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95% Content is a show for B2B content teams who want to build trust with the 95% of buyers who are out-of-market today, but will be ready to buy in the future.
You can call it many different things: content marketing, demand creation, brand marketing, dark social, or zero-click content.
No matter what you call it, the goal is the same.
You want to reach future buyers on the social and content platforms they hang out on every single day, and in a way that compels them to want to work with you when they’re ready.
We’re going to cover how B2B companies can win with things like: organic social, short-form video, podcasting, YouTube, newsletters, webinars, and communities.
Because the best way to win today is to already be on your buyers short-list the day they decide they need a solution.
On this show hosted by Erik Jacobson, we’re going to explore how B2B content teams can do exactly that.
Intro/Outro: [00:00:00] A word to the wise. Keep the eyes on the 95%.
Erik Jacobson: I'm Eric Jacobson. Welcome to 95% Content, A show for B2B content teams who want to build trust with the 95% of buyers who are out of market today, but will be ready to buy in the future.
Dmi, thank you for joining me today. I'm super excited to chat with you. I have been following Limbless for quite some time. One of the reasons is, and one of the things we'll probably talk about a lot today is the founder led and the employee led content and LinkedIn strategy. You all have done. You've done a great job.
Documenting the journey along the way, and then how fast and how large Limbless has grown, has in large part been due to that, frankly. And I know you've added a lot of other content channels to the mix as time has gone on, [00:01:00] and we'll, we'll go through all of that, but for everybody to have a little bit of context, you are the CMO at Lelys.
Limbless is essentially like an all-in-one prospecting platform, so you can identify your ICP, all the various personas that are in your TAM and be able to outreach to them. It's a very powerful tool. That can essentially solve that entire stack and that flow all in one in the platform. And as long as my understanding is correct, I believe you've gone from zero to upwards of 30 million a year.
A RR bootstrapped. You all have had acquisition offers that you have turned down along the way. Kept doubling down, doubling down, and I love that tens of thousands of companies are using Lend List today. You have millions of monthly LinkedIn impressions every single month. And your first 1 million in a RR [00:02:00] came from LinkedIn ca exactly what I was describing.
That founder led, you know, LinkedIn content strategy and that has, I believe, and we can touch on this when we get there, but LinkedIn still is one of your top. Inbound generators of signups and customers and users. So yeah, that's kind of the context for everybody.
Intro/Outro: What an intro. What an intro.
Erik Jacobson: Yes. Yeah,
Intro/Outro: I'm gonna hire you.
Erik Jacobson: Yeah, I mean, like, this is exciting because you all are, you're pulling a lot of content levers. We could talk for quite some time, so I'm gonna try to keep it laser focused here. But yeah, you're doing social extremely well. Your YouTube channel is very strong. You've got a great employee advocacy and personal brand strategy operating very well.
Your short form video strategy is firing very effectively. And so maybe before we dive into like the content strategy and tactics, like specifically, could you just give like in the CMO [00:03:00] seat how you think about marketing and the prioritization of. Whether it be, however, we wanna look at the terms like lead gen.
For those who are actively searching for a solution like LEM List today, they're going into Google, they're typing in those keywords, and you obviously want to be found in those places versus more of that 95% content marketing or brand building and essentially like wanting to be in front of the 95% of buyers.
Who are not in market today, but they will be days, weeks, months later. You want them to already be thinking about Lamb list as the number one option when they, when they do move in market because of the content and awareness and affinity you've already built with them. So how do you think about those two buckets, just from the broadest perspective, from a philosophical standpoint?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Well, I think you've already like kind of answered, the success of Limb List was built on [00:04:00] the build in public strategy we had from a funder es, and the fact that he started like giving value before anything else and before like selling promotional stuff. And as he always says, like eating his own dog food and trying limbless and sharing whatever would work or not.
And I think this is still like the philosophy we have in the marketing team, and when it comes to content, it's like share first value to create brand preference and awareness and advocate about the pain that audience feels, and that's the number one priority that we will always have. Obviously then. We are in the metro market, so it's also important that we talk to the prospects that are already looking for a solution and ready to buy, and that we convinced them that we are the best solution and we are in a quite competitive landscape.
So we are obviously also investing there. But I would say that because we are in this metro market that we are lucky to be bootstrapped to have a lot of budget. Which is not the case for a lot of companies and because this is the [00:05:00] philosophy, endless, it's like 75% on creating this credibility, sharing educational content, doing building public, and then the rest would be like very more bottom of the funnel and promotional content.
And so
Erik Jacobson: then when it comes to that 75%. Could you give an overview of what those channels are that you're focused on at the moment, and then we can go into some specifics, but just so the audience has that context on what channels you're focused on to where you're allocating that 75%. What are those channels?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Yeah, so on those demand gen part and brand awareness and educating the market, we are doing a lot of things. I would say maybe that we have like seven channels that we are using. Um, we are doing educational webinars, uh, trying to have like great speakers, uh, great US sales leaders for instance. So sales influencers in the US we are doing a lot, as you mentioned, uh, of lending advocacy.
We actually have. People inside [00:06:00] Lendlease that happens to have 50 K followers and LinkedIn and that do like a million of impression over the year. We can go back to that after because there is a lot to say here. I think we are doing YouTube. YouTube has always been like one of the favorite channels for gu and he actually happens to have his own channels.
He has one in English, one in French, and so we also have one for him. List. Most of the content there is super educational, quite top of the funnel. We also do short form videos, um, maybe educational, but also, and mostly recently, and we can also talk about this later, but, um, more like relatable, entertaining content just to create connection with our audience.
So that would be like a funny TikTok style video or stuff like this. We also publish a lot of playbooks and workflows like super practical content because outbound is a technical subject. And at some point if you wanna talk to sales teams and especially rev ops team, you need to bring some ethnicity in your content.
And so [00:07:00] playbooks and workflows are a good way to, to produce this kind of content, which we try to leverage a lot of sales audience to create content for sales by sales. And this. Can take like different forms, but for instance, lately we've launched like an Alban playbooks. Um, so basically it's like VP of sales or BDR, sharing how they operate Alban inside the company.
And it's a mix of videos. Sharing templates that they use, sharing concrete examples of copywriting from the emails. So it's a bit of hybrid content, but this is like, this has been so well received in the market because it's not really seen our audience see how, uh, similar peers do their own job and succeed at it.
And this is, I think, the best content you can create to educate in your market.
Erik Jacobson: Incredible. And are those with external creators and influencers, or is that internal generated content?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Yeah, we, we have a philoso yet are trying to do most [00:08:00] of the things we do ourselves.
Erik Jacobson: Okay.
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: I mean, I don't know if it's because we are bootstrap and you know, it's like sometimes company that raise a lot of funds, they might like use their money to use a lot of agencies to create content for them.
Maybe because we have this philosophy of being doers and, and launching stuff fast and iterating, and also thinking that it's like getting your hands dirty, that you also takes the learnings faster, you know? But still we don't have all the knowledge inside. So it's super important to be able to leverage external people to create content, but it's not really for the sake of producing, it's not for the sake of.
Getting the knowledge where it is. So I think this is something we talked about just by email before, but basically I think for a marketing team, the biggest challenge is creating expert level content when you are not actually marketing to marketers. Because I mean, when you are creating content inside a marketing team, you know a lot about marketing.
But if you are marketing toward, I don't know, finance people or salespeople [00:09:00] like we are, you don't really know what it takes to be. A CFO or VP of sales. So you need at some point to find that expertise somewhere else. And this is where it makes sense, I think, to go and find some help and expertise. And you could do it through four ways, basically going to your customers or prospects.
So this is what we do with them. The sales playbook I mentioned. The last one published was with the VP of Sales of 11 Lab, and it's amazing. He shared so many stuff like concrete metrics and example. We also do a lot of stuff with partners. Um, Solenis works a lot with outbound agencies, and I'm sure like most, B2B says have partners, and often they are like really good at what they do.
And so we leverage them sometimes to create content on topics, uh, that they're, you know, really good at. For instance, we have this guy in the uk he loves. Like copywriting. And so we, from time to time, we create like templates with him because he's so good at it. So this is a great way to, uh, create content like, uh, leveraging our knowledge.
[00:10:00] Also, you can leverage communities. I think this is something sometimes people forget about, but. Most of industries have established communities where basically people just need to share questions and pains and learnings. Um, and those communities, if you can get inside them, those are like great to get some knowledge, but also stats.
For instance, there is, um, a community called Business Operation Networks. It's the rev ops community, and our CEO is part of it. And sometimes he runs annual, like surveys, big surveys on them to learn about the tools they're using, the latest challenges, their the, the latest. Metrics and this is great content to share then for your audience, right?
So yeah, communities are are amazing. And last thing about this, I truly believe that something is probably going to change in the next years, but I believe that marketing teams are gonna hire experts like job experts inside their own team. Like I believe that [00:11:00] if you are, um, SaaS, FinTech. Tomorrow you will hire a next CFO, or maybe not a CFO, but a next finance guy inside your marketing team to create content for CFOs.
Intro/Outro: Yes,
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: because I believe this is the best way to create content and also to have someone that can be the face and be like, legit. To talk to your audience in webinars. Yeah. I'm not legit in webinar to talk to sales team. Like I'm not having, you know, like people hang up on me all day long. But if I have a sales, and we always leverage our sales team at Lamb List and they were super nice with the marketing team, but if I have a sales in my own team that can do this content and like be the face of the company, this is so much stronger.
So right now I'm actually recruiting a sales inside my marketing team. So yeah, I, I think this is super strong.
Erik Jacobson: Are you hiring for that role on your marketing team? It sounds like?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Yeah. I have someone like at the very end of my pipe, so hopefully this job will be closed soon enough.
Intro/Outro: But yeah.
Erik Jacobson: Amazing. I love [00:12:00] all of this.
I love all of this. A couple things that I would say here as well, which would be one, is that if you don't have that internal expertise to your point. You can be the guide. You don't necessarily have to be the expert. Mm. Ideally, you can get to that point where you are able to bring on. A subject matter expert creator.
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Yeah.
Erik Jacobson: Which is sort of like a designated role that you're describing there, but if you're not in that position quite yet, and sounds like to what you all have been doing is leveraging current customers, partners. Exactly. External friends who are in that position of expertise, but you co collaborate and co-create that content together.
You can still capture the, the audience tam that is those roles because that content, your job is to make sure that content is the most valuable possible content for them. You don't [00:13:00] necessarily have to be the one generating the insights, although it is ideal. But yes, you can be the guide. I completely agree with that.
The concept of the internal creator that isn't a subject matter expert. I think that is the next. Evolution of internal content creation. Frankly, I think this concept of an SME creator, Hmm, like that is your role in house. And the reason why is because it is incredibly difficult. You know, we've seen with many, many, many companies where the internal expert.
Has the capability. Number one, do they have the capability and interest in even creating content? And then number two, do they have the time? And it is incredibly difficult to find someone internal to check both of those boxes when that's actually not a part of their role and responsibility that they were hired for.
It's an afterthought. And then it's like. Where are they supposed to [00:14:00] carve that time? And are they good on camera? Do they even enjoy creating content? Those are incredibly important things for the sustainability and effectiveness of your content strategy. And so it is such an unlock. It's obviously a meaningful part of your budget allocation to carve out a role like that, but.
I think the, the ROI on a role like that will be 10, 20, a hundred, a thousand x eventually over time, a hundred percent. And then you're not actually overt tasking. The other person on the team who wasn't actually hired to do that role.
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Exactly. This resonates so much because for a long time we had, um, you can see him like he's basically the number one face on a YouTube channel.
A big blonde guy, uh, Tal. And so he was one of our first sales guy and he was really marketing best friend. I love you, like always happy to jump on the webinar, on a YouTube shoot, do a lot of videos for us. But at the same [00:15:00] time, he had quotas to hit and now he's like leading the CAM team. Yeah. Like people to onboard and train.
He cannot do this anymore, you know, so we were lucky enough to have this person willing to do it, being good at it, and actually being passionate about it. But at some point he has enough job to, to feel right. So exactly what you're saying.
Erik Jacobson: How would you recommend another company to think about actually like posting for that role?
Do you set any benchmarks of like, what does good look like? What are the outcomes we're hoping to drive or Yeah. Any, any tips on that?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Yeah, that's a good question. It's been like a challenge because it's the first time I hire such a role, to be honest, and I couldn't find a lot of similar roles, so like bench.
When you are hiring for product marketing, you can bench like a hundred like job descriptions and you have already done it like several times. Yeah. So you know what good looks like. You write your scorecard in like five minutes For that role. I think there are maybe two learnings that I, I have now First.
I think it's super important that [00:16:00] if you want this person to stay relevant in their role, you need to accept that this person should still allocate a small percentage of the time doing their initial job. So basically. I want this person, and I have decided this, like lately I want this person to keep doing a bit of sales.
And that's a good thing because we have another, the expert in inside the marketing team that can like create a lot of traction for this guy to call leads and write sequences because I want him to stay like aware of what are the pains, what are the best tools, try those, try your own product and build in public.
But if he doesn't. Or she doesn't do sales anymore, then it's, it's not gonna be like as strong. So this is like the first learning. I'm recruiting someone to create content, but I still want this person to keep a bit like a foot into the initial job and into the field. And I think this is super important and you need to accept this as a leader.
This person cannot like [00:17:00] allocate a hundred percent of the time creating content, otherwise it will be empty again, like after some month. Second, I think it's hard to make this kind of job attractive. I mean, maybe it's because I'm looking for sales who wanna do marketing. Maybe it's easier to look, I don't, I'm not sure.
But to look for finance or HR that wanna do marketing, I think it is. So yeah, you need to think, how am I gonna market this role and like make sure good players are gonna actually be interested by this role, and not only people that suck at the job and looking for next door. And so you have to think what's in it for them.
You know, like why is it a win-win? And I think for us, the win-win here and the story to share was like, you're gonna be the face of the company and you're gonna be able to build your personal brand. And this is such a strong asset in today's world to build a career, to have a strong brand on LinkedIn and to publish a lot.
And there are not a lot of companies that actually allow you to do this. You know, like [00:18:00] publish success because companies are like, oh, don't tell how we do. Do this, otherwise everyone is gonna do the same. No, but there is something different between the idea and the execution, you know? So yeah, being able to publish this success.
Yeah. But also the failures. Not being afraid of saying, we tried this and we wasted tons of money or tons of times sharing metrics and so yeah. At Lendlease we allow this and we accept also that we invest in people that might grow the audience. That someday they might leave. You know, and yeah, this is a risk, but we are betting on those people and it's okay.
And so that was my win-win. Um, the thing I was offering basically, and a lot of salesperson are really interested into building their own audience, but they're in companies where they don't have the time or they're not allowed to do so. And so that was my sweet spot. And so I changed the name of the job description.
First it was named self Content Strategist or something like this, and I had like really bad inbound and then I just changed the [00:19:00] name to from AE to sales influencer, and I got like much more good inbound. So I think it's all about
Intro/Outro: marketing the world, you know?
Erik Jacobson: Yes. Oh, that is gold. I think it's really smart to keep some portion of the role tactical.
Intro/Outro: Mm-hmm. '
Erik Jacobson: cause to your point, eventually, let's say we fast forward and they are successful in the role and they're there for 12, 18 months, 24 months. Then now they're really referencing, at least from their first person point of view strategies and things they were doing 24 months ago.
Intro/Outro: Yeah.
Erik Jacobson: So that can be problematic.
And so it's almost switching this idea of. Let's not find a sales person on our team to allocate 10% of their time to content. Let's find a sales influencer and they allocate 10% of their time to sales and 90% to content. So you basically switch it.
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Exactly.
Erik Jacobson: But you still, you keep the prioritization in line with what you're [00:20:00] looking for with the role.
Okay. That is fantastic. I love all of that. Let's go to, if you look at all the different channels that you now are operating, if we just take it back to square one a little bit, and you're looking at recommending or advising to a team on how they should approach getting started with, with content in general, let's say it's a team that has a really strong product.
They have high retention, high customer satisfaction. They've grown through other channels, but now they want to layer on content in a meaningful way. I think there's a lot of companies actually in that bucket. They've maybe done a little bit of stuff here and there, but like, okay, now it's time to really mm-hmm.
Really put on some brand demand. Gen 95%, whatever you want to call it. How do you recommend companies approach that from first principles?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: It's really funny that you are asking, because this is like probably the, [00:21:00] the question I receive the most from founders. When CEOs write to me on LinkedIn for marketing advices, the number one question being like, who should I hire as a head of marketing?
But the second one is often like, where should I start with content, et cetera. I have a framework that I think it can work for everyone. Basically, companies should ask what's their market maturity and what's their budget? So you can see this as a matrix. Basically, you have on one side the market maturity and on the other the budget.
And so we can start with, uh, the left. Up corner. So if you are not in a very mature market, but you happen to have quite a lot of budget because maybe let's say just raise funds or your super successful bootstrap company and you happen to have like runway in front of you, I think then here, yes. Start by creating demand because.
90% of your time is not aware that they need a solution like you. This is what it means to be in, in the not Met market. [00:22:00] It's, uh, you have a lot of signs that tell you that you are not in a MET market. You don't have a lot of competitors you don't like, have a lot of searches on Google about your keywords.
And it's fine. Sometimes it's great to be not in the major market because then you can have the first mover advantage. And if you have again, the budget and the money, then that's great. Like invest in demand generation. And so launch your own podcast. Um, do tutorial webinars. Just educate, basically because you need to convince people they have an issue they're not aware of, and you need also to build credibility around your brand, something that works super well.
In those cases, in my experience, it's creating like studies and benchmarks because people love knowing where they are versus other companies in the same industry. So this is the kind of content that can work like super, super well. But then if you go back to these metrics and you go like on the opposite corner, [00:23:00] where basically you are in a major market, but you don't have a lot of money, which is probably the case for a lot of companies because yeah, they launch their own product because they know there is a huge pain.
But there is. They'll precede and they don't have a lot of money. They have a like one person marketing team, and sometimes they come to me like, should I launch my podcast? I'm like, no, dude. Don't launch a podcast. Like do bottom of the funnel content and just start by buying time and convincing the people that are already ready to buy and looking for solutions.
So. Here you can do like super good content, like success stories. Just take your top three clients that are super happy, offer them. Mm-hmm. Something, it can be just a launch, you know, or credits and create a super cool story with metrics. Do a video out of it, then give it to your sales team. Use it in our, your outbound campaigns, in your email nurturing.
Just go after the demand that is already there. You can also do obviously like, um. Use cases how [00:24:00] to content that is super useful on how to be basically successful with your own solution. Those are content that rank pretty well on YouTube, for instance. And that can resonate quite well with people that are already looking for solution and are quite aware of what they should, uh, use.
So yeah, this is my, my advice. And obviously then if you take like the sweet spot, that's basically you are in a mid to market with a strong budget that's. For instance, Lely case, well, you can double down and meaning you should do both because obviously you should go after the existing demand, but you should always think of the future and keep working on your own brand awareness and educating the market because the market is evolving so fast.
Like for instance, outbound is changing so fast. Like a few years ago, spray and pray would work. You would just send tons of emails and you would get. A good decent percentage of answer. And that's how it one works. Yeah. But today it doesn't anymore. So you need to educate again and again. So what's the new market today?
How to succeed in [00:25:00] this new market. So you should never stop educating and creating content that's not promotional in my opinion. And especially if you have the team and the budget to do it. You should not stop. And then you have the last one, the low left end corner. Where you are not in the metro markets and you don't have budget, and I'm always telling this is the abort mission corner.
Don't go there. Like if you need to, if you need to educate your market and you don't have the money, you don't have the team, it won't work. Because creating demand, creating awareness, it takes time and it takes resources and it won't drive like direct answers. So yeah,
Erik Jacobson: very, very helpful. I love that visual and.
Let's take an example of, let's say they, let's say they have budget and they are not in a mature market.
Intro/Outro: Mm-hmm.
Erik Jacobson: So they, they have to sort of prioritize creating that awareness and [00:26:00] affinity to some degree. Yeah. What would be your recommendations then on how to think about. Because even with budget, you still have to prioritize, of course, which content levers you want to pull, and then sort of what order and over what period of time and all that kind of stuff.
Is there any way you think through that? You mentioned, you know, content basically being not optional at this point. Mm-hmm. But maybe what is optional is like which things you prioritize at what time. So do you, do you say like, Hey, we need to start here. I would recommend you start with X, Y, Z. Go to the next one, go to the next, you know, how do you think about that?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Yeah, there is only one answer is where is your audience looking for information and how are they consuming content? And this can really be different depending on the industry, but also on the seniority of your personnel. Let's say like if you are [00:27:00] targeting senior HR vp, it's not gonna be the same if you're targeting junior BDR, obviously they're not gonna consume con in the same way.
They're not gonna, mm-hmm. Go on the same platform. So I would start there and you can launch a little survey toward your users. This is something I, I do a lot of the time. I always add marketing questions to our annual product surveys, like where do you come consume content? Yeah. Do you go to events?
What's your favorite podcast? And this is super helpful. Yeah. Because this is how you know where to start. Like sometimes people. Come to me and say, oh, like, uh, I love, uh, you know, the employee advocacy you have, uh, on Lend list. How do you do this? Uh, I really want to do this for my company. And then I look at what they do and basically they are targeting a senior VP in the health industry, people that are not on LinkedIn, you know, and I'm like, are you sure this is where you wanna go?
Right. But, and on the contrary, there are tons of local events and conferences for health. And I'm like, maybe I would start [00:28:00] by doing one pillar presentation about I don't know if numbers and trends and use it and hack like those conferences. And maybe that will be more useful than having your employees speaking on LinkedIn when your audience is not even listening there, you know?
So yeah, that would be my answer to prioritize.
Erik Jacobson: Yes. Absolutely. That makes a ton of sense. Speaking of that, then maybe for those companies where it would make sense to launch and scale an employee personal brand and advocacy program, which you all have done really well for LinkedIn, which is, you know, starting with the founder on LinkedIn and he executed that and still is executing that really well.
Now you've added on other employees. Mm-hmm. To that equation. So in an effort to sort of like help this be true, which would be anytime one of your prospects or potential audience would open up LinkedIn, in an ideal [00:29:00] world, they're seeing content from somebody from LEM List. If we just look at the North Star goal, like of course that's a dream scenario and I think you all have executed to that end very well.
So let's say somebody is in a camp of, it makes sense. Their audience is on LinkedIn. Their market is on LinkedIn. How do you recommend approaching building that out?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: If it makes sense for audience, I think that should be the number one priority because there still is a lot of room to grow on LinkedIn and it's still quite working.
It's not as easy as it used to be, I think like maybe 10 years ago, five years ago, where you could get tons of followers super fast, but still the engagement is still pretty good if you are posting the right content. So definitely worth it. I think it's a great channel because it serves both. The awareness is the credibility, but also if you're doing, it's like with the right split, it can be a great channel to also distribute more promotional content.
So it's definitely a sweet spot [00:30:00] between both. Yep. Actually there was a company that, I think it was like an agency, a growth agency, that uh, used that term and I really liked it. That said that they had the Avenger Avenger strategy. So basically they would have several superheroes in the company. With a specific, you know, like role and, and image and tone of voice.
And everyone would, in their own way, start building their own audience and storytelling on LinkedIn. And this is what we've tried to do at Limb List. And I think it's, it's working super well. So basically we obviously have a founder talking to founders, our CEO, talking to CEO, but also a lot to VP sales and rev ops because he come from there.
So he gets. Those topics quite well and love speaking about it. Yes, we have our VP of sales talking to sales. We have our lead up talking to ops myself, talking to CMOs. We have a lead group that has like 30 K followers. Speaks a lot about growth and outbound. So I think this is great. You shouldn't ask for people to talk [00:31:00] about everything.
Like you should let people speak about what they know and be the face of what they like. It should be logical, right? And this, I think this is some, a mistake I see sometimes, like companies are like, okay, we're gonna post on LinkedIn some generic content and everyone is gonna speak about the same thing.
It doesn't work because it doesn't feel legit. And also, I don't think it works to force people posting some kind of generic content. People should post stuff about their everyday life, their beliefs. So this requires a lot of freedom. And again, I said this earlier, I think that's the number one advice I give to CEOs that wanna launch employee advocacy in the company.
I'm like, I'm giving them a checklist. I'm like, are you okay with people sharing success and failures, sharing numbers? Sharing sometimes belief that you won't agree with. Like, I'm not sending my LinkedIn post to my CO for validation. Every time I knew a CO who was like, I'm validating everything. I'm like, how do you wanna scale if you validate everything and it's, it's just gonna sound like [00:32:00] cooperate fluff at the end if you validate everything.
Like I'm allowed to roast my own CEO, and I think that's why some of my posts work so well because. CMOs love roasting their own boss. Right. And because sometimes they deserve it. Yep. So I think this is, this is very important and obviously like knowing that you should post 90% educational, entertaining, relatable content, and 10% promotional.
Obviously when we have a big launch or something exciting, I'm talking about it, but. Like again, if you look at my post in the last year, it's not even 10%. It's like 5% is promotional and the rest is really about my life as a CMO. And I think this is also very important because if you keep just selling your own stuff, people not gonna be interested by what you're saying.
Erik Jacobson: Yeah.
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: And then on the operating system. Basically, obviously like having a great profile. This is the basics, like not gonna go through it, but like this, a [00:33:00] sharp description about what you do and what you're talking about, like cool LinkedIn cover and, and profile picture, et cetera. A featured post on your, on your profile.
That's like the super basics. But then if you go into less basics, I think when you start, it's really important to. Define your core topic pillars, like what are the three to four topics you're gonna cover? For instance, for me as a CMO, I'm like, I'm gonna speak about hiring and management. I'm gonna speak about marketing strategy.
I'm gonna speak about creativity. And so find your pillars. So you kind of consistent into what you're saying because this is super important. People are looking for consistency. And because otherwise you're gonna, people are gonna be lost if you speak about a one day and Z the other the other day. And obviously like being active on LinkedIn, comment on other people, posts following other people.
I'm using LA list to add CMOs automatically a bit every day. This works super well to get new followers and great, like [00:34:00] relevant people following myself back. So yeah, those are like all the advices that I would give.
Erik Jacobson: And this topic honestly could obviously be an entire episode on its own, but one question I would have on that is.
How are you incentivizing or encouraging or, um, maybe not necessarily in this term, but requiring those other employees to post on LinkedIn? 'cause kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, if it's not a part of their role and responsibility that they are measured against in terms of their.
Annual evaluations or what, what have you. Yeah. And they're actually measured against hitting quota and maybe they don't necessarily see this random post on a Tuesday that they're gonna do is going to help them achieve that. Hmm. How are you baking that into something that is allowing all the team to like, uh, uh, do this in unison?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Yeah, that's a great question. We actually had [00:35:00] debate internally about this, like, should we financially incentivize people to post and like, reach some kind of, uh, engagement and, and impressions. We actually tried this. But then we stopped because we thought this wasn't our DNA, and actually we worked a lot on, on our employer branding content and and DNA recently, and we decided that building public and basically being transparent was in core DNA and that we would expect employees to embrace this without like being financially supported to incentivize to do this.
And in the end. I truly believe I was the one deciding to stop paying people. Like, uh, a lot of leaders were like, no. Okay, let's do this. It's fine. We already have a lot of perks at Le List and a lot of bonus. I was like, no, like it's gonna be a win-win or not. We are offering people the opportunity to build their brand and use whatever they do at Le List to be.
Credible in, in the market and bet for their future career. And I think that's already [00:36:00] like something great. And I want people to publish in LinkedIn because they are passionate and because they, they love doing it, not because they're forced or because they wanna be paid the end of the month because. In the end, the results were not so good and the best posts have been the one posted by people that are not looking for money.
They're just doing it because they love sharing, they love building their community, and they know that tomorrow if they look for a job or I don't know, like when I launch the organ company, this will be a huge asset. So yeah, this is my opinion. Maybe some people won't, won't agree with this, but yeah.
Erik Jacobson: I think this concept or fear that used to exist a few years ago, which was, well, what if all of these employees that we have on the team start posting.
We are helping encourage that and provide resources and support for that, but then they leave the company.
Intro/Outro: Yeah.
Erik Jacobson: And that was a fear, and I think that still is a fear, but the fact of the matter is [00:37:00] that is something that's going to exist and it's never not going to exist, and your only other option is to not do it.
Only have the person or the people who you can a hundred percent, you know, validate will never leave the company, which presumably would be the founder, not even the CEO. The CEO may leave at some point. Potentially. Yeah. But it's really the founder. So is your entire social strategy only going to revolve around that one person who will probably never leave the company?
Or do you want to take advantage of. The best execution capability possible for that platform, which would be what you just described. And so
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Exactly.
Erik Jacobson: I don't think the risk to reward that reward scale is far weighted in your favor, in my opinion, in comparison to the risk. So yeah, I think that's just something that, it's a rational fear, but it is, the alternative is to simply not do this strategy, and I don't think that is wise.
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Exactly. Yeah. Couldn't agree [00:38:00] more.
Erik Jacobson: So there's two more things I wanted to cover. One would be a fun topic that B2B doesn't touch on too often, which is TikTok, but before we'll end on that fun one. Okay. The one question that I could see, you know, some people having right now is like, how do you measure all of this content?
Like. Are you looking at this in terms of, to your point, if content is not optional? Then we, we don't need to look at certain measurements or like inbound or pipeline and say, if we don't generate X pipeline from LinkedIn, we're gonna stop doing LinkedIn. It doesn't sound like that's even on the radar because it's not optional.
Like we have to be on LinkedIn 'cause that's where our market is.
Intro/Outro: Yeah.
Erik Jacobson: So if that's true, then how are you looking at. The measurement or the success or whatever you equate the ROI against or you know, any of those sort of benchmarks?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Yeah. [00:39:00] Uh, I'm gonna give you like concrete answers, but before as an intro.
I think it goes back to your company's initial philosophy. If you are in a company that has a strong belief in content like we have at Lendlease, because the whole success was built on what Guemes built with content, then it's all easier because you have this, it's like faith, like you have this f that whatever you do, it will have an impact.
And I, I would advise as a marketer to make sure that if you like content and wanna do content like. Qualify this before you enter a company because there's nothing worse than arriving in a company that has no belief whatsoever on the impact of content and is asking all the time, KPI and metrics, because yes, you can, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna give an answer here, but it's super hard to attribute this.
Attribution is hard. In general, it's even harder when it comes to content. So at limb we have this philosophy first that content is super powerful, and second that. Maybe not even for content, but for [00:40:00] marketing in general, it's better to spend your time doing stuff and launching stuff rather than trying to attribute everything and build complex dashboard and apps.
Like we would rather spend our time get done and launching stuff than being like, you know, little, yep. HubSpot dashboard, Holly Holistic Dash, we have dashboard, you know, like, but obviously. With a 45 million AR company. But yeah, I think this is super important. So regarding the metrics, again, I think you don't have the same if you're doing either like content for demand generation and brand awareness, and rather if you're doing content for lead generation, if you're doing content for brand awareness and and creating the demand for tomorrow, obviously there are KPIs you can look at.
For the brand one, you could look at the share of direct traffic and branded SEO. This is still the best metric you could have, and if you have experienced this in a lot of company, especially in metro risk companies, where we were, we were launching offices abroad, so we would [00:41:00] like, for instance, arrive. In Germany, like with no brand oneness at all.
And so the, the search for the brand name in this countries would be zero or like two. And then after one year of doing, launching a podcast, doing webinars, uh, blog posts, we would start having maybe like. 20% of our traffic from people typing directly the name of the company. This amazing, this a great metric that shows that people are starting to search the basic.
But I think it's still like probably the best one, like the brand search, obviously like looking at the evolution of brand search on Google, uh, social mentions. I think this one is less powerful, but still can be. It's, I think it's more of a metric to be honest. Mm-hmm. Um, because unless you are like huge.
B2B or B2C brand. The social mentions probably won't be big enough to give you an idea, but still it can be a good insight. Obviously, LLM requests and your share of voice on LLM is a good insight and especially now if we are in a AI area, I would advise to to look at this. So [00:42:00] yeah, this is like basically for, for dimension and something else that sometimes marketing teams forget about.
It's also the evolution of your conversion rates, especially if you're a sales led, obviously, because for instance, I've seen it like I was only working in sales led company. Every time we were running outbound campaigns. There would be a huge difference in terms of conversion rates. When we would have a little of bon is when we dumped, and this makes sense, right?
Like your sales calls and if a hundred percent of the guys are calling never heard whatsoever about your brand, it's gonna be harder for them to reach the next step, right? So this is a good sign if sales are like, it's less hard for sales to book meetings, um, when you are like launching love marketing initiatives to educate in the market and, and create awareness.
So that's for the dimension side of thing. And then for the lead gen, I would say you can use content definitely to fill your sales pipeline. Like for instance, let's say you do a success [00:43:00] story and you push it with a BM on LinkedIn or stuff like very bottom of the can of content, basically. Um, you could definitely bench the conversion rate from those campaigns versus your average.
Promotional product led campaigns and see if it works better. And that's a good sign that your content is helping driving either signups or demos, uh, into your, your funnel. If you have like a strong ops team, you could also fo in my previous company we were doing this, you could also look at influence deals.
So basically every time a sales is using a content you've created, may it be a one pager, a battle card. Spot on the funnel content and that it led to meeting, then you can say, yes. The comment that we are creating is helping our sales team close deals. So it has an impact.
Erik Jacobson: Yes. Love this. And yeah, I think it's also just, let's look practically at where we are hanging out and what channels and things are [00:44:00] influencing our decisions as buyers and users as well.
And so it's like, yes. Cer, like LinkedIn is hard to attribute a click to an inbound because it's not necessarily like, like LinkedIn Organic or YouTube or any of these other content channels. Um, because that's not really how we behave.
Intro/Outro: Yeah.
Erik Jacobson: And so we can also just look at, if our market is on a channel, we should probably be there and then we can do smart things to.
Measure, are we being the most effective We can be on that channel, but not should we be on that channel. And I think, yeah, the way you described it is really great. We've got a few minutes left. Is there a quick, I tease the TikTok thing, not many B2B companies are focused on TikTok. Uh, what would you say is any learnings you've had from TikTok or your opinions on TikTok in general?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Yeah, well my opinion first to start like with [00:45:00] with the why we tried TikTok and I think it's a super interesting channel. I think for reasons first, it's a white space, like not a lot of B2B brands are there. So it's super interesting when you have a white space. Mm-hmm. Second, it's probably one of the channel where you can have.
The best virality today, like today, having virality in, uh, and creating buzz on YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram has become like super hard. Uh, but on TikTok with one video, you can reach millions of impressions super fast. And so this is super interesting because every time a platform is launching a new channel, basically they are kind of.
Making it easier to get, um, to get views and engagements so it's the right time to leverage this. Also, I think the new generation of buyers are in TikTok, it's like a cliche to say all young people on TikTok, but it's true also like young people on TikTok and the other people gonna buy your solution tomorrow.
Yes. And finally it also has a lot of [00:46:00] impact on search. If you look at zero click content and, and what appears in the SRB of Google, like. More and more TikTok content is appearing and obviously it's also, um, gonna influence LLM. So for all those reasons, I'm like, why not try it out, you know? But then TikTok is not an easy channel.
So what we've learned, my belief is that don't go on TikTok. If you're not committed to create 95% entertaining content that's not gonna talk about your product, and that you need to be okay with the fact that you're not not gonna sell anything, and that you're not gonna be able to link TikTok to a performance KPI whatsoever for quite a long time.
And so if you're not ready to this. Don't go on TikTok obviously. But then the learning we had like trying to launch this entertaining and really table content, I would say two main learnings. The first, we tried to externalize it at first because [00:47:00] nobody had ever like done TikTok content before in the company myself.
First, and so I was like, let's try to go fast. Uh, let's break the blameless rules and then pay some expert to do it with us. Not forced, but with us. But in the end, it didn't. We had some learnings and we were able to put some stuff really fast that was good for this reason, but I ended up the collaboration quite fast because I realized that TikTok works.
When it's super spontaneous and genuine, and actually the videos that did get viral on the TikTok account were videos that either my team or myself did on the spot. And I think that's the kind of content that you cannot create with an agency. You need to do it yourself. Like, I'm gonna give you one example.
I was at the office and there was this sales guy on the phone. And he was like doing a lot and a lot of very short demos. And some of them were in Spanish and some were in German and, and like he was like trying to say Spanish and German and Italian words. And it was so funny because like he [00:48:00] wouldn't really know the language, but he was trying so hard, you know?
And so I kept feeling him for like an hour and then I was like, this is gold content, you know? But yeah, this is something that was on the spot, right? I couldn't like imagine that he would be doing this. So yeah, I think at some point, if you want a content to be genuine and being in the TikTok codes, it's probably best that you do it yourself.
The second learnings is, I think you need, before you launch a content, you shouldn't only be like, oh, I'm gonna post funny stuff for my audience. Like you should be like, what are the core topics that will, um, make my audience say, oh, they get me and they have. My back, and that's what I call defining your brand standpoint.
And I think this is super important because this is also helping you having the ideas then on the spot because you have this framework of what are the opinion you wanna illustrate as a brand. And so for instance, for them list, we have three brand standpoint that we built as a team. The first one is.
[00:49:00] Marketing dreams and sales are in the trenches. So basically we're roasting marketing that sometimes like brings shitty leads to sales team or create like fluff for complex messaging that the sales team cannot even use in in their everyday life. And so we created love. Mini videos around that theme.
Another example is around AI and sales saying basically that AI is not the enemy, but the enemy is just, if you don't go and use ai, someone like using AI will basically replace you. And so we are trying to do funny videos on how AI can actually help sales. So for instance, this was actually. And promotional, but it works super well On TikTok.
We had this, uh, launch that is an AI voice recorder that basically can create LinkedIn voice note for sales team with their own voice and it can also make them speak another language. And so we had recorded some of a sales. Teams and then we made the ai, the nameless [00:50:00] ai, we met them like speak another language.
For example, Tal, we made like the French Tal, you know? And then we went to Tal with his own voice in French and we filmed it like live, like listening to his own voice in French. And he was like generally laughing and that was a really cool content just about this topic. So yeah, that was our learning on TikTok.
We're still learning to be honest, but it's uh, I think it's a great playground.
Erik Jacobson: It's such a good reminder to not get caught in these old tropes that everybody repeats, which is like B2B buyers aren't on TikTok. B2B buyers aren't on Instagram or you know, it's like, to your point, these platforms are changing fast buyer behaviors are changing fast.
And like the people who get the biggest reward, for example, on LinkedIn, to your point, if you were doing this strategy, you all are doing now on LinkedIn, which you've been doing all along. But if more companies were doing it [00:51:00] six years ago or five years ago, it was much more. Blue ocean there, and possibly even faster growth and opportunities as a result.
So now if something looks obvious, now it means it's more competitive. So this is just a good reminder you're doing for everybody right now, which is like, don't automatically write off TikTok as not a valuable use of your time, because it's not obvious, which might actually mean. It's very interesting opportunity because nobody else, no other competitors really are playing there, and it's very high likelihood that you have buyers that are hanging out on TikTok, very high likelihood.
So it's, yeah, it's a great note to end on there. This episode was fantastic. The insights per minute were very, very high, so thank you for, for taking the time.
Intro/Outro: Thank you so much for having me.
Erik Jacobson: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I recommend everybody listening go follow [00:52:00] DMI on LinkedIn. She's dropping posts there at least, you know, one, two multiple times per week, what have you on a lot of the stuff that we talked about here today, as well as other marketing.
Related topics and check out ly go check out the, the different channels that we talked about. Go look and study what we talked about today. 'cause it's one thing to listen to this and like get inspiration, but I think you can connect the dots even more. If you go look at Limbless YouTube channel. Go look at LinkedIn, go look at the people posting there.
Go look at the website and how they're incorporating all of this stuff together. That's where you'll really be able to, uh, see what they're up to. And so, yeah, dmi, anywhere else you would recommend me to guide people to, or people to check out?
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: No, that was perfect.
Erik Jacobson: Awesome. Well, thank you again. And uh, yeah, we'll catch everybody on the next one.
Domitille de Saint-Exupéry: Thanks, Eric.
Intro/Outro: [00:53:00] 95.