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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Demand Geniuses podcast. So I am super excited by my guest today. I've got Catherine Aragon with me.
Catherine has a long background in marketing. I'll let her go through it all, but for a little bit of context, leading 30 person content teams at Crazy Egg, ran content at Sales Hacker, which I think is now going to market now. Catherine, I think that's quite cool.
I've been seeing a lot from them recently and now runs her own kind of consultancy and also another business called Access XL. So first of all, have I got my introduction right? And is there any more context you want to give us on what you're doing? Okay, well, thank you for that. Again, my name is Catherine Aragon and I have been in marketing for 20 years, supporting every stage of the customer life cycle for B2B companies from startup to Fortune 500.
And so as you've observed, you know, I've worked with Crazy Egg, which is conversion rate optimization with Sales Hacker, which was all about B2B sales. And along the journey, one of the things that's fun for me is I get to learn from every company I work with. And this has resulted in this entire framework of marketing and revenue growth that starts with lead gen and goes all the way to retention, because it really does take the whole thing.
But along the way, I've also written seven books, and I founded the business and growth media group, which includes a podcast, a newsletter, and a business book club. Currently, I'm an executive coach focused on marketing and revenue growth. And I work with clients to solve whatever growth challenge they're facing, whether that's lead gen, sales enablement, or customer retention.
Okay, fantastic. So first of all, seven books. Wow.
Yes. All on the same kind of topic? Well, early on, I would, you know, my first book was largely to promote the content marketing services I was providing at the time. And that one is old.
It needs to be updated. But I wrote a little collection around writing and things like that. But I've also written one on sale, customer success.
I did another broader marketing book with a client. So it's been a pretty wide variety. And a lot of what I do either started or has been expressed in these books.
Yeah, okay. And so let's focus a bit more then on, before we get into some of the questions that we want to get into, on what you're doing now. So maybe give us a little bit more context on, first of all, what you love about the current role that you have and how you work with kind of founders and SaaS companies.
Well, and really, when it all comes down to it, the reason I chose business and growth as the name of my media group is because growth is something I am passionate about. I feel like we should be lifelong learners, lifelong growers. We should always be developing and evolving.
And so for me, I get a great deal of joy from helping my clients succeed. I feel if I can help a company grow by serving its customers better, it's a win, win, win. And that just makes my day.
So trying to turn that into something that is monetized has been a challenge throughout the years. But ultimately, I realized over the last year in particular, I was codifying everything I do at every stage. You know, like, why is it that every time I work with a client, I drive growth that maybe had been flatlined before? And I started just putting together all of these frameworks and realized, you know what, if I stack them, I've got an operating system that consistently drives growth.
So that is my new offer. And it is a Revenue Growth OS. And it's a consulting.
So I would like to work with executive C-suite folks to help them drive growth for their companies and help them serve companies that are an ideal fit, keep them long term. So revenue is a given. Yeah, and I think that must be one of the real unlocks of having a bit of a background in writing, right? Because what you do sounds like almost by accident is you end up chronicling everything that you think and your entire framework and belief system almost.
Yeah, it's like, it helps me think. If I can start writing it down and I can see all the connections, I'm very good at creating systems and workflows. And when I start seeing the connections, I put it together and it's like, wow, look what I've done.
It gets really exciting. And I do enjoy sharing that with people and helping them implement it in a way that actually works. And so let's get into a little bit more about kind of the work that you do then.
So is there a particular stage of a company's development that you tend to get involved with? Because it might help guide us. Traditionally, people think of me as top of funnel. So lead generation is something they'll come to me for.
Historically, they would come to me for running their blog or things like that. Interestingly, I've been trying to get out of specifically content marketing since about 2017, but apparently I branded myself really well. I struggled with helping people realize that I'm more of a strategist and a very holistic thinker.
So even when I was running the blog, I would observe the challenge was, okay, I'm bringing all this traffic, but what's happening with it? And so the goal is to make sure that everything we do from top of funnel to middle of funnel, down to the sales and beyond drives revenue. I even created an acronym for it, RACE, R-A-C-E, Revenue and Customer Experience. If you optimize those two things, you will grow, guaranteed.
Yeah, okay. So there's two really interesting things in there that I want to ask a few more questions on actually. One that you said is almost your own personal brand is quite hard to shake.
And it reminds me of a conversation that I had very recently actually when someone was asked, talking about how a brand perception is super, super sticky, right? So the example they gave to me is, what do Gong do? Conversational Intelligence. What do Outreach do? Sales Outreach. In fact, both of those companies have broadly the same offering and we try to view themselves as a one-stop shop.
Yet that initial perception that they created around where they started is something that they haven't been able to get rid of. And you can discuss whether they should try. But I think as everyone thinks about personal brand, what you just said is like, that's something that you need to be a bit conscious of as an individual as well if you're building your own brand.
I think it's critically important. And even if you're an employee at a bigger company, you have a personal brand and what you do with it determines what you are able to achieve moving forward. I branded myself as a writer early on and that was my passion at the time.
But the more I learned about the business, the more I realized, you know, the strategy side of this is really fun. I want to do more of that. I was, oh, it was a year or two ago, I was reaching out to some warm contacts.
These were not cold people. And I just asked that initial question, oh, wait, we don't need help with our content. And it was like, you didn't even let me ask my question, really.
So the assumption that you are, you will always be what you are today, to me is a problem that we have to really work around. So owning your personal brand is really about managing that, making sure people see you evolving and see what you're thinking and see where you are so they understand the value you can provide. Yeah, well, because I think it's quite terrifying, right? I don't know about, early in my career, like, I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And it was, you have to go and you have to try things, but it's very difficult if you start getting kind of pigeonholed into that thing, right? I think it's probably something that a lot of marketers can resonate with. When I first started my business, I really just wanted to get paid to write. Like I said, I was a writer at the time.
And people would say, oh, you need to niche, you need to niche. And I didn't know enough about what I was trying to do to be able to niche or create this big, complex business plan. It's so, I've had so much fun.
This year, I've been creating a formal business plan and just being able to see my own growth from where I was 20 years ago to where I am now is really incredible. We are always evolving, I guess. We're always growing and we should always be.
But back to me being a writer and chronicling that, when you sit down and write something down for yourself, even if you never share it with the world, it's amazing how much growth you can see. Or you'll hear yourself talking, like we're talking today, and you'll hear yourself say something and go, wow, that was good. Look at me, how much I've developed.
Well, we were just talking before this as well about editing podcasts and it can go the opposite way where you hear yourself say something and you're like, oh no, what have I done? That is so true. Yeah, I've had those moments as well. Okay, there's a bit of both.
That's good, that's not just me. Right. I think there's something quite interesting about the transition you're trying to make from through yourself as being seen as a writer to a more strategic way of working with clients, right? And I think that is quite symptomatic of how content functions as a whole struggle.
To what extent do you think that transition has been enabled by it? Has the role of content changed a little bit, I guess is what I'm getting at. That is a good question. That lends itself to a more strategic lens for that skill set.
Content marketing in its early stages became what it was because the internet was new. And we had many opportunities back then that we don't have today. Algorithms didn't exist the way they do today.
It was kind of a wild, wild west of opportunity. And content marketing was a way to market for free because we were just coming out of everything being analog. And then it was pay for play.
You had to execute on this certain level. You had to be uber professional and really quite wealthy to be noticed. All of a sudden, it was equal opportunity.
And content marketing leveraged that beautifully. But it was around 2015 to 2017 when I started noticing the results were slipping. And a lot of it was, let's say, Google's algorithm updates.
Those were so consistent and so harsh on people. Like people who had been following what they thought were the best practices all of a sudden found themselves on page 50 of Google because Google created a new rule. And we can talk more about that.
This whole game we play with SEO and with social media is what I'm trying to overcome because we've been trying to game systems. That's what content marketing was really about. We create our message and then we go game these other systems and platforms in order to get our message in front of our audience.
Today, the algorithms are preventing us from doing that. And that puts us in a very different role. We have to think outside the box.
So rather than thinking, oh, I'm going to do SEO for traffic and I'm going to go to LinkedIn and share this content or Instagram, let's say, and I'm going to send all this traffic back to my website. Nobody wants to visit a website. We're operating in an old way of thinking.
So we have to upgrade our thinking. We have to understand how these platforms are working, what their growth agenda is. We have to understand how consumers are consuming content.
And then it's not about tweaking what we've always been doing. It's about doing something entirely different. Today, if you don't have authority and trust, you won't even win at lead generation.
You have much less sales. So I put a stage above lead gen. And this is part of going to market is having an authority ecosystem where you create content and you basically create your own algorithm.
You own your content platform. You create the ability to cross promote within your ecosystem. And that just gives us a way to work around all of these algorithms because we do have to still work with them, but we want to be able to move beyond them.
We don't want to be so reliant on them. Yeah, and I think that's really interesting because I think it's something people always try and strike a balance on, right? It's OK, social media platforms, third party platforms, provide obvious benefits and you just can't ignore that. But I think there is also huge risks.
Being completely reliant on that. My background is in digital media, B2C publishing. That's an industry that's been absolutely hammered by just the loss of their customer over the last 15 years or so.
And it's completely for them, it's completely intrinsic to their business model, right? What they do is they sell subscriptions or ads on their content. And either way, those eyeballs are that's their product almost. How do you think about that? Because I think what you're saying is we have to lean into these social platforms.
But does that carry risk and are there ways to mitigate that risk? Yes, it does carry risk. And yes, we still need to do it. Yeah.
In my opinion, the authority ecosystem has really three elements to it. You have to own your own media. So, for instance, email is probably the best way to make sure that you can send out messages to your audience and they're most likely to see it.
Now, I know there's problems with email as well, but you need that channel. You need social media because, again, as I said earlier, people are not visiting websites. They're going to their favorite social media platforms.
And if you aren't present and if you aren't visible, if you aren't sharing value there, then you may as well not exist. So taking your message to your audience, wherever they happen to be, that's part of it. And yes, that feels risky because we are at the mercy of the algorithm.
If I don't play nice with their algorithm, if I don't show up every single day, if I don't keep people on the platform, if I try to take them off, I'll get throttled. And then nobody, I put in all this effort and nobody sees my content. And that's why I have a third element.
And that is what you're doing here. You're creating a podcast where you control what goes live. You could put little inserts to promote an event for let's say, or some promotion you've got.
You've got control over how this works and it's a searchable asset. So wherever you publish it, people can find it. Just like we search for websites or for information on Google, people can go to their favorite platform and search for a podcast like this one and they'll find you.
So if you're creating that authority content and putting it on a platform where you are findable, then you essentially give yourself this, it's like diversifying your investment. Exactly what I was thinking. The key to leveraging third-party platforms is leverage all the third-party platforms and then you diversify and you aren't completely reliant on one.
Yes. And years ago we said you want it to be everywhere. And I think there is an element of that, but within reason.
Because if you try to overdo this, quality goes down because now you're just spending all of your work creating content rather than running your business. But if you do it right, you can have the best of both worlds. You can have this ecosystem going where you cross-promote, you share the same message in different platforms in different formats because different people like different types of formats.
And it gives you a measure of control. And so what role, if any, then, does a company's own website play within that kind of strategy or that playbook? That is, that's the piece that, and again, I keep referring to the difference between now and the way it used to be. Because I think that's key to understanding.
We have reached a different phase of digital marketing. And that is digital marketing is marketing. That's what it is now.
There's not this distinction between, you know, the old way and the new way. It's just, this is what we do. So your website used to, we used to say, oh, no, no, this is a living, breathing asset.
It's not a brochure. These days, I honestly think it's more of a brochure. And I know that's a little extreme, but it is.
People only go to your website to learn more about you, to answer a few questions and to decide, basically, do I want to engage with a human at this place? Or am I willing to do the trial or buy this product? They don't come until they're ready to buy. That sounds an awful lot like a brochure to me. Yes, it does.
But it's funny how marketing kind of comes full circle of the insult of 10, 15 years ago is now just the right approach, right? Or the way to look at things. But I think also you can reframe that as a marketer, as an opportunity, right? Yes. Okay.
Your website's role has changed. It's not this kind of living, breathing entity that's going to nurture people through every step of the buyer journey. But what it does mean is that if the top of funnel is now happening on social, happening via AI, it changes the role of the website because what you now have is these super high value, high intent, educated prospects who are coming to your website to try and decide whether to buy your product.
Exactly. In what world is that a bad thing? Exactly. And then you understand what you're trying to do off-site.
Before they get to the website, you're trying to get them to the point that they're ready to buy before they hit your website. That's the goal. Yeah, so it changes how you have to look at your website content.
It's probably going to be a lot more product-oriented, that kind of... So I published a blog not that long ago. I kind of spent the best part of a week down a rabbit hole looking into the kind of effect AI is having on search traffic, right? And what it's cannibalizing is informational search terms. If you want to find out the answer to a question you're doing top of, kind of start of the buyer journey type research, you go and you talk to ChatGPT about it and it helps you work it out.
What isn't really being impacted yet, and probably won't be for quite a while, is commercial search terms and transactional search terms. So it changes your SEO strategy because yes, you probably need less content, but also it's not these kind of very wishy-washy listicles at the top of funnel. It's people with super specific search terms and how do you appeal to that and get them into your owned ecosystem then at that point.
Well, and this is... Here we're talking about SEO, essentially. And the thing is, let's go back to what Google actually is and always was, and that is an AI chatbot. So here are these, all of a sudden ChatGPT, Perplexity, these other AI tools come out and people are like, oh, why are we even using Google? Because these tools will not only go find the content, it'll summarize it and pull out the answer we want.
Google ultimately saw this and realized, oh, wait, we have the original AI tool. Let's just upgrade the way we do SEO. So now what they're doing is we type in, not a search term, we type in a question.
It gives us the answer. Now, if you think about this, AI tools and Google are all user-generated content platforms. We are creating content, they're making money off of it.
They're using our information to answer questions. So let's get to the root of what they're really saying. What we're really talking about here is people don't search for a website.
They don't search for an article. They search for an answer. And this is what you're saying.
Once, you know, the top of funnel, I want an answer. They go to ChatGPT or sometimes Perplexity. It kind of depends on the context for me as to which one I'll go to.
But if I'm doing a direct search for a website or if I'm doing, I want to understand a product better, then those are the commercial terms. I use Google. Many times that they will give me the direct answer I want.
Other times they'll take me to the website and then the website is really the content we're creating should be answering questions. So if we think in terms of what do our people, what do our ideal customers need to know in order to make us the market of one, the number one choice for them. Now, we're not just optimizing for Google anymore.
We're also optimizing for all of these AI tools. And I've actually had prospects come to me and say, I learned about you through AI, not through a web search. So this fundamentally changes the way SEO works.
I think it's less about keywords anymore. And it's more about understanding our customers, the information and the questions they're seeking, you know, the questions they have, the information they're seeking and making sure we're providing that on our website. So we are the thing these AIs use to provide answers and make recommendations.
Yeah, well, it's about understanding the biojourney, right? Because when you do that, you can start understanding, OK, what are the questions that people are trying to answer at each point? And then you can make a decision as to at what point you want to try and bring them into your domain. Which points in that biojourney do you go and meet them where they are? And when do you say, OK, now you're asking questions that we actually need a bit of a... Because you can build different relationships in each of these channels, Yes, exactly. You have the ability to build up first party data and potentially try and use that with a call to action to build a human to human relationship.
And there's a point in the biojourney where that's how you help them along, but it's not a start. Right. So, yeah, it's... If you understand the entire journey and understanding the touch points where you can intersect with their search for answers, you want to build authority and trust at each of those touch points.
And that's really what it's about. Because if you think about a company that is there for you before you buy, you feel really good about that company. You feel like, well, if they're there for me before the purchase, they'll be there afterwards.
Whereas the companies that make it difficult to find answers, those are the ones that move down your selection pool. The ones that provide the right information are the ones that move to the top. That's how we need to be thinking about content, SEO, customer experience.
Because to me, customer experience starts before the sale. Yeah, well, it's interesting because I think content marketing traditionally, almost by design, has made it super, super difficult to answer questions, right? It's that thing, like, if you Google a baked beans recipe, like a beans on toast recipe, the first thing you're going to see is the history of beans on toast. And then you're going to see all the different components to beans on toast because they're trying to jam beans on toast into that article as many times as they possibly can.
And it's just beans on toast. Yeah, exactly. And so you have to scroll three quarters of the way down before you get your fucking recipe.
Yes. And see, that's why that focus on keywords lowers the quality of our content. It provides a worse customer experience.
And so I'm trying to look at everything I do, marketing, customer success, all the entire thing with different eyes. Because I believe we're at an inflection point where we are reinventing what it looks like. And those of us who figure this out early are the ones who are going to win long term.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'm going to, so let's take the perspective of someone who's listening to this, who maybe works in a relatively small marketing team. And it's kind of hearing this and thinking, okay, so I need to optimize my blog for AI.
I then need to have these great bottom of funnel pieces that can capture questions. I also need to be across every social channel. Like, where do you start? And how do you, it's got to be a process of building up to this, right? Yes, and you just said it, building up.
When I work with a startup or a beta, I start building from the bottom up. Because remember, revenue and customer experience are the two most important things to business growth. If you, let's say you have a startup, right? So you've got to get paying customers before you can move up in your marketing plan or your growth plan.
And the idea is, you make sure that the next level where the customer is going to go is already built out. So if I want to get some new customers, I try to build that onboarding sequence first. That's also going to help me understand how to talk about the product.
I could create a couple of, I call them edge content. It's basically product content, a sales presentation and article format. And this can be used to support customers, but also to sell to them.
This becomes your sales enablement content. And so real quickly, with just a few assets, you can advertise, you can do customer support, you can sell to the customers. And then once you have that, your three revenue levers pulled, now you can start building out your authority ecosystem.
And if you do that right, you've taken care of all of your content. So it's about, and it kind of links into the winning by design and the revenue architecture. Yeah.
That gets a lot of, that people talk about a lot now, right? So one thing I can think again, as someone trying to implement this, it requires a long-term perspective, right? And so I know you work a lot quite directly, increasingly with founders, who founders often are very impatient people with a board that's asking them to hit revenue targets. So it can be a difficult thing for a marketer to go and ask what they've delivered this year. It's like, yeah, okay, we didn't get to the leads yet, but all the framework is there ready.
Like, how do you go about managing that conversation as you implement the architecture that you need to implement? I think it's about building their confidence that what you're doing is strategic and will affect the bottom line. Again, keep revenue as your number one priority. But the reason customer experience has to go with that is if you don't provide a good customer experience, they'll leave, they'll bail on you, and you won't have the revenue.
You've got that symbiotic relationship you've got to focus on. But if your board understands that you're focused on revenue, which is going to impact them, then they'll support what you're doing. They just have to understand it's strategic, it's measured, and it will affect the bottom line positively.
Yeah, and so that part, it's measured. How do you go, like, talk us through a little bit of what are you measuring? Okay. Traditionally, we measure a lot of vanity metrics, engagement numbers, and especially at the top of the funnel.
Further down, I think less so, but we're still measuring things that may or may not make a difference. When you are measuring revenue, you're measuring time to revenue, things like this, you know, how quickly are we converting people? Those are actually the right numbers. Then you get further down, how long are we retaining people? What's our churn rate? And if we can improve those numbers, the three things you really have to focus on is you've got your number of sales, the size of those sales, and then how long are you keeping customers? Because all of that impacts your revenue.
So measure those and then use those other numbers as leading indicators. To understand, okay, am I engaging the right audience? Do I need to refine my messaging? So those vanity metrics, I'm never against them. I just don't think we should build a business on them.
Yeah, it's always my... I've probably said this on this podcast a number of times, but it's always my thing. Vanity metrics are great. They're very useful leading indicators, but they should be no one's North Star.
Across all of the global market, the only North Star anyone should ever have is revenue, and it's about how can we collectively do the best job of contributing to that? So there is always going to be an element to that, particularly for marketers who have traditionally been put in this pigeonhole at the top of the funnel, and they will always still be found as board CEOs, CROs, even some CMOs who have come from that world and will continue to do that. And that's why I want to tear down the silos. There should be this continuous flow, just like the customer experience is continuous.
So should the internal workings of the organization. It's a team, and we shouldn't have marketing doing one strategy, sales doing another, and customer success doing yet another. This is all one continuous flow.
If we want to create the best customer experience, it needs to work that way. So from an organizational
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