Ever wished you could tap into the brilliant mind of an author, successful company founder, and and senior manager at a cool company like Adobe? Meet today's guest Andy Lambert, author of Social 3.0.
I was lucky to have Andy share his experiences and insights on B2B growth with me.
Andy schooled us on how to shift our mindset to use social media for growth and the importance of consistent, positive actions in the B2B industry. He gave us an intimate look into launching a social media scheduling platform and how educational content was crucial in generating interest.
Andy didn't hold back on the secrets of his trade. He elaborated on how understanding your customer base's needs can power your business objectives and fuel your content marketing strategy. He emphasized the importance of aligning sales and marketing, and how this harmony could be the key to success for any B2B organization. We also touched on 'dark social' and its role in driving content marketing success, a concept that will have you rethinking your strategy.
In the final part of our discussion, Andy really drove home the value of educational content and how it should be prioritized in budgets. He made a compelling argument about creating demand for the majority of the market, not just the 5% actively looking to buy, and why trust is more important than awareness for conversions. Lastly, we explored the power of word-of-mouth marketing and the importance of building relationships with influencers.
Hearing about Andy's approach to B2B growth was enlightening, and I hope it will be for you too. Tune in to hear all about it.
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Ever wished you could tap into the brilliant mind of an author, successful company founder, and and senior manager at a cool company like Adobe? Meet today's guest Andy Lambert, author of Social 3.0.
I was lucky to have Andy share his experiences and insights on B2B growth with me.
Andy schooled us on how to shift our mindset to use social media for growth and the importance of consistent, positive actions in the B2B industry. He gave us an intimate look into launching a social media scheduling platform and how educational content was crucial in generating interest.
Andy didn't hold back on the secrets of his trade. He elaborated on how understanding your customer base's needs can power your business objectives and fuel your content marketing strategy. He emphasized the importance of aligning sales and marketing, and how this harmony could be the key to success for any B2B organization. We also touched on 'dark social' and its role in driving content marketing success, a concept that will have you rethinking your strategy.
In the final part of our discussion, Andy really drove home the value of educational content and how it should be prioritized in budgets. He made a compelling argument about creating demand for the majority of the market, not just the 5% actively looking to buy, and why trust is more important than awareness for conversions. Lastly, we explored the power of word-of-mouth marketing and the importance of building relationships with influencers.
Hearing about Andy's approach to B2B growth was enlightening, and I hope it will be for you too. Tune in to hear all about it.
Guest Links
Learn More:
Social media is undergoing one of the biggest macro shifts in its history. The dawn of social commerce is powering the growth of the creator economy, which in turn, is creating an explosion of niche communities. This represents an unprecedented growth opportunity for businesses. But tapping into this new paradigm won't be easy, especially so for B2B businesses. B2bs have been historically guilty of seeing social media as just another channel to distribute their content. But if B2Bs want to power growth in this new era, this mindset needs to change. Social media B2B. How forward-thinking B2Bs can unleash the power of social media that's what we're going to talk about next with my very special guest on this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
Speaker 2:Social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tick-tocking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing, you've got Neil on your side. This, Neil Schaefer, is your digital marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer. I am your digital marketing coach, and welcome to my podcast. I will be well in full disclosure of what I read to you in that teaser actually comes from today's guest. His name is Andy Lambert and he is the author of a book called Social 3.0, how Forward Thinking B2Bs Can Unleash the Power of Social Media. Andy is a B2B SaaS startup founder. He's also one of the key executives and driver of product over at Adobe for their Adobe Express product, which I am honored to be brand ambassador for.
Speaker 1:I knew Andy before he went to Adobe and then after he went to Adobe, and I just think it is amazing the product that he's making, which, as you can imagine, is primarily being used by B2Cs, but also by B2Bs. I say that because I think the topic today is a general one, about resetting how you think about social media. It's something you know that I've talked a lot about, that I'm writing about in my new book. And Andy, just one of the smartest guys you'll meet and one of the most genuine and really nice person as well Great speaker on stage, if you ever get a chance to see him. I'm looking forward to seeing him again at Adobe Max in Los Angeles in October. If you're going to be out here, please let me know. But without further ado, I really want to jump straight in to this interview with Andy Lambert.
Speaker 2:B2B growth.
Speaker 1:If your company is in the B2B space will. The times are changing and if you want to continue to grow in your market, what are your options? Specifically, when we talk about marketing, and even more so when we talk about social media marketing Today, to reset the conversation and to get us thinking about B2B digital social media marketing in a brand new way, I'm really excited to have my friend and true thought leader of the space, andy Lambert, who is the author of Social 3.0. He is currently at a executive position at Adobe that we're going to talk about as well, and he also, in the past, is one of the founders of ContentCal, a leading media scheduling tool used by leading enterprises around the world.
Speaker 1:So B2B growth might seem like a weird combination of terms, because normally, when we think of B2B, we think of this slow burn, we develop relationships, long sales cycles. Is there a way we should be looking at this differently? And maybe because he wrote the book Social 3.0, I cannot think of anyone more appropriate to have on about this topic than Andy. So, andy, without further ado, let me just bring you on stage. Welcome to the live stream edition of the original marketing coach podcast.
Speaker 3:Hi, neil, good to see you, man, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Awesome to see you, andy. So you know, I have known Andy, as I was saying, for several years, from his ContentCal days and then more recently at Adobe Express. Disclaimer, I am an Adobe Express ambassador. That's the product that Andy works on. But this live stream interview is by no means being sponsored in any means by Adobe, so just wanted to get that out there. But I did have a chance to see Andy speak for the first time. Actually, I saw you speak twice at Adobe Max and Los Angeles past fall and just really, really great educational content. I know that you had so many people asking questions afterwards and just what a treasure it is to have you on the podcast or on the live stream. So, andy, you know Adobe ContentCal, social 3.0, bw Social, sort of. Where did this all start?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. So probably back in 2016, when we initially launched ContentCal, which was a social media scheduling and planning platform. You know we took a little while to get that thing going and we initially tried to scale it with like direct sales, as most businesses do, right, and I had a sales background. So naturally you know hit the phones, trying to get as many people to try out the product as possible, sending out as many cold emails as I could.
Speaker 1:You've already missed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, you know, just trying to get this concept off the ground. You've got an MVP and you want to get it launched. So that was, yeah, that was 2016. And you know, after probably about 18 months, we started to hit some traction and then we started to really double down on our content marketing strategy, of which I'll explain more. You know what that entailed at some points throughout this chat, I expect. So we started to really get some momentum. The flywheel was spinning. We started to generate a lot of interest and a lot of positive sentiment. Built community, that kind of thing leaned in heavily to educational content, which is an area of my own personal passion, right, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats, right. So, you know, levelling everyone up around you that interacts with your business in any way and was absolutely at the kind of core of our go-to-market strategy. Anyway, the business grew to a state that we raised about 10 million in funding.
Speaker 1:Can we take a step back, andy? I know like this is what every I mean not just B2B, but every business wants to be able to say we finally got traction right. It's this like crossing the chasm, riding their tornado, these classic Silicon Valley. You know books about growth, so what do you think attributed to I know you're going to talk more about that content, mark what you did? What do you think attributed to that traction that you've got? Was it just a matter of time? It took time for these efforts to show value, or are there specific things you did that others can learn from that got you that traction?
Speaker 3:So there are some very pointed things that I'll go into and typically, you know, we often look for these things that will unlock growth, and then a particular initiative or action or strategy that suddenly, like propels us into hypergrowth. It very rarely happens. It is absolutely a case of consistency. Is the thing that drives greatness. Being consistently good over a long period of time typically beats like the big swings. That's what I've always believed in and it's showing up consistently. But anyway, well, everyone gets that. But let's kind of make it a bit more practical.
Speaker 3:So, as I said, early days, cold emails, that kind of stuff you know, hit with a lot of like who needs another social media scheduling tool? We've got Hoots, we've got Buffer, we've got a million tools right, you know this space incredibly well. It's cool, yeah, we met right. So, like, why on earth do you need another one? So we kind of flipped down his head a little bit. So, rather than just having kind of you know the occasional sales that we're trickling in in the first six months or so, how do we scale it?
Speaker 3:The first book I read that absolutely unlocked it for me was a book called the startup owners manual. It's a massive book. I've read it all the time, but I would recommend only reading the first two chapters, because I didn't make it much further than that because I was like this was gold. It's called the customer discovery process. You're basically flipping sales on its head and essentially I spent the next kind of three to six months forget how long it was going through this customer discovery process, which really was a case of I would reach out to them, the people that we were targeting for sales but instead of like saying we've got this great new product that I'd love to see how you could make use of it, or whatever, my sales pitch was hopefully something better than that.
Speaker 3:And I'm assuming- this is the book. Right, that's the one. You got, exactly that one, so you did that very quickly. Yes, Okay, I do have this one on my blog the role reversal here through the startup owners manual is saying, like you know, outreaching folk you're still doing a cold outreach at this point saying we've come up with this new concept, a new idea, and, given your expertise in this space, we'd love to get your take and get your opinion on what we're building. And, yeah, if you're open to sharing your feedback, we would absolutely adore it, Happy to come by your coffee or wherever you are.
Speaker 3:And then that naturally gets a lot more uptake because people feel seen and heard. People like to feel like they're part of something. It's not for everyone, admittedly, but what happened was it's like you get two things out of that One. You get meaningful time in understanding truly what drives that audience and, and outside of the sales context, people are much more open because you know, tell me about how you come up with ideas for content, what do you plan, how do you run your paid campaigns, how do you run organic who's in your team? All of that stuff you can ask, because people don't have the defensive to go. Oh, someone's trying to ask me questions so they can sell to my pain points. It's more like I'm just here to learn. And then what happened was it's like you start to understand those things that become more important because quite often what you deemed as your biggest value proposition isn't the same one as your customers deem it. So then you embark on this research journey looking at your different segments, because obviously you go through different segments and a big spreadsheet of like his, you know social media managers at enterprise or B2Bs, or you know freelancers, agencies, yada, yada, all of that. What are the pain points? What are the kind of things that they were struggling with? And we just heard again and again that the same thing coming up. It's like it's a nightmare to plan content. It's a nightmare to get other people to review and approve it, it's hard to come up with ideas, and it was kind of in that space. So, rather than the whole like save time, scheduling your content thing, which was our kind of initial value proposition, completely flipped on its head where we made it on. Like planning, organization, strategy, team collab, like the best ideas are often created together. How do you roll your team in the whole content creation process.
Speaker 3:Quite often social media which absolutely shouldn't be is often just the preserve of someone in the marketing function which is based on oh, you do the social media stuff. Like social media, like, if you're going to do it properly, it needs buying, it needs other people to contribute, and that's the thing that makes it strong, Anyway. So we learned all of that and that just allowed us to pivot our messaging and sometimes that's all it takes right, it sounds super simple because it, you know, this stuff isn't rocket science, it just takes a diligent approach to it. Where you go, right now I understand these true pain points of my customer and now understand how to write that email to get the interested people so we can start having those you know, more productive sales meetings and get a few more yeses. But it also means I can now start fueling what will become our content marketing strategy, because now I know the true pains, I now know what people really struggle with, I know what they need help with. That is gold dust. That's all you need for your content marketing strategy.
Speaker 3:Like I said, this is, you know, say often and this is a problem in B2B like marketing is where you got sales over there and they very rarely talk, often at loggerheads, right, yeah, and I had the fortunate position where I ran growth, so it's kind of like it's both sales and marketing in one function. So it becomes a very unified affair because essentially all marketing is this sales at scale, right? So you still want, you're still using the same messaging, you're still using the same value proposition. You're just scaling it rather than having on a one to one basis. Am I making any sense? You follow in the track.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am. So you know it sounds like you got traction because you were in often with startup, you know, b2b, saas companies, sort of a technology looking for a market in a crowded market where you already had a lot of competitors. And when you started to talk to actual users, when you had the opportunity, when you shifted things to say, hey, we want to get greater feedback, we want to build this together with this huge community and understand their pain points, because even if someone is using a buffer or a hootsuite, they always have pain points, right, yeah, so how can we further improve upon that? So it's really this combination of sales marketing, you know, a product marketing and we could say influencer marketing, because you're also reaching out to. I mean, you reached out to me and you reached out to others, yep, and so you know you're a big influencer in the market.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great way of looking at it is, you know, with B2B, especially at the start of phase, you know of including others and really building something special that people feel it's almost I mean, this is before Web 3.0. We're still not at Web 3.0, but we talk about this participatory economy and product and it sounds like you were an early iteration of that with ContentCal. So that's a great way of putting it yeah, fast forward. So you got the 10 million pounds in the bank, mm-hmm, and I think that's a great way to do that. I think that's a great way to do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So. Yeah, got our traction, got the content, got the flywheel spinning off of the back of like now we've got you know. We know our value proposition. We started to build our content marketing strategy off that and all of it was based around. You know, a weekly webinar is like the main center point of all of our content marketing strategy. That became the core thing of which all of our content fell off that. So that was like the cornerstone of our content strategy, if you will. That gave us attraction. That gave us a constant throughput of leads, conversion rates in.
Speaker 3:It just becomes a case of optimizing the machine and then scaling that machine, of which paid media was also a way that we were scaling that machine. So got to a point where it was a case of we had an approach of which made a great deal of sense, because, you know, when a company like Adobe approaches you one, firstly you think, like, is this a joke? Can this actually be happening? And then you know, when you start to realize the vision that they have for Adobe Express, which is where content Cal basically morphed into a feature called content scheduler that sits within Adobe Express. It was what we always wanted to create, like you know how I started this conversation with this whole customer discovery stuff and then we learned that people struggle around ideation and planning. You know, and it was.
Speaker 3:It solves all of that, right, because you've got like, the biggest stock library, photo library on the planet, as well as stock video, stock audio, as well as all of these templates and all of these assets, all the ways to ignite your creativity in all manner of different ways. You've got all of that and then you plug that into one of the market leading, like content planning organization, team collaboration tools, like that's. That is a proposition that you absolutely want to sign up for, because selling a company is often like oh, glamorize, because, oh, yeah, that's it. You've x did, and aren't you, aren't you wonderful, but where did you think? Of course, yeah, exactly, but it's actually like no, this is just the next stage of like that. The vision that we have remains intact. We absolutely want to be the most widely used content planning organization and publishing tool on the planet. I don't mind saying that, and that is absolutely our ambition. But now we've got the firepower of Adobe right, that vision a reality much sooner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, amazing story and amazing validation that you built the right thing. And whether that technology is built out through a separate entity called content cow or as part of the Adobe entity, it's the same mission. So I think that that's really awesome and and a great way, and I know that not every company who buys every other company is this amazing brand and company like Adobe and their culture and their focus on people and both employees and customers. So, yeah, cannot say enough good things and I'm sure you'd agree, but I just want to sort of I just sort of want to, you know, summarize what we were talking about before we go on to the next topic, which you know. Now you're at Adobe and obviously you have your book and we'll put the ticker down there. But is that you started with by aligning your messaging with the needs of the general? You know users, you know people that would be using the product. That allowed you to fine tune the messaging, the product, and then, really worth starting what you started doing weekly webinars, obviously, the content you get from the webinars feeds in the social. You got your emails going with the opt-ins from that and then a little bit of paid media to accelerate, and you were doing that on a weekly basis.
Speaker 1:So I am a big fan, especially for B2B. I am still a huge fan of webinars. I still think that they do work. I know people think since COVID they don't work anymore, but I would disagree and I've seen the data. So I think that is a really, really good framework that any company listening and you know, can V2C companies do something similar? I think they can. But a weekly webinar, that is a lot of work. I mean, I do monthly webinars and that's a lot of work. So I'm curious as to anyone listening if they were like okay, I'm going to do like what Andy? What content Cal did? My company is going to be bought out by an Adobe or Google or Facebook. Yeah, I'm going to start to do weekly webinars. What is sort of the effort that went into doing that? Just if you could share some anecdotes from that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is a sizeable effort. Anyone that's run a webinar, like you have before, or a podcast, it is sizeable effort. You know, the promo piece, the actual content production I don't think is is actually that heavy lift, but the promotion and organization and like making sure you've got a good follow up cadence off the back of that. Too many people do a webinar and go it's done, but like that's when your work actually starts right.
Speaker 1:It's just the start.
Speaker 3:What's the cadence after that? How do you follow up with people? And it's not just oh, you joined our webinar, would you like a demo? No one cares about that. Like, how do we continually nurture people through that flow and you never know when it's gonna be the right time for someone to buy. And obviously, what I've had to and I talk about this a lot Like not everything is a funnel just because someone joined a webinar doesn't mean they're gonna convert at the end of it, who knows.
Speaker 3:The point is it's like we're trying to build trust, right, we're trying to build trust in our brand and in our brand in the industry. We want to be the first to mind whenever someone thinks of hey, I need something better to plan my content. I'm seriously inconsistent with how I publish social content. Like, I have not struggled to come up with ideas. I need a tool to help me and I want people to then buy. Wanted people because from content calories. Wanted people to be like what is that product? I want that product to come first to mind as soon as people think about it. So that's the overall ambition. But really, like when I say the competent production side is not actually that difficult because it was always done with someone else. And the same way that you invited me on, today we're giving other people the platform we were giving people the platform. That was even like the next stage above of who are our customers right now. So we'd have Monzo, we would have innocent drinks, right. Everyone knows those two. From social media perspective, we also have Ryanair. Everyone loves Ryanair's TikTok content. So having people like that on and knowing those social media folk means you're kind of stitched into the fabric of the industry.
Speaker 3:These people aren't customers. We didn't even try and make them customers or like oh, should try out. Like just, we're part of the industry, we're social media people. We were an agency before we get social right. We don't need to sell at every point, but we want everyone else to know or think and they should understand like they're working with a company or watching a webinar or, you know, signing up to a company that really cares about what they do and that runs as a thread throughout the whole culture of content, cal and continues into Adobe.
Speaker 3:Like we really care. We're all social media folk. We think about it all the damn time. We're stitched into the industry. We speak to the heads of social media everyone because they're our friends, right? You know we want to be part of it. We didn't create this product just to make some money. We created this product to make a difference. And you know, when you have co-hosted webinars with people like you know, innocent or Ryanair, you know you send a signal to the rest of the industry. People are like wow, like that's really high quality content. And you know brands like that on their webinar yeah, I'm definitely joining that and they end up. Of course, you know you make reference to the product. It's not never a sales demo, but you make reference to it.
Speaker 1:And, indirectly, people just assume that Ryanair is a client of Content Cal Exactly, Even though they weren't. But yeah, I think that's where the B2B and the B2C approach that is, the single biggest difference is the focus on the person and the relationship, because that person is part of a larger organization and they need to convince other people if they want to do business with you. Right, and that's where whether it's a webinar, I'm obviously a big fan of podcast live streaming, what we're doing here because it gives you the excuse. If you strategize that webinar to say, you know leaders in social media and then you invite them and you have other, you know similar corporate rock stars, they're going to be more inclined to join. Right, Definitely, and it just feeds everything else that you're doing in a very positive way.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and it's like we sometimes obsess over the format. A webinar is good or a podcast good, right now, like it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. As long as you're turning over the platform to someone else, that's all that matters, right? So you're sending a signal to the industry that you get it and you're producing something of real high quality that has genuine insights. And like we would curate what, even like Stephen Bartlett, who joined our webinars. So you know Dragon's Den, dario Vesillo, stephen Bartlett I'm sure everyone knows, but, like you know, even when he joined our webinar, we'd curate the content to make sure he's going to be talking about things. It's not just best practices, it needs to be actionable. People need to come out of this with something and that is a real differentiating factor Not coming out of this. Our focus wasn't people to come out with this with, you know, buying content. Of course we hope that's going to happen, you know, just indirectly.
Speaker 3:You say indirectly, but we want people to come out and go. I have a new insight that's going to unlock something for me today, and when you focus that much like and that consistently on what people need which starts back to the right of the first of me sat in my garage trying to figure out who is our customer starts right back from there understand what they care about, understand their pains and clear everything out of your way just to serve that pain.
Speaker 1:Focus on that consistently, and that's the only growth hack I have, because, well, it's an amazing growth hack because you're doing, you're basically learning while marketing right, exactly While, you know, boosting that email database would have you, so Everyone wins. I mean, we could just, like you know, finish the recording right now and we're done, but we're not done. But I think that's a great way of looking at B2B growth right there, through, you know, content marketing, but also through the mindset that says we are part of a larger ecosystem and we want to learn what are the pain points and we want to get to know other you know other people, what they're going through, so that we can better, you know, adjust our product and our marketing. So, you know, really well done, a really great case study. I want to move forward to some of the other topics, some of the things we talked about, in addition to what you've talked about, that we wanted to talk about today.
Speaker 1:When we talk about B2B growth, when it comes to, you know, marketing, sales, what have you is this impact to dark social? So when I saw you speak at Adobe Max, this is something that you didn't talk about. So I'm really excited to find out your views on this. For those that don't know dark social, and I mean and you can give the definition as well. But I'm assuming when people share, you know people are not coming directly from a website or from email. They're basically, you know, copying your link, putting it somewhere you're finding it in, you know, a Facebook Messenger conversation. It's this large amount of traffic that you just can't attribute anywhere is definitely part of it.
Speaker 1:But can you talk a little bit more? And, you know, redefine if necessary? But what is this impact? Because this is literally lurks in the shadows. Right, it's like a pod. I did a podcast last week where I talked about the ROI podcasting. You don't see like link clicks, even from a LinkedIn live or a YouTube live or Facebook live. You don't see link clicks somewhere. But if people were, you know I show your book right here and if people were to go to Amazon right now and buy it, we would not know what came from this live stream. No, so it's a similar sort of concept, just to give everyone a real life example.
Speaker 1:But I wanted you to sort of you know, talk about this for a bit as we proceed forward.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you framed it perfectly and it's the biggest cultural shift that B2Bs need to go through. And I think, yeah, the premise of the book I wrote was just being, like, you know, logically, b2bs get it but they struggle to make it happen because they're typically, as you started with Neil, they're sales lead, right, they're short-term focus and sales lead and, like Chris Walker on LinkedIn talks about this all the time. And, to be honest, I never even thought about this term of dark social because I'm a yeah, I'm a big fan of Chris's work. So it was only when he mentioned dark social I was like, ha, that is literally everything that happened over the course of ContentCal. So now I've absolutely, you know, I endorse the term fully because that was everything that drove ContentCal.
Speaker 3:We couldn't attribute it and, to be honest, we made some. We made those mistakes that are often cited, right, because, you know, like any small business, we're, you know, venture backed, raised a lot of money, so naturally you want to drive sales hard, so that typically, even for us that are, like you know, his me sitting, isn't this great, wonderful, like content, marketing, growth, et cetera. Like we still absolutely had struggles. We still took a whole load of missteps. And the major one of the major kind of learnings we had was we over-indexed on Google paid search. Right, because what we were learning through HubSpot, which was our CRM, loads of traffic was coming through Google. So logically you go all right, well, if it's all coming through Google, let's fire up the Google canons, throw a load of cash into it and let's see what we can do. Surely we'll scale leads, and we did. You know we lit up KPIs. Yeah, so our weekly KPI dashboard, which I'm gonna come to like, looked wonderful, it was glowing.
Speaker 3:But you know, when you look at whether those leads actually convert and then you start to look at the cost associated to those leads, it starts to maybe look a little questionable, you know. So don't get me wrong. I'm not saying here advocating why organic is better than paid. You need, like in everything, it's always a balance. But we over-indexed and I see a lot of B2Bs doing this. And I understand why. Because you know you've got investor pressure, you've got management pressure or whatever. You need to hit some numbers. So you need to get.
Speaker 3:You know, we were a bit of a mix of freemium and sales-led motion, so naturally, pushing people to demos was our highest converting tactic. So we kind of over-indexed in, like throwing loads of money at Google, trying to push people into sales demos and you know some of them were effective for sure, but we ended up having a lot of noise and that's quite a lot of wasted time of like salespeople following up with leads with lower intent and that kind of stuff. It didn't necessarily. What we found was like there was a ceiling for our Google media spend, that it just wasn't effective above that. And the reason is because attribution software which we were using HubSpot at that point, and HubSpot's a great product, but no attribution software can get that. It's just to your earlier point. It's like it can never tell whether someone came through a webinar. They might have watched the one we did with Ryanair three months ago and then suddenly now they've got the need because their contract wasn't expiring then but now it is, so they're ready for us now.
Speaker 1:So, andy, did you get to a point where it's like, in order to do business in a modern digital society, we just need to, every month, have a spend of X dollars? Try to hit these KPIs, whether they attribute to the conversion or not. It's just part of a modern digital infrastructure. Did you come to that conclusion at some point?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, we did. There's absolutely. We realized there's a ceiling. We continued to like, well, we doubled down on like the educational content because we you know, I just had to go deep into the data, which was annoying, like had to go deep into the data to prove a case to you know, even though I'm on the founding team, there's still lots of other people who still had grown quite big business at this point, so still had to validate, like this is why it's so good. Right, because now we've got the flywheel spinning. The costs of leads just come down and down, and this was a compounding factor of like the kind of collaborative webinars that we were doing. Is that naturally, you know, as people are about to be hosted like the same thing, like you hosted kindly hosting me today. I promoted this on my own channel, so that's. You know, I have 16,000 followers on LinkedIn, so that's 16,000, well, not 16,000 people are going to see it, obviously, but you know however many LinkedIn algorithms are going to choose, but this is brand new, so that is brand new exposure for Neil Schaefer, influencer, market 101, right there, exactly, but you're not going to be able to track it. So who knows? And we saw that all the time and it's just well.
Speaker 3:I came to the conclusion that trying to do the weekly KPI you know the treadmill about trying to attribute everything and trying to track everything it's just like you cannot do it. It's not possible, it's not practical. You can't measure the ROI of one single piece of content. You've got to trust that it works. Now, in the early days, it's hard to prove. You typically have to prove it out through qualitative measures. So, like, are we getting like good feedback on it? Like, is it something people's paying? Are we having more conversations as a result of this, like DMs with our target customers? More kind of? Because it's going to be smaller.
Speaker 3:In the early days of proving out our content strategy, it becomes much more quant or qual rather than quantitative stuff. But as we start to scale, then it's more, like you know, we're evaluating shares of it. For example, like, is that allowing us to go further? And, to be honest, I talk about this quite a lot, especially when we talk about Dark Social. I'm going to mention this again as we come up. Like the thing that really matters is because we're focusing on educational content, championing the industry, you know, giving a platform to other professionals in this space.
Speaker 3:The thing that I really cared about was share of voice. That is like the number one metric for me. You can forget everything else. The reason it's the number one is because, like, if you think about it, when you're looking at a weekly KPI or trying to evaluate the ROI of a single piece of content, you're looking like that. You know you are absolutely blindsided. It's only when you can take a step back and go right.
Speaker 3:Over the last quarter, what was our share of voice? You know, and share of voice is simply how many times that we're mentioned, and there's loads of good tools that do that. Mentionlytics is usually my favorite to do that. Basically the impact that we're having, because you know by the end, by the point that we're required, all of our kind of own social channels. We only had about 20,000 followers, but we typically were hitting between 750K to a million impressions Every single month, and the reason for that is because all of our content that was mentioned by other people, right.
Speaker 3:So, whether it's influencers or people that we've championed or people just saying, oh, that was an awesome webinar, I'm wanting to share it, because when you produce good quality insights and educational content, people want to share it because it represents them really well. People feel smarter if they share good quality content, so no one should do it right. So, and all of that has a compounding effect of getting lots of word of mouth. People talk about it in Facebook groups, people talk about it in their own private communities. None of that stuff will ever be tracked. All you'll see is just a load of new people appearing in your CRM saying that they came from Google, because they kind of just searched you and they came there. But it all has happened through the beautiful thing of having a strong share of voice and a strong word of mouth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to throw out just a few things here. Appreciate the comment from Peter. You know B2B it has to be relationship-centric. It's relationship-centric in sales. It has to be equally relationship-centric in marketing, even though marketing is one to many, but in B2B, yeah. So I appreciate you, peter.
Speaker 1:Getting back to your point, you mentioned Mention Lettix. I'm a big fan of Social Insider. So if you're looking at ways of developing share of voice, yeah, those are two great products to check out. But the other point is, I do think you get to a point where I tell my clients well, if you're not sure about the ROI, let's pull the plug, let's just. I have one client they're completely stopping social media ads for three months to really understand the impact of social media ads on everything else, and the first month guess what? There's really not that much of a difference in terms of their sales. So I mean that's the ultimate way to do it. But at the end of the day, there's this infrastructure.
Speaker 1:And what's funny, andy, is that I am always recommending educational content as early on. Even before you do paid media, start with educational content. And in fact I will tell even B2C clients do paid media towards the educational content, not to your shopping cart page, which sounds a lot counterintuitive. But you're warming up an audience and now approving the ROI of doing that. We're doing some A-B testing, but that educational content and then, if you don't have the educational content, what do you talk about in social media? So it fits so many different purposes and I'm really glad that you have shown a case study of how that works. But I'm really curious when you're talking to executives who are used to spending money with Google Ads and they think they're getting the attribution, and you're saying, hey, we got to switch gears here. We need to invest this money in more educational content, and what sort of pushback do you get? Because I've seen just intense pushback at that idea. How did you convince them to approve of that shifted budget as you last?
Speaker 3:did. Yeah, yeah, it's a challenging one. There's some brilliant studies that I point to in the book, but you can also find this online too, which I think is Les Burnett and Peter Field, which is like their marketing OGs go right into brand marketing, but their research says that only 5% of a given market are actively looking to buy at any one time. The other 95% are not. So we saw this absolutely in our content. Gal data, as I've referenced before. You agree? Yeah, so you'd look through HubSpot, which will track people's cycles, and we'd typically see 58 website visits over four months and then they convert. I just don't think the funnel is. We like to think in marketing that it is a thing. I still talk about funnel because it helps create a mental model, but it doesn't really exist in many cases.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that it's also that it takes 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 20 touches to convert. So at the very top they're bouncing around like a pinball or a pachinko machine before they actually drop. It is my impression of it, that's a good way to think about it.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's all mental models anyway. So, whether it's a flywheel, a flywheel or a funnel it gets you a metric.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly. And plus it's blog post content. If you want to say flywheel's dead or funnel's dead, it doesn't matter. Either way, all we're doing, whatever mental model we apply, we are, to your point, producing as much educational and awareness-orientated content to get our brand out there to appeal or create demand. Because if you just break it into two areas, 95% of the market not ready to buy right now.
Speaker 3:For that audience we need to create demand. Then for the 5% that are in the market, we need to capture demand. So for the 5%, that's pretty easy Because we already know there's kind of intent-based tools that we can use. And this is where we spoke about earlier about where Google Spend was good. So bidding when people are looking for best social media tool, then absolutely we're going to bid on that, naturally Because people are in the market and that's where you have a nice consistent Google Ad spend because you're capturing the demand. So you're on that 5% side of the line, capturing the demand with a 5% of the market. Then you've got the 95% that you're trying to focus on.
Speaker 3:So using well-proven industry data is a great way to argue your point for this with executives, because it's kind of hard to argue against really well-rounded, well-grounded research that exists out there. You don't need to make your own case. But it also helped that HubSpot was great at helping us at least track customer journeys et cetera, so I could kind of show what that 95% looked like in reality for a content cal customer. So it became a lot easier to get. And then you can also point to the fact of money talks. You can go well, look at these 20 customers, including some of the top 10 largest that we've won. They all came through these webinars Because you can track it back.
Speaker 3:It just takes a long time Because you then have to sift through your attendee list and go did that person join? So you can always look it, you can always track it. It's just attribution. Software is not going to do it. You just got to trust in the process. It will work. Because it's simple marketing, because our number one job as marketers, as business owners or whatever, is to capture or have or maximize mental availability is the marketing term, which basically means being first to mind whenever a customer has a problem. So that's all we're out to do, number one job. So in order to do that, the single emotion we need to generate in our audience, because the most strong emotion when it comes to buying something is trust. That's it. Because you buy from people you trust. It's never changed. It doesn't matter whether we're now we're doing everything digitally or we're doing things in person or kind of that relationship driven Comment that we mentioned earlier. It doesn't really matter hasn't changed. We do not do things or do business with people you don't trust. So the best.
Speaker 1:You know, I like to say like no, and trust and and the know is from the educational con, the like. I mean, this is where maybe the sales team comes into play. But you want to become a likable product, a likable company that people get that emotional attachment, really want to do business with you. Right, so that's the sales people that are building the relationships. But, but there's stuff you can do in the marketing end as well. Right, it definitely your experience and you know all the other things, events and what have you.
Speaker 3:But yeah, from like that liking thing. I'm glad you brought it up because you know you're a great example of this, right, because you're out there, you're doing this podcast, doing these lives, etc. People know you, people feel connected to you because you have your face to camera right eyes and trust right, and it's much easier for someone like, yeah, exactly so. So it's much easier for the people to connect and like a business if it feels human right, because it's simple psychology, we're gonna connect more with a fellow human than we will a brand right, a single logo. So that's where, you know, I mean being being front and center to this, like whether it's kind of having your CEO in front.
Speaker 3:I don't believe any of this is limited to just CEOs, right, because I wasn't the CEO, I was, you know, director of growth, so I was absolutely public, as was our CEO and as we encourage all of our sales team to be, because you know we, we stand. You then start to get into the employee advocacy, internal influencer type of stuff, right that you, you know the age of influence, which I read, so you know all of this stuff right.
Speaker 1:I want to talk more about that because before we started, you know planning for this interview, one of the things you wanted to bring up but I think we're already sort of hinting at this yeah, that buyer behaviors are changing and we're talking about B2B buyers right and leaning more towards social. So I see this these, you know, executives Maybe older executives not so active on social that just get further and further removed from the reality of where the buyers are today. So I'd really like you to go into more detail on on how you see this unfolding.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and this is yeah. I'm glad you brought this up because this links perfectly into this thread of conversation that we're talking about, which is typically we're seeing a shift in how decisions are made, and it's been well reported anyway. So I'm not this is no massive like new insight from me, because we know people don't want to speak to sales team. You know, we know that I think status on somewhere like 70 to 80% of buyers have decided before they speak to a business, right? And how have they decided? They've decided through all that dark social stuff that we were talking about. They've decided because Someone told them about it. Right, because there's what's the best way to shortcut trust, because we're all looking at shortcuts, right, we've got complex lives, so we're looking at shortcuts. So if you tell me to use the early example, example, neil that social insider is a good product, I'll believe you because you know this space, so I'm gonna trust you. So now we shortcut, shortcut, shortcut trust, and now I think that social insider is a good product.
Speaker 1:Well, andy, it sounds like word of mouth marketing is alive and well, and B2B as well. Huh, hell yeah, it is like imagine that it's never gone away.
Speaker 3:It is never. There's a reason. It's the most powerful form of marketing. Always hasn't always will be. Social media just lights a fire under it. But the problem is we've misunderstood how we should be doing social. Is that we think, oh right, you know, we've got a thousand followers. We should tweet about our business or whatever platform we want to do it on? We should a message about our business and treat our followers like they're our email subscribers. That's how I see B2B is approaching. No one cares Literally no one cares. We over focus on what's on our own channels. We do not focus anywhere near enough about what other people are saying about us, because that's where decisions are being made.
Speaker 3:Decisions are being made in in discord communities, in Reddit threads, in WhatsApp groups, in Facebook groups those places where whatever buy you have with its IT professionals, marketers or whatever it is they're hanging out in their own tribes, in their own private spaces. They have people they will go to when they're like I need new HR software, I need whatever it might be. They will speak to other people first. They'll speak to their friends. I'll speak to their colleagues in HR first. I'm going to just do a Google search and go that first one. I'll take that one, thanks. You know it's more complex than that. There's a reputation on the line and of course there's multiple stakeholders that are involved in it and of course this is where sales comes into it and more kind of complex B2B stuff. But typically that initial touch point is going to happen through that element of trust that's been generated through word of mouth.
Speaker 1:So, if you're not, I guess the net, net of that and I want to, you know, sort of get to the closing of the interview with, well, really, the grand finality, and before we get to these six golden rules to unlock social media growth for B2B is, which I assume, will summarize a lot of what we've been talking about Pretty much yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But you know, that point of if you're not in social, if you're not part of the conversation and if you're not listening to the conversation, that is just a whole world of opportunity that's growing that your organization is just completely missing out on is really the net net of what you've been saying there, right that?
Speaker 3:is exactly it like outside of that educational stuff that we're doing and you know, the webinar stuff that we were talking about. The other major tactic was to be in every single group that we could ever find related to social media marketers and not spend time link dropping and saying we've got a webinar, come join us. It's like actively participating, saying, oh, these are the things that work for us, like engagements, being up because of these things, being part of the community and building relationships with the community owners, that kind of stuff. But it takes time, it doesn't. You don't just turn this on so it's again. Go back to the relationship point.
Speaker 3:Deal, work with all of those kind of people that influence in your sphere and your business. You know it's not just about paying people money. In fact, whenever we've paid people money to talk about us that don't have genuine advocacy and won't name names here, it has to work. Never, never works. Because you can chat, you can tell, because what you want is you know if you work with someone, we're always happy to pay, but like you need to work with someone that when the money stops coming in, they'll still go. You know what you should use content Cal, because that was the best product I've used and that's what you want.
Speaker 1:All right. So they've already said a lot of nugget takeaways, but we've saved the best for the last. Let's do it the six golden rules to unlock social media growth for B2Bs, andy. So let's do it and, like I said, might be a summary, might have some new stuff, but let's go for it. What is the number one golden rule?
Speaker 3:Cool. Number one scaling word of mouth is our ultimate ambition. That's it. Scaling word of mouth is our ultimate ambition. That is all we need to do with social. So that means point two, and they all link together. Point two is share of voice is the most important metric to track. So those two things are inherently interlinked.
Speaker 1:And for those that don't understand, the share of voice is basically using a tool to understand mentions of your company name compared to mentions of your competitors company name in social media. I actually do this with SEO as well, with rank tracking software to see where I rank compared to the hub spots and the buffers and the hood suites for these keywords that are really strategic to me, and I recommend you do that as well. For email, we can't do that. If you have a podcast, you could use listen notescom, but definitely social media is the best place to grab this. And, andy, this is a tactic that's been used by Fortune 50 consumer brands for more than a decade, so it definitely is important.
Speaker 3:Kpi for most companies, like, if we're talking to B2Cs right now, they'll be like, yeah, you're on. Like we get that, they spend, they know this right, b2bs don't, anyway. So point three collaboration is essential to success. We said this through the webinars. We said this through collaborating with those community and group owners that we were just talking about. The more people you work with and spend your time and invest that time wisely, treat that like a real go to market strategy. In the same way that you have your sales team approaching your sales targets, you need to have someone dedicated at outreaching those influential people in the space, and it's not about just getting them to talk about you. It's about building genuine, meaningful relationships with those individuals.
Speaker 1:Thank you, andy. I will not tell you how many times over the last 12 months I get people pitching me. They want to come on a podcast, they want to be in a blog post, whatever. They want to get something out of me, and it's always let's collaborate, would you like to collaborate with us? And it's always this one-sided message, right, and it's like well, what's so? I love that. A collaboration is not just some tactic. I think a lot of marketers misunderstand this, like the link. Spamming in groups is that a collaboration is oh, I'm going to reach out to someone and they're going to do this for me and they're going to become this indirect Facebook ad or LinkedIn ad talking about me, where it is a truly mutually beneficial relationship. And that is the core tenant of a collaboration. Right, exactly that.
Speaker 3:It's relationships ongoing, like if anyone that you're working with needs to be ongoing because you don't can't build a business, whether, like a business, comes to you and say, oh can you tweet about us please, neil, and that's it. What you need is something that's consistent and what you want to do as a business is build genuine partners, because you'll always find other ways to work together. So, yeah, collaboration essential to success. Then participation drives engagement. Number four so the more you encourage people to participate through whether that's just simply asking for comments on your content, making it about your making all of your content that you're bridging yourself, about your audience. You know what's your favorite takeaway? What did you learn? What would you like to see next? Who would you like to see on the webinar next? All of that kind of stuff. Because the single. That goes into point. Number five because the more you get people to participate, the more your content drives engagement. There you go, Thanks in point. There you go, so there you go. Perfect. So the more engagement you drive, the further your content will go. I mean, we could spend forever talking about social media algorithms, but the single truism across them all is that if more people interact with your content. It's going to go further. So make sure it's about your audience and get those questions in. And that then leads us to number six, which that was yeah, the I think we just did. Number five Participation drives engagement and engagement drives reach was number five. Got it Okay.
Speaker 3:Then number six is, at the end of it all, the best product. The best product is the one that people know. So think about this, because we often think, oh, we've, we've got the best product because you know, we've got the best features. People don't think like that. People think the best product is the one that they hear most frequently. So if people are talking about it lots within a Facebook group, it suddenly amplifies in that person's sphere of influence. So they suddenly go, actually, well, like, content call is the best tool to you. I keep on hearing it and we heard this again and again. Like, people will always say to us like you know, I thought you're much bigger than you are. That's just because we're being amplified in those people's sphere of influence. And it's all about going back to seven years ago of sitting down with people for coffee and going what matters the most to you, and that's where it all started.
Speaker 1:Amazing. This has been an amazing conversation and, yeah, many friends, we've covered so much territory. There have been so many golden nuggets here, just really starting with this whole journey of seven years of you know, building content. Call to Adobe, to Adobe Express, starting with what's important to you. Whether they're a customer or not, as long as they are in your market, they have a voice, they have experience. Why aren't you tapping into that? And then, when you bring 10 of these people together over the course of a few weeks, that is just a goldmine of data. But also getting back to the relationship, right, you now build those relationships and you never know where those go, especially if they are in your target market. Who are they talking to? So just some really, really great reminders. And I do believe, because B2B is a little bit more smaller of an ecosystem, it's actually easier to get that. I would call it surround sound effect when multiple people are talking about the various channels. It does, but it requires you to develop relationships with those people in order to get there. So today I think it's been part product marketing, part growth marketing, part content marketing, social media marketing, influence marketing. It's this unique combination of things I think the savvy people and organizations get, but you can't put a KPI on every single little activity you do for that. It's a mindset and you got to put a few different balls in motion and time. But you will see that right and I think that's probably the biggest message that hopefully people take away from this.
Speaker 1:And if you need help convincing your boss on what we talked about, obviously Andy is the author of Social 3.0. Andy is basically United Kingdom. I know he does a lot there speaking, what have you? So I'm in the United States. We hear other people, see other people at conferences, but this is absolute brilliant book that if you're interested in learning more about Andy's thoughts and experiences, you should definitely buy into. But Andy, where else? As we come to the end here, I guess, first of all, is there anything else that you wanted to impart? Closing words of wisdom that we might not have talked about? I have a feeling we covered everything, but I want to give you that opportunity.
Speaker 3:The final thought I would just say is like marketing is not a function, it's a business strategy and it's sometimes for other businesses it's a bit of a culture change. But in my experience in building content, gal, marketing was front and center of how we grew the business from everything that we've just been speaking about, not a function. It's not like build a product and then get it to market. Marketing needs to be stitched through the entire business process. That's the only way you can make marketing work. Otherwise, marketing just gets pushed out to be a promotion function, which we know does not work. So that's my kind of main take.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're bringing me back to my days in Japan, where marketing as a function doesn't exist in a lot of companies because it's just seen as advertising and promotion, and product marketing as a concept does not exist in most Japanese B2B companies. So what you talked about there is something I talk a lot about in Japan Fascinating, or even further behind, yeah, especially with B2B. But that is a topic of another podcast interview that we shall do at some point. So, andy, obviously we talked about your book. Just curious, what other places should we send people to if they want to find out more about you?
Speaker 1:Obviously, I am an Adobe Express ambassador, so I will have an affiliate link for all of you to sign up for to get a free trial. It is an amazing tool. There are more famous tools when it comes to creating creative designs and content for social digital media, but I think what Adobe the advantage that Adobe has is that they are a latecomer, relatively speaking, but they can see things in a different way, provide a new, fresh approach and tap into that amazing history and infrastructure and experience that Adobe as a creative brand has. So I think you should definitely give it a try. Like I said, we'll have a link in the show notes and in the descriptions, wherever you're watching this on live stream. But, andy, where else can people go to learn more from you and connect with you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you'll find me across every social. Andy R Lambert, so same handle on every channel. But yeah, linkedin is where I spend most of the time, and feel free to DM me. I'm always happy to offer any advice or support, so yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1:Awesome, there's the spell once again. You could find the book wherever fine books are sold. Andy R Lambert on social and Andy, thank you so much for joining me today this has been a wealth of knowledge and, like everything else, I do believe that these critical marketing concepts, even though we, you know, we talk about B2B, they're applicable to, you know, b2c nonprofit government really they're the best practices. So thank you for sharing your wealth of experience and wisdom with all of us today.
Speaker 3:It's a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me and thanks for being part of the journey for the last seven or so years, because you are on the receiving end of my early outreach. So there you go, and the relationship still lasts seven years later. So there you go?
Speaker 1:Yes, and thank you for the opportunity to collaborate, my friend.
Speaker 3:Anytime, so good speech, anil.
Speaker 1:Isn't, andy, just awesome. I want to let you know. You should know this by now, but these interviews that I am doing on my podcast, as you know, 50% of my shows are solo, 50% or interview these interviews. You can also see them all on YouTube Unedited and maybe get to hear a few things and maybe a few comments by the audience that didn't make it to the podcast recording. So go to YouTube comm slash, neil Schaefer and the AL SCH AFF ER I hope you know how to spell my name by now and you will see. In the live tab you will be able to see not only all the past recordings of all the amazing guests. You're gonna see some recordings that haven't yet made it to the podcast, right, and you're gonna see some videos of some of my older podcast episodes that were never livestream as well, because I'm going through and Livestreaming them live streaming, basically pre-recorded zoom interviews that I think well, I want to give you all a chance to see. So if you check recently, you You're gonna see some new videos, some new upcoming videos that you can get notified for for future podcasts, as well as some from the historical Archives, all for your viewing pleasure and convenience right there on YouTube.
Speaker 1:All right, hey, I want to send out a little reminder that well, this podcast has been around for a while and when I go to my podcast play or lick of my podcast on on Apple, I noticed that this podcast, this episode, is actually number 335 and this podcast has 58 ratings. So I heard this done on another podcast. I thought it was an amazing Tactic that I just want to keep reminding you that I really want to get to 100 reviews. I know that this podcast touches way more than a hundred people, especially when you think about it historically, but I really want to get to 100 reviews, especially well, hopefully by the end of the year, but at least before I publish my next book, which I'm hoping is in early 2024. If you'd be so kind to go over to Apple, drop a review, that would really make the world and I, hopefully, going forward, will sort of read some of these Interesting reviews of the views that I find interesting.
Speaker 1:So, hey, make sure you use your real name, so I know it's you and I can thank you, and I'd like to share what you learn from this podcast with all of our other listeners to benefit them. Needless to say, if you have not yet subscribed to this Podcast. I really hope you will. As I said, 50% of these shows are interviews, and I try to find guests that are true experts, authors, speakers, who provide advice that you may not find anywhere else, and then half of it is going to come from myself and my experience working with clients, teaching, etc. Etc. All right, well, that's it for another episode of the digital marketing coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, signing off.
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