The rise of AI has brought lots of talk about Authenticity in marketing.
But even when human creators do the hard work… are you giving them the best chance to connect with your audience?
Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, shares his experiences on brands gaining better traction by promoting individual experts.
Get Joe’s insights to authentic, personal connections in this B2B Forum 2023 clip, or read the transcript below.
We’d love to connect with YOU on a more personal level. Join us in Boston this Nov for B2B Forum, the most actionable B2B marketing conference on the planet. Ann Handley will be there, along with more than 50 other presenters and marketing leaders sharing their insights. View the program, plan your trip, and make sure to stop by the MarketingProfs booth for enthusiastic high-fives and coveted B2B Forum conference swag! Don’t delay—space is limited and tickets are available now.
Creators—not content.
You’re all of course inundated with, “I’ve got to be creating more content!”
You got to put all this content into all these channels, sometimes unnecessarily.
But I want you to think a little bit different about all that content you’re creating. And think about it as you are a creator resource department or an agency for internal creators.
Lemme give you an example of how this looks.
So first of all, who are the internal subject matter experts?
You know a lot of them already. Some of them you don’t know. You want to get to know these people.
And then you want to say, “okay, I’m going to figure out who these human beings are. And we’re going to put them on one channel.”
Not all over the board. Not just creating blogs for your newsletter or podcast examples.
You want to say, “get them to own one channel.”
Is it a podcast? Is it a video series? Is it LinkedIn? Is it YouTube? Is it your blog? Whatever the case is.
And then be the agency for them!
Help set them up to be successful, so that they can create consistent, valuable content over a long period of time. And then totally integrate that with your content plan.
Mathew Sweezey was all in on Web3 when Web3 was cool a couple of years ago, and Salesforce was all in on Web3 because this was going to be the next big thing.
And Salesforce said,
“Well, instead of creating a whole different content group within our content marketing program, we’re just going to have Mathew be our internal expert…
“We’re going to have Mathew write the book. We’re going to have Mathew create the blogs. We’re going to have Mathew do the interview series. And we’re going to put everything into Mathew and then integrate Mathew in everything we’re doing instead of just being part of our content program.”
This was working really well until Salesforce fired him and stopped their entire Web3 effort, which is okay, but the example works!
If they would’ve kept going with it, if they believed in that as a topic, it would’ve really worked well.
If you’re familiar with Indium Corporation—Indium Manufacturers, industrial soldering equipment, very, very sexy industry—they started this out as a group blog, which was fine when they started it 10 years ago. And it’s worked really, really well for them.
But as they’ve gone on, they figured out, “hey, we should just put more resources to one or two of our experts that are really our rock stars in our organization.”
So they talked to Dr. Lansky. He’s really selling it as a rockstar. They put more and more resources into him, helped him out with his social media presence. He’s focusing more on being sort of the persona behind this blog… instead of it just being Indium Blog.
Which is what a lot of us do, right?
It’s the blog from your company. It’s the newsletter from your company. It’s your company’s podcast.
But you know you’re not going to get as much trust if you focus on just your brand and not the individual.
So this is what I want you to start thinking about, and I think this is what’s going to happen over the next few years.
You have your main brand—and that’s probably the least effective way to send out your content: coming from your B2B brand.
Then you could say, okay, “well we have a content brand…” And we’ll talk about what those are in a second.
But then you have your person. That’s the thing that’s going to get most open, most connected, most shared: the person.
And you know that!
I mean, look at your email. What are you more likely to open? Something from an individual!
Look at a couple of examples.
So this is from a great creator who focuses on the creator economy industry, Jay Klaus.
Jay Klaus is the individual, and Creator Science is the content brand. That’s the name of the newsletter that comes out.
Then you have Dan Runcie who has a great newsletter called Trapital. So you said that’s the content brand coming from the individual. And so here’s where all three of them come in.
Sarah Mitchell is the rockstar creator. The Write fit is the content brand. And Typeset is the company.
Most of us are sending it from the company.
Then you’re sending it from the content brand.
Then you might send it from the individual.
So we’ve got to change our thinking and start saying, “how do we set this up for the individual’s success?”
You might be thinking, “hey, is there a risk behind that?”
Absolutely there is. They might go get another job.
But the advantages of this outweighs [that risk].
We’re creating so much content that nobody’s engaging with at all. So if you can switch over to this model, you’ll get a lot more traction as you go.
And of course, we know Ann [Handley] does this as well.
So it’s coming from Ann Handley. Total Annarchy is the content brand. And I know this is her personal newsletter, but really she’s doing this in a lot of ways for MarketingProfs. So it works really well that way.
So this is how it plays out:
You have your B2B creator. That’s the rockstar. That’s that internal expert in your organization.
Set them up on one platform. Don’t give them two. Don’t give them three. Just give them one thing to do really, really well.
It’s research. It’s a podcast. It’s a newsletter.
Then, that will give them speaking opportunities. And you see a lot of that here. A lot of people here work for their company, but they become really well known in their industry because this has happened.
You get interviews, you set them up.
“Okay, well we need to help them with their book.”
You package with your social. You do a newsletter.
And then you get the best possible leads on the planet because those people are really engaged. They want to hear what that creator has to say!
And oh—by the way—it’s part of your content marketing plan.
If you see what New York Times is doing, this page all used to be just the little infographic widgets up there. It was just nope.
And you see, every time I check it, there’s more people.
They have a person behind every content effort they’re doing.
We do that horribly in B2B!
It’s always our brand or our content brand.
We have to make the switch like every other reasonable company out there and focus on who are these individuals that can connect one-on-one with our audience as we go.
Third, co-create with your customers.
At Content Marketing Institute, we really felt at the time—this is back in 2012—that we really needed a documentary about content marketing. Nobody had really gone through the history in an hour, an hour and15 minutes or whatever, and we said, “we really need to make this happen.”
We couldn’t do it by ourselves.
We went out to one of our best customers at the time, Brightcove, and they put this on together with us.
And over the last whatever few years, we’ve had over a million people that have watched this thing. And I really believe… it’s made a real difference in the industry and really led a lot of the goals that we’ve been trying to do long-term.
With The Tilt, now we really feel like every year we’ve got to get some benchmark research on the creator economy, on the content entrepreneur.
We went to our best customer, Lulu, and said, “hey, can you make this happen?”
We put out a really good piece of research this year and we’ll do it again next year.
I think a lot of times, when you think about these big projects, you think you have to do it [by yourself.
You can get help from your absolute best customers.
So make a list!
Who are your best customers right now? However subjectively you look at that.
And say, “how can I get them involved in my content?”
And maybe they’ll help financially support that as well and get this thing paid for!
So it could be a weekly podcast Q&A with a customer or prospect.
It could be a series with your largest five customers.
It could be a blog written by your customers.
It could be an event featuring key customers.
The goal of this whole thing is, how do you create better B2B customers?
The number one way: get them involved in the content you’re creating. That creates the stickiest customer possible.
So whatever you’re doing right now: how do we get your customers involved?
And by the way, for the pleasure, they might actually pay you.
Published September 4, 2024
B2B Forum is packed with marketing insights, strategies, and tactics taken from the real world experience of over forty industry experts, packaged into context you can actually put to use.
Join us in Boston for B2B Forum 2024 this coming November 12-14, 2024. Early buyers get B2B Forum tickets at their lowest rate, and discounted hotel rooms are available while they last.
