I started AudiencePlus in 2022 with the conviction that inbound marketing – a twenty year old playbook that has served our industry well – is no longer an effective strategy for driving revenue.

So much has changed since then:

• Content formats have evolved from SEO articles to multimedia as buyer attention has become increasingly difficult to capture and retain.

• Paid distribution has become scrutinized as an inefficient channel by CFOs and FP&A teams.

• Organic social channels continue to algorithmically throttle access and distribution.

Beyond these three headwinds, the AI revolution has made first-party data a precious resource for creating personalized experiences. For years marketers have talked about personalization, but in reality, they were creating segments and associated workflows that really weren’t very personal. 

AI holds the promise to deliver meaningful personalization at scale – but its primary fuel is first-party data. 

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have been overly reliant on these outdated playbooks for too long – despite diminishing effectiveness – and the impact on their careers has been profound. Already the shortest tenure of any executive in the C-Suite (and with average tenure now falling to the lowest level in more than a decade), CMOs are feeling the pressure to find new and innovative ways to impact revenue.

I believe that the only way to recover is to own your audience – to reduce barriers to content distribution and leverage valuable first-party data to inform marketing decisions. Software vendors in the consumer and creator industries such as Patreon, Substack, and others provide powerful examples of how this works – and now is the time that we too embrace a similar strategy in B2B marketing.

For this reason, we’ve used the language “owned media” as the rally cry for our movement.  We’ve been fortunate to have that category recognized by both Gartner and G2, with its values echoed by thousands within our audience.

But owned media was always meant to be a means to a greater end.

That’s where Audience Marketing comes in.

Introducing Audience Marketing

Audience Marketing is anchored in a belief that marketing’s most important and leveraged role is to build relationships at scale between brands and the audiences they serve. No charter is more important for our role within the modern GTM team.

We’ve believed a dangerous falsehood that marketing can create demand rather than capture it – as if we could deploy our Jedi mind tricks that invade the internal meetings of our would-be buyers and open budgets, launch initiatives, and create cross-organizational buy-in. 

The reality is that’s simply not true.

Capturing and converting existing demand – one of the foundational premises of inbound – is critical for the 5% of your audience who are in market for your products within your category. But an Audience Marketing strategy, by contrast, empowers your brand to build meaningful and authentic relationships with the 95% of your audience who may not yet be in market, but are within your ICP and are paying active attention.

And the foundational premise is this – when your audience does open up an initiative (or to keep the analogy going, enters the 5%), companies who have embraced Audience Marketing will have a serious leg up on the competition since you’ve already established a meaningful relationship. 

Your audience will be more likely to want to engage with you and more likely to convert into high-quality pipeline.

Remember too that the 95% represents a much bigger slice of the market. The better your team gets at executing Audience Marketing as a strategy, the better the odds that your audience will enter the market as prospects.

With an audience-first approach, you’re building tomorrow’s pipeline today.

Our Commitment

As we usher in the Audience Marketing era, we view our role at AudiencePlus as pivotal in driving the evolution of the marketing industry.

Here’s our approach:

• Software:  Our platform is the only Audience Marketing software on the market built from the ground up to operationalize this new GTM strategy.

• Expertise:  At the time of publishing this letter, over 5000 members of the marketing industry subscribe to our content and best practices – benefiting from daily content drops that equip our audience with the tools they need to operationalize Audience Marketing within their businesses.

• Community:  Our Goldenhour portfolio of events are designed to bring the pioneers in Audience Marketing together – both executives and practitioners alike – in order to compare notes, draw inspiration, and find connection.

I for one could not be any more excited about the work ahead. 

There’s something very noble in a career path that’s intended to build authentic relationships and deliver real value. And if being successful in achieving that aim translates into positive outcomes for the business, well, that makes coming to work every day just a bit more fulfilling.

Anthony Kennada

Founder and CEO, AudiencePlus