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04: Inbound and Outbound Are Out, Nearbound Is In with Logan Lyles
74 Plays1 year ago
Inbound marketing is a magnet. But nearbound marketing is an even bigger magnet. In this episode, we dive into how Logan Lyles and Teamwork are implementing a nearbound marketing strategy, taking advantage of content co-creation in their ecosystem.
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Transcript
Introduction to Logan Lyles and Nearbound Marketing
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B strategy podcast, your roundtable of B2B strategists guiding you in every decision you make in growing your business. Today we'll be talking to Logan Lyles. For several years, he worked at Sweetfish in various roles on the leadership team of the B2B podcast production agency, as well as being the co-host of B2B growth, which is one of the highest ranked marketing podcasts on Apple podcasts. He is now the head of partnerships at Teamwork, a SAS project management tool built specifically for agencies.
00:00:27
Speaker
Last week you posted on LinkedIn about nearbound marketing, a concept that to be honest, I wasn't really familiar with at all. And you guys are currently implementing it at teamwork right now. But before we tackle what it is in that post, you started off with saying inbound marketing is getting harder. Why do you think that is? Yeah. So for me, I hit the workforce like 2008, which was interesting, great recession. And I had a journalism degree and I went into sales, but
00:00:53
Speaker
I always had an appreciation for inbound marketing and content marketing, which was really going through a massive shift at that point, right? Like right then or shortly thereafter, really inbound marketing and content marketing started to be a thing, become mainstream. And I always had my eye on it from the sales side because of my journalism roots, I think, and my love for content. And I remember this visual that HubSpot put out maybe in one of their Academy courses and it was like,
00:01:19
Speaker
comparing outbound versus inbound. And outbound was this megaphone that, hey, you've been interrupting your prospects, right? But now it's a noisier world. That's not as effective. You need to put down the megaphone and you need to pick up a magnet. And instead of interrupting with a megaphone, you're gonna be attracting with that magnet. You're putting out informational, educational content that's gonna draw your prospects in. And that still works to a degree, but it's getting harder. And I think the reason is is that
00:01:47
Speaker
If you have this mental picture in your mind of yourself, you know, your company, your magnet and your prospect seems like, why isn't it working anymore? But if you zoom out, you see that your prospect is surrounded by magnets, right? Everywhere around them. Other companies putting out content, trying to attract them.
00:02:02
Speaker
that Netflix series demanding their attention. TikTok taking up 30 minutes, 40 minutes, okay, let's be honest, three hours of their day, whatever it is, right? And guess what? Some of those magnets are bigger and more powerful than yours. So you have the option to try and just create a bigger magnet, create more content, create more ads, send more emails, but it's hitting a point of diminishing return.
The Shift from Inbound to Nearbound Marketing
00:02:27
Speaker
Really, this term of near bound, I started to hear from Isaac and Jared at Partner Hacker. They've recently merged with a SaaS platform called Reveal.
00:02:37
Speaker
And where I think this concept of near-bound marketing comes in is if the magnet's not working, what can you do differently? Near-bound is going from outbound that was interrupting, inbound that was attracting to now near-bound, the word is surrounding. So how can you reach into the market to the folks that are closer to and have trust with the target audience you're trying to reach?
00:03:02
Speaker
and use the collective power of all those magnets to draw your prospects in. So it's still that similar motion. We're not saying you need to go from pulling to pushing, but you need to find a better way to get enough pull to pull in your audience and by surrounding them with people that they already know, like, and trust and working with them.
00:03:23
Speaker
marketing together instead of marketing alone. That's really the shift to near bound marketing and how it compares to the evolution from outbound to inbound to now near bound.
00:03:34
Speaker
So pulling from all sides instead of just one side, kind of. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing is like, you know, if you've ever played with a little stack of magnets, right? If you have one, it can maybe pick up a penny, right? But if you stack them all together, all of a sudden you could pick up something really heavy. So like, I think the analogy kind of holds. I like that. That's a great analogy. Yeah, for sure.
Teamwork's Co-Creation Strategy
00:03:53
Speaker
So how are you guys doing this at teamwork with agency life?
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, so we recently we wanted to I think one thing I've heard my friend Dan Sanchez, who was a previous guest on on this show. He's talked about this idea called a meatball Sunday. Your content is like this mixture of bottom of the funnel product stuff.
00:04:14
Speaker
top of the level thought leadership stuff. And you put that all on your blog, you put it all in one newsletter and like a meatball Sunday doesn't sound very good. Even though meatballs taste great and Sundays are awesome. Ice cream is great. You don't want them together. And we recognized we wanted to do more thought leadership. We wanted to take a near bound approach and not just create content from our brand, but with the people in and around our audience. So our audience, our agency owner, so we wanted to,
00:04:42
Speaker
talk to existing agency owners, whether they were our customer or not. We wanted to talk to consultants who work with agencies day in and day out. We wanted to bring in people who are serving and providing other things of value to agencies. So one, we wanted to take a near-bound approach and focus on co-creating content. And two, we wanted to create a separate area for this thought leadership content that is less tied to our brand that is, I don't know if it's the meatball or the ice cream,
00:05:11
Speaker
It's one or the other and segment it and make it this destination that obviously it's presented by teamwork, but you're not going to find product updates. You're not going to find feature releases. You're not going to find case studies and customer testimonials. We still have all that.
00:05:26
Speaker
And as much as I'm a brand guy, like product marketing still has its place, but separating that out. So I think for us, it was their recognition that we want to co-create content. And also we want to create a separate place for our thought leadership segmented to a degree away from our product marketing and some of those other things that are still necessary, but better when you're consuming them a little bit separately or alone.
Content Engagement on LinkedIn
00:05:53
Speaker
And so how are you driving people to that?
00:05:56
Speaker
coming in through just all from the website from LinkedIn. Where's it all coming from? Yeah. So for me, I'm a big believer in LinkedIn organic. And, uh, I've, you know, preached this because I saw it in a previous role as with an agency, uh, sweet fish. And we ran an evangelist program as a small agency. We didn't have a ton of budget for, for paid ads.
00:06:20
Speaker
a lot of the things that larger B2B SaaS companies have. And so we leaned into the personal profiles of our individuals, activating those. Myself and Dan were two of the most active in that evangelist program. And so it's early, but one I've started to share
00:06:37
Speaker
content from agency life that we're creating, the podcast episodes, the webinars, the clips that are coming from that, those sorts of things. My goal is to eventually activate more internal evangelists. I think what a lot of people do, whatever you're trying to drive people to, if it's a content hub like agency life, if it's a podcast, a webinar series, you might have a strategy for repurposing content and creating micro assets that are designed to drive people to that, but you use them just once.
00:07:06
Speaker
And I think that's a crying shame. Like if you're creating micro content to promote that, why can't you use that through multiple profiles in different places like in your email newsletter, um, in paid ads through different individuals who are posting organically through a boosted.
00:07:22
Speaker
Company page post those sorts of things so linked in both paid and organic we also took a Content newsletter that we had I will give a hat tip to the rest of the marketing team at teamwork We were avoiding that meatball Sunday sort of thing we had segmented our product update newsletters that some people want and
00:07:41
Speaker
and our thought leadership, our content newsletter, and we rebranded that content newsletter to be agency life. Because it's like, if we're making this effort here and this year, why would we have a different name or not tie this together? So that was some built-in
00:07:59
Speaker
a built-in channel that we found that we could leverage by taking that content newsletter, rebranding it, putting it in line so that we don't have these different channels on their own editorial calendar, not kind of feeding off of each other. So it's been a number of different things. I feel like I was rambling, but those are some of the things that are playing into it, man.
00:08:17
Speaker
No, I can confirm that I found Agency Life through LinkedIn. And it's interesting how you describe the evangelist, evangelism at Sweetfish. That's how I found you. I first found Dan, I found James, and I found you all through that way. And now, even though you switched companies, I have now found Agency Life. And I'm enjoying the content on there, especially because I'm starting an agency.
00:08:44
Speaker
Perfect little hub for me that doesn't exist anywhere else. Not that I have found because I'm on LinkedIn and I haven't seen it. Thank you for checking it out. What's needed for a B2B company to implement this kind of strategy? What kind of resources do they need to have?
Key Personas in Nearbound Marketing
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, I think the good news is that you obviously with a near bound approach, it's still driven by content much like the inbound approach that we've all been used to for the last 10, 15 years. So you still need people who can create content, those sorts of things. To me, three key personas though have come to mind that I think marketing teams either need to identify to bring into the mix and add to their existing
00:09:32
Speaker
roles within the marketing team or at least look for these skills or these descriptors of these personas that they can add to their marketing team. One, I think, are journalists. That was how I got into B2B sales and marketing was, you know, I loved content. I loved telling a story. I loved being able to communicate that both written and visual. I was a photojournalism major, so I knew enough about photography and videography to be dangerous, but also was trained in writing and that sort of stuff.
00:10:00
Speaker
And to me, I think there's a huge opportunity. Obviously, when I left journalism in 2008, it was going through a lot of disruption and a lot of contraction. Well, that's still happening today. And I've heard people on LinkedIn say that like B2B marketers are journalists that just actually get paid for the work that they do.
00:10:17
Speaker
And I think there are a lot of people who still haven't realized that reality. And where that fits with nearbound marketing is if nearbound is different from inbound saying that we're not just going to use our magnet. We're not just going to create content alone and put it out there and try and draw people in.
00:10:34
Speaker
we're going to co-create content, then I think what journalists can do is they can identify those people out in the market that have the stories to tell, identify the people out in the market that already have the trust, because that's what journalists do. They don't just do great storytelling, they're great at story finding.
00:10:53
Speaker
And I think that's what a lot of B2B marketing teams are missing. They don't know how to find those stories. They don't know how to work their network. They don't have a rolodex of sources like a journalist does, that sort of stuff. Because that's not been their skill set, right? So I think if you can pluck people from journalism onto your
00:11:09
Speaker
B2B marketing team, you're in a great spot. Or you might find people who just have that skill set. Do they know how to find a story? Do they know how to chase something down? Do they have obviously the communication skills, but obviously any modern content team in a B2B SaaS company is going to have writers and videographers and folks like that. So I won't belabor that too much, but I think journalists.
00:11:31
Speaker
You know, I, that's really funny that you say that because recently I have been, I mean, partially because what I've been doing, you know, at recorded is where we interview people and just make video content out of that. And so I've been trying to learn about more about journalism to help me with that. And I've come to the realization that
00:11:51
Speaker
You know, you have people, B2B companies, they need subject matter experts to have the expertise for the content, but they need someone to extract that content out of them because they often don't have the expertise to know how to create that content and what content to create. So I think.
00:12:07
Speaker
There's a new position, a new job role that's coming into play. It's going to be some kind of content journalist, B2B journalist, something like that. I couldn't agree with you more, man, because it's something that I took from my time at Sweetfish. Obviously being a podcast production company, we thought a lot about interviewing skills and how do you train your guests and that sort of stuff.
00:12:30
Speaker
And I'll credit Timmy Bauer for putting this in my mind. He mentioned when we were both at Sweetfish there, he's like, everybody has experience-based content to share. But there are two problems. One, they don't know what that good experience-based content is. They just don't know how to identify it. And or two, they don't know how to share it, to your point. You might have that SME internally. And I've heard marketers say, oh, we've got such great thought leaders within our organization.
00:13:00
Speaker
Are they thought leaders? Is anyone following their thoughts? Are they sharing their thoughts? No, then they're a subject matter expert. But if you have a journalist who can extract that content from them, you can take them from SME to thought leader, but you need those journalistic skills. So I think that's why that's one on the three personas. I think marketing teams need to start adding and incorporating more.
Authenticity in Marketing through Former Buyers
00:13:21
Speaker
The second one kind of blends into the third. And so two and three on this list for me are content creators. And number three would be former buyers.
00:13:34
Speaker
One of the two podcasts that I host, you mentioned Agency Life. I'm also the host of a show called Marketing Together. And on that show, a previous episode, I interviewed Arthur Castillo at Chili Piper. And he was talking about how they're working with content creators slash influencers in B2B sales space. And he was like, we started working with Kevin Dorsey, known as KD, and Beck Holland. They have audience. They are in the B2B sales space. But what was interesting to me is he didn't just identify them as content creators that they're
00:14:03
Speaker
marketing team could work with to reach a sales audience. They were former buyers. They had implemented Chili Piper. They had solved the problems of routing inbound leads and closing that time from demo request to book to meeting those things that Chili Piper is working on solving for their audience. So I think that marketing teams can leverage people who have sat in the seat
00:14:28
Speaker
of the buyer that they're trying to reach because one it's a more trusted message going back to what we were talking about earlier you need to surround your buyers with a message of trust and two if they've been creating content it's likely content that that is believable that is authentic because so often
00:14:49
Speaker
B2B marketing teams, who do we task with generating the content ideas and starting to create it for these different personas? It's the entry level, it's the marketing intern and no knock on them, but they've never been a B2B SaaS salesperson. They've never been a VP of sales or a CMO or a CIO or CTO or head of people ops, any of these personas, it doesn't matter, right?
00:15:13
Speaker
If you can create content with people who are not only great content creators but have sat in the seat of your buyer, that is a much more trusted message than just coming from the brand where you're kind of cranking it out from your content engine that's just coming from what you're Googling and what you're researching and it doesn't come from that true hands-on experience.
00:15:35
Speaker
I think there's some blurring of the lines of those three personas, journalists, content creators, and former buyers. But I think those are the things that marketing teams can be looking for as they assemble what I would call a nearbound marketing team or a segment of their marketing team dedicated to nearbound. And so how do you reach out to someone, people that are in the similar ecosystem? How do you reach out to these people to do the content collaborations that you need to be able to do nearbound marketing?
Personalized Outreach and Relationship Building
00:16:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think it comes from similar to what we advise B2B salespeople, right? Like you don't spray and pray. You customize the message. You go where they are. You engage. You try and warm up the relationship before you go for an ask. Because if you are a marketer focused on near-bound marketing and content collaboration and co-creation,
00:16:30
Speaker
You're still pitching someone on something, right? You're asking them for their time to listen to your message or read your LinkedIn DM. You're asking them for their time to come on your podcast or be a panelist on your live stream, whatever the case is. And so you want to personalize it. You want to engage with them so they know who the heck you are before you make an ask.
00:16:51
Speaker
And third, I think you want to make it easy for them. So one of the things for me when I stepped into head of partnerships at Teamwork, I identified, hey, who has the ear of agency leaders? Well, one guy I know, Pete Caputa, he built the agency program at HubSpot that is now prolific. He's now at Data Box where they work with a lot of agencies in their partner program. And I see him talking about
00:17:17
Speaker
advice for agencies, not in all his content, but in a fair amount of it. And I'm seeing our ICP at teamwork agencies engaging with his content. So I'm like, okay, Pete's a good guy to get to know. We both know Jared Fuller. When I sent a connection request to Pete, I'm like, Hey, Jared, we both know Jared.
00:17:37
Speaker
I'd love to connect. Here's why that personalized that boom. I didn't immediately ask him to create some content with us. Right. Over the next few weeks, I'm engaging with his posts, that sort of stuff. And then I noticed a post where he was like five steps for an agency to go from an agency to a consultancy and how that will help you drive higher margins. I'm like,
00:17:58
Speaker
sweet. I'm now hosting a monthly live stream for teamwork. We're now folding that live stream in the agency life, but it wasn't part of that hub yet. And I'm like, this would be great content there. So now not only am I connected with Pete, he's seen me engaging in his comments, those sorts of things. When I asked him, I was like, Hey, will you speak on this live stream? And I wasn't just like, Hey, will you speak?
00:18:23
Speaker
I was like, we could turn this post into, you know, a 45 minute discussion. We'll do the deck. We'll, we'll focus it on this. I'll interview you going back to that, like extracting content from a journalistic, uh, sort of approach, um, as opposed to like, can you show up? Can you build the deck? Can you run a presentation? It's like, no, you already have these thoughts. I'm going to tease out more. You're not going to have to do the heavy design lift or anything like that.
00:18:51
Speaker
And you're not going to have to do a ton more than just show up and speak passionately. And like, I was looking at the chat on that live stream and people were like, whoa, Pete is getting fired up and this and that. And I didn't have to make a big ask because I identified the right person. I built the relationship over time. I personalized that outreach and then I made it easy for them to create content with us.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, that was just making it easy as possible for them. Least amount of effort makes sense.
The Role of Trust in B2B Sales
00:19:20
Speaker
Who do you think this strategy works best for? Are there certain kinds of B2B companies that would wear
00:19:30
Speaker
when your bound marketing would work best coming to others? You know, candidly, I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about this. Like, does it work better if you've got a high volume, high velocity, low ACV model? Or does it work better in a service-based industry or SaaS with a higher LTV? What I will say is this.
00:19:54
Speaker
maybe as I'm just thinking out loud because you prompted me and asked the question. So this is kind of meta, right? Extracting content. I'm not quite sure what it is yet is that
00:20:03
Speaker
One thing I've heard from Jared Fuller at Partner Hacker, and I alluded to this earlier, I forget if it was 06, 07, 08, it was declared that data is the new oil. And now we had data could fuel all these things in our content marketing and especially in performance marketing. Well, now we have all this data and we have all this information. We have all these magnets around us.
00:20:26
Speaker
Now, trust has replaced data. Trust is the new data, is something I've been saying. I've been hearing Jared and his co-founder at Partner Hacker Isaac saying a lot. And I think that the bigger the investment, the more that you're going to need to lean into this fact that trust really accelerates things. I've heard people say, well, B2B buying isn't really emotional like it is with B2C. And maybe there are some exceptions.
00:20:56
Speaker
the person who really is into cars or even sneakers or whatever. There's a lot of motion tied up in that. But in a B2C purchase, if you make the wrong purchase, maybe you have to drive to UPS to return it to Amazon, but no big deal. But if you pick the wrong sales engagement platform or you pick the wrong marketing automation or you pick the wrong agency for your B2B brand and you're making a more high consideration, high dollar purchase,
00:21:24
Speaker
your job, your career, and your livelihood could very well be on the line. Not to sound too dramatic, but you're putting your neck out there and usually expending some political capital to make that decision. That's also why people are making B2B buying decisions by committee, so they're not the only one with their hand on the flag. They're like, hold this flag up with me and wave it a little bit. But I say all that to say,
00:21:49
Speaker
the bigger the purchase, the more the risk for the buyer, the more that they're not going to just look at G2 and do a Google search. They're going to text their colleagues. They're going to go to that Slack group, whether that's like a pavilion or something like that. And they're going to ask people like, what was your experience? Like, Hey, Dylan, I see you use this platformer. I see you've
00:22:12
Speaker
use that agency before, tell me the real deal. I know what the review says. It says 4.2 stars. They all say 4.2 stars. So I would say that as you climb up in high consideration, high dollar purchase, it's even more important to lean into this aspect of trust is really what's fueling things is the new data was the new oil.
00:22:37
Speaker
But I think all of B2B can see that this is happening, that the inbound magnet is weakening, that it's harder to draw people in. So I'd say it's broadly applicable. The more that you're asking people to spend, the more you're going to need to lean into a near bound approach to leverage trust.
00:22:53
Speaker
This is exactly what I have been focusing on my content in the past couple of weeks on LinkedIn because so many people on LinkedIn are creating content. And for a lot of them, their goal is to build their audience, but get followers. And so recently to answer that really common, just accepted belief is that that's not always the case for everyone. You don't need that many followers. So I kind of created a graph where the
00:23:23
Speaker
The higher the cost of the service, really the fewer followers you need. If you sell a $100,000 service and you get five people to trust you enough to buy it, that's half a million dollars. If you're selling a $100 online course, you don't need that much trust, but you need a ton of people to just know about it. Because of that, you need lots of followers.
00:23:47
Speaker
Like you said, to offset the amount of risk, you need to focus on trust rather than something. I think it goes deep on the different kinds of content that you make. Some will naturally attract more followers, some will attract more trust, and you need to focus on trust. Really interesting point about that.
00:24:09
Speaker
And so, also a similar topic. In agency life, you only have long form content. Podcast episodes, webinars, articles, ebooks. I'm assuming this is similar just because it builds more trust. Is there a certain reason why short form content couldn't work?
00:24:34
Speaker
for this kind of approach?
Incorporating Short-form Content for Trust Building
00:24:35
Speaker
That's a really astute observation and a really great question. And it's actually, no, I don't think that a longer form content builds more trust. It's primarily been a resource thing. So right now my plan is to actually change that. And I had a conversation with Laura on our marketing team.
00:24:56
Speaker
about this earlier and we were in full alignment. So going forward at a minimum, what we're gonna be doing is out of each and every podcast episode. So we have the live stream series monthly. We have the podcast episodes weekly. We may do this with both, but starting with the podcast, we're gonna do a few things. One, we're gonna make sure we get at least three short form video clips out of that. And I think the normal approach would be to push those out through the company page.
00:25:22
Speaker
I'm saying no, no, no, we want to take a near bound approach. We want to activate evangelists within our network to share that content because I think near bound is about reaching in and creating content with the people who are closer to your buyer, but it's also about distributing that content with the people who are closer to your buyer. And so I think that's your employees. I think that's your partners. It could be advisors.
00:25:46
Speaker
could be executives on the team because then the content is coming through personal profiles. And I know like you and Dan and probably previous episodes in the show, you've talked about like the idea of an evangelist program, which to me is like new version of employee advocacy. I hear employee advocacy and it's like old way.
00:26:03
Speaker
evangelism program new way. So all that to say short form clips, which I know you do a great job of and is core to your service here. So I'm a big believer in that. So making sure like we get at least three out of every podcast episode, doing carousels as well. I've found a little hack to use the bulk create
00:26:22
Speaker
a new option in Canva to make that faster. One thing I'm toying around with is doing a carousel in two versions. Like one that kind of highlights the guest and speaks from the third person point of view. So I could post that. I could share with that with another team worker who could post it. And it's like, hey, Jay Owen from Business Builders was on talking about EOS and here's what he said and da, da, da, da. And then tweaking it just a little bit where it's in the first person tense and sharing that with the guest and being like, hey,
00:26:52
Speaker
We already wrote this carousel for you and post that and testing the different formats between text, video, and carousels. And then I think the other thing we want to do is not just have the video content be distributed through LinkedIn, but also take those clips. I think there's a huge opportunity with YouTube Shorts right now
00:27:12
Speaker
um in the changes that have been going on there for it seems like a while in the you know social media and and uh channel uh um terms of timeline it feels like it's been a while right but um youtube shorts and then also embedding those on the site so that because one of the first things i looked at in our design of agency life i was like i don't have a whole lot of faces and i think to harp on the
00:27:38
Speaker
uh, the topic of trust, like seeing faces, seeing eyeballs, seeing people on videos, seeing pictures of people, like builds a lot more trust than kind of this nameless faceless content hub. So I want to see more of that. And I think incorporating the videos, not only into our social channels, not only into YouTube, but in the content hub on our owned media asset at agency life will be a big piece of it as well.
00:28:02
Speaker
I hope this episode helped you understand how inbound and outbound marketing are no longer your two options. By using nearbound marketing and co-creating with your whole ecosystem, you can build a stronger magnet and more effectively bring in new customers. A big shout out to Logan for joining me today. Definitely check him out on LinkedIn. You'll learn a ton about B2B marketing. And if you own or work at an agency, definitely take a look at AgencyLifeOnTeamwork.com to find some really amazing resources on building your agency. I hope to see you all next episode.