B2B Show with Ugi

Why do B2B brands feel beige while B2C gets to have all the fun?

Most B2B marketing still looks and sounds the same.

Same features.
Same ads.
Same “ultimate guides.”
Same cold emails rotting in inboxes.

Meanwhile, B2C marketers are out there building brands people actually like and remember - using simple stories, strong personalities, and one clear thing they stand for.

In this episode of the B2B Show, I sit down with Vector Head of Marketing Jess Cook to break down how B2B teams can steal the best parts of B2C and stop shipping boring content.

Jess shares how she builds brands around “one word” positioning, finds universal truths that hit people in the gut, and turns tiny content tests into full campaigns that drive pipeline.

We get into signal-driven ads, founder-led content powered by AI, programmatic SEO that still works in 2025, and why being different beats being “better” in crowded categories.

If you care about content, creativity, and standing out without burning the whole budget on gimmicks, this one is for you.

🎬 Here’s what we cover:

B2B vs B2C creativity - why most B2B feels boring and what to copy from consumer brands.

Brand personality & “one word” positioning - how to decide what you stand for and repeat it a hundred ways.

Universal truths in your market - finding those “everyone feels this but no one says it” insights and building campaigns around them.

Story over features - how to make people like you first, before you ever pitch the product.

Minimum viable content - testing ideas with the smallest possible asset before you waste time on a big production.

The breakup letter campaign - how a simple joke about VDI turned into a top performing video.

Real feedback loops - what Jess actually watches to know if a concept is working, beyond vanity metrics.

Vector’s big bets for 2025 - small events, narrative focus, email, and founder social as core growth engines.

Signal driven ad audiences - using intent and behavior to build smarter ad audiences instead of blasting more cold outbound.

Founder led content with AI - the system Jess uses to turn 30 minute conversations into months of LinkedIn posts.

Programmatic SEO that still works - how Vector is ranking and driving pipeline while everyone tweets “SEO is dead.”

Long term attention - why “different” beats “better” and how to become a magnet for the right buyers.

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Connect with Jess & Ugi:
Jess: linkedin.com/in/jesscook
Ugi: linkedin.com/in/ugljesadj

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Click here to watch a video of this episode.

What is B2B Show with Ugi?

This show is made for B2B marketers who are tired of the same old advice. Ugi Djuric, CEO of ContentMonk and B2B Vault, sits down with some of the best minds in B2B to talk about what’s really working, what’s broken, and what nobody tells you about growing a company. This is the show where people share their deepest insights and secret knowledge they wouldn't otherwise share on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1: 00:00
First you have to get people to even like you before they will consider you. Each one that you mentioned, you said one single word about what they stood for. What is the thing that when we say this, everyone will go, oh yeah, I relate to that. I think the most successful content I've worked on has kind of like been sparked by that universal truth. Marketers can only select top performing creative 52% of the time. That was actually the top performer. A two minute long video of just someone typing in a Google Doc to piano music. Click through rates on this campaign we're running for signal driven ad audiences and was nearly 3%. I built a pretty solid content system for both of our founders to get them posting more on LinkedIn. Whenever they post we see, you know, that spike in interest and engagement. I use that to train a project on their voice and their post structure and the topics they post about. I know everyone's like SEO's dead. Blah blah blah. It's not.

Speaker 2: 00:59
Hey, hey, hey guys. Welcome to another episode of the B2B show show with Oogie. For thousands of times, all of us heard that B2B is boring. And to be honest with you, most Companies are doing B2B marketing on a boring way because we are always constantly talking about our features, how our products are great and we are forgetting to be creative, to be different from our competitors and kind of everything started looking the same. Fortunately, there are tens of thousands of marketeers out there in the world who are doing marketing a little bit better way than Most of the B2B folks because they are doing it in a far more competitive niches. Marketeers that are working in direct to consumer or B2C industries are forced to be different, are forced to think differently and to be more creative because competition is 10 times bigger. And for a long time I have been really curious about how can we as B2B marketers take creativity and take that B2C marketing mindset into the B2B to do far better work and to get far better results. And who is the best person to tell me all of that if not Jess, who is a CMO of Vector? Probably one of the funniest companies out there. But guess also what? Jess came to B2B from the B2C world. So she kind of had an experience to work in both worlds. And we talked about many things. First and foremost, how can B2B marketers start thinking and become creative as B2C marketers? What are some universal marketing truths that are always the same, that no matter what you're selling and to whom you're selling. What are the big bets she's placing on Vector in 2025 and 2026 and a lot of other amazing things. So sit back and enjoy because this is probably one of the best episodes. I know that I say that every single time I. But it's just I enjoy every conversation so much that all of them are great. And this one will definitely give you some actionable takeaways to use for you at the end of this episode. Enjoy. So tell me, since you have a lot of experience in B2C, like, what can B2B marketeers learn from B2C? How can we be more creative? How can we stand out with our content, our ads, or any other kind of a marketing initiative that you're doing?

Speaker 1: 03:37
Yeah, it's a great question. I'm starting to see it more and more. Just B2B brands borrowing from B2C kind of cues because, you know, they've had that figured out for a long time. How to build a brand personality and how to capitalize on that and all of their channels. And. B2C brands have to do that because, you know, their products aren't technical. They'Re characteristic. They may have, you know, three kind of defining characteristic characteristics, if that. And so what they really have to go on is some sort of personality shtick, something for people to recall what they are, who they are, what they stand for. So I think what that comes to when we. Okay, how do we take that from B2C over to B2B is we can't be so focused on the features and think that that's going to draw someone in because that's what we've been doing for, you know, however long in B2B and it's stale and people are tired of it and they scroll right past. And so I think there has to be some sort of, like, what is our. Essence in terms of, like, what is our essence and personality? What is our essence and our values? What are the things that we can do and say to stand out that have nothing to do with features. And that's going to get people to notice. So, you know, for instance, at Vector, we are building in public and we take that to the extreme. So we have an entire podcast where it's essentially like, you have been invited inside of my one on ones with my CEO, a marketing leader and CEO, basically, like talking about all the decisions they've had to make together and like, what were the sticking points and where do we disagree and how did we come to an Agreement or at least a compromise on certain things, right? And, and it's things like that where it's like we're putting our people out there in a different way. We have a mascot that we put out there and people see the ghost and they, they know that it's vector, right? And so I think we've found kind of these little surprise and delight moments that are differentiated that people aren't doing and they have nothing to do with our product and our features. And I think people appreciate that because that, I think what you have to get first, you have to get people to even like you before they will consider you, right? And so I think we miss that step of like, how do I get someone to actually just like me first before I try to put all this out there and say, like, okay, but here's why you should actually buy, right? Like, just get them to be interested and intrigued by you first and foremost. And B2C brands have that on lockdown.

Speaker 2: 06:35
What about storytelling, right? I mean, right now in. Software categories, you have a lot of different players, right? And many of 99% of them basically are all the same. Same products, same content, same keywords, articles. Literally like everything is the same. And if you're about to buy a new software in a specific category, you either do not know who to choose or you already have like a one or two companies in the consideration set on the other side, like in the B2C space, for example, let's say car manufacturers, right? It's a very crowded category. You have a bunch of them, but you already know if you care about safety, you're going to go with Volvo. If you care about luxury, you're going to go about Mercedes or all these other. And when you take a look at these kind of an old ads, like from 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, like they were short, they were crisp, but behind every ad there was a story. So what about storytelling for B2B software?

Speaker 1: 07:57
So I love what you just said there about car manufacturers because each one that you mentioned, you said one single word about what they stood for.

Speaker 2: 08:04
Yeah.

Speaker 1: 08:04
And I think that's pretty universal for, you know, yes, car manufacturers, but also clothing brands and shoe brands and. Grocery chains. Right. Like, I think any B2C brand out there is usually, if we know them, if they're a household name, it's because they have kind of stuck to a value or something they want to be known for and they've leaned into that really well, really hard. So I think and, and to come back to storytelling, they do that through storytelling. Right. All of the great Jeep ads of like the 90s and early 2000s were all about, like, freedom. Freedom to go places that like, no other vehicles could get to. Right?

Speaker 2: 08:48
Yeah.

Speaker 1: 08:49
How do we, as B to B2B brands, portray that one thing that we stand for in our storytelling, in our podcast appearances, like, in every single touch point that we get out there, right? Like, that's all brand. And I think you have to be able to reiterate that one thing that you stand for over and over and over. And you, as the marketer or as the founder or as, you know, the leadership team, whatever, you might get sick of it at some point. You're like, ah, that we just keep talking about this one thing. But like, I don't know, McDonald's has done that since the outset, right? Like the onset. All of those car brands you mentioned, they have done that since, you know, advertising for cars was a thing. So people don't get sick of it, like the, you know, internal team does. They don't notice except for the feeling that that's what you're talking about. And you just have to find, you know, a hundred, a thousand different ways to say that same thing and keep them interesting each time.

Speaker 2: 09:55
What about when you are about, let's say, to approach that kind of a storytelling for B2B from your B2C experience, how would that process usually go? When creating your storyline and story brand, do you intentionally pick the enemies and put your customers as the hero of the story or you put your product as the hero of the story? How do B2C marketers approach that? And is that something a second question, like, is that something that needs to come from the founder itself or it can come from marketing team, from an agency or anyone, anyone else?

Speaker 1: 10:45
Okay, so the first question is, like, how do BSC brands kind of come to that? A lot of it has to do with, like, sitting down. Usually it's a creative team and figuring out what is the universal truth that we can wrap this brand around. Right? Like, what is the thing that when we say this, everyone will go, oh, yeah, I relate to that. So. I'll give you an example of a B2C campaign I I worked on. So one of the brands I worked on as a copywriter and a creative director was cottonell toilet paper. Um, and one of the universal truths of toilet paper is people position their role, their roll of toilet paper either rolling over on their toilet paper roll or rolling under. Right? Like, everyone has an opinion on that. And, and no matter the reasoning, everyone has an opinion. And we took that and kind of ran with it. And here's the thing with B2C that is true for every toilet paper brand. It doesn't matter what toilet paper brand you buy. Everyone has that opinion of, like, which way to put it on the toilet paper holder. Cottonell was the first one to really talk about that as a universal truth. So that's kind of another, like, that's a universal truth of V2C, right? There is like, you don't have to be the only one that can do it, but you have to be the first one to, like, go out and talk about it, because then once you've done that, no one else can really take that from you. So that's another thing I think that we need to capitalize on in B2B, which is like, there are a lot of brands out there that will allow you to go out and do essentially the same thing. You know, maybe a little bit different feature set, a little bit different control over those features. But if you're the first one to put a stake in the ground and say, like, this is what we stand for. No one can really take that from you. It's really difficult to come from behind and take a positioning like that from someone. So I think that's step one. Find that universal truth. There is something to be said. If, if it's ownable to you, that's great. But if it's also just something that, like, you're the first one to come out and say, like, try it and see what happens. Oogie, remind me what the second part of that question is.

Speaker 2: 12:59
Does the story need to come from the founder? Or it can come from internal marketing team or external marketing team.

Speaker 1: 13:07
So I think the input for something like that probably has to come from the founder, the executive team. There has to be a reason why, you know, this software was created, right? There has to have been some sort of problem that the founder decided they wanted to solve, and they wanted to solve it differently than it was being solved currently. And there has to be some sort of story around that. Now, that universal truth might not come right out of the founder's mouth or the CEO's mouth. Sometimes it's just the input and the story that a creative team or a marketer needs to be able to spin it into a universal truth. So I think it's a combination of the two things, like the story and the why has to come from the founder and the executive team. But the spin and kind of like digging in and finding that universal truth that will resonate with the audience usually comes from the marketing team.

Speaker 2: 14:01
Tell me. Jess, you have. A very specific approach to content marketing. I mean, that, that's something I, as a content marketing person like, who spent the last 10 years in content marketing. I don't see that often across other people. So it gave me like, walk me right now through what's your, like, you know, approach to content marketing. 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 level 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. 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.

Speaker 1: 15:42
Yeah, yeah. How much time do we have?

Speaker 2: 15:46
A lot. A lot.

Speaker 1: 15:47
Okay, good. All right. Yeah, absolutely. I. I mean, obviously the best content helps someone. Breaks down a, a concept in a way that's super digestible and actionable for somebody. I think that there is. I think the most successful content I've worked on, again, has kind of like been sparked by that universal truth that we were able to find about our audience. And then kind of capitalized it on a way that was just really human. So, for instance, I created a quiz a few years ago for a company I was at called Mar Pipe and the Universal Truth. But actually, let me back up. Marpipe was a software that allowed you to multivariate test Ad Creative so you could create, you know, 64 versions of AD Creative by mixing and matching, you know, background color, different images, headlines. And doing that, it would allow you to know exactly like which background color, which headline, which image were kind of the creative outlier. Outliers, the top performers. And I, I kind of knew, like, as an advertising creative myself, that, you know, we advertisers have this feeling that because we've been in the industry, we know better. We can spot high performing creative From a mile away. Like we it in instinctively, we just know that. And I wanted to kind of push on that a little bit and like test that. So I created this quiz where I took. Two different versions of essentially the same ad from five different mar pipe customers and put them in front of marketers and advertisers. And I had them guess which one was the higher performer. And it turned out that marketers can only, you know, select or choose top performing creative 52% of the time. Like, you might as well flip a coin. We don't know any better than any other person on the planet. Right. And I think that that was kind of, I think the universal truth there is like we, we marketers, we have a little bit of an ego when it comes to the idea that like, well, no, we know good marketing, we know good campaigns, we know good ad creative. And so I think that's, that's been a pretty big crux of like content marketing for me is finding that universal truth. Figuring out how can we exploit it is the wrong word. But like, how can we bubble that up a little bit in a really interesting way and kind of get people to reflect on it? And, and that's been kind of a fun process to like, how do you take something that's really, you know, can be pretty technical, like multivariate ad creative testing. Right. And show people in a really simple form what it means to them and why they need it so badly.

Speaker 2: 18:55
What about your minimum viable content? Like, how do you build this? How do you build those, you know, feedback loops that actually tell you, like, whether something makes sense or not? Yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:09
So minimum viable content. A little bit of a tongue twister. Something I've been talking about for a couple years is the idea that you just, if you have an idea, you don't need to go to, you know, the ends of the earth to create the perfect pillar piece of content around it as your first step. In fact, you do not want to waste your time on something like that until you know that it's going to resonate with your audience. So let's say you have a hunch that there's this universal truth. There's this idea, there's this piece of content you want to put out there. I always go back to print, like magazine ads as like the perfect form of an idea because it's usually one line, a headline and an image. Like, how can you boil the idea down to something that simple? Maybe it's a social post, right? Maybe it's, maybe it's just an image and the headline and a bit of support copy to go with it and see what happens. So you're not, you know, pouring hours and resources and budget into creating something without first kind of going out and giving it a little bit of a test. So something that we actually did this with when I was at island, we had. We had this idea. Around. Breakup letters with a certain piece of technology called vdi. It was something that island could displace. It's a really, really horrible user experience. It people, which was our audience, they hated it, their users hated it, but it was really secure. And so it was kind of like, you know. What am I trying to say? The lesser of two evils, right? But everyone just like hated it and wished there was a better way. And so we thought there was this really interesting idea around. Like with island, you can actually break up with vdi. Can we kind of show that? Can we do like a breakup letter? So we started with a piece of minimum viable content. We created one image with a headline on it, and it was a social post. And it was something like, dear vdi, it's not me, it's you. And it was the first time we put something out into the island kind of corporate social feed where we saw our ICP actually used the laugh emoji. It was something we just hadn't seen before. And so we were like, oh, there's something here. Like, that is a really good signal. That's a great one, That's a great test. And two, you know, that's not like your traditional KPI. But we hit a nerve here. So we took it a step further. We turned it into a gif. So as the GIF was like, that letter was being kind of typed out. And when it got to the middle of the letter, you got like the spinning wheel of death, right? The idea that like VDI is, is slowing you down and making your system lag. And again, like even more, you know, laughter emojis from all the right job titles. And so we thought, well, let's really blow this out. Let's turn this into like a two minute video. So we set this two minute video of someone typing this long breakup letter to vdi. We set it to like sappy piano music. And that was actually the top performer. A two minute long video of just someone typing in a Google Doc to piano music got, you know, better engagement than any of the others. The right job titles, more comments. Again, those laughter emojis. So those are the kinds of things you can kind of like take something really small, test it get, bring it a step up. Bring it a step up. Right? Because something that happens is we go all in on an idea and either it doesn't work or it, it works once. But then we go to scale it and we find out that like it was really just like lightning in a bottle the one time. So I, I love that idea as just like a, a step approach to, to content and seeing what works and what resonates and what you should really go all in on.

Speaker 2: 23:15
How much feedback there do you think is enough to get a real sense of whether our content will perform or not perform?

Speaker 1: 23:24
That's a good question. I think it depends on like, what's your baseline as a, as a company? Like for us, the baseline was on our social posts. We'd always get a lot of employee engagement. We'd get a couple of like partners who would really like our content and every once in a great while we'd get, you know, our ICP to like, comment. And so it was like, this was a big shift. Like we saw a pretty big change in the makeup of people engaging with these posts. So I think it really depends on, you know, what is baseline for you? What does the average look like in terms of, you know, if this is a, if this is a, an ad campaign and a landing page you're putting out there, what, what did your previous three, you know, what was the performance of your previous three ad campaigns and landing pages? And then take a look at this one and how does this compare? So I think it's really important to find a baseline for your individual kind of company and brand and your audience before you can understand like, what does good look like and what are we actually going to look for that's going to tell us this test worked. Let's take it up a notch and try it again.

Speaker 2: 24:34
Love that. Jaz Kinet, what are the biggest content or marketing bets that you're making at Vector, like for the next few years or months?

Speaker 1: 24:45
Yeah, there's a few. Small intimate events is something that's really on our radar. We have a couple that we're doing this fall. We're sponsoring a dinner. We are co sponsoring an event with a, with a partner. And you know, there's usually a hundred to two hundred folks at these events. So they're small, they're intimate, they're very much built, built on like getting to know the people that are there and understanding their problems and a lot of discussion and sharing. So we're really excited about that. A second one is. We'Re, we're really doubling down on a very specific use case that we've seen a lot of customers have success with. And so, you know, all of our content. All of our enablement, all of our talk track is going to start pointing to that one use use case. It's specifically around ads and advertising and building smaller, more effective ad audiences through Vector. So that's something we're really as a narrative going to focus on. Our kind of like founder and internal team. Social has been performing really well. LinkedIn is actually our number one lead source and that's both organic and paid. But the organic often. You know, either at least outperforms the paid or like sits right at, at parity with the paid simply because, you know, people really love to hear from the people in the company. And email, email's been doing amazing things for us. We have a we one weekly email and one bi weekly email at the moment. The weekly email is kind of update on all the things product wise that are happening with Vector. So that goes out to all customers and prospects. And then. The biweekly email has very little to do with the product at all. It's actually comes from me and it's a, it's just kind of like the top takeaway from our latest podcast episode. So we have a podcast called this Meeting could have been a podcast I kind of talked about a little bit earlier where it's kind of like you're getting dropped in on my one on ones with my CEO Josh. And so I take kind of one thing that we talked about from each episode and I break it down, you know, to the nth degree inside of that email. It's funny how those have very little to do with the product and the response rate on those to like book a demo off of them is, is pretty incredible. So those are kind of the three that we're looking at. And of course with all of those wrapped in, all of those is content, right? We have to have content to put in the emails, we have to have content to speak about at these events. We have to have content around this new kind of narrative. So I think, you know, as, as tough, I think as it is for some founders and CEOs to really understand the. The idea of content, right? So many CEOs and CMOs and founders are very, they lean heavily into demand gen and so it's hard for them to kind of like grok like, well, why do I need what's the content thing all about? Like, especially because it's such a long lead time and all of that but like, everything I just mentioned that we're really bullish on all of it. Requires content in some degree.

Speaker 2: 28:22
Yeah, Content is the backbone of like, I mean, it needs to be the backbone of everything. Marketing department, departments. Departments. Do tell me one thing. I'm so dozy. Email, as you mentioned, like, they are newsletters, right? To your newsletter subscribers. Yeah. Yep. Well, tell me when I go to LinkedIn, right. I see vector most commonly in the context of, hey, it tells you like, who visits your profile, who visits your website now you need to reach out to them through cold email or that kind of stuff. Are you doing something like that for yourself?

Speaker 1: 29:05
We are. So Q3 was the first time we had a really legit ad budget, paid budget. And so right now we're running a handful of campaigns and kind of testing out like, okay, what's signals are we pulling in? You know, what's kind of showing us that people are interested or where they are in their journey. And then how can we use that to, to build an audience inside of Vector? What kind of ad creative are we going to build around that? And then we, you know, use all of that to actually launch those. So we, we have a few, A handful of campaigns, a good handful of campaigns running right now doing exactly that. You mentioned cold email. It's funny, we, we're moving more toward this ad kind of platform idea simply because we've seen so much success with customers who are using the information they're getting from Vector, who's on their site, who's researching competitors off their site, who's clicking their ads but not converting and then using all of that information to build new ad audiences. We've just seen so much success there and it really, you know, it outperforms kind of the, the other side of the coin, which is sales teams taking this information and pushing it into their outreach programs. Right. The inbox is so, so crowded now and it gets really difficult just to get people's attention there. And so what we're seeing is our customers that are running ads with vector audiences or are running ads with vector audiences and using those same audiences to do warm outreach. The performance is, you know, 6x what it is if you're just using it for kind of sales use cases. So that's the path we're going down because that's where we see success, that's where our customers see success. And that's where, you know, we're using vector for vector and we're seeing success as well.

Speaker 2: 30:59
Love that. What are. So since you're focusing on Ads right now. Like, what are your best performing ad funnels right now? Like, well, what's, what's the offer, what's the front offer, what's the back offer? How the entire journey through that funnel looks like?

Speaker 1: 31:16
Yeah, so one of the campaigns we're running right now is for a product called Signal Driven Ad Audiences. Essentially you can take any signal, you can use that signal to push in a vector and build an audience. You know, we're getting really solid match rates on, on all of the ad platforms. This morning I checked an audience of vectors on LinkedIn we had like a 90% match rate and then you actually can push them right into the, you know, ad platforms that you want to serve your ads and build your campaigns that way. So you know, we're seeing things like 5x dwell time on these ads. This, this morning I took a look at click through rates on this campaign we're running for signal driven ad audiences and was nearly 3% which is again six times the, you know, the standard on LinkedIn. So a really magical thing happens when you put the right message in front of the right person, which we can do because we're contact level at the right time. And when you can scale that with something like vector, things get really, really interesting. And just, you know, the kind of the payback on programs you were probably already running but to a larger, broader audience just gets much more effective.

Speaker 2: 32:41
And what's the how, what's the format of the ad like? Does it take them to some kind of a lead magnet or it's like a video or it's like just a simple post on LinkedIn. Like what is it?

Speaker 1: 32:52
Yeah, so it's a, it's a single image LinkedIn ad. It's about the product, you know, has kind of our cute ghost has a great headline. And I think, I think the headline is put, put your signals where, where the scroll is, which is kind of fun. And he's like on a phone and you can, he's, you can kind of see what he's scrolling through it. You can see kind of the list of the signals that you can use. So really hardworking ad that's kind of the top performer right now. We had three concepts and that was the one that really stood out. And we're dropping them on a landing page specific to that product. So you know, we have kind of the matching luggage where like the headline matches the H1 on the page. We're giving you more information. We're showing product ui so you can kind of start to get an Idea of like how it would work inside of your workflow. We have social proof there. We have a customer, Isaac Ware at User Gems, who's using this exact product to see really, really interesting performance lift. So we have some testimonial from him there. He, we worked with him to build a playbook. So you can get to the playbook. It's not gated. We don't gate anything because again, we can see who's on our site. We don't need to gate anything. Right, which is great. So you can get his playbook for free and take a look at like exactly how he's running this play. So really informational, really based in like, you know, social proof and customer proof and good storytelling as well.

Speaker 2: 34:25
Okay, Jess, now tell me this so you had an opportunity to listen to me how I'm using AI in content or day to day, whatever. Now I would like to have the same opportunity. So Jaz, tell me, like, how are you using AI day to day?

Speaker 1: 34:48
Well, first of all, I have to say, like, you are leaps and bounds ahead of where I am. I've never used N8N. I was blown away by your workflow. I wouldn't even know where to begin. So let's just lay that out there. First, my use cases are going to seem very elementary compared to yours. Couple, couple main ways we're using AI at Vector. So one is founder led content. So I built a pretty solid content system for both of our founders, Nick and Josh, to get them posting more on LinkedIn. Whenever they post we see, you know, that spike in interest and engagement and often demo requests. And so, you know, it felt important to get them to be doing that really consistently. So I built a system where we, we backed it down. Now it was every week for a while. Now we brought it down to every other week where I'm sitting down with them, where I'm interviewing them, I'm asking them questions about things I've heard in the market or something I heard a customer say or something that was brought up in an all hands. And I want to really like dig into that with them. And after 30 minutes I have a great transcript. I've trained a cloud project on both of their voices. I had them give me, you know, a CSV of all of their posts ranked from top performing to least performant. And I use that to train a project on their voice and their post structure and the topics they post about and right down to like how much sarcasm they use. Right. And so every week I take those transcripts and I Pretty systematically kind of like find the best moments. I feed those into the Clod project and I'm, I'm asking it to, you know, help me craft some posts for both of them. And I think the beautiful thing about it is a lot of founder led kind of social. Programs are, you know, ghost written and maybe don't sound like the person at all or they, they just aren't sustainable. Like you can't really scale them. And I think we found a really nice system that checks both of those boxes. Like their posts could not be more different in terms of tone and voice and structure, but they're both really powerful and we've now found a way where I can deliver them, you know, four to five posts every other week that they can kind of intersperse and again test out and kind of test messaging with our, with our audience on a bi weekly basis. So that's been a big one for us. It's just been really consistent, really helpful. It's also just been helpful for like the founders to, to parse through their thoughts and like get their narrative out and, and really understand how they want to say the things they want to say. So that's been pretty amazing. The other big way we're using AI is with programmatic SEO. So I know everyone's like, SEO's dead, blah, blah, blah. It's not. Thank you. I appreciate you knowing that. We're seeing really great gains in that space. So you know, we do some pretty traditional SEO. We are, we're creating a category of contact based marketing and contact based advertising. So there's a lot of top of funnel stuff that we can just create that people are looking for, trying to understand this new way of doing things. And then we have our programmatic side where you know, there are certain topics that we can basically create a template for. Right. And create 20 of these pieces that are similar, say, you know, similar structure with different content in it. And we, it can allow us to put up, you know, 20 or so posts at once and really start to see what's working. So an example is. Can you, can you identify website visitors with X? And we fill in x with like 8 different popular marketing tools. Right. That brings people to our site who we know are trying to understand who's on their website and they're trying to understand how they can go about that. Right. And so we created, I think with that particular query maybe 10 or so articles. We are able to get them all up very quickly. And then what we start to see is like two or three of Them really start to take off in terms of organic traffic. And those are the ones we know we want to spend more time on. Actually put, you know, some interesting information in there, maybe some research data, maybe some UI screenshots of Vector to get somebody, you know, even more pulled into what we're doing. So those are really the two ways. And we're seeing, we're seeing results from them, you know, in terms of like, growing pipeline and interest for the brand.

Speaker 2: 39:44
Love that. I mean, the first one is. I mean, we. We also have like something, I would say very, very similar, perhaps executed. Executed a bit different. But, you know, we, as an agency, you know, we have to write. We are writing for like 30, 40 different LinkedIn profiles for seven, eight different brands. You know, all different styles and tone and voice of writing. So we have. Yeah, something similar for like 30 different people.

Speaker 1: 40:12
That's amazing.

Speaker 2: 40:14
Yeah. And the second thing. I just can't help myself but ask these topics that you mentioned, can you monitor website visitors with X? Are you monitoring who visits those articles with Vector and then sending them email? Something along the lines, see, Vector can see who is visiting your website. Like, have you tried?

Speaker 1: 40:44
We are, of course we are. So one campaign we have going right now is anyone that comes to those kinds of pages, anyone that comes to a playbook page, anyone that's visited the blog, we're serving them an ad. Like, obviously you kind of like what we're doing over here, sign up for our newsletter, right. Like, if you want more of this. So it's kind of a like wink, wink, without going and saying, we saw you on our site, which is kind of a. It's kind of a weird gray area for people right now. I think we, especially as marketers, we know we're getting tracked, but not everyone likes that idea. And so I think where, you know, our point of view is like, we want to build serendipity. We want it to feel like, you know, when you go shopping for a car and all of a sudden, like now that that car is on your mind, you see it everywhere. Like, that's what we want to create with our brand, right? Where it's like, oh, it's weird. I was just on a blog post that I was looking at for them and like, now they're serving me this ad. Right? So that's something we absolutely are working toward and we just want to get even more narrowed down. Right. Like, the example I just gave is pretty broad. Like, if you're on any kind of editorial content at all, like, sign up for the newsletter. But I think the ideal state is to get to that point where it's like, oh, we know they were searching for this topic specifically. Let's serve them an ad around that topic, right? And then let's bring them back in to a landing page or another piece of content that expands on that even more.

Speaker 2: 42:14
Tell me, I would like to know, I would love to know, what would your content marketing brain do? So, like, if you. Tomorrow, if you suddenly got a lot more resources in terms of, like, manpower, budget, like, whatever, what would you do from the content standpoint?

Speaker 1: 42:37
I would do video. And I would do, like, funny video. Clientboost K L I E N T B O O S T. Just put out this incredible series of videos. Their marketing agency. What's that? Yes, the hand holding and the many hats. Right? Like, they take kind of these tropes that we find in B2B marketing. And they, they, they took them to like, the. They took them very literally in these videos, and they're fabulous. Like, I think that that is such an incredible way just to. It's like a moving meme, right? Like, we can all commiserate with all. Every single piece of. Of the. Every single moment in those videos. That's the kind of content I love to create where it's just like, let's just get people to be like, yeah, I felt that in my bones. And clearly these people understand me. Like, that's the kind of stuff I love, love, love, love to do. I also love crazy stunts. Like, weird. Weird. Like you go to an event and you do something weird to draw up attention and you film it and you use it for social media. Um, so I'd love to do something like that. Have a few ideas in my back pocket, but don't want to give them away. So that would be really fun if, like, I had unlimited. Unlimited resources. Yeah. I think those are the two places I would double down. And of course, like, that's easy for me to say as like, the brand person. You know, it's like.

Speaker 2: 44:11
But see, like, that's the B2C marketer speaking from you, right?

Speaker 1: 44:18
You are right.

Speaker 2: 44:19
I mean, I doubt, like, other B2B CMOs out there would do something like that. Instead, they would go and say something boring like, I would like to get, you know, 100 more PR mentions, you know. Or something like that.

Speaker 1: 44:36
Yeah, well, you know how you get 100 more PR mentions? You do some weird stunt at a big event. Right?

Speaker 2: 44:43
Exactly. Exactly like that. I love that. Just tell me, like, now when you're talking about stunts. Right. Okay. That's something that we can all do once, we can all do twice, three times. It's more like, I would say, like a short term tactic, you know? But how do you get attention in the long run?

Speaker 1: 45:12
Ooh, that's a good question, I think. I believe it's April Dunford who brought this up, but maybe that's not right. Don't quote me on this. That it's better to just be different than better. Right? Like, it's. Anybody can come out and be like, we're the better solution. Well, like how? And, like, maybe you're not better for me. Maybe I like the way that this other tool operates. Like it fits my workflow better or just how my brain works better. So I think there's something to be said about how you're different than the competition. And I think what that does is it makes you a magnet. It makes your brand and your tool a magnet for the people who like that version of different. Right. Where you know, there are tons of video editing tools out there. My favorite is Descript, because they're different. Because they let me, who is not a video editor, edit a video by editing just the script, right? So they're different. I could have maybe learned how to go use any other really sophisticated video software, but, like, that's not how my brain works. And okay, they're maybe not the best tool for, like, really sophisticated video editors, but they've given me a brand new skill. Like, I didn't used to be able to edit video and now I can. So I think there's. There's something to be said if you want long term attention and trust and interest for leaning into what makes you different and not worry about trying to be better.

Speaker 2: 47:01
Love that. I really love that. Take Jess. Tell me the last question before we wrap up. Yeah. How do you. How are you winning the game of life? And what is that winning for you?

Speaker 1: 47:19
The game of life.

Speaker 2: 47:20
Yeah.

Speaker 1: 47:20
Great game, Great game. I love this question. I am winning the game of life because I'm at a company I love. I believe in the product. I believe in the people. We're having fun. Like, I think that's it's such a big value of ours is, like, not take ourselves too seriously and have fun. Because if we don't have fun at this, like, what are we even doing? Why are we even here? I'm winning at the game of life because, man, I have an amazing family who's super supportive. I have this incredible role that allows me to work from home and be with them and spend time with my girls and my husband. And I'm winning at the game of life because I've, even though it's scary sometimes, been putting myself out there on LinkedIn for a couple years now. The people I have met and the friendships I have made. Right. Like, you and me right now talking, that's all a byproduct of just like, all right, this is scary. And, like, someone's gonna think I'm cheesy or dumb, but I'm doing it anyway and just, like, going for it and sharing my perspective. So, yeah, I would say those three love my company. I have an awesome family who I get to, you know, spend my time with and believing in myself enough to put myself out there, even though it's a little scary.

Speaker 2: 48:51
Love that. Love that. Jess, thank you very much for being on the show. I had a really great time speaking with you.

Speaker 1: 48:58
Oh, me too, ugi. This was amazing. Thank you so much for inviting me.