It’s been quite the year here at AudiencePlus.
We have a strong conviction that every company is becoming a media company. The decade+ practices of traditional media and business to consumer (B2C) brands is coming full circle. It’s making its way into B2B software.
We’ve fully embraced this at AudiencePlus, so much so that we’ve gone all-in. Launching our media property before our software. We see the power of content and community and know that bringing value to the market will produce long term benefits.
With that being said, we launched our media property on October 12, 2022. Since then we’ve published:
3 show franchises
17 episodes
15 articles
2 exclusive live events
I can’t go any further without calling out the person behind the creation of all of this incredible content. Justin Siegel, our Head of Owned Media. He brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, and execution that makes this possible.
We created all of this fantastic content in partnership with top thought leaders and practitioners in the industry. We’re pulling a roundup of a few of the highlights and key learnings.
Let’s jump in!
The Media Marketer
A show dedicated to elevating and helping content marketers evolve their skill set for the new media landscape.
Hosted by Kaleigh Moore who has deep roots in journalism and media research. She understands how content teams can implement new formats of media at software companies to drive meaningful impact.
Here are three key takeaways from the Fall season of The Media Marketer.
Learn from the Practices of Journalism
Consumer brands and media companies understand the consumption habits and buying behaviors of humans.
It seems that marketing teams at B2B companies have forgotten that a company is made up of humans. Yet, historically we’ve built our entire content and marketing strategies around the idea we’re selling to a thing with no emotions or feelings. This has led us down the path of stale, boring, and extremely formal messaging and marketing programs.
But there is a new (but it’s actually old) way. A B2B company can use a media company strategy in order to effectively reach and engage with their target audience.
This involves creating and distributing relevant and valuable content, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, and experiences to educate, inform, and inspire potential customers about the company and its products or services.
However, it’s not just about creating content in new formats. You’ll only really benefit from this approach if you adopt the age-old practices of journalism. These practices are, transparency, inclusivity, and inquiry.
You must serve the audience before self-interest.
This looks like a dedication to
High quality material
Providing reliable information
Substantive content
When these principles and this strategy are implemented it’s an impactful formula and can lead to increased sales and revenue.
Additionally, a media presence can help a B2B company to establish their brand and differentiate themselves from competitors.
Want to dive deeper on this topic?
Execute an Owned Media Strategy
Brands have been building audiences on social media for the last decade.
The problem?
This is rented land. Brands and creators have no control over the reach of their content and analytics on consumption habits are hidden in a black box. Ultimately, you’re stuck trying to create content for an algorithm rather than truly bringing value to your audience.
The solution?
Owned media. When you implement an owned media strategy you have:
More control
Better engagement
Build trust and authority
This doesn’t mean social media goes away. It just becomes a distribution channel that drives your audience to your owned media platform where you have more control and visibility into how your audience is engaging with your content and brand.
Want to dive deeper on this topic?
Repurpose Your Content
“Build it and they will come,” right? That’s a common saying that we’ve all heard. Most professionals would disagree with this concept. Even if a product or service is the best in the industry, it won’t reach its full potential without good marketing.
Yet, marketing teams have, many times unknowingly, taken this approach with content. They form a “create it and they will consume” mentality. This leads content teams to the hamster wheel of create, create, create and not focus on create, distribute, repurpose.
You don’t need to constantly create net new content. In fact, it’s better to create fewer deep, rich, valuable content pieces and then repurpose them for distribution across channels.
What are the main benefits of implementing a repurposing strategy?
Adds value to blog posts
New ways to reinforce messaging
Reach people you missed the first time
Don’t reinvent the wheel, reuse what you’ve already invested time and effort into creating.
Want to dive deeper on this topic?
Check out the full season of The Media Marketer here
Media House
A show created to showcase the stories and learnings from industry leaders who have seen success implementing a media company strategy at their own organizations.
This season we’ve heard from people like Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell, Camille Ricketts formerly at Notion, Kipp Bodnar CMO at HubSpot, and Dave Gerhardt formerly Drift.
We’ve learned a ton from these industry luminaries, here are three big takeaways from this season of Media House.
Have a Distribution First Strategy
Camille Ricketts is the former Head of Marketing at Notion. She also built First Round Capital’s owned media brand First Round Review which started a massive media trend in venture capital.
Her journalism and content marketing background helped shape her approach to marketing. She’s learned that your distribution strategy is one of the most impactful growth functions but it’s often overlooked or pushed aside in the content planning process.
Camille believes that 80% of the success of content marketing is the distribution. If people are not seeing it, or if it’s not making its way to the right people it’s wasted effort.
If you don’t have a distribution mechanism for a type of content, you should question if you should produce it at all.
A few critical steps to take for a distribution first strategy
Identify where your target audience lives online
Create and repurpose content into the proper form for your different channels
Drive traffic from those channels back to your owned media property to build your subscriber list
The most powerful distribution channel is email. Building an ’owned’ database of people from your target audience will allow you to control when, how, and who sees your content.
Want to dive deeper on this topic?
Watch the full episode with Camille Ricketts here
Creators are the Future of B2B
Kipp Bodnar is the CMO of HubSpot - one of the most iconic brands in B2B marketing.
Under Kipp’s leadership, he and his team inspired the world with the idea that content can drive performance - this was evangelized through creating the category of Inbound Marketing.
In February of 2021 HubSpot acquired The Hustle - a newsletter read by more than two million people everyday. They also recently launched HubSpot’s podcast network and creators program, all of which are fully evolving their brand into a media company.
Consumer brands have been partnering with celebrities for decades. Over the last ten years they’ve also begun partnering with individual creators, or solopreneurs, who have a large following on social media.
We’re on the bleeding edge of this strategy in B2B, but it looks a little bit different.
Consumer brands tend to go mostly for reach. They find social media influencers or celebrities with vast followings in order to get their product in front of the most people.
In B2B, we need to partner with the right creator over the one with the largest following. Find creators who are well aligned with your target audience. They’ve built trust and engagement with their audience through content, thought leadership, and adding value.
Kipp’s prediction is that brands who implement this strategy well will dramatically outpace those who don’t.
Want to dive deeper on this topic?
Watch the full episode with Kipp Bodnar here
You Don’t Need a Big Budget to Start
Dave Gerhardt rose to prominence during his time at Drift. He’s now the Founder of Exit Five, a community of thousands of B2B marketers sharing learnings, advice, and growing in their careers.
One of the biggest blockers to creating a podcast or show is budget. As marketers we let the idea of our content not being perfect, or Netflix-quality aspirations get in the way of us starting.
Perfect is the enemy of good. You don’t need a huge budget to start creating, and your content doesn’t need to be perfect.
As Dave says in the above clip, you don’t need to have multimillion dollar production out of the gate. Start with minimum viable production to get your content out the door. You have the idea and know where you want to start. Don’t let production quality be an excuse to not create.
Marketing is inherently iterative. We’re constantly learning and implementing changes to make things perform better. The same is true with a podcast or show, you need to ship and start publishing so that you can learn and make your next version better.
You have to publish to learn.
If you start with a low budget and prove the idea out, you can then make a case for more budget for the next version.
Want to dive deeper on this topic?
Check out the full season of Media House here
Owned
B2B companies can learn so much from consumer brands. These companies have been marketing and selling products to humans for decades (sometimes even centuries).
That’s why we created the show “Owned.” Where our Founder, Anthony Kennada, and James Carbary, Founder of SweetFish Media tear down popular consumer brand strategies and extract learnings that can be implemented in a B2B strategy.
We’ve pulled learnings from three of our episodes and compiled them below.
Liquid Death | Keywords Should not Determine the Content You Create
Liquid Death is one of the fastest growing beverage companies of all time. Their founder, Mike Cessario, felt a strong conviction that water companies were boring and that the plastic waste being generated from the water industry needs to change.
Mike created Liquid Death, a brand dedicated to murdering your thirst and the use of plastic.
With these strongly held beliefs they’ve created a brand that stands out, and while it has a premium price tag for water they’ve seen immense success. They raised at a $700M valuation and will achieve $130M in sales in 2022.
So, what can B2B companies learn from them?
Liquid Death isn’t building their content calendar on keywords. They’ve created an editorial strategy based on their ideas and strongly held beliefs. Their content is an offshoot of those beliefs. The keyword does not determine the content that is created.
While B2B brands don’t necessarily need to have this edgy of a marketing strategy, they should be creating content around their point of view to educate, inspire, and entertain their target audience.
Check out the full Liquid Death episode.
Morning Brew | Email is Not Dead
If you’re a marketer in the tech industry, odds are you already subscribe to, or have at least heard of Morning Brew.
Founded by Alex Lieberman in 2015 to share the latest Wall Street and Silicon Valley news in 5 minutes or less now boasts over 3 million subscribers.
Alex says using an audience funnel strategy is what helped Morning Brew be hyper successful as a media brand.
Rented
Owned
Monetized
Using social channels to amplify our content on rented land, drive subscribers into your owned database, and then monetizing through value. The currency of this? The email address.
B2B marketers have been using a similar tactic for years to build a “marketable database” of opt-ins. However, we need to shift this mindset to building a subscriber base, a much more personal thing than an ‘opt-in.’
Building a subscriber audience that wants to engage and nurture them to become members of our community.
Check out the full Morning Brew episode.
Barstool Sports | Cadence and Consistency is Critical
Barstool Sports is a digital media company founded in 2003. Originally started to share sports and gambling news, they soon branched out to cover more topics. While the brand has been the subject of several controversies they have remained a successful media brand with many learnings to be extracted.
The website receives an immense amount of traffic, over 8 million unique visitors per month and well over 10 million followers across social media channels.
One thing that stands out is the cadence of content release. Barstool is pushing new content out as often as every 10 minutes!
While this is not a realistic or sustainable level for B2B brands, there is a learning here.
To remain relevant and top of mind you must be regularly publishing content, ideally at a steady cadence.
This can be achieved by setting a release schedule of new content (e.g. every Tuesday at 8am), while delivering consistent publishing of repurposed content across channels.
Check out the full Barstool Sports episode
Check out the full season of Owned here
From the entire AudiencePlus team, thank you for tuning in and watching, listening, and reading our content this past season.
We’ve got big things planned for our Winter Slate. You won’t want to miss it!
To stay updated on new content drops, exclusive events and experiences, and potential swag subscribe below (we promise to protect your privacy and we don’t even have an SDR team, so you won’t be enrolled in a sales sequence - you’ll just get valuable content delivered right to your inbox).
JK Sparks | About the Author
Head of Marketing, AudiencePlus
JK is allergic to the words “guru, ninja, and hack” when used to describe anything marketing related. Instead of chasing the latest “growth hack” he’s focused on building sustainable and predictable levers that fuel healthy growth. This philosophy has led to success in both bootstrapped and well-funded environments scaling from <$100K to more than $100M in revenue. You can follow him here.
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