Social Media Strategy for B2B Brands – with Andy Lambert from ContentCal | DMR #235

Full transcript:

David Bain 0:00
Digital Marketing Radio, Episode 235 social media strategy for b2b brands

Bot 0:05
Digital Marketing Radio with David.

Hi, I’m David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio the show for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who want to stay on top of the latest tools, tactics and trends shared by today’s modern marketing masters. Is it possible to make your b2b brand popular on social media? It seems a lot easier to be on social media as an individual or as a personal brand or even as a b2c brands compared with a b2b brands, but is social media really that more difficult for b2b brands? And what precisely should b2b brands be doing on social media? We’ll find the answer to those questions and more from today’s guest, a man who counts the NHS Virgin and Specsavers among his clients. He’s one of the founding team and director of growth for content Cal, a content marketing platform that’s used by over 40,000 businesses around the world. Welcome to DMR Andy Lambert.

Andy Lambert 1:06
Hello. Hello. I love your intro. David. I think any aspiring podcasters should look at your show as an example of how to do an intro. Oh, it’s such a priority.

Bot 1:16
Thank you What was some of the time, I think is I’m always adding something to it and just trying to confuse myself just a little bit more. But I wouldn’t necessarily advise in doing that. Just to start with I’ve, I’ve done about 235 episodes of this particular show and loads of other podcasts. And I tend to advise people working up, start with audio audio only podcast. We’re obviously live streaming at the same time recording a video and things like that, but it’s fun, as long as you have fun doing it. And that’s that’s good. Absolutely. I

Andy Lambert 1:44
love it.

Bot 1:45
I love it. So you can find Andy over at content calendar IO. We’re talking about b2b brands and social media today. So Andy, is social media actually different for social for b2b brands? No. Okay. was the end of today’s show? Thank you for joining us. Exactly.

Andy Lambert 2:01
We’re done. Yeah, social media is over complicated by many people, strategists or whatever, fundamentally, it’s the it’s the same thing. It’s just that many businesses are fearful of it being the same thing as other channels, personal brands, or b2c organisations might use social. So typically, businesses have used social media channels in the same way that they’ve used other content marketing channels, which is in, in most cases, quite an antiquated approach to things. So whilst that might be a little bit provocative, fundamentally, the way of that all businesses should use social irrespective of their industry, their vertical, there are some exceptions. Appreciate to this. There are some exceptions. But in the main b2b businesses need to approach social media, like any other organisation, because the first thing you need to think about is its I don’t really believe actually that b2b or b2c actually exists anymore, it’s more kind of business to consumer or peer to peer is probably the better way of putting it. And when you start to think through that lens, then tactics, strategy, and creativity all becomes a whole heap easier. That’d be my view.

Bot 3:11
So Gary farmer shooting in live watching us some thanks for tuning in. Gary are any questions please ask and we’ll ask the questions to Andy. Andy, I guess it’s a challenge then for maybe directors of b2b brands, because surely there’s a an issue or a perceived issue that if you gave marketers full leeway to show personality on social media, then it’s perhaps going completely a different direction to how they want their brand perceived online?

Andy Lambert 3:42
It’s a very good question that is right at the heart of the fear of it. So there’s lots of practical things you could do to address this, which is clear tone of voice guidelines, make sure there’s a clear values and mission statement that the whole business need to understand. But quite fundamentally, outside of those kind of practical things. It’s a massive behavioural shift that businesses need to go through. And it’s difficult, right? There’s, there’s nothing I can say is going to make that particularly easier or more palatable for businesses to say, actually, the more powerful thing you have in your organization’s on social isn’t necessarily your brand. This is not the case. For every business. I’m excluding some of the massive massive enterprises take Salesforce or or HubSpot of the world’s people that genuinely have power behind their b2b organisations, I’ll add drift into that list as well. But underneath that, for a typical b2b organisation, I’m missing a huge trick where you’re not using the voice of the employees and the voice of the organisation gets so much stronger as a result. Yes, it requires lots of people to have more faith in it. When I say lots of people, I mean, directors, as you say, a b2b marketing organisation to have more faith. But the opportunities there if if businesses choose to take it, but it’s a it’s a fear, that’s Is this from happening right now? Not the kind of opportunity that exists for businesses that do it well.

Bot 5:07
So two quick follow up questions in relation to that. Firstly, if you do allow individuals to have more of a voice for a b2b brand, what happens if that individual leaves that organization’s? Should that be a fear for the directors? And just secondly, slightly in relation to that is, how do you actually draw a line in between the brand voice and the personal voice to ensure that the tone shared is fairly consistent?

Andy Lambert 5:34
Let’s answer the tone one first. So firstly, absolutely, it should be consistent. So whilst everyone have their own slight personality, like the way that you deliver content is different to how I would deliver content, but we can all work to one, you and I could work together on one kind of corporate brand message and what message and tone of voice that we might have so so some clear brand guidelines, clear tone of voice document, clear social media policy, with those three things in place, we’ve got the guidelines and the frameworks, we need to make sure we are saying the things and what you believe is what I believe as well, which is what the organisation believes, so our worldview is aligned. So once that’s in place, then ultimately you can start to think about some creative freedom on this. And it does take some time for people to have a voice on social, we’re going through it in our own organisation at the moment, and it is, it’s not natural for everyone. And not everyone wants to be public facing right. Not everyone can deliver as naturally as, like, you can, for example, David, so there’s, there’s a lot of training that needs to happen as part of this. But fundamentally, everyone should have a similar tone, they should have a similar message. So that really is, you know, that’s quite an easy thing to solve, because that’s something you would sell just through through training through having the right documentation and processes in place. But the other part of it, what was the other part of the question? That was the first part of

Bot 6:59
what I was actually thinking of what I was asking. And the first part was a persona building a persona, for a buyer to ensure that it’s important to actually keep the I guess, the message fairly consistent between each individual that happens to be producing content on social media for the brand, Is that necessary to do that to have the ideal customer in mind when you’re writing content?

Andy Lambert 7:23
Yeah, absolutely. Right. So this is, this is at the core of all of your content marketing strategy, and really, your employees within a b2b organisation are really just an extension of that broader content marketing strategy of which all feeds down from your ideal customer persona. And that persona, just as a bit of a sideline shouldn’t be, you know, we’re targeting people, you know, middle aged men between 35 and 45, that work in these industries, industries is important, but the the kind of gender and demographic stuff, nowhere near as important as like the behavioural stuff, the things that really starts to matter about the persona. What what are these people that you’re targeting goals, ambitions, fears? What are they afraid of? What do they really want to achieve? Understanding the human emotional drivers of the people that you’re trying to serve? That is the more important a persona or understanding of your persona that you can get I see so many businesses get that wrong. And someone that I’ll mention later, actually, I won’t, I won’t spoil it right now. But someone I mentioned later talks about this all the time, and has such a great narrative around and such great guidance for businesses creating personas. So yes, as a long answer of, you know, me saying yes to your question, that’s ultimately you, as an organisation, as a marketing organisation, within a b2b organisation, you need to have a very clear target customer in mind the things they’re afraid of the things that they want to achieve, and really make that very clear to anyone that is going to be, you know, having a more kind of public profile of your organisation from a social media perspective. You’ve heard of that second part of the question, okay, go for it. Yeah, I just remembered it. So you were like, should businesses be fearful of an employee that has a voice and then leaves? So I would point anyone in the in the direction of drift for this one, because this is a really good example. Right? So Dave Gerhard is a bit of a marketing hero of mine. And he was fundamental to the growth of drift, which is a brilliant b2b organisation. I think I often hold them up as you know, some of the best b2b marketers that we see alongside HubSpot and Salesforce, so that his voice on marketing was absolutely key to driving drift growth, because it makes logical sense. He’s, he’s a marketer. He’s talking to marketing and they sell to marketers shop Cora, that works. And as a result, he’s built his own personal brand and he’s gone on to do wonderful things that other organisations so he’s carried his credibility with him. But the important thing is, is that drifts credibility remains, whilst they can’t necessarily replace Dave Gerhardt, his legacy lives on in the way that they talk, they talk to the market, the way that they educate and the whole narrative and tone of voice. It’s, it’s really to the point, it’s incredibly concise, and it’s got a really nice human tone to it. So my answer to that question is, yeah, I mean, you should not be scared about there’s the opportunity exists both for the person who’s doing this because naturally an individual, like yourself or myself, representing a brand more publicly, there’s opportunity, even when employment changes. But even for those those people, those employers that are giving a platform to these individuals, it’s it’s not actually the individual that remains at the front and centre. It’s the kind of it’s the narrative, it’s the impression, it’s that feeling of trust that you leave with your potential audience. And that’s, that feeling of trust is the most powerful element.

Bot 10:57
Yeah, yeah, great point there. I think it’s important to let people be themselves and also give some of their personal brand authority to the company as well, because you get quite a decent amount of organic reach on things like LinkedIn profiles. And if you let people lead and be comfortable sharing content in their own voice on their own social profiles, the company brand is naturally going to win because of it as well. I’ll tell you what scared me most talking about being scared of doing things was the one of the first things you said there was that middle aged men from the ages of 35. Okay, so you become middle aged at age 35. Okay.

And let’s talk a little bit about mistakes and maybe mistakes that you see bt B brands making, perhaps without naming anyone would be great if you could name a brand, but okay, except that you possibly not going to name a band a brand in this in this scenario. So what would be a typical type of mistake that a b2b brand makes with social media? And what do they need to do differently to rectify it?

Andy Lambert 12:06
Yeah, that’s a tough one to answer without giving examples. But they’re, they’re probably two core elements to it. And I’m not, I don’t class them as mistakes. So class summers, opportunities that have not yet been fulfilled, it’s probably a better opportunity, there’s not been realised is a better way of putting it. So number one, and that relates to kind of customer care on social. So I see lots of organisations, some in very close to our space, getting lots of interaction on social, but doing nothing with it. So typically responding very quickly to those sales inquiries. But for those slightly unhappy customers that have not received a response or not got the support they needed, not jumping on that immediately. You know, customer care on social is just going to get bigger and bigger. And actually, it’s actually an afterthought in so many organisations, I speak to content strategies are built purely with like the output in mind, and marketing. Customer Service teams typically work in very independent silos, which for me, is a massive mistake. Because marketers are typically the most withdrawn for actually what’s actually happening in the market and with, with customers, the people that really know, a sales, but even more, so is customer service. Those organisations, those individuals in those departments are the ears of your organisation. And I see so many marketing teams working in silos, just using their personas and just executing content strategies against that which which has has its merit has its place, but I don’t see enough organisations kind of getting more people around the table when it comes to defining a content strategy. So like, what’s coming up in sales conversation, what’s the object objections, we’re seeing regularly? What’s happening from a customer service perspective, regular complaints, one of the things that people are asking for, so that kind of then leads into more of a social listening side of things in that I often don’t see many organisations, certainly from a b2b perspective, keeping an ear out on social not just for when they’re mentioned or being complained about. But when people are talking about them, ie, you know, what’s the best social media tool to use, for example, listening to those conversations, and and having a place on that not actively wading in with your sales boots, but wading into participate and contribute to that conversation. Everything is happening on social right now. In fact, like brand discovery, through social has gone up 66% in the last four years, for obvious reasons, right? People are turning to their social channels to make decisions, asking in Facebook groups saying oh, what’s the best tool to use? Can anyone recommend something that is where kind of brand decisions and advocacy is built? And I see brands just focusing solely on their kind of just bare content strategy, which has their importance definitely, but not really. having their ears open to what’s happening in the broader market sense. So there’s so many tools out there to do it. And it’s, yeah, it’s kind of inexcusable, why you wouldn’t do that.

Bot 15:09
I love the fact that you talk about customer service teams and also sales teams as being a great resource for marketing teams. And they can tell you precisely what kind of questions prospects or existing customers actually ask. And that’s a wonderful source for publishing content. And as you say, I’m a great fan of Marcus Sheridan’s book, they ask you answer, and it talks about the help content and your work. It’s, it’s, you know, initially what you should be writing about on your website. And it provides you with a great starting point for your SEO as well. What about which platforms or b2b brand should be using? It seems obvious that a b2b brand should be on LinkedIn should be a b2b brands be on every social platform possible?

Andy Lambert 15:57
I think it’s a hard question to answer because in an ideal world, you’d be across all of them because anyone’s customers are spread across all of them. And if someone says, Oh, my customers aren’t on Tick tock, they would be wrong, because they are. But not exclusively Tick tock, I’m just giving that as an example, with with 650 million monthly active users, there’s no chance that your customers are not on tik tok, basically. So in an ideal world, you’d be everywhere. But that is not practical. But like the two biggest channels that are ranked that come out top for brand research is YouTube and Facebook. So they are the channels that b2b buyers, and there’s some data I need to find, I don’t have the citation to hand right now. But I remember looking at this research in January, that b2b buyers, their top two channels, they go for research on what tools, what products to buy, they go to YouTube, and then secondly, they go to Facebook, actually, LinkedIn was quite far down the list. And LinkedIn is obviously the number one for most people’s b2b social channels. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be beat, LinkedIn has a brilliant, perfect place to play. It’s my personal favourite platform. But it just goes to show that actually thinking about those other channels, namely YouTube and Facebook, for example, really powerful if used correctly, for b2b. Typically for Facebook, though, I would say, you know, from, from our own perspective, from a b2b brand, where we see most success is working in other Facebook groups. So working with those other group owners, and working with them to create content together for unique communities. I’ll talk about that kind of community approach later on. But so we that’s where we see Facebook doing really well, for us, our personal Facebook pages, or our business, Pedro, is doesn’t really do anything. If I’m completely honest, our Facebook group is pretty good. So what we do in Facebook groups are really good. But YouTube has been a really good addition to our strategy, fantastic for people discovering things and learning things, a brilliant way of generating that educational content that you were talking about. So I just see YouTube, in particular, missing from so many b2b content strategies, and it’s, yeah, it’s a massive mistake to not have YouTube as part of the strategy. In my view,

Bot 18:12
how do you measure the value of YouTube? If someone discovers you, for the first time discovers your channel? Do you attempt to drive them back to your websites? or How else can you actually measure the value of that view?

Andy Lambert 18:22
Yeah, that is the big question. I don’t have I don’t have a single answer for a How do you measure the value of a view? My view is, is that the YouTube subscriber base, I don’t really don’t mind too much about how our subscriber base grows, I care lots about kind of watch time. And, and that kind of engagement is the thing that that matters. Most, I don’t really care so much about vanity metrics on on YouTube, like subscribers likes comments, particularly, it’s about watch time, and it’s about retention. And because our content on YouTube is is quite mid funnel, so when someone will have discovered us through somewhere else, and now it’s kind of in the consideration stage, that’s where our contents really good. So if someone’s watching any of our videos for three minutes, four minutes, etc, they’re, they’re being told quite a content cow specific story. So whilst you know, our Google Analytics will tell us the traffic that we’re coming that comes back from from YouTube, we don’t put unnecessary value on it. But we, we made sure that as part of our regular publishing cadence, that’s for sure, because, you know, second largest search engine, 2.4 billion monthly active users, it’s like the 2.2 or 2.4. I can’t remember but either way, a lot. So yeah, it’s just it doesn’t make sense not to be there. Especially if YouTube shorts coming out, which will be coming out in the next couple of months. I’m

Bot 19:46
really interested and excited about that actually turns YouTube, much more from like a long form destination where you how’s your videos into much more kind of continuous engagement on short form content. So that’s quite exciting. Do you spend Any resources driving people to your YouTube channel from email from retargeting or from some other place? Or do you just rely primarily on organic discovery for YouTube.

Andy Lambert 20:13
So it’s primarily primarily organic discovery, it’s used for our regular content. So like, every week, we do a kind of weekly news roundup of everything that’s happened in the world of social that goes on YouTube. So that does get promoted in our newsletter and through our social channels. But the rest of it is actually more housing, the the videos that complement the blogs, most of our blogs have some have some form of video with them, because it’s, you got to kind of cater for people that like to consume information in in different ways. And all of our content is educationally LED, like five ways to do this, or seven ways to do X or whatever it is. So that kind of content that we’ve generated, of which our content ideas have come from, to two places. So one, our kind of quantitative research through, you know, from an SEO perspective is what’s the keyword volume and all that stuff. And then our qualitative research, which is stuff I spoke about earlier, which is what’s our customer base saying the feedback from marketing, and sorry, feedback from sales and customer service, and the result of like social listening. So that’s our kind of qualitative stuff. So that’s the thing that informs our content strategy, we produce, you know, educational content, like I’ve just been mentioning, and that educational content is always a blog with an embedded YouTube video. So that means that blog can be chopped up, put on social, that video will be over watched, and that blog that we shared on social as well as it’s a kind of more appealing asset, and also put on our YouTube. So that kind of, we’re trying to find as many ways that we can kind of create once and publish everywhere as much as possible.

Bot 21:50
It’s always tempting to go further and further down that rabbit hole and say, Okay, what do you produce First, the video or the blog, and I wound up having a conversation for two hours here. So let’s segue into the part two of our discussion. So it’s a town turn for Andy’s dance in the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET SOFTWARE, so Andy, Cierra, lesser-known martech tool that’s bringing you a lot of value at the moment and why that tools important for you.

Andy Lambert 22:13
So I would, I’m gonna give content cow a plug here because I would be remiss if I didn’t, so, but I’m hugely biassed, anyway. But we are one of those rare software company that we build a build a product that we use every single day. So anyway, content Kalfa content management, but you want to know a new tool the.io V, W e d.io. That is, like I mentioned, we do a lot of video content. So we want to make sure we subtitle those videos, little little bits of creative to it. You know, some some titles be able to add some animations. Really simple for like a video editing novice like myself, we can smash things together so so quickly. So I find that a really powerful tool to use and it’s great for snipping things to like the the right aspect ratio for, for Instagram for YouTube, etc. So really good to create an asset of video asset really quickly and easily add a nice bit of creative stuff and chop it up into the right formats, so that YouTube can be sung on YouTube, same for Instagram, Facebook, etc. grid.io

Bot 23:21
wonderful and such a pro having the website address as well. I want to say a quick hi to say I’m at home watching live on Facebook, who’s liked the video. Thanks for liking it saya we’ll have to get you on a future episode of Digital Marketing Radio. Good to have you tuning in there. But let’s move on from something that Andy currently uses to something that he’s going to use. And that is NEXT ON THE LIST. So what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to test as soon

Andy Lambert 23:48
as right between two here so I’m actually going to give two again. So one is a product I just found a Product Hunt, actually, or is a month ago now. It’s called copy Smith. So copy Smith is a machine learning type of copy editor. So I’m gonna do a massive disservice and how I describe them. But it’s built using GPT three, which is a machine learning technology. If you read about GPT three, if you don’t know already, the fascinating rabbit hole to go down. But ultimately, this allows you to put in a few key words and it uses machine learning and like assimilate so many different articles on the same subject from across the web to produce really good drafts of like like snippets long form blog posts, and automatically creates those for you now you still need the mind of a copywriter to edit those but to get some of that core copy done. Yes, super, super powerful and great to be able to write a draft as well, because that’s the thing with with content marketing, there’s quite a lot of duplicative stuff we end up doing writing the same copy or descriptions of our company writing different kind of keywords or little kind of headers here and there. There’s quite a lot of duplicative stuff we end up doing. So finding ways That can help us do some of that kind of more donkey work really of getting some kind of core draft of some copy written up for us to then edit thereafter. So yeah, copy Smith, I think it’s copy smith.ai. But yeah, really interesting to see how this GPT tech three technology is evolving. And then second to that, which is slightly more kind of like nowadays, because copy Smith is probably like, you know, next generation software, slightly more nowadays is probably a tool that I imagine you’ve used David, which is descript. Yeah, no, descript?

Bot 25:33
Yeah, I’ve used it a little bit time, I haven’t actually integrated it 100% in every single podcast episode that I produce, primarily because I for some podcast that I produce for clients, I’ve got to be really subtle with the edits that I do. And I think the script, do great editing based upon removing words. And then the audio, obviously, it was automatically removed, I’m not sure how much in depth, they go into the specific aspects of different audio tracks that you can edit individually and things like that. But perhaps you can tell me,

Andy Lambert 26:04
yeah, I mean, to be honest, you’re probably as much an expert on it, as I am, because this is this is next on my list, because of doing lots of video stuff and always having a transcript associated to these videos. Because to answer your question earlier, is it blogged before video, our approach is that to do video, typically, and then have the blog produced thereafter. So something like the script is amazing, because you can just get the transcript of it. And then naturally, as you’re kind of doing a video, there’s arms and RS or you might think actually I could phrase that better. So it’s really nice to be able to chop up a bit of the the audio just chop the transcript as well. So just saves you editing both the transcript and the the video at the same time. So all of that kind of saves a lot of like chopping up and editing time. By like you say, David, there’s, if you want to go proper pro level, there are probably better tools. But for someone like like us where we’re producing lots of content, and maybe it’s not polished to the nth degree, but has enough value. Those kind of tools are really good. Once again, just cutting those duplicative processes out of content marketing as much as possible to speed up the flow of content Really? Absolutely. Yes,

Bot 27:16
there’s a fine line between quality and quantity. And you can’t get everything This is saralee absolutely pristine, even though I’m probably guilty of trying to do that, or erring on that side more than actually publishing too often. That’s why it’s great to actually committing to doing a podcast or doing a live show, because then you’ve kind of got to do it. And it’s not going to be utterly perfect all the time.

Andy Lambert 27:34
Indeed. Yeah, I’m with you on that.

Bot 27:36
Well, let’s move on to this or that right. So this is the quick response Ryan’s 10 quick questions, Just 2 rules here. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to see the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready? Alright, I’ll

Andy Lambert 27:51
try.

David Bain 27:53
Tick Tock or Twitter,

Andy Lambert 27:55
Twitter,

Bot 27:56
Facebook or LinkedIn, LinkedIn, YouTube or podcast, YouTube traffic or leads. Lead paid search or SEO, SEO, ads or influencers?

Andy Lambert 28:11
influences

David Bain 28:12
Google ads or Facebook ads. Google ads, email or chat.

Andy Lambert 28:20
Email,

Bot 28:21
Mar tech stack on one platform. Tech stack one to one or scale.

Andy Lambert 28:29
Scale

Bot 28:31
was a breeze for you. No problem at all. I was partly thinking that you’re gonna actually select chat instead of email because you were talking about drift earlier on there as well. But you’re obviously still a fan of email marketing.

Andy Lambert 28:41
I am it’s it still is like I have Dave Gerhardt actually describes email as the money button. Because he now works in a B2C organisation. It’s just and we see the same as like whenever we’re struggling for for kind of attendance on a webinar or something. As soon as we put something out on on email, we will see the result off the back of it. So yeah, chat has its place. But if you’re talking about getting a message at scale, to a mass audience, email Still, if you do it well, which I think we’ve still got a way to improve, to be honest. But if you do it well, then he has a huge opportunity and email

Bot 29:21
and a little follow up question then what’s the best way for a B2B brand to build an email list?

Andy Lambert 29:26
For us the best way that we’ve we’ve built an email list has been all through our webinars and our academy that we created. So we produce so many webinars over the course of the year that we turned all of the recordings of these webinars because we made sure these webinars are super actionable. like five steps to do X or whenever that kind of format because we made all these webinars super actionable. They let it let themselves really well to being nested in a in an academy, which thing provided a nice free resource of a whole load of content like How to do Google ads, how to do LinkedIn ads, how to do you know, organic, you know, LinkedIn, for example, how to set up employee advocacy, all this kind of stuff. We really get into the academy stuff, we’ve gone massive on like educational content, things that we know that our market needs to know. So and because we’ve given away so much value through that, probably frustrated some people in our peer group by offering all of that for free. But ultimately, it’s built, it’s built a email list that is 60,000 people strong. So yeah, that’s that’s how we did that. And the majority of that is all happened within last year, because we launched our academy and started doing these kind of courses last March.

Bot 30:49
And do you use any paid traffic to drive people towards Academy content?

Andy Lambert 30:54
No, we don’t actually. So that’s a lot of that comes from organic. So we promote all that through organic channels. We have a community of influences. I use that in the lightest sense possible, but people that we work with that have a similar kind of worldviews who asked like those Facebook groups I mentioned earlier, working with others, because we’re producing valuable content of which is good for other people’s communities, too. So that’s been a good traffic draw to to bring it back. We’re big on paid stuff that it’d be said, though, for more kind of direct response. So signing people up to a 14 day trial. We do. Yeah, Google Ads works very, very well, for us. So does, to a lesser extent, Facebook ads, but they do work.

Bot 31:42
Okay, let’s move on to the $10,000 question. If I was to give you $10,000, and you had to spend it over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend it on? And how would you measure success

Andy Lambert 31:53
influences, please. So I when I say influences, I’m not saying like, go pay someone X amount 10,000. To do a post who’s unconnected your brand, I would work with that $10,000 with as many kind of smaller owners of communities as I could. So great examples from from what we’ve done is, people might be familiar with this community already, or if they’re not, they probably should be, which is the marketing meetup, run by a guy called Joe Glover. He’s brilliant, and, you know, has such brilliant values that align with our brand. And we’ve spoken about trust a couple of times in this all in this session today. And that is fundamental to everything you do everything you do as an organisation, B2B, B2C, whatever it all comes down to trust, because trust is a thing that predicates reputation and your reputation predicates your brand. So really, it’s all down to trust. And the best way to build trust is both by putting the humans behind your brand to the fall, like we were speaking about right at the start, and also working with others that have already earned that trust. So Joe Glover is trusted by his community of 25,000. Marketers, because he produces fantastic valuable content for them. And it’s a community that’s just focused on adding value that absolutely aligned with our mission here at content counts. So that is a no brainer to work with. So we don’t have time to go into details of like how to work with influences for another another session, but ultimately, where there’s a really good value exchange, where there’s a complimentary offering between a community and you know, and a vendor, or whomever, like us, in this instance, a B2B software vendor, where there’s really good alignment, there’s already trust in the community and us being brought in into that community is like a seal of approval from Joe who runs a community that, you know, these are someone’s to, to be trusted. Now that trust needs to be used very carefully, because, you know, you can easily go in that group and start selling, but that’s not the way it works. It’s about long term thing. And it’s about how we build trust over the long term. So without $10,000, I would find as many of those kinds of communities as possible, and build trust from the ground up. And that’s the thing that will drive scale over the long term, because digital marketing is all wonderful. But ultimately, all it is is word of mouth on steroids. So if you can start, you know, engineering word of mouth from the grassroots level, then you’ll be onto a winner.

Bot 34:25
That’s great. And just a slight follow up to your intention to spend the $10,000 on influencers is easy enough to measure the success of that do you give everyone an individual trackable link?

Andy Lambert 34:38
We’re trying to track it we say UTM codes, discount offer codes, you know, that kind of stuff to help you track it. But fundamentally, all you’ll see is some you will be able to attribute some buy that but you need to kind of step back and realise there are some things in marketing like this year’s contract and you can’t truly attribute everything. So you need to Need to kind of relax in the knowledge that, you know, this is the right thing to do. But safe in the knowledge that you can’t actually attribute everything because someone’s going to find you through income through organic or direct traffic. And you won’t, you won’t really know where you’ve where they found out about you unless you always get your salespeople to ask. But if you’re just a kind of like, you know, a non sales, lead business and online business, there’s a lot of that you’ll never know. So outside of trackable links, and an offer codes, which, you know, we offer like an offer for any any, any member of the community, which said the US but many people forget to use the links, and a lot of people don’t even redeem the offer. And I think I think to be honest, that’s a it’s an it’s an important message for marketers in general. And it’s, and it’s hard, it’s a hard message, like conversation to have with leaders of a business is that for a lot of this stuff, you need to actually relax into the fact that you can’t attribute everything you can’t, like, you can’t track everything. And to be honest, that’s going to get harder and harder as time goes on, not easier in the light of what’s happening with Facebook and apple in the light what’s happening with Google cookies as well. So there’s, there’s a whole load of change in terms of tracking. And, and it’s the kind of this obsession with attribution. And I’m not saying like data doesn’t serve its purpose. But you know, there’s it’s part art and part science, marketing. So whether it’s content marketing, or digital, whatever, it’s, it’s still part art and part science. And there’s there is a place for tracking performance. But it’s also worthwhile not getting completely hung up on it, because you’ll never track every everything. And if anyone tells you, they can track everything, they’re telling Porky pie,

Bot 36:42
I think digital marketers probably need to get a little bit better at being able to tell the story or position, the value of what they’re doing in this is what we perceive the value is. Because if they see the full real story to some leaders and organisations and say, Look, we think it’s good, but I don’t think it’s right, it’s trackable, it’s impossible to measure, it becomes much more difficult to get budgets for something. And traditionally, PR agencies, traditional PR agencies for TV or for radio for newspapers, a lot of that was guessed guesswork, and they were just very good at presenting the value of what he did based upon a lot of presumptions.

Andy Lambert 37:26
And that’s exactly it. And there’s you’re absolutely right there’s there’s a case to be made. And you can you can put a notional value on traffic, because most people will know their average conversion rates, site traffic to lead to paying subscriber whenever it’s not that hard to figure out those kind of those metrics, average sales price or customer cost of acquisition, work that backup into a model of, you know, that all say, here’s a nominal value for each new visit to our site. So we can make some presumptions based on the size of the community, and how many, how many new people we bring over here and the value of a, you know, a lead. So there’s absolutely some modelling that’s going on there. But to prove that unequivocally is going to be it’s going to be super tough. And it’s actually this obsession with attribution, that actually damages content marketing, and means that many people don’t realise the opportunity within it till it’s too late, because, you know, this was some data out from LinkedIn recently, where LinkedIn is kind of contention was that they were seeing so much budget go into like direct response, short term kind of ads that are intended to drive a conversion. And because it’s so easy to put money into those ads, and it’s so easy to see whether something, you know, works or doesn’t, is that in businesses quest for short term results, which is typically how most businesses are orientated, based on monthly or quarterly results, swipe, paid, social gets so much budget share, and the pay team gets so much more budget share, rather than a typical content marketing team, is because it’s so easy to prove. And it’s, it’s actually very, it’s a real kind of limiting. And bit of a dubious strategy, because paid stuff will only serve short term goals, it will not build your brand over the long term, because you’re only serving a message to a smaller defined list of people, whereas content marketing is about going broad. So it’s all about having a good mix between the two. But my point was just like with this session of attribution, too many people focus too many on like too many short term wins. And not that they take their eye off the long term stuff, the thing that grows over time, but ultimately, you just can’t see it, you know, in a snapshot on an Excel spreadsheet, and it’s having that kind of faith and having that confidence to pitch that to your marketing director or CEO, whatever that might be to say, you know, this is a long term game, but if we want to build a brand, we’re going to have to be in it.

Bot 39:49
Wow, okay, tend to have so many follow ups from there, but I’m not going to do that I’m going to move on to someone else who deserves it. And that is a MAGICAL MARKETER who’s an up-and coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to What can we learn from them? And where can we find them?

Andy Lambert 40:02
Awesome. So I’m going to take Louie Glenny a, see if my French pronunciation of his name. Yeah, how was I?

David Bain 40:12
David cobia is super.

Andy Lambert 40:17
So, Louis Grenier he runs a podcast called everyone hates marketers, which is one brilliantly titled. But too He talks lots about that kind of persona stuff that I was talking about at the beginning about like, forgetting the age demographics or you know, or gender demographics so much in your persona and thinking more about the customers behaviours, think about the human drivers behind them. He talks a lot about that. And just on his podcast, he gets such brilliant guests. That, you know, I definitely recommend that so you can check out when you find them on everyone hates marketers, you’ll find that podcast on all the usual places. And you can follow me on twitter at Louis slices. So Liu is slices not entirely sure what that’s all about. But yeah, he’s very good nonetheless. And I think that his his kind of key narrative is about radical differentiation. And that on this maybe this is the final point, I don’t know. But creativity in marketing is like the real on the final unfair advantage, right. So creativity is the thing that separates, you know, us from them separate it really separates a really good brand. and creativity is all about like this radical differentiation, how you can look at what’s gone in the past and how you can take a different spin on that and he’s big on like, talking about how brands can can differentiate themselves in a in a radical way. And he’s, you know, he used to think it was senior marketing at Hot jar and they did some brilliant stuff at Hot jar. So yeah, I think I’ve blown enough smoke some flames as well. So check him out. He’s brilliant,

Bot 42:02
superb resource and superb final point there. You have been listening to Andy Lambert, the director of growth for content calm so in today’s episode, Digital Marketing Radio shared lots of wonderful specific tips. I love the Dave Gayheart recommendation Don’t be afraid to that individual share their own personality as well. SECRET SOFTWARE as well you’re talking about feed value creation creation service, foetal IO, I think you said that was that NEXT ON THE LIST, you were talking about copy Smith, or AI, as the copy editor and descript is what we want to try as well. Louis, granny was the MAGICAL MARKETER that he shared as well. Everyone, everything that you shared, will be in the show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com. And of course, in the show description on YouTube, Andy was the best social platform for someone to follow you and say hi.

Andy Lambert 42:52
LinkedIn is my thing. So you can just find me Andy Lambert on LinkedIn. Yeah, I’m sure you’ll find me.

Bot 42:58
I’m sure you won’t eat. Well. If you want to watch the next episode, live, sign up on the YouTube channel, Digital Marketing Radio, just search for Digital Marketing, Radio and YouTube. You’ll find us there. You can of course, listen to us on your favourite podcast player. It’s probably Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcasts, and amazon music. We’re even on there. So whichever podcast app is your favourite, make sure you’re subscribing and you’re also listening live if that is your preferred medium. And until we meet again, stay hungry. Stay Foolish. And stay subscribed. Aloha.

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