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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.
Tom Rudnai 0:00
I mean, I think the need to change is just starting to happen, right? Like, you can look at go-to-market efficiency metrics across all of SAS, and it's like on average 2.51 pounds per 2.51 to one ratio in terms of go to market efficiency. So, for every one pound of ARR we're getting, or $1 of ARR, we're spending two pounds 51 which is just not sustainable, right? And that's been getting progressively and progressively worse. So, I think as VC money dries up, which was what was keeping that model alive, right, because we knew that we could just pump cash into that inefficient model. But coming back to, so, the way the content structure, I love that visual of it existing horizontally across all of go to market, and then you've got the jobs to be done, and that's how you structure yourself, and it probably requires specialisms, right. So, at the top of the funnel, there's going to be, if you're owning problem awareness, there's going to be particular channels which you need to specialize in, you need to major in, right. But you need an awareness of all of them. I guess what I'm interested in. So, how do you go about creating this change? Because, so, you specialize a gross print in the, like, 10 to 100 million range of development, right. So you're probably coming in where there's a structure in place, and I'll bet it's not that. Like, how do you go about taking people on a journey to get to a place where they're structured in the way that you're suggesting from a people perspective?
Brendan Hufford 1:15
Okay, so can I give everybody like a sneaky positioning lesson, really quick. My public positioning of I help companies go from 10 to 100 million is actually code for if you are a solo founder and you don't even have an internal marketing team, but you want to hire me, you're too small, you can't, you can't tell me. I've had a lot of well-meaning founders hop on and they're like, I'm going to write the blogs and I'm like, we're not a good fit, you're too small, but if you're over $100 million in revenue, you're probably a pain in the butt to work with, because legal wants to review the blogs before they go out. You're there's too much, you know, I'm gonna have to spend two weeks filling out security things and all this stuff just to be an approved vendor, and I don't want to deal with that. So, my public positioning is not only here's where I get the best results, but it is also, if you're too big, I don't want to deal with you, or you're too small, I'm not the right investment for you right now. So, there's a lot, anyways. Just like I said, it's a sneaky positioning lesson in terms of how do I get teams in the right place. I'm very fortunate that I've been working at this for a long time, so I don't work with teams that aren't already in the right place, but I also work with teams. I was just telling somebody that, and this is in a sales call the other day, it's kind of flipped, like my, the clients I work with have flipped from maybe two thirds big teams to now two thirds small teams, sometimes even solo marketers, where they're like, hey, I actually don't just need help with strategy. I also need somebody who's going to do this, you know. You get on sales calls enough, and you hear people say, so do you actually do the work or do you just do strategy? And it's like, I disagree at a core level with that statement and question, right? Like, strategy is nothing, which is just an insane take, but I also get where they're coming from. They're sitting in the seat, and they're like, if you just give me a pile of resources and 300 Google Docs, that doesn't help me. I get that. So I've actually helped, like, a lot of my work, maybe over the last six months, has been translating the stuff that I used to give to big teams to figuring out, like, what's the most efficient model, how do we roll this out? What does a phased approach look like? I call it again the teaching background. I, we used to call this in teaching a gradual release of responsibility. I called it an I do, we do, you do. I'm going to do the first one, the second one we're going to do together, the third one you're going to do it, and I'm just going to watch. And then you should be good to keep running with it as a program, and that's really important to me. I'm not just giving you a bunch of ideas, a bunch of tactics, or an overarching strategy. I'm giving you marketing programs that you can keep running. You want to build, like we decide leveraging a founder brand on LinkedIn is really important. Cool. What does that look like as a program that you can run sustainably by yourself or with a small team? Okay, cool. Now we're gonna run. There's an SEO play to be done here. Cool. What does that really look like? You don't, I, you don't need to be on an SEO retainer. You're not big enough. It's not a core channel for you. Here's what we're gonna do. You're only gonna mess with SEO two or three times a year, at most. That's what Airbnb did. Most people don't know that. SEO giant, for a long time, they actually didn't have an SEO team, they had a growth team, and they would just touch, you can actually see it in their organic traffic chart, historically, like when they focused on it, there's like these huge upticks. I talked to their team and asked, like, "Hey, what's up with this? And that's what they told me. So, like, depending on what it is, there are ways to phase in. It's just about prioritization. It's about what do we do first, and then what order do we upkeep certain things, and what can we build that compounds like you see a lot of those like atomization of content type of things, where it's like take one asset and turn it into 40 of these and 20 of these and seven of those, and I'm like that's just checkbox marketing on steroids, because like imagine you produce a podcast, right, and it's like you're you have the mandate, every podcast I gotta get seven. Clips from it, why? Why not six? Why not 30? Like, that's just a made-up number, because you're like, I need seven, because there's seven days, and I want to put out a clip every day. Well, what if the podcast.. like, what if this podcast we're doing right now? I don't think it is. I think we're doing a great job, but what if it sucks, and there's only really three clips? We're gonna force four more and put out a bunch of bad stuff that doesn't resonate, because, like, shit, I gotta like fill the days. I don't think so. So, I think a lot of what you see. So, the question is, then, like, how do we build it into a program that prioritizes impact? Like, I post every day on LinkedIn. My good friend Devin Reed, I think he posts like two or three times a week, maybe, and he has bigger impact than me, who's doing it right. I don't know, right. So I think stuff like that, where it's like, hey, let's be like more thoughtful about this, and then, like I said, building those programs. But everything I do now is built where a big team can scale it really big, and a small team can run it sustainably.
Tom Rudnai 5:59
Well, it's like systems thinking, and one of the things that I really have a problem with is Marx's thinking in terms of campaigns. I just think it's really outdated in terms of the end user experience that it creates, because it means that each stage of the funnel, or the lifecycle, whatever, you're seeing these kind of disconnected one-off campaigns, but it also leads to exactly the approach you think of, is you're not thinking about how can we build a system that we can maintain, remove ourselves from, so that we can progressively improve it. You're just thinking about churning out campaigns, and we've got room for five this month, four next month, but there's no, there's no holistic strategy behind
Brendan Hufford 6:35
it. I've seen it so many times where it's like, hey, we actually can't start working with you, Brendan, because we have to finish this campaign, and I'm like, "Well, what comes next? They're like another campaign, and I think that works. Like, I don't.. I didn't, like I said, I didn't come up in the traditional marketing path, right? Like, I didn't come up in big brand campaigns where it's like, "Oh, Nike launched this campaign, and whoever, you know, whatever, Ralph Lauren just launched a really well done campaign. I think there is a place for campaigns in it, but they sit at a different layer than like foundational pieces, like what I would say most of the time is the job of content, right, especially in SaaS and software, and in bb.
Tom Rudnai 7:22
No, I think that's fair. You touched on a minute ago, SEO. Like, what from your perspective? Obviously, a lot of talk about SEO at the moment. What, from
Tom Rudnai 7:30
your perspective,
Tom Rudnai 7:30
is the role that SEO plays within, like, a modern content strategy?
Brendan Hufford 7:35
SEO used to be a core strategy that you could build a whole company on. We saw so many companies where they, and they could raise a ton of money off that too. Like, look at our organic growth chart, we own this, so it felt like a defensible moat. And now, what? Almost every single company.. I don't know if anybody's looked at their Google Search Console lately, but go check it. I guarantee your chart is what I call an alligator chart. I heard some.. I should go back and find out and give credit where it's I didn't come up with that. Somebody said in my comments, because I posted a bunch of them, where you see it's like a tight line, and then they break out, impressions are going up and clicks are going down, and they all kind of look like different like alligators opening their mouths at the end, and that alligator chart is what almost every company is seeing right now, and it sucks, because year over year used to be like, "Hey, we're up year over year, we're up month over month, or quarter over quarter, everybody's down year over year, and it's like, "Well, does that mean we did a bad job? No, because if we did a bad job, we would be down 90% we're only down 15% and that's the state of the world. The Google search channel is maturing. Nobody abandoned, you know, LinkedIn when the reach went way down, not too long ago. Nobody, I mean, people still, Facebook is still a highly effective platform. I would argue both organic and paid, paid especially, but also organic. People didn't stop posting on Instagram when the reach went way down. These channels mature, right, and that's kind of how a lot of these discovery and social channels and everything have worked, where it's like we got to get you in, and eventually we figure out how we can needle down on stuff, raising more like getting more money for us, less value for you, and we got to find that perfect balance, where you'll still use it, we're not going to churn out users, so a lot of this stuff is kind of figuring that out, but nobody abandoned those, right? Nobody abandoned Instagram. I don't think people should abandon search, despite what all the LinkedIn think boys will tell you. SEO is dead, it's dead. Okay, cool. Don't, don't do it anymore. Please go all in on some other dumb thing, go all in on Reddit, I guess, which is still also awesome in a place I play in, but what I'm seeing is it can't be the foundational channel for you anymore. It's still what I do. It's still what I'm really good at. The problem is a lot of companies used to do what I would call like spreadsheet SEO, checkbox SEO, where they would get their keyword export for all their keywords and all the 1000s of variations. And then Tom, they would sort for like highest volume and lowest keyword difficulty, and then that was the content strategy that we're going to do this keyword and then this one, this one, highest volume, lowest difficulty, most traffic, easiest to rank for, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, down the list, that doesn't work anymore. Now we have to talk all the things I talked about earlier, how to get really close to your customer. Let's find out the stuff they're googling now that the SEO tools don't even show, because the SEO tools all use clickstream data. In case people don't know this, your SEO tools, the way they get their traffic data, is they bought like all of your Chrome extensions are tracking all your clicks. You all consented to it, so did I. It's fine, right? Like, they're tracking everything, Chrome is tracking, like everything is tracking you on your browser for the most part, unless you're really conscious of that. Then they use that to aggregate how many people are googling things, what people are searching for. The problem is that data is three, six, sometimes 12 months behind, right? If you look in the search terms, it'll say people are still googling like 2023 keywords, they're using like no, they're not. It's just old data, right? So, the problem is that they can't keep current events. You're going to find those opportunities. I remember when the Cares Act came out, I think in 2020 I was working with a 401 k company in B2B, and we ranked for, like, hey, how does the Cares Act affect your 401 k? And I think we had like 20,000 people on that blog the next month, and all the SEO tools were like, "nobody's googling this. We knew they were googling it, we knew, because we were close to the customer, right? I worked with a software supply chain management company, essentially. If people aren't familiar with that, when you're coding and you're pulling all of this stuff from different places, from this, from this resource, that from your patch working, you don't know what's secure and what's not, so you actually need to know what part of your code has the vulnerabilities in it, otherwise you're just getting slammed with like error messages, and everybody ignores them, because you get 50 a day. But what about if you're vibe coding, Tom? If I'm vibe coding, I have no idea where that code came from. Sometimes I don't even know what the code is, so how do I know if that's secure? How would I like, do I want to roll that out to customers if there's a vulnerability? If I can have a database breach, somebody could hack in really easily, because I didn't know where this came from. So we looked up, we started ranking for everything vibe coding that we, that we knew customers cared about. All the SEO tools said don't, nobody's googling vibe coding. Yes, they are, and in six months you're going to tell us 10,000 people a month are googling it, but today it's zero. That's not true. So we got ahead of it, right? Vibe coding security tools, vibe coding software supply chain, like all of these different articles about different variations on that, that we knew they would be searching for. That's what I think the future of SEO is. Let's start bottom of funnel, not top, and let's look at where the puck's going, not where it is right now, to use a Wayne Gretzky quote,
Speaker 1 12:51
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