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This show is made for B2B marketers who are tired of the same old advice. Ugi Djuric, CEO of ContentMonk and B2B Vault, sits down with some of the best minds in B2B to talk about what’s really working, what’s broken, and what nobody tells you about growing a company. This is the show where people share their deepest insights and secret knowledge they wouldn't otherwise share on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 (00:00)
And we saw that one performed 33 % better than the short one and 50 % better than the long demo.
Speaker 2 (00:05)
you
Speaker 1 (00:09)
We really wanted our demos to be very polished and look and feel like the real thing.
The homepage, always have to go pretty wide. You're casting a pretty big net. The biggest thing I recommend always is thinking of these demos like a story versus just like click here, click here, click here. They usually have a good amount of research already done before they even talk to your sales rep. Usually what we recommend is between eight to 13 steps. So I actually just A-B tested this. So I have data to show that off. They're going to their communities. They're going to their friends. They're texting them and being like, who should I buy? I have a few different thoughts of like what marketing will be in 2030. I do wonder if eventually everything's just going to be
obviously like prompt based. You hear all the time with ChatGDP gets so much better the longer you've been using it. The celebrating and emphasizing your customers actually plays really well in the GEO. Really weird part of marketing right now where I see two different trends happening. At the end of the day, it should benefit our audience and help their day to day rather than just say like, hey, look, Nevada, it's great.
Speaker 2 (01:11)
Hey guys, today on the show we have Natalie Mercutullio and Natalie, she's a head of growth and product marketing and novatic. I had such a fun recording this episode because Natalie and I talked about many things such as for example, how to move that aha moment that user feels from your product to your website, what are the best interactive demo,
practices that get you the most customers. And we also touched based on what is Novatic currently doing to stand out in the market. What are their content operations and how their content puts their customers on the spotlights, gets them the most attention and eventually also gets them the SDRs. And at the end, I picked the brain from Natalie on what are the future marketing trends and what can we see.
in the next years. So enjoy, it's going to be a hell of an episode. So tell me, you probably know that I'm the very big advocate of the fact that everything right now slowly becomes a commodity, right? And we have multiple brands like literally looking the same, having same designs, writing the same content, using the same phrases, etc. So
From your experience, personal and the experience when working with Novakik, according to you, what's the best way to stand out right now with the market?
Speaker 1 (02:48)
Something that we think about a lot, and I don't know if that's just particularly right now, but I think it's emphasized right now, is really the way to stand out is that customer experience, that actual relationship, really trying to feed bird-of-mouth as much as possible. We've seen, and like every conference I go to, we're talking about this idea that buyers want to buy from each other. They usually have a good amount of research already done before they even talk to your sales rep. They're going to their communities, they're going to their friends, they're texting them and being like, who should I buy?
Our mind, really, like one of your few differentiators is that relationship you have with your clients is ways that you can help celebrate and empower your clients and customers, not just use them for referrals, but really develop a close relationship with them so that by the time someone reaches out to them and says, hey, who should I use? It's a no brainer to suggest you.
Speaker 2 (03:37)
Let's start with interactive demos for a moment, because I see that's something that you're very, very obsessed. I mean, of course, that's not the norm. think that's right. So currently, there are a couple of interactive demo solutions in the market. And as someone who is not even a, I I'm not a SaaS founder. don't have a product. My clients do.
Usually, always, diabetic comes top of my mind when we talk about interactive demos and all that kind of stuff. How did you position yourself in that consideration,
Speaker 1 (04:15)
Yeah, one thing we focused on really early from the beginning was the fact that we really wanted our demos to be very polished and look and feel like the real thing. One of our number one use cases is putting a demo on the website. And we know if you're going to put anything on your website, you want it to be really high quality. You want it to make sure it's really showing your product in the best light. So one thing we focus on a lot is, one, the ability to actually clone the product with to get a little technical here. You can actually clone the HTML CSS.
So it's not just screenshots, it's not just videos. It really does look and feel like the actual product. And then we also have lot of capabilities around editing those captures. That's what we call the HTML CSS clones. So you can really make it look like your product, but also you can edit if there is any messy demo data, is there anything you wanted to clean up?
So really our focus has always been not just like how do you create a quick demo that you can put on your website using like screenshots or videos, but one that does show in the best light. And then we also do a lot of ⁓ research around best practices. So when you're working with us, kind of going back to that first point of like, how do you stand out that human relationship? It's really about coaching on, know, okay, like maybe this demo is a little too long, we stop our best practices and data we'd recommend making a little shorter or.
we'd recommend adding another CTA or maybe changing up the copy here. So again, really just positioning around like making sure that you're having success with the demo, not just building one for the sake of building one.
Speaker 2 (05:42)
One thing that we definitely talked about on LinkedIn and other channels and that I could see is that you're very rigorous when it comes to your content and the quality ⁓ criteria that you have. So can you walk me a little bit through kind of a standards that you have in your team and kind of content processes that you end SOPs or whatever procedures?
that should be built in Sainabati.
Speaker 1 (06:13)
So I'd say our marketing standard that we have across the board, and this will tie into content, is this concept of unique and valuable. So everything we do needs to be one unique. it being such a competitive market, we don't want to just be copying what others are doing out there. Not saying everything has to be just like a crazy different campaign, but what's maybe a unique piece of data that no one has. Maybe it's a unique customer example that no one else has. So those are kind of the unique criteria. Then valuable, at the end of the day, it should benefit our audience and help their day to day.
rather than just say like, hey, look, Nevada is great. We really try to position everything more for here's again, a piece of data that will help you. Here's an insight, not just look at this new thing we have. So when building out content, we keep that within our criteria and say, again, like no content could ever be something that someone not on the Nevada team could help write or outline because it's going to include unique data, a unique interview or just get insights.
or unique examples from our customers. And so when we outline our blogs, it really is a long process to make sure that we are pulling in those unique insights. And it's not just like we outsource that to a freelancer to outline them or like copy a bunch of other blog articles. We don't freelance it out to AI or anything. We might use it to help like polish and make it more concise. But really it's kind of having at that early stage going through and making sure it's like, okay, this really is something that no one else could replicate.
Speaker 2 (07:40)
One thing I forgot to ask about the interactive demos for a sec. This is something that really piqued my interest quite recently, I would say. The whole point of interactive demos is to get that aha moment from the product, put it on the homepage, product page, whatever it is, and have potential users experience that aha moment.
Have you seen a case where interactive demos of a sort could be implemented not just for products but also some kind of services?
Speaker 1 (08:18)
I have seen, for example, if you sell some sort of course and you want to give a preview of what that course is, or I have seen some services that might have a community aspect part of it. We have a few different communities where their main, what they sell is a service, but they use the community for Legion. And that's examples where on the website I've seen them create an interactive demo showing off like, this is what you'll gain if you join this community, or again, if you sell, let's say a multi-set course.
having a little screenshots or little snippet of that course on your website and showing, okay, like if you sign up for this course, this is some of the value you're gonna get, a little sneak peek. That's the main way. And I guess I also have heard some services talk about if they've built any proprietary software or even if they just have a certain tech stack, kind of being able to show off like, hey, this is the process it would be like working with me.
Speaker 2 (09:07)
Tell me, recently, I think actually the previous episode that I recorded. The guy, I think it was Logan Hendrickson, I don't know if you know him. He's all like that, basically his philosophy is that specific pages and the website, product pages, now bring far more conversions and everything else than the homepage.
From your experience, and this is also probably perhaps mentioned in the B2B WIFFS report, where is better to place the interactive demos? Is it on like dedicated product page, feature page, book and demo page, I've seen companies doing that as well, or?
Speaker 1 (09:55)
So we see two most common use cases either on the homepage as a secondary CTA. So you might have the main CTA, a book, a demo, then explore product. Or I think to the point about more product focused, we've seen more and more customers adopt like a demo center, which is a specific page just for all of your demos where you might break it up by use case, persona, feature, like product line. And my guess is that's why the product page is converting better just because it's more specific than the homepage.
The homepage, always have to go pretty wide. You're casting a pretty big net. So if I'm a buyer, I might be going straight to a product page, be like, that's the exact pain point I'm experiencing or what I'm looking for. So we haven't seen as many customers implementing it on the product page. Plenty do, but more are using it in that demo center to be like, hey, look at this is everything our product can do and give you the option to explore the part that you care about most.
Speaker 2 (10:46)
And from your experience, ⁓ what performs better? Shorter Perl demos or the wrong
Speaker 1 (10:53)
So I actually just A-B tested this. So I have data to show that off. That's what I've been working on the past month.
Speaker 2 (10:59)
Hey guys, just a real quick story for interrupting the episode. Did you ever feel overwhelmed with the amount of low quality and crappy content that you find on Google and LinkedIn? Well, B2B Vault, the producers of this episode, solved that problem. B2B Vault is a database of hundreds and hundreds of expert level
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We send out a newsletter with a few most important reads every B2B marketeer should read at the start of their week to make sure that you hit your quota and get more deals in the pipeline. So just very quickly, if you're interested in this, go to theb2bworld.com slash newsletter and join thousands of other B2B marketeers in our Monday newsletter. See you there.
Speaker 1 (12:09)
We did see, so we ran two different tests, one that compared a shorter versus a longer one. We did see the shorter one perform better than the longer demo, and that was about 13 steps. Usually what we recommend is between eight to 13 steps, and it had about like a 3 % better click-through rate than the longer one. However, the one that performed much better than both the short versus long demos was a demo that was personalized by Persona. So to go back to my point of like people wanna see exactly what's relevant to them.
So upfront, you could choose what your persona was. For us, it was sales, growth. And we saw that one performed 33 % better than the short one and 50 % better than the long demo. So I would say short is better, but still give options upfront so people can tailor it and see what they want to see, and then keep those tailored demos shorter.
Speaker 2 (12:55)
So basically the winning player here is asking pre-qualification questions on that interactive demo page. Like what title you are and what's the main use case and then lead with that. So basically 7, 8, 9, 10, doesn't matter, different interactive demos on the one demo.
Speaker 1 (13:11)
Exactly.
Yeah, I think you could do it on the one page by asking up front or the demo center. That's sort two ways that you could give them options.
Speaker 2 (13:29)
Yeah, yeah, makes sense. from the... How do you call this now? Like a product tooltips, world tour, product tour that you can see on the interactive demo page. Tell me how, from your experience, because I went through like a lot of interactive demos and to be honest with you, like 90 % of them didn't quite hold my attention. So how do you hold attention and how do you make the visitors...
go through the entire conjunctivism.
Speaker 1 (14:02)
The biggest thing I recommend always is thinking of these demos like a story versus just like click here, click here, click here. I think we have a lot of times people go in to build a demo and they think of it kind of like a walkthrough, like how you would do for something like Pendo or WalkMe, like an onboarding tool where it's much more just first you click this button, then you click this button. And so what we constantly recommend is write out the story first, figure out what you want to show.
and make sure in each step you're giving a value. It's not just that you're showing off like how to physically use the feature, but what would get someone excited about using it. And then I think some of the best demos I've seen, they do a really good job of incorporating throughout maybe even social proof or just little moments of something that's not just about the product, whether it's like stats or something like that, that again gets people excited to keep going. I'd also say we recommend have multiple CTAs throughout the demo.
So maybe step six, give an option to either book a demo live or keep going. So if people are maybe like, you know, I think I've got it. I don't need to see the full thing. It doesn't have to be just wait till the very end to convert.
Speaker 2 (15:09)
And from that kind of a story perspective, is it better to lead with some kind of, know, jobs to be done for specific titles or like the outcomes they want to, you know, have or the features or, you know, comparing features with other, you know, vendors in the market? Like what's from your, what's the centerpiece of a story in product development?
Speaker 1 (15:34)
I will say, I do think it sort of depends on the channel, right? If you are building a demo for G2, let's say, you actually might want to show more of your differentiating features and lean a little more into features because those are buyers looking to figure out how you're different. For a homepage demo, what we've seen, again, similar to the persona demo, that was a little more of like a jobs to be done or the outcomes you're going to get versus, hey, you're going to use X, Y, and Z features.
In general, I'd say defaulting to jobs to begin or outcomes, but I would think about what is the channel you're sharing this? Like, is this a channel where they might want to go a little more into differentiating features or things like that?
Speaker 2 (16:10)
Yeah, and then like something that just crossed my mind, when it comes to interactive demos, can you, do you by the way offer the option to see who could interact with demo? Yeah, so before that kind of, you know, customer finishes the demo, right?
Speaker 1 (16:25)
Yeah.
Yep, we have a few different ways. You can, if you add a form, obviously you can see, but we do also have a tracking script that can connect to any of your CRM tracking scripts. So you could see, for example, if someone on your website filled out a HubSpot form for like an ebook and you have them cookieed and track in HubSpot, you can still see if they went through your interactive demo, even if you don't gate that at all. And then we do have an accounts identification feature. So a few different ways you can get an idea of who's seeing your demo.
Speaker 2 (16:57)
So you have something natively similar to like RB2B or Lidfid or something like that, right?
Speaker 1 (17:04)
Not at the person level unless you have them already in your CRM.
Speaker 2 (17:10)
Yeah, yeah. And I guess there is an option to, know, okay, so let's say that for the, you know, customers who are not in your CRM already, right? I have RB2B installed or any other solution like that, doesn't matter. And I have Navati on the other side and I get notifications from the RB2B, you know, who are the people who are visiting the interactive demo page, right? Have you tested any
outreach, outbound, retargeting, any kind of other motions that can target specific personas who took the interactive demo based on the RB2B data, for example, but did not convert. How do you re-engage?
Speaker 1 (17:57)
Yeah, we've seen two different ways customers will do that to your point, either through LinkedIn Ad View targeting or through outbound. And that's sort of also the value of asking upfront, hey, what is your role? Because then you can create more segmented targeted ads or on the outbound side. For example, Unifi, they're one of our customers. They do have an amazing outbounding tool. You can segment by a million different things. And so what they do is they feed all of it into their Salesforce, including their Novatic data. And then they have different outbound campaigns.
depending on how far they went to the tour, again, like what role or what use case they selected. And then they have specific messaging in that outbound that better matches, okay, you told me again, you were this role, I'm gonna use that in my messaging and continue to nurture you.
Speaker 2 (18:41)
Meaning kind of templates or messaging that you sell across the board.
Speaker 1 (18:47)
for email campaigns?
Speaker 2 (18:48)
Email
or retargeting ads, whatever it is. Any good success stories that you saw from your clients.
Speaker 1 (18:56)
For email campaigns, generally what we see is more like, okay, honestly, sometimes just acknowledging it. We saw you went to the demo, you're interested in this feature, and then following up with an additional resource. So if you saw they went through, again, maybe their specific role, follow up with a case study or quote from someone in that role. Continue on the social proof to try to get them further down the funnel. And honestly, same with the LinkedIn ads.
We've generally seen if you are retargeting them, that might be a good chance to add in an offer. Obviously, the gift card campaign, if you want to go with that, or if you have some sort free motion, something to get them to move that next step along because they've already showed a good amount of intent. ⁓
Speaker 2 (19:38)
Okay, enough with interactive demos, let's talk about funnier stuff. ⁓ Okay, so I was ⁓ actually just reading yesterday a piece of content by Sam Altman from OpenAI. And it's really great, will be in the B2B World next week.
It's a really great piece and in that article some basically like, know talked about the future of AI in the next five ten years, you know, and how AI will be, you know Connected with our the way how we work, etc. So Tell me what does your marketing brain think about? Where will be because like the changes are super fast, right? The changes are super fast like what used to work one year ago
doesn't make sense to do it anymore, right? Where do you see marketing by 2030, B2B marketing?
Speaker 1 (20:36)
Yeah, I have a few different thoughts of like what marketing will be in 2030. I have one idea where the main thing is like, wonder if there's really going to be like UI for softwares anymore. Like so much of marketing is design and creating that cohesive image. But I do wonder if eventually everything's just going to be obviously like prompt based. And in that case, I wonder if it's going to be much more just like almost entirely actually true PLG.
where so much more of is it just about like, okay, I heard this other customer is using it. Maybe even I've heard ideas of like, maybe your customers are actually your salespeople. Maybe they're the ones constantly selling for you, like sort of in a more true B2C fashion where like the influencers are the ones actually maybe like selling for you as well. And that it's much less that the, maybe like the sales team from the company is actually involved or the marketing is involved. And it's really, you're working directly with your customers and they're almost the,
Yeah, the end sellers or the end people going after because at the end of the day, if we have such a very like product led motion, you probably just want to see, okay, how did someone else use it? What's their use case? Talk to me about it directly versus going through a traditional B2B sales cycle. So this is like five to 10 years. I don't know if it's happening now, but almost like cutting out the middleman of current marketers and salespeople.
Speaker 2 (21:55)
It's interesting, Melissa Rosenhalfer, she also on the pod, we were talking a lot, ⁓ she said that, if I remember correctly, she believes that in a few years we won't even have websites anymore. You basically do everything into a chat.
Right? Try GPT, Claude, whatever it is. You can get all the information you need and that there will be no need to visit other companies' So because of that, and for example, let's say that we don't even have the product you buy anymore, as you said, right? How will that impact the size of the market in every category? If you get what I'm trying to say.
size of the market in terms of the vendors, not in terms of demand, but in terms of the vendors' software. How do you think that would impact that? how, if you don't have visitors visiting your website, if you don't have visitors using your product in a way that they're using right now, then how do we get data? How do we market ourselves? How do we stand out, basically?
What do you think about?
Speaker 1 (23:19)
do wonder if there will be some sort of marketplace for all the different apps, if we're not. And I've already kind of seen this rising with the idea of something like demo. If they were not going to have individual websites, will there still be some sort of listing that's like, hey, if you're looking for this solution, here are all the tools that do it, and you just optimize more for those marketplaces. As far as the number of vendors, I've heard two different opinions, and honestly, I'm not sure which one I am going down with yet. But one is the consolidation play.
Like if so much of AI, the value of it is the data that you have. Like so much of it is being able to say, okay, from one source of truth, like you hear all the time with Chat GDP gets so much better the longer you've been using it because it knows more value, it has more of that data. There is a value of consolidation. If all my tools live in HubSpot and HubSpot just has access to all my data, I don't have to worry about any integrations, then anything I'm prompting off of, I know it has the full picture. So I've heard one argument of like, we're just gonna see a bunch of consolidation, number of vendors will go down.
I've also heard the argument that because everyone can build something now, it's much easier. We're going to get hyper niche because you can have something built. That's like the perfect version of that software for you or your use case. And that you'll be able to just like cherry pick, okay, I need B2B SaaS and I need something that's really good at repurposing blog posts into LinkedIn posts or something like that. And it's just going to specialize in one task, but do it really well, which I think we're seeing with a lot of these GPTs. So.
I haven't made my decision yet if it's gonna be consolidation or going hyper niche, but I really feel like it could go either way.
Speaker 2 (24:50)
It like hyper-nicheing down. There is like a... Okay, you can niche down and you can niche down and you can niche down, but at certain level, that's it. You can't possibly niche down. For example, ⁓ you can build interactive demo software for software companies. You can go one level down and say, okay, this is interactive demo software for a fine tech company.
Or something like Ormartech or whatever it is. And you can perhaps even go down and say interactive demo software for finite tech companies doing up to 5 million dollars in green-grabbing. But that's it. I mean I don't see any other way to finish that.
Speaker 1 (25:39)
Yeah, I do think there is a natural limit. But I would imagine people building these niche software aren't trying to like scale or grow something crazy. Like I think we're just going to see people start building something that fits solves their needs. And they might slap a like, Hey, do you like this product? Give me $5 for coffee type of thing. Like I have engineering friends who will do that. They'll just like build side projects for things that they have a pain point on. And they don't really invest in marketing it. They don't really invest in selling it. It's all word of mouth. And it's just like, hey, if you like this, maybe give us some money.
So I do agree. The niching stops at some point, but I also don't think these are going to be people who are evaluating their TAMs and thinking about, I need to make sure the market is this big. It's more just to people like, hey, I want this, so I built it. If you want it too, give me $5.
Speaker 2 (26:22)
Yeah, makes sense. But also, I mean, if it's easy for other people and creators out there, know, people with ideas to build software, various kinds of software right now, then it's also easy for companies to build in-house software and, you know, solve their problems very, very specifically, right? So we might even, you know, be in a situation where
We won't have other companies, I mean at least some categories of products, right? Because all of them will be building personalized in-house. What do think about that?
Speaker 1 (27:00)
Yeah, I think that kind of fits into the consolidation play. Like if you end up just buying lovable and you build all your own apps internally, to your point, that's one tool that you're So I could very much see a world where everyone also just goes, they hire someone who's like, your whole job is just to build internal apps. I do think though we've had enough companies, I don't know if we have to learn this lesson again, kind of get burned by, you have one person who's a dedicated, like build the internal apps and then they leave and other people don't know how to manage it. So.
I'll be curious if that fully takes on just because it does take a lot of rigor towards like also documenting and making sure everyone knows how it works so it doesn't just one person built it and then it gets forgotten about.
Speaker 2 (27:39)
⁓ When I was talking about this one, 30 seconds ago, it just crossed my mind, like, I guess I am the most complicated CRM user, whoever you are, because I absolutely have no idea how to use a CRM. Literally. And I've tried dozens of CRMs in my life. None of them works for me. And it's not that we are running like a...
you know, 1000 % company or something like that. But our needs are very, you know, specific because, know, we have people in our CRM that you want to build relationship with. We have people who might be potential clients, people for podcasts, know, people for interviewing for specific articles, know, all of these types of things. And the best solution at the end of the day for us.
was to build our own serum inside their table. Because none of them have a know, or any other. Now, what is this one? Attic? That became popular like right now? None of them work for us. yeah. Anyway, let's talk about my attic for a moment. How are you preparing for...
the shifts that we can expect in the future. What's in your roadmap for the next six months, a year, two years?
Speaker 1 (29:06)
Yeah, think the biggest thing we're thinking about is just again, how do we make it very simple to build a demo, but keeping our best practices in mind? So a more tactical example of that is this year we released this concept of a storyboard AI builder. As I mentioned up front, one of the biggest mistakes people make is they don't think about the story before they build the demo. But it's kind of like outlining an essay, like the task you to do in college. No one likes the outlining phase. So we heard customers would always say, like, I know how important this is. I really don't want to do it.
So we built a tool that repurposes landing page copy and then spits it out into a format that is optimized for interactive demos, has all of our data and best practices built into the prompt. So you know that it's going to be high performing, but also is based off of your own landing page copy. also if it's your own brand, value props, messaging, all that. And then you can import that right into your Nevada account. So we're trying to think of things like that, just making it even smoother to get from zero to one building a demo, but not just something that's
Again, like a click here, click here, click here, but really still follows all those best practices. So make sure that you're going to see success with it.
Speaker 2 (30:13)
the same question but what about your growth marketing you know from that
Speaker 1 (30:20)
Sorry, I was too too focused ⁓
Speaker 2 (30:23)
⁓
I wanted to ask you about...
Speaker 1 (30:26)
⁓
perfect. ⁓ On the product side, I'm just thinking, or sorry, on the growth side, I'm thinking more about that concept I brought in earlier of how can we like really champion our customers and have them almost be like that word of mouth flywheel. So one thing we've been doing right now that we're going to expand on is we've been doing workshop and events that are customer only. Sort of reminds me back to like, I don't know if anyone remembers the HubSpot like hugs groups, but what we're doing is it's four hour events.
where half of it is workshops and presentations from customers, but it's only customers there. And it's really trying to like, let's nerd out on how you're using Novadic. It's not high level ROI numbers. It's here's a very specific use case. Here's how I set it up here, the details, who was involved. And then we do workshops where we really just go around sharing like how you're using it, what are pain points are you running into to your question of like, if I send this an outbound, what language should I use? And just a lot of knowledge sharing. And then we do a little bit of like,
celebration, happy hour, food afterwards, but trying to think how we can keep scaling up things like that where customers can learn from each other and almost enable each other and share use cases. Right now we're focusing on the in-person, but might be focusing on a way we could do that digitally as well.
Speaker 2 (31:40)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how many kind of workshops like this you have right now? Per month? Is it 20 or more?
Speaker 1 (31:50)
We're doing about like one to two a quarter right now. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:53)
So it's
on a bigger scale, like you have like 100, 200, 300 people in, right?
Speaker 1 (32:04)
Sorry, 100, 200, 300.
Speaker 2 (32:06)
Customers either.
Speaker 1 (32:07)
No, we're doing it like a more hyper local. So generally it's about like 30 to 50 customers. And then we'll have a good amount of too. So that's what I'm thinking like, we're kind of testing this model this year. And then we're going to think about how we can scale it up. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:23)
I mean, I like the customer-centric approach. I recently, I don't know who was it. I read something, either it was either, know, Dave from Exit 5 or Peplaya or, you know, someone like that. And they were basically saying that, you know, our job as marketers is not to sell, it's not to, you know, our job is actually to...
make our customers become heroes in their lives, in their organizations, in their companies, whatever. So I see a very big correlation between that and what you're doing right now. What about the other stuff from the content standpoint? AI, SEO optimization, GEO, AEO, however it's called these days.
Speaker 1 (33:21)
We're definitely thinking about GEO to your point of like, that's what we've decided to call it internally. I don't know. ⁓ And for that, I mean, I'm taking it like early days SEO, like my background was in digital marketing. I'm more just trying to explore and learn right now, like what really are the channels that make the biggest impact? I do think though, the celebrating and emphasizing your customers actually plays really well into GEO because we've all seen that like Reddit is a really big channel. We've all seen user generated content as some of its favorite places to pull from even LinkedIn posts.
So in my mind, it's, you know, if we are celebrating and powering our customers, we've seen time and time again, someone who attends an in-person event, someone who we develop a relationship with, much more likely to post about us, much more likely to give us organic shout outs, much more likely to just like go on their own, give us a G2 review. Obviously G2s are big into that. So we actually do think this like word of mouth customer celebration play ties in really well to GEO that is focusing on a lot of these user generated channels.
Speaker 2 (34:17)
Yeah, one trend I'm noticing ⁓ is that vitologist changes in the last two, three years. It's actually, I mean, this is paradoxically, but it's actually pretty hard to fake stuff, right? I mean, before you could just, know, hey, let's write 30 articles a month. Let's do a keyword research, write 30 articles a month. Let's write LinkedIn posts, you do this, that and that, and you will have results.
But right now, many things and LLMs included, they ⁓ try to give you the answers based on objective sources of information. And all the other stuff, everything comes down to actually, are you providing enough value to the market and how other people feel about it.
So I think building those kind of relationships is more important than...
Speaker 1 (35:20)
Yes, I feel like what a really weird part of marketing right now where I see two different trends happening. One is to your point, like brand and authority is more important than ever. We see LMS are picking up on this. We also just see that they're so saturated. Like brand is one of the few things you have to stand out. And again, if I have 20 options, I'm going to go with the one I know. And I've heard five people say they like. But on the other hand, because this is such a new channel that hasn't fully been discovered or figured out yet, I'm seeing a lot of almost like
black hatty type SEO tactics, like how can I hack this system? How can I, you know, create a bunch of articles that only the LLMs can read and make sure that I just like feed it with information about myself. So it's sort of a weird time where like, I do think where LLMs are trying as much as possible to go off of authority and make sure that they're rewarding companies that invest in like PR and brand and are, yeah, like are thought leaders.
but also there's a lot of like hacky tactics going on because whenever there's a new channel, I feel like there's a lot of hacky tactics going on.
Speaker 2 (36:20)
But the thing is that they are ⁓ not sustainable.
Speaker 1 (36:25)
Exactly. think we're going to see a lot of stories of short-term success and then probably will fall out over time. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:31)
Yeah, like it was with know, hacking like 10 years ago or something like that. Tell me, Natalie, we are soon wrapping. One thing though that I wanted to ask you before we wrap up is, again from the content standpoint, because that's kind of you know, both yours and my game, what do you think about the velocity of content in terms of the blog, blog written content?
I don't know if it's true. From my perspective, it felt like you kind of slowed down a little bit with publishing blog articles and especially more like some kind of extensive guides or that kind of stuff. So I'm wondering like, are there some specific reasons for that? Some kind of tests that you run or what's the point?
Speaker 1 (37:25)
It's interesting. We've actually kept our blog content pretty consistent. I have been promoting it a little less on LinkedIn. I've been seeing that that like what used to work really well for me was repurposing a blog piece of blog content and then turn that into a LinkedIn post. I think that became a very popular tactic. So now unless there's a unique angle to it, like, hey, here's something that only we ran. And again, all of our content is, but we haven't seen like that performing as well. So I'm more just experimenting with different types, but
From the beginning of Novadek, I've always posted about four to five articles a month. We find it's hard to really keep that threshold of unique and valuable if we do much more than that. And then four to five is still pretty consistent content. There's only so many keywords as far as interactive demos. We covered that, trying to make sure that it's again, keeping that threshold and not just being a very obvious listicle. How can we make sure that is unique and viable as well?
And then most of our content now is actually more enablement. Like it's sourced from CS and our sales team and it's, hey, we have customers who are asking about why should I use an interactive demo over a free trial? Can we give, you know, write our opinion on that and then maybe give some examples or even we publish one about like what's the best way to end an interactive demo the other day. So we've kept it pretty consistent throughout, maybe just a little less top of funnel blog posts for publishing and more like enablement focused.
Speaker 2 (38:46)
Yeah, I agree with you. The unique advantage of every software company is the data that they have from their CS teams, product, whatever it is. So, good news for that. Okay, Natalie, I had a blast. Let's wrap up with the last question that I have for you, which is something not marketing related at all. How do you win at the game called Life?
And what is that meaning for you?
Speaker 1 (39:19)
Wow, that is philosophical for a Friday morning. That's a good one.
Speaker 2 (39:23)
Sorry about that.
Speaker 1 (39:26)
No, no, I love it. think for me, honestly, I really just care. mean, this shouldn't be surprising based off of my marketing, actually. But I care most about the relationships in my life. Like if I have a few really high quality, great relationships and surround myself with good people, I think that's winning. I feel very lucky. live in New York and surrounded by lot of friends and family and get to go do cool things. And that's sort of always what I'm optimizing for, just like being around good people, helping them out when I can.
And just as much as I love the job, also enjoying the non-screen time and work time.
Speaker 2 (40:00)
That's all, thank you very much for being on the show.
Speaker 1 (40:03)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (40:05)
Okay guys, that's a wrap. What an amazing episode that was. Before you go, just let me ask you very quick question. Do you know that your B2B company might be in a great danger of AI commoditization? And if your company out there is not standing out, if you're not fighting for the attention which is the most important currency right now, then
you are slowly becoming a commodity and when you're a commodity no one is going to buy from you organically on their own. So Contentmonk the agency that I run is a full funnel content marketing agency that works with fast growing B2B software companies and helps them become category leaders the main winners in the field with original content that stands out so reports lead magnets articles AI
content optimization for LLM search, massive content distribution. And the another thing that you're doing is we are monitoring different intent social signals across social networks to see what people are engaging with your content all the time and who online is a sales ready lead for you, but they just didn't subscribe yet. So that's how help fast growing B2B software companies grow.
We offer a free consultation for everyone so don't hesitate to go to contentmonk.io and book a free strategy session with us where you will get a free strategy and a battle plan without hard strings attached. See you there and see you in the next episode as well. Have a great rest of the day.