Have you ever thought about what makes B2B marketing special?
Because there is something about it, isn’t there? There’s a certain…feeling to B2B marketing that those of us who live in it day to day inherently understand.
We collaborated with MarketingProfs B2B Forum partner, TopRank Marketing, to explore that feeling with top experts in B2B marketing today.
Check out this special “Feeling B2B” series, hosted by TopRank Marketing co-founder Lee Odden.
Explore Wil Reynolds’ passions for nurturing and optimization in B2B marketing!
Lee Odden: Welcome to the Feeling B2B show, a limited interview series featuring conversations with some of the top voices in the B2B marketing industry, brought to you by the fine folks at MarketingProfs B2B Forum. I’m your host, Lee Oddens of TopRank, and today we are speaking with Wil Reynolds, OG SEO innovator, data nerd, runner, and all around awesome human being. Of course, Wil is founder of Seer Interactive, where he works as VP of Innovation and Wil has actually been in the SEO game since 1999, just a year after Google was founded. Welcome to Feeling B2B Wil.
Wil Reynolds: Yo, thanks for having me. I really appreciate you having me on the show and being here.
Lee Odden: Awesome. So let’s get started. What do you love or what do you love most about B2B marketing?
Wil Reynolds: I love nurturing. There’s something about it, I’ve worked with clients e-comm and B2B and B2C, and all these different things and you can sell in B2C just when somebody’s having a bad day…I don’t feel good about myself, I’m going to buy those shoes, right? And what I love about B2B is it makes you have to stretch more as a marketer to say, how might I be able to answer your questions—this is my approach—over time so that you better understand why I am a better solution for you than all the other solutions out there. And then the game’s not over when you get the ranking and the game’s not over when you get the lead; there’s this whole other process you have to integrate with to make sure that MQL becomes an SQL becomes actual revenue. And to me there’s complexity in that and I like to run to the complexity, not the simplicity. And it’s simple when you’re like, did this campaign, got this money…done. B2C. Versus did the campaign, got these leads…oh wait, those are the wrong kind of people? Okay, now I have to think again about the leads. What am I bringing in? So I just love that whole, the complexity of the journey it makes you have to be really on point as a marketer.
Lee Odden: Awesome. As with our previous Feeling B2B guest Joe Pulizzi, we’re both runners. We love to run. And I’m wondering what are some lessons you might’ve learned from running that are applicable to marketing?
Wil Reynolds: A couple things. One, I realized the connection for me around, dare I say, it’s addiction to optimization. The job is never done. You’re never done running. But also, it sounds cliche, but it’s the journey. It’s like I was saying before, you don’t, if you’re training for a marathon or even if you just have an annual goal, you start off your year at zero. And there’s something about the reset on Jan one every year that’s like, oh, here’s the goal. Look at how little that bar is today after running my four miles on my massive big goal for the year. And you just have to be in that mental space of this isn’t going to be quick, it’s not going to be easy. I’m not going to, that’s what I was saying earlier is I’m not just getting the sale. These are rainy days, snowy days, days where I drank too much wine the night before and I gotta get through all that to be able to climb the hill. So for me, it’s no different than to me in marketing with longer journeys, it’s like I’m not just going to be able to produce the content today to get the sale today. I got to figure out what’s their next question and then when are they in this part of the funnel? And then how does my marketing change and how does my messaging change? And it’s never just that quick, woke up, get it done today, we’re over. It’s part of that longer journey.
Lee Odden: At B2B Forum, coming up here real quick, you’re going to be speaking about how to find, fix, and scale to make better landing pages and how chat GPT might be a solution or a resource to help do that. Can you share a nugget, a preview of your presentation?
Wil Reynolds: Yeah, so I focus on customers always and more than canonicals and more than keyword research and more than keyword difficulty, I think about customers and I want to show how bad landing pages can be at solving problems for customers. And then the problem when I show that to people is it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming to see how bad landing pages are, that we’re paying for clicks to, at solving problems. And then I’m going to show you how to find them manually, and then I’m going to show you actually how to scale it using chat GPT yourself.
Lee Odden: Awesome, awesome. So as I mentioned, you’re speaking in B2B Forum. What are you looking forward to most about speaking at a B2B conference at B2B Forum itself for MarketingProfs in Boston?
Wil Reynolds: Well, so first of all, it’s always to the best that I can. I won’t be able to spend too much time in the crowd, which I’ll get into in a second. But it’s like I like to learn what I love about this time with AI and the amount of disruption that’s happening and search generative experience and Bing and Perplexity and Claude 2 and Pie.ai…it’s a great reset. It’s like no matter how old you and I have been doing this stuff, how long we’ve been at it, all of a sudden it’s a brand new thing that we’ve got to re-envision ourselves through. Like, hey, does all this stuff work still or does it not work? Does it still serve me? How many of my customers are going there? Are they not going there? So I just love that kind of reset. And going to any conference in person especially, you tend to hear things, you tend to see things, you get to hear how other people are brainstorming things over lunch.
So that’s cool. But what’s really cool is it’ll be the first time my kids will see me speak. So my wife is traveling for work to Nicaragua and this got booked at the same time and she’s like, well, I’m not in the country, so you got the kids, so you gotta figure it out. Which I was like, that’s true. I do have to figure this out and I’m going to have my kids in the room and they will have to be there quietly. Hopefully everybody will use the potty beforehand. But my kids don’t really understand what I do when I get on a plane and fly somewhere to do something and this will be the first time they’ll see it, and they’re eight and six, so they’re super young. So we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be like, guys, you literally cannot interrupt me for the first 45 minutes. So we’ll see how that goes. I’m looking forward personally, on a personal note, I’m looking forward to sharing with my two sons what they have seen me leave the house for and do that they’ve never gotten to see themselves with their own eyes.
Lee Odden: That is fantastic. That is so awesome. And I can say that I was able to bring my daughter to London with me for a presentation and she got to see me speak for the first time, and it really connected some dots about what does dad do when he goes away. So that’s really cool that you get to do that and your kids get to see you in action. And you’re such a great speaker.
Wil Reynolds: What was one of the dots that she connected? That’d be really cool. Tell me.
Lee Odden: In terms of what is it I was doing and the category of topic you know talking about in that case, I was talking about influencers in B2B, and she was familiar, and she was probably 13, 14 at the time. She was familiar with the idea of influencers and a consumer perspective, but not really what that meant for business. And so she gained a little more insight as to the kind of thing, the category of thing that I was doing. And that for some reason people seem to want to listen to me about it.
Wil Reynolds: Especially when they don’t want to listen to you.
Lee Odden: Yeah, exactly. So I know you’ve got lots more to say, lots more that people can learn from you. And for everybody tuning in, you can listen and learn from Wil at MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2023 that’s happening in Boston and online. The workshops at the event are October 4th, and the full conference is October 5th and 6th. And you can get more information about Wil about all the other speakers, the sessions, the venue, all the other things you’d want and all the shenanigans as MarketingProfs likes to call them at the event at www.mpb2b.marketingprofs.com. Of course, we’ll have the link in the show notes. Wil, I know you’re a super findable person, but where would you prefer people connect with you at?
Wil Reynolds: Oh man. I would just say go to the Seer Interactive site. It’s where we share most of our information on our blog. I have a Medium and I have on YouTube, I am starting to share some of the hands-on AI work that I’m doing on my YouTube channel as well.
Lee Odden: Okay, super. We’ll include links to those also. Thanks a lot, Wil.
Wil Reynolds: Thanks for having me.
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Published 9/27/23
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