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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.
How do you start a community? You should follow this playbook if you want to promote yourself. In my experience, a lot of people start communities for all the wrong reasons, engaging with the community. A playbook that we have that works really well is I'm making sure that I'm setting up some kind of matchmaking program. Should I start it on Facebook? Slack? The larger we get, the more we need to create sub communities. Let's say you started a community specifically for people in ABM that companies from 10 to 50 million. So there's a couple different ways that we are collecting feedback. That's an example of like a content process that is working really well for us right now. Our members are doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to that stuff. Okay, this isn't allowed in the community.
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Speaker 1
00:46
I'll refund you what you've paid us and I'll cancel your membership right here, right now. I don't care to keep somebody's money that isn't there for the right reasons anyway. They've been caught in the act, red handed and they don't want to admit it. I don't think anyone's going to want to stop asking other humans questions. Two biggest levers for B2B marketing in the next year, couple years, if I could enjoy my life 70% of the time, that's. That's pretty damn good.
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Speaker 2
01:17
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the B2B show with Oohgi. I'm your host, Oogi Juric, CEO of Content Monk and co founder of B2B Vault.
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Speaker 3
01:27
And in today's episode we have a very special guest. His name is Matt Carnival and Matt is the head of community at probably one of the biggest and the best.
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Speaker 2
01:41
Private communities for B2B marketing called Exit 5.
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Speaker 3
01:47
And this episode is very fascinating because we talked with Matt on his firsthand experience on how to build the winning B2B communities. Where to host communities, how to get people and members inside, how to engage with these people. But we also touch base on the.
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Speaker 2
02:08
Other side of the communities, which is you and I and everyone else who.
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Speaker 3
02:13
Is a member of community.
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Speaker 2
02:14
And how can we get the most.
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Speaker 3
02:17
Benefits out of community without being too.
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Speaker 2
02:19
Pushy and too promotional? So a great episode is ahead.
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Speaker 3
02:25
So buckle up and let's get started.
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Speaker 2
02:28
Are about to start a new community right now. Where would you start?
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Speaker 1
02:36
Well, I think I would look at what are the goals of what you're starting the community for. In my experience, a lot of people start communities for all the wrong reasons. The main reason Being they want a new channel that's going to help them nurture and bring in new leads. And you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to do that. But I think community is very different channel in a sense where it really does take time and it's really about building relationships and helping people in your community meet others and get value that way. So it's very different in the sense where it's like, I'm not going to create a piece of content that's going to make people love me and pay attention to me.
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Speaker 1
03:20
Instead I'm going to put the right people in the room so that they connect with and get value from each other and then that equity passes back to my brand. But that's not just something you can turn on, flip a switch and get leads from. It's, it's a different long tail type place. So I think it really depends why you want to start the community and making sure you're doing it for the right reasons. And if that's not the case, then I wouldn't start one.
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Speaker 2
03:44
Yeah, I mean, like, I would say like at the end of the day the goal is always like kind of, you know, to get more leads or you know, to build more relationships that will, you know, down the road result in more leads or more customers or whatever. But like, I would say, I definitely agree with you that if you start, you know, just with getting more leads or sales as the main goal, that, that's, that's a no. No. Right. That's something that will come as a, you know, byproduct of, of everything else. So considering that you have the right intentions. Right. And you have an existing audience. Right. How do you, how do you go from there?
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Speaker 1
04:31
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, how do you start a community? Like, I, I think what I would do if I were starting a community and I had those right foundations set up, I would say, okay, let me try and pilot maybe a 25 person community. Let me start with 25 people that I really want in the community. And I'm going to say, okay, I have a month to get these 25 people in the community. I'm going to make sure that at the end of this month I have a really strong offer that's going to want them to join by this certain date. So let's say, you know, at the end of the 20 or at the end of the month with those 25 people, we're going to do.
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Speaker 1
05:10
We're going to bring in like the CMO of HubSpot to do a roundtable on how to implement AI across your B2B marketing org or something like that. So that's the pull to get those first 25 people in. And then once those first 25 people in, that's when I'm really doing the initial grunt work to get the community up and running. So I'm making sure the onboarding is super smooth. I'm making sure that the members know who the other members are. I'm making sure that I'm setting up some kind of matchmaking program maybe to get people to meet one another or get to know one another. I'm also making sure that I'm just talking to my users and learning and building out the community the way they want it to be built out.
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Speaker 1
05:51
So I think like high level, that's how I would do it is I would start with a pilot and then from there you're just taking your learnings and building on there. So that's like high level strategy as to what I would do. There's. There's also the element of like, how am I actually going and setting it up? So like picking the right platform to start your community, that's a question that I get all the time is like, should I start it on Facebook Slack? Should I use a third party tool like a circle like Exit 5 does? And my honest answer to that is like, I'm not going to say it doesn't matter, it does. But you know, in Exit 5's case, we started as a Facebook community and then switched to a circle community.
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Speaker 1
06:33
So I would say just start with whatever is an easy place that you know your users will interact. So that could be Facebook, that could be Slack. And then if you ever have a compelling reason to switch to a more advanced community platform one day, then go ahead and do that. But if your community is thriving in one of those free platforms, then hey, like just keep it there. I don't think it's that big of a deal. I think wherever you can get it to work. So I think those are like some of the two elements at least when starting a community that people need to consider.
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Speaker 2
07:06
You forgot the Patreon, by the way. You said Facebook Circle, but Patreon.
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Speaker 1
07:11
True. Yeah.
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Speaker 2
07:12
By the way, I was in Fun Fact, I think I was like the member 20 or 30 of the exit 5. Yeah, pretty much from the day one there. I think that there was called something like a list the first version, something like that.
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Speaker 1
07:28
It Might have been. Yeah, yeah, I was like, same here. I was super early. I don't even think I was that early. I was dgmg. But yeah, I think that might have been the first name.
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Speaker 2
07:37
Yeah, yeah, something like that. When I know that they launched Patreon. So yeah, I'm telling you, like, if someone is about to build a community, Right. How can you differentiate that community from the other communities out there? Because like, for example, Exit 5, for example, is doing an amazing job. Pavilion is doing an amazing job. Right. And there might be some other, you know, more specific communities for content. For example, Jimmy Dallas one or whatever it is. Right. So how, what, what would be the main, you know, unique selling points and differentiators between the communities? Like is it the niching down or like the type of content that's published there? How, how would you approach that?
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Speaker 1
08:28
Yeah, I think it's both. I think that, you know, if you look at Exit 5, like the ones you mentioned, Exit 5, Pavilion, Jimmy's community, I think it's super path, Right? Yep. If you look at those three, one thing that they all have in common is they were somewhat of a first mover to a certain space. Right. So Dave, Exit 5 was one of the first to start talking about B2B marketing in the way were Pavilion, the same with, you know, revenue, Jimmy and his team, the same with content. Right. So were able to go broad and say this is a community for B2B marketers or this is a community for revenue people. But I think that's going to be harder for new entrants.
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Speaker 1
09:12
So if I was a new entrant and I was like, okay, I'm a B2B marketer but my background is in fintech. So specifically I want to like, Maybe it's like B2B marketing is my thing, but I found that I'm really good and can do damage in the fintech space. All right, maybe I'm going to just go at it strictly from the fintech angle and say this is for B2B marketers in fintech as an example. Now maybe because of that, your community will be only a fraction of the size of an Exit 5 or pavilion. But what you can do is you can really narrow down and charge those people a lot more and just make it this super premium, high end specialty community.
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Speaker 1
09:50
I think that's a great angle is like we're for more of a specific person because even at Exit 5's case and Pavilion's case or whoever, I'm not going to speak for any of those other communities. But in Exit 5's case, the larger we get, the more we need to create sub communities. So that's like your local, a local community or a space just for people in ABM, etc. So we need to do that anyway once we get to a certain size. So if you're a new entrant, I think it's like better to just start there and then maybe if you find a.
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Speaker 1
10:23
Let's say you started a community specifically for people in ABM that companies from 10 to 50 million, maybe you find that a lot of people that are 50 to 100 million also want to be part of your community and are joining, then maybe you start to expand from there. So I think you could actually start with a sliver and then increase the size of it as opposed to the other way around. I think that's a better way to wedge yourself in. And then yeah, the content piece is big. I think though, if you have the intention of having a smaller and specific niche, then that informs the content and informs the programming of the community, so that becomes your differentiated angle.
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Speaker 2
11:03
And tell me, I know that Exit 5 grew. I think it was like something like 100% something like that in like the past 12 months, right? Yeah. Now I know that you're all about like curating the content, not overly, you know, burning out with creating the new one. LinkedIn is like the, I would say the top of the funnel of your, you know, acquisition that there is like an email and people email leading people to the community. What else is hiding behind that kind of growth loop that allows you to grow so fast and get new community members?
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Speaker 3
11:44
Hey guys, just a real quick sorry 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 levels, insights and articles written by 300/B2B marketing experts. And B2B Vault monitors hundreds of websites every single week to uncover new trends and new articles. So you are the first to learn the new trends, insights and playbooks from the best B2B marketing minds. And every Monday morning 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.
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Speaker 3
12:39
So just very quickly, if you're interested in this, go to the B2B Vault.com newsletter and join thousands of other B2B marketeers in our Monday newsletter. See you there.
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Speaker 1
12:54
Yeah, I think it's a couple things. I think so, yeah. LinkedIn obviously, you know, our Top of Funnel has been performing well for us. A big thing too is building our email list. So we focused in the last year we've been extremely intentional around building our email list, which is not necessarily a new tactic, but we've just been really intentional about how do we get people from LinkedIn, organic and paid onto our email list. And then once people on our email list, how are we delivering a really good product for them. So we've also invested in our newsletter in the last year and just made it better content and we also added a newsletter. So we now send out two email newsletters a week.
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Speaker 1
13:40
So before it was just one email newsletter and it was pretty much we would just take one of Dave's LinkedIn posts and turn that into a newsletter, which isn't a bad strategy per se. But now we're taking our podcast episodes and we're taking a lot of that Top of Funnel content and writing more in depth posts within our newsletter. So I think that's really was part of it is just we said, okay, we're really good at Top of the Funnel. We have this strong community product, but in the middle we have a newsletter. But how can we make it better and how can we just drive more people to it? So that was it.
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Speaker 1
14:13
And then even as we're capturing more emails, every time we launch something, put out a new feature in the community or something cool that we're offering, that gets obviously blasted to the entire list. So that's just more people overall that are seeing our stuff in their inbox. So I think that was really a big part of it. And then the last one is, you know, Dave hired me not to make myself the hero team effort, but he hired me to improve the community. And we've as a team have treated the community like a product and we've added a bunch of new features and done a lot with exit 5 in the last year. So I think just making the product better made our offer stronger.
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Speaker 1
14:53
People, you know, want this thing that we are offering is good product market fit, so it's much easier to sell.
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Speaker 2
15:00
Tell me, tell me about the growth loops. Now. I saw a couple of times that you were talking about growth loops inside Exit 5, but I kind of the first thing that comes to my mind, for example, are like the referrals. I don't quite remember seeing any referral campaigns, are there?
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Speaker 1
15:20
I mean, we. We have a referral program in Exit 5, but we don't really promote it that much, and it's something that we just haven't really took a big enough swing at yet. But, yeah, I mean, like. Like, I don't know, I guess it's like I've seen growth loops defined in. In different ways. For me, it's like the way I look at it is it's some reinforcing loop in your marketing and your growth strategy that feeds itself. I think for us personally, there's two of them. One is just our content overall. Like, as we put out more content, more people share it and talk about it online. Like, we have people every day going LinkedIn and being like, oh, I listened to this podcast of Exit 5 from Dave, and I learned X, Y and Z.
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Speaker 1
16:07
So our podcast comes out, people talk about it, and then more people find it, and those people go and listen, and that just grows our overall reach. So I think that's a big one, is from an awareness and brand standpoint. And then, yeah, even. Even in our community, I think, like, there's a loop there in and of itself where it's like. There's a network effect of, like, the more people that join, the stronger it becomes. So the more we're able to promote that element of it, which drives more people into it. So I think those are the two. The two loops at play.
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Speaker 2
16:41
Yeah. And now when you're talking about loops, every product, Right, Needs to collect certain types of feedback, Right. So how. What are your feedback loops inside the community? Do you just, like, kind of monitor the conversations and then have some internal sheet where you write down in codes or whatever snippets, whatever community members are saying, or there is, like, a more sophisticated approach.
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Speaker 1
17:12
Yeah, that's a good question. So there's a couple different ways that we are collecting feedback. One is we do a. Twice a year, we do an NPS survey. So we started that last year. The next one is actually coming up in the next week or so. So halfway through the year, we do an nps. So that's like a really obvious one, but that's probably our most structured form of feedback. The second one is I'm just in the community every single day engaging in posts and content, and not only am I seeing how people are reacting to things, but a lot of people will message me when stuff is broken. So, you know, we're just lucky in the sense where we have a strong community base.
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Speaker 1
17:56
That will tell me when something should be fixed or not necessarily like broken fix, but when they want to see something different. It's like, hey, how can I meet other people in Philadelphia? It's like, oh, okay, maybe we need to go at a feature, you know, local Philadelphia group. We also, we have a matchmaking program inside Exit 5. And within that we send out a form to everybody after saying to them, you know, what would you rate this connection? Would you want to continue and be part of this program in the future? So we use a lot of that feedback to inform that stuff as well. And then in whenever we do like live content or training sessions, a lot of the time we'll ask our attendees to rate the session one through five.
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Speaker 1
18:39
And then we'll use that to inform and be like, okay, that was a good content medium that hit with our audience. So I would say that's. Those are some of the biggest ones. And then the last one is we will randomly, just like, this isn't structured or like timed per se, but randomly. A couple times a year, I'll just reach out to a couple members and ask for a chat. Or Dave and I will do like a live thing where people will just come off mute and say, yeah, it'd be great if you guys did more of this or did more of that. So we'll do that kind of stuff as well. Just to collect that qualitative feedback and get combos going.
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Speaker 2
19:15
I guess probably one of the most interesting parts that I'm personally interested in is how your operations look like. Like what happens in the background, you know, of running a really great community. Like, do you have SOPs for particular things, how you handle something? Do you use some kind of automations, AI agents to make the entire work easier? Like how the background behind the curtain machine looks like.
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Speaker 1
19:47
Yeah, so. So specifically for the community, I would say, like when I first joined, it was a lot of figuring stuff out from scratch. Like, Dave had a way of doing things and a lot of those things needed to be innovated on. So that was step one was like, how do we just make a lot of stuff better and how do we create processes around things? And I would say, like, we don't really have, like from a tool perspective. You know, we use things like Zapier to help build an automation into our community, but we don't really have like anything crazy sophisticated on the back end. I think right now, today, just to leak it a bit, we are investing more there.
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Speaker 1
20:35
We're investing more in like Playbook documentation and making sure that we're getting the right help to run our playbooks on repeat in the background. So I would say more of that is coming to the forefront. But yeah, like the operations in the background I think is just a matter of the playbooks were figured out and now they just run, rinse and repeat by our team. So yeah, that's the background playbook pretty much.
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Speaker 2
21:01
What kind of playbooks do you have?
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Speaker 1
21:04
Like for what specifically?
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Speaker 2
21:05
Well, for ops, for growth. For engaging with the community members as well.
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Speaker 1
21:12
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So let's take the first one, engaging with the community. A playbook that we have that works really well is we have what's called a contributor program inside of Exit 5. So when you join the community, you're asked to fill out a form of like what your strong suits are. And then every day someone from a team goes through the content in the community and tags an individual who's smart of a certain topic in that post. So if you posted, if you want to learn more about or you had an SEO specific question in the community, we're going to tag someone related to SEO. So we have this big spreadsheet of all our members and what they are smart about and we use that to tag people.
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Speaker 1
21:56
So that's an example of something we have in the background that works really well.
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Speaker 2
22:00
Is that only. Sorry for interrupting. Is that only based on the answers that new members give or also based on your observations inside the community on who engages with what, where provides value and that kind of stuff?
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Speaker 1
22:14
Yeah, it's both. So, so at the easiest level it's. It's what people self report where they're smart. The other part of it is what I observe, whether it's in the community, it could be on LinkedIn, it could be people that I know that are in our community that talk with something on LinkedIn every day and I'm going to go tag them. And then the other part of it is referencing older content in the community. So let's say there was a question about pardot in our community, for example, and I can't find a pardot expert in our database or anywhere. What I'm going to go do is I'm going to go search the word pardot in our community and I'm going to find people who have mentioned, you know, that they've worked with pardot in the past.
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Speaker 1
22:52
And then I might tag them in the post and be like, hey, could you give your two cents on this piece of content? Yeah, so that's an example of, you know, one for engagement. I would say from a content perspective, we have leaned a lot on ChatGPT, specifically custom GPTs to template some of the stuff that, you know, we know works well. You know, we're lucky in the sense where, you know, Dave has a lot of great writing he's done over the years, and overall, like, just, we have a lot of good content out there, so we're able to templatize a lot of it. So, you know, for example, all of our podcast episodes eventually become a topic in our newsletter.
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Speaker 2
23:31
Yeah.
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Speaker 1
23:32
And a lot of that was done through ChatGPT. I mean, there's an. There's a human element to it also. But what we could do is we could take transcripts, we could plug it into Chat GPT, we could extract a lot of the main stuff out of there and then give it to a writer that we have on our contractor bench. They write out the newsletter, our team proofreads it, and then we push it out the door. So that's an example of like a content process that is working really well for us right now. So, yeah, I guess I'll. I'll pause there for a sec. I don't know if you have any other specific ones that you want to learn more about, but those are two that are really interesting.
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Speaker 2
24:04
Tell me. I guess this is something that interests most people, right. How do you properly and effectively promote your stuff inside communities without getting banned or, you know, being flagged or whatever it is? Like, how do you, from your perspective, like, what would you say? What's your advice to people out there promoting their content or their product or their service or whatever it is?
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Speaker 1
24:36
Yeah. So I'll give you some background first to start. So when I first joined Exit 5, we had a space inside the community called promote your stuff. So it was literally a space where somebody could say, I'm Matt and I work for company XYZ and I have a webinar happening next Tuesday about AI SEO. And people could promote stuff. They could share links to stuff. It was a specific space in the community, but they could do it. And after about three, four months of being at Exit five, I was looking at our feed and I was like, why is this stuff here? Like, this stuff just does not fit the vibe of our community. It clutters the feed. It's ugly. It's self serving. It's not even what community is about. So what we did is we completely banned all self promotion, all link sharing.
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Speaker 1
25:23
So now nobody can share anything that is Even slightly promotional. Even if it's like a really sick LinkedIn post that they wrote in the community and just want to share because they think it'd be valuable. Even that we don't want, because what we found is most people have some ulterior motive to sharing it. So with that being said, if someone were to ask me, okay, now that you've removed the ability for me to do anything, what's the best way for me to promote myself? Well, I think it's the same way you would promote yourself on LinkedIn or other platforms. I think you have to really focus on giving value to the community. And the way I would do that is I would say, okay, what is my area of expertise? Let's say that area is content. Okay, great.
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Speaker 1
26:05
I know that looking at the feed in exit 5, maybe once a day there's a post about content that I can get involved in. Great. So once a day I'm going to log into exit 5, I'm going to scan the feed and I'm gonna spend 10 to 15 minutes looking for that post. And once I find it, I'm gonna give the best in depth answer I could possibly give. And then what's gonna happen over time? Maybe it's not a daily thing, maybe it's a weekly thing, whatever it is, but over time, over two months, three months, what's gonna happen is you're gonna become one of the core people in the community who gives away tons of value when it comes to that topic. And people remember that. Then people know, okay, if I wanna learn something about content, I have a question.
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Speaker 1
26:48
I know that this person is going to give me what I want. So then they may post about it, but they may actually just DM you and they may want to just chat with you, or maybe they go to your LinkedIn and connect with you because they know you put out smart stuff. And within all that, in your community profile, sure you have your name and an email, but you also have the company you work at, you have a link to your company. So eventually people are going to check you out. Right. And if they have, and it doesn't even need to go that far, I think that if people have a problem with a certain thing and they need a content person, they're just going to go to the first person they know that knows their stuff. And that person should be you.
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Speaker 1
27:23
If you are properly engaging in the community.
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Speaker 2
27:25
Yeah, yeah, it's all getting back to you, to, you know, these kind of people. First relationships, you know, building really like a genuine relationships with people in the space instead of, you know, trying scalable, you know, ways of doing stuff, outreach, you know, all that kind of stuff. Stuff. How do you fight with spammers and, you know, people who are there just for the only sake of, you know, earning some money?
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Speaker 1
28:01
Yeah. So the first thing is if somebody shares something in our community that is self promotional, we just straight up delete it and then we will message them and say, hey, we had to delete your piece of content because it violates our guidelines. We link to the guidelines and that's pretty much it. Very easy playbook. And we've instilled this culture in our community so much in the last couple of months that people actually flag posts for me now. So our members are doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to that stuff. But I think first you need to lead by example. So first you need to be the person who is like, you know, coming down hard on everybody who tries in their community. And then people learn that behavior and they say, okay, this isn't allowed in the community.
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Speaker 1
28:45
So when I see somebody else doing that doesn't fit the mold, I'm going to go and try and flag it for our admin. And a lot of people do that. So I think that's like, you know, first offense type thing. If somebody does it again, then it's the same play. It's delete the content and then it's message them and say, hey, done this twice now. You know, obviously not being rude or an about it. It's like totally cool. I get why you're doing it. You know, you want to promote your stuff. Here's how I would recommend promoting your stuff. So we have a post in the community that we reference that is literally called like how to Promote yourself inside Exit 5. And it literally has nothing to do with promoting yourself and everything to do with giving away value.
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Speaker 1
29:24
So we'll link to that and say, you know, all good. I think you should follow this playbook if you want to promote yourself. Just letting you know that if you do it again, we may have to look at a removal of membership or temporarily blocking you from the community. And then if they do it a third time, then we'll just straight up delete their account and cancel their membership. I've had people that I've had to do that with. I've had people that, you know, would were really combative even the first time when I said to them, hey, this type of stuff isn't allowed in the community.
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Speaker 1
29:59
And there's been people like that where I've just said to them like, no problem if it's, if this isn't the experience you want, I'll refund you what you've paid us and I'll cancel your membership right here, right now. Like no hard feelings. And yeah, there are people have taken you up on that offer. So I've no, like I don't care to keep somebody's money that isn't there for the right reasons anyway. So yeah, that's what we'll do and we have no problems doing it.
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Speaker 2
30:22
Yep.
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Speaker 1
30:23
We also like one other piece to this also is we have a line in our community that is or in our guidelines that says even if something does not necessarily fit the criteria above, we still have the right to remove it from the community. And you know, that one's tougher because it may sound a bit subjective but I think it's very clear when somebody is doing something for a specific purpose. So they know it too. When they get super defensive, it's because you know, they've been caught in the act right handed and they don't want to admit it.
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Speaker 2
30:53
Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Tell me, where do you see like the future of communities with AI and these huge market shifts and everything else? Where do you see like the future of B2B communities in the next few years? What are some trends that are going to emerge? How are the communities going to work? Like what's your take on that?
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Speaker 1
31:15
Yeah, good question. So I think it's a couple of things. I think the biggest thing is. Well, I think there's a couple of big things. So the first one is communities will be, I'm not going to say less about content, but the importance of content in the community I think will flatline while the importance of connection skyrockets. So every day we are interacting more and more with obviously things like AI and we're having those conversations with it back and forth all day long. And because of that the desire for communications and talking to actual people is going up a ton. People want to talk to each other, they want to meet face to face. Those are really big ones, events. Right. So it's not necessarily like a virtual. They want to attend more virtual events where you're talking at them.
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Speaker 1
32:04
No, they want to talk to other people, whether that's a matchmaking program or in face event. So I think community is going to be a lot about like you are part of the community and we match you with other people inside of it, as opposed to like, we're just talking at you, or you could just ask people questions. I think that's not going to be enough of a value driver anymore, which is kind of. The second point is like, communities will be less about discussion boards in the past, even Exit 5, you know, still a big part of our community is the ability to ask others in the community questions. I'm not saying that's going to go away. I don't think anyone's going to want to stop asking other humans questions.
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Speaker 1
32:44
But there will be a lot less questions that you need to ask somebody else for. Like in the past, you would need to ask somebody how to do basic stuff or how they find certain things in their Google Analytics reports or how they build out certain dashboards. You can now ask ChatGPT or Claude, whatever you're using, and it's going to tell you exactly how to do that step by step. So I think that people will rely on discussion boards a lot less. So, so two things. The more connect, more desire for connection, less reliance on the discussion board aspect of communities, that will be less of a defining factor. And then I think the third thing is the reliance on AI to help bring in content and conversations to the forefront.
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Speaker 1
33:31
So what I mean by that is one of the biggest limiters to community is, let's say community's been around two years, like Exit 5. People only see what's been talked about in the last couple days. Yeah. Which sucks because there's so much good stuff there. What AI can do now, and we already have a tool inside Exit 5 that helps this, that is getting better over time, is you can now ask the AI and based on a past conversation, it's going to bring up old content and say, oh, this is how Tom fixed this problem at his company. Read this piece of content here. So I think that's where what AI is going to do. It's going to help resurface that old content. So.
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Speaker 1
34:09
So yeah, I think those three things are like, at least in the short term, maybe the next 12 months, going to define communities. And then I think in the long term, really community is going to be less about, like it. There's going to be obviously like the virtual component of it, but it's going to be really about like the badge of being part of that community and what that means for you and what it gives you access to. I think it's about like, I'm an Exit 5 member and because of that I can attend like two in person events a year. I can attend like one live training session in New York City and I get, you know, 50% off my ticket to drive every year.
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Speaker 1
34:46
It's going to be about like the access to a lot of the in person stuff and group of people.
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Speaker 2
34:50
More like a membership club or something like that.
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Speaker 1
34:54
Exactly. It's going to be more about like I'm part of the club.
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Speaker 2
34:56
Yeah, yeah. And tell me like if discussion boards and that kind of stuff goes away, like is that even community anymore?
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Speaker 1
35:06
Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, community is a term that nobody in B2B has been able to define yet, including me. Like it's, there's just so many different ways to define what a community is. And one of the most basic definitions is like any group of people that have a shared interest is a community. So the soccer community, it's a community. They don't live in a Slack channel, they don't have a Facebook group, but they're all interested in soccer now. It's a very broad community. It's hard to just meet someone in the soccer community, but it's still a community. So yeah, absolutely.
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Speaker 1
35:42
If there's no discussion board, you know, if there's one massive in person event every year and a local event in every single city and you are part of that, you have a membership card and you can access that thing, you know, you're still interacting with the community once a year or you know, twice a year type thing. So yeah, absolutely. I think it's a community.
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Speaker 2
36:03
Yeah. Tell me in general now when we are talking about AI and the future, like in general, since you're talking with a lot of people, you know, all the time, where do you think B2B marketing in general is heading in the next and where will it be like in the next five years?
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Speaker 1
36:20
Yeah, so I think what's happening, what I'm seeing is just more and more people struggling with the traditional ways that their teams would operate and market and create pipeline for the company. There's more struggle across the board. So that's like less people visiting your website, less people downloading your stuff, less people looking at your LinkedIn, all that. So I think for a lot of B2B marketing teams there needs to be some kind of moment of like we just need to think about this quite differently now. I don't know exactly what that looks like. I don't even think I can envision the next six months to a year. I think they're changing so quickly, but I just think there's Like a big changing in the way people will need to think about things. A lot of the traditional playbooks just are not working anymore.
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Speaker 1
37:14
I think that, and I've heard a lot of people talk about this, some of the two biggest levers for B2B marketing in the next year, couple years will be one, creativity. So I think the most creative teams will win. You know, I still like to believe that we are more creative than these tools that we're using as long as we put our mind to it. So if you can step outside of the everyday, just going to these tools and like using it to. To pretty much guide you through the day and stepping out and actually getting creative with your ideas, I think that's a big lever because less people will be doing that. It's pulling the lazy people in, so it's much easier to be creative and stand out.
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Speaker 1
37:55
And then I think the other part of it is like actually going deep on these AI tools and like just being able to construct, like a better use of technology to do the things that everybody else is doing and using freelancer budget and human capital to do. So I think it's like the technical component and then the creativity component will be two big levers for B2B marketing.
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Speaker 2
38:17
Yep, yep. I mean, like, even right now, 95% or even more of all the B2B brands out there are boring. Like, they're like all the same, you know, Same insights on LinkedIn recycled over and over again by like hundreds of people. Same websites, same, you know, website structures, designs, fonts, like visuals, like, I agree with you, like creativity. And how do you stand out is the numero uno for, you know, winning in the next. In the next few years. Matt.
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Speaker 1
38:57
Yeah.
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Speaker 2
38:57
Tell me. Yeah. One question. The last question that I have for you before we wrap up has absolutely nothing to do with marketing. And, and it's ironically my most favorite one. How do you win at the game called life? And what does. What. What is that winning for you? What is winning in life?
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Speaker 3
39:23
That's.
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Speaker 1
39:23
Yeah, it's a. It's a heavy question. I mean, I'm not gonna say I've even figured it out closely, but, you know, I think for me, like, as basic as it sounds, it's like, if I could enjoy my life 70% of the time, that's. That's pretty damn good. 70, 75% of the time. And that goes across all aspects of my life. So if I wake up and enjoy my work 75 of the time, that's awesome. Which I do. I'M very happy about that. If I'm able to be in a relationship where I'm happy, ideally more of the 75 of the time, but you know what I'm saying, Mostly happy. I think that's really great. So I think it's finding whatever that 75% is for you.
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Speaker 1
40:10
I think what a lot of people do and I've been guilty of and I'm still guilty of it is like focusing too much on the 25% that doesn't make you happy and thinking that the grass is greener and there's something else amazing out there that I should be chasing. Not to say you shouldn't keep striving for better and more in life. It's just knowing that like with everything, there's some elements that aren't that great. So it's finding that part what you can live with. And I think if you could find enough of that in your life and majority of the time you're a happy person who enjoys what you're doing, then I think you're. You're pretty good in life. I'd like to think so.
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Speaker 2
40:45
That's.
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Speaker 1
40:45
We'll see.
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Speaker 2
40:46
That's spot on, Matt.
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Speaker 3
40:47
I had such a fun.
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Speaker 2
40:49
Thank you very much for being here today.
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Speaker 1
40:51
Yeah, of course. I appreciate you having me.
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Speaker 3
40:53
Okay guys, that's a wrap. What an amazing episode that was. Before you go, just let me ask you a 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 Content Monk, the agency that I run is a full funnel content marketing agency but 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.
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Speaker 3
41:41
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 network folks 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 we 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 the great rest of the day.