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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
Talk us through a little bit about the kind of clients that you work with, the stage that you typically get involved, and how you work with them.
Lee Densmer 0:05
You bet, almost all of my clients already have a content program in place. Most of my clients are in the six to $60 million range of turnover, and they almost always have like a VP of marketing who believes in content, and then maybe a writer or a digital marketer who is also being saddled with writing content on top of handling, you know, publishing blog posts and doing email builds in HubSpot. So, there's always a gap in these content programs about strategy. They almost always tell me, "We're writing content, we're publishing blogs, but we don't have strategy. We don't really know our buyers, we don't really know our narrative, we don't really understand distribution, we don't have any repurposing, so there's always a handful of gaps in their strategy. So I'm able to come in and figure out what those gaps are, and then figure out how to plug those gaps, whether it be with like some extensive buyer persona research, or hiring a writer who can do different content formats, bringing in a video strategist, so you can start doing video, for example, building repurposing plans. I also help teams get organized, like they don't know where their content is, they don't have any process for managing reviews, so if a content program is frustrating or failing, it's often because there aren't foundations in place, and it's often also because they have a chaotic process, a chaotic like production process.
Tom Rudnai 1:33
Yeah, okay. And I think it must be very common, like I had Olivia here, shut in, if you know her, quite prominent on LinkedIn on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, she gets involved very much at the start, and so she was kind of talking about best practices from day one, but one of the challenges she faces is there's this pressure instantly, we want blogs, we want output, right, and I guess what you see is people who go through that without Olivia, and it's about trying to bring them back a little bit, like that must be a really difficult thing once there's momentum built up to it owes strategy retrospectively, because there's also a pressure to execute and deliver. How do you go about that?
Lee Densmer 2:08
It's a good question. Sometimes you have to convince a team that stopping is the best strategy at that point. Stopping is the best strategy. Literally, put a pause on it. Is not going to hurt you if you stop publishing blog posts for a month. It's not going to hurt you. You can promote old posts if you really need to be driving traffic back to your website. So, I encourage teams to stop and go back and spend a month or six weeks on the strategic foundations, which are the buyer, the distribution channels, the content formats, and so on. So, stopping is okay. It's okay to just hit a pause. It's okay to get off the hamster wheel. I will never tell somebody you gotta publish two posts a week, no matter what. Keep up the velocity. There's no need to do that anymore. It used to be required so that you could build authority on Google. It used to have to do with how Google boosts you, which is less important now, because of AI search. At any rate, so inserting a process where you assess the foundations, take pause, put those foundations in place, and start up again is going to give you better ROI than just keep doing what you're doing. I so often find that businesses are over complicating the thing, just complete over complication planning in an Excel file with 16 tabs, doing 10 different content types, running a podcast and a newsletter and webinars, and it's and, and, and when they should have been thinking about or and picking the ones that were really the most strategic that they could commit to
Tom Rudnai 3:41
that. That's something that I think exists across all of greater market, right? Not just content about for a long time, and everything we do, we've operated under the assumption that volume is directly correlated to output, right? So, if we do more of things, whether it's cold calling, cold emailing, producer content, you're going to get more traffic, more responses. That's starting to change, right, because then it's just such a noisy market that the more isn't always going to cut through. It's about actually less that can cut through the noise,
Lee Densmer 4:08
and I actually think everybody agrees with that. That is not a controversial opinion. It's that people don't know how to slow down and how to pick and choose from among the initiatives. Not controversial to think that doing too much doesn't get good, or I mean, it's like busy for just the sake of being busy.
Tom Rudnai 4:24
Yeah. Well, and that's the thing that's come up a little bit on this podcast, right? Is that especially when times are tough, busyness helps you not get fired, right? You want to look busy, particularly when, if performance isn't quite where you want it. The last thing you want to be the person who's saying, like, guys, let's just still take a minute. Like, no, you kind of want to show that you're doing things to solve it. It must be a challenge that you get sometimes in coming in to slow down, like there's convincing people that that's what needs to happen, but I presume there's also a political element to that, because someone is responsible for the strategy and the approach that they've taken, and someone has said that's going to deliver results. Results, so I'd imagine that's something that resonates with a lot of people who are in house, which is like, how do I navigate that, and how do I convince the people that matter that this is the right approach, even once I know it. Do you have any tips for that?
Lee Densmer 5:11
I think this is easier for me because I'm a consultant, because I am hired as an expert to come in, so by the time they hire me, they're, they believe in my expertise, and I can come in, do the assessment, and say, look, you need to hit pause, and then I can report to their senior managers why I've recommended that, and what I'm going to do next, and what I expect the outcomes to be, and because of the way in which I've been hired, I find that that goes over well. I'm brought in to fix a problem, whereas if you're an employee, you're doing somebody else's bidding, so that has given me some latitude and maybe some freedom and maybe some trust to do this kind of thing, to hit pause and go and go back 10 steps. And I tell people when they, before they pay me and bring me on board, look, I'm probably going to tell you to hit pause and go back, and based on what I've heard, you're doing too much. And yeah,
Tom Rudnai 6:00
there's a good disclaimer, you're not going to like what I tell you at first,
Speaker 1 6:03
and it
Lee Densmer 6:04
might be hard for us to sell internally, but this is why you need to do it.
Tom Rudnai 6:08
You've come to me with a problem, but I think there's a really good lesson in that. I've been saying for a long time, like I think content is becoming a much more strategic discipline within go to market, but part of that is you need the right relationships to allow you to do that job. If you are three layers removed from the people who make decisions, then you are not in a position. So, part of it is, go show the value of what you're doing and use that to build bridges to the people that you need in order to make the sometimes the tougher decisions, right? Which is the benefit you get coming from outside,
Lee Densmer 6:37
right? And that's why I think a writer, a junior level writer or a junior digital marketer could never drive, and I want to be careful with my words, because their contribution is valuable, but they may not be senior enough, or broad enough, or well-rounded enough as a professional to say this is what you need to do with content, and this is why. So, you do need a strategist, you do need somebody who understands content in the very broad sense, all types of content distribution, repurposing to come in and assess a program and tell people how to get ROI from it, how to reach their audience with it.
Tom Rudnai 7:10
And so, yeah, so you're coming in typically six to 60, that that kind of scale up phase. What I'd imagine you've seen a whole, a whole load of mistakes that have happened during the north of six phase. I'm at like no point five, so what are the things that you would expect someone like me to start doing, and what should I avoid?
Lee Densmer 7:27
Yeah, so when I will, I love to discuss the mistakes, because most people start nodding right away, right? Whether as a consumer they've seen these mistakes, a consumer of content, and then it's a little bit harder to see the mistakes I think in your own program, but when I start talking about the mistakes, people go, oh, okay, so maybe the first one is too much top of the funnel. So a lot of businesses, when I go in, are doing a lot of what is content, they're trying to define a problem that's been defined 1000 times, they're talking about topics that have been written about 1000 times, and that AI is capably able to cover, so when I do a massive assessment of the blog, categorizing all their blog posts, where they sit in the funnel, the topics that they cover, the traffic, and it's easy to see that they've got like 60% top of the funnel, Tom, they're easy to write. It's easy to write a what is blog post. It's much harder to write like a how to or how we. It's much harder to write something that is more thought leadership lead. So you can pretty quickly see that they've been just churning out top of the funnel content. That's a mistake, because it's undifferentiated. The competitors have already done it, right, and now AI is doing it. So, that's one of the first mistakes I see. It's easy to convince people why to not do that and to shift away from it. So, maybe the second one I see is no newsletters. So, when a business has an email list and they're not using it. That's a pretty tragic thing. So, newsletters are a really great way to put out short-form content to an audience who has raised their hands to hear from you. And so, I see businesses with databases of 3000 contacts, I'm like, you're not doing anything with this database, start a newsletter. And newsletters are not a big lift. It's easy to repurpose a blog post or do a quick interview with somebody and put out a newsletter, so that's one thing right off the bat that I talk about. Social is content, and so I see that a lot of businesses don't really understand that their social handle and their social presence is content. It's a branch of a content program, and so I often see what I call so what social like don't give a crap social and that's when businesses are just putting a post or two on their corporate handle a week and they're usually like we are excited to announce or somebody's having a work anniversary or here's a blog post with the. Link, and that is so what social that is, that has no impact. And social is a great way to test concepts in the market, and a great way to reach just a broad audience base. You can drive them back to your newsletter and back to your site if those are goals. So I often will quickly put some kind of social strategy in place and start generating content that can get buzz on social, so I also, I want to point out that social is an earned channel, anybody can be kicked off of LinkedIn anytime, LinkedIn could blow up tomorrow, so that's an own channel, an earn channel, and I want to state that newsletter is kind of its counterpart, because you own that channel, and so having them both is kind of protective of your brand. You want to build channels both on owned and rented land, that I kind of juxtapose those two.
Tom Rudnai 10:52
Yeah, I think that's a really important point. We had Katherine Aragon on the podcast not that long ago, and she was talking about the concepts of like authority ecosystems, so you have to like in today's world, you have to build some on rented land, but it's super dangerous to go and start building everything on there. Possess, something springs to mind is Sam Jacobs, who runs Pavilion, posting about how he just saw his LinkedIn traffic fall overnight due to some kind of change in their algorithm, and if that's the foundation of your business, that's a huge risk, right? It's
Lee Densmer 11:19
a huge risk, right.
Tom Rudnai 11:22
So, thank.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai