super consistent
like regardless of the market that it's a result of the investments that we've
made.
So it's not always like the most easy to attribute thing because we're not like
we're not working
off a super intense reporting metrics that are coming from someone who watched
like a
YouTube show there's a little bit of difficulty obviously in doing that unless
you crack that.
But it's it's all of the programs we run that I think help build our brand so
events
media social content those are uncuttable and those are by pipeline I think
proving to
be successful for us.
And then where else do you spend your money uncutables?
Yeah the questions and the challenges of what I really need to and what we need
to critique
is a marketing team is I'm curious your take on some of these.
So SEO what what we do there what we do there and how that works for us in the
future don't
know right so that feels like something that really obviously you want to
capture super
efficient when you have a strong SEO an organic engine that's working for you
does that investment
pay off in the future it feels like a thunder like a period of huge disruption.
I think that low intent outbound work is also under a period of disruptions we
have an
SDR team I think like we need to be really innovative in that's like very
valuable work
that gets done by people who are excellent at personalizing and reaching across
multiple
channels and building human relationships.
I think the way that we in tech have utilized that resource has been not as
effective as
it can be and we need to change it so the low intent sort of outbound has got
to go.
And then we ripped all of our outbound because yeah we switched it all to
inviting people
to co-create content with us we invite them on our shows because we were doing
we were
doing A/B testing we would send the same email to the same group and you wouldn
't get a response
from the product thing because they were not in market and they would be like
oh come
on your show absolutely this show sounds awesome and then you build a
relationship with them
and then you know within two seconds whether or not they're in a buying cycle
and you made
an impression on them and it's like to me it's just like why would you waste
the emails
and waste anyone's time it's like just build a relationship with them in some
way and then
yeah like I would not.
That's like to the point though like the effort and the work of personalized
outreach and a
human reaching out to a human that doesn't doesn't not work that worked for you
but you
had to change up what your approach was and why you were reaching out reaching
out to someone
not in market like super difficult high intent or reaching out with something
that actually
builds a relationship that's like a much smarter way to utilize that resource I
think.
I think it's really just being super candid I think it's really hard to reach
out to people
and say hey do you want to talk to a you know 24 year old that doesn't really
know that
much about your business when you're a senior executive like just being candid
like most
people if you're a senior executive don't.
You know what I think would be interesting in the future and I think we need to
also
awesome but well yeah like I love the function I just think it's about how you
utilize it
so yeah who is the right person to reach out to an executive is it your own
executive
team how do you leverage like those people in different ways I don't know I
think there's
a lot more to be explored in what you do there and then I think the last thing
that I always
question is the amount of spend that you invest into external events right you
're sponsoring
something or having a booth somewhere it's like what's the brand benefit from
that what's
the pipeline it really really depends on being really smart about that trying
to find or
speaking opportunities than just sponsoring opportunities and trying to be
smart about
investing more into our own owned owned event portfolio that creates stronger
brand relationships
yeah we got to do some really quick quick quick kids these are quick hits and
quick
questions just like how qualified helps companies generate pipeline quickly go
to qualified.com
and check them out because they're the best and they've been with us for the
very beginning
Katie quick hits are you ready I'm ready yeah let's go number one hidden talent
or skill
that's not on your resume I paint favorite book podcast or TV show that you'd
recommend
succession or the bear for TV shows which your best advice for someone who's a
VP of marketing
never let someone else's confidence make you feel less confident in your own
ideas.
Oh that's great I love that I've never heard that that's a good one Katie it
has been
yes wonderful having you on the show I could talk to you for hours wonderful
chatting with
you for a listeners go to kluclu.com I'm sure you've heard of them nudge your
product marketer
get them all over it also go to the compete network check out the new show
ready for launch
and all their shows yeah Katie any final thoughts anything to plug?
No I think I've plugged enough today that's that's enough I had a great time
chatting with
you it's really fun to talk about all this sort of own media stuff with like
minded people
so this has been a treat for me thank you.
[Music]