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00:00:01
Are Solo Creators Better at Building an Audience? w/Mj Peters
30 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Dan Sanchez talks to MJ Peters who is the VP of Growth at Refine Labs about whet her solo creators are strong audience builders than businesses.
Together they explore:
The pros and cons of each
How businesses can tap into the power of individuals
Together they explore:
The pros and cons of each
How businesses can tap into the power of individuals
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Topic Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to the Attention podcast. I'm Dan Sanchez with Sweetfish, and today I'm here with MJ Peters, who is the head of growth at Refine Labs. MJ, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Dan.
00:00:14
Speaker
Today we'll be talking about solo creators versus companies when it comes to creating content specifically to build an audience.
Solo Creators vs. Companies
00:00:22
Speaker
Over time, I think anybody listening to this show or who is hearing this on LinkedIn knows that there's a difference when it comes to the people creating all the content, like what shows we're actually subscribing to. Usually the shows we're listening to are made by
00:00:36
Speaker
creators or media companies that are specialized in just producing media. We go to the New York Times. We go to Gimlet. We go to Mr. Beast if you're into that kind of thing on YouTube. But as B2B marketers, we're often competing with these guys out there. But it sometimes seems to me like one is much better at creating content than the other. Not to say that there haven't been some very successful B2B marketing campaigns or content marketing campaigns out there. There have
Trust and Connection: Individuals vs. Companies
00:01:04
Speaker
been.
00:01:04
Speaker
We all know that there's been, like Refine Labs is a great example, which is why I wanted to talk to MJ here, who's been on the Refine Labs teams for a while now. And you have your own LinkedIn following you've been building up. I know I've been a big fan of your content. So I wanted to talk to you as an expert in the space about the difference between solo creators and companies when it comes to content marketing. Starting with, why do you feel like solo creators are better at creating an audience than companies are?
00:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, so I'll start with, I do think this varies a little bit from platform to platform. And I don't necessarily know why this is, but I just feel like on some platforms it is a standard operating procedure to follow a company or engage with a company and treat that company like a human.
Developing a Brand Voice
00:01:55
Speaker
And I think probably the best example of that is Twitter. On Twitter.
00:01:59
Speaker
companies can quote-unquote get away with acting like humans and talking like humans and people interact with companies and subsequently I think you see companies with huge followings, especially B2C companies, I think. But on LinkedIn, I think
00:02:15
Speaker
personal pages are far outperforming company pages. And I think at the end of the day, what it really comes down to is people trust people. They want to hear from people and they, it's almost the company has a profit motive or a revenue motive or a growth motive, but a person has personal
Value of Original Thinking in Content Creation
00:02:35
Speaker
goals and as an individual, you can relate to that. So you can, it's almost an automatic inbuilt trust that an individual creator has that a company needs to earn.
00:02:46
Speaker
It's interesting. It makes me think that as an individual, you almost have a baked in story or are more likely to have a story in a narrative of where you've been, where you are, and where you're going, where a company might not. A company story, I don't know if you've ever sat through like story sessions and you're like, our goal is we want to make more money, which is compelling to nobody versus an individual might have a more compelling story. For sure. You think that plays a role in why people like to follow people.
00:03:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think story for sure, as well as voice. So one of the most interesting exercises I've ever been through from a brand building perspective was at the last company I worked for, we all sat down in a room, and the consultant we were working with challenged us to define the character that would have our company voice, if our company voice was owned by a character, right?
00:03:43
Speaker
They started with a real historical character or a person, a fictional character. Our voice is Peter Pan, but more serious, right? So that's how the exercise went. And I think it's a very helpful exercise because you didn't, you don't associate a voice with a company. The voice has to come from a person. So in order to develop a strong company voice, you had to make up a fictional person that you could then associate your company back to so that everyone could write in this person's voice. It just like removes that psychological barrier.
00:04:12
Speaker
whereas obviously a person has a voice and I actually think the Refine Labs company page has a very easy time of writing in the brand voice because the brand voice is Chris Walker and he's a real person so our company page just writes in Chris Walker's voice and it's quite easy but I think a lot of company pages struggle with that because they don't have an external person or a person that works at the company who is the company's voice and so they need to manufacture one and if you can't then you have a bunch of people making their own assumptions about what the voice should be
Embracing Controversial Opinions
00:04:41
Speaker
Makes a ton of sense. And it reminds me the most of like, mostly B2C companies doing this. We can't think of a B2B company that's created like a character of some kind. But even companies that have wildly successful brands like Coca-Cola have created Twitter accounts for, I think it's Doc Pepperton, something like that. Where it's like they've created this like old historic figure of the founder and kind of given him a quirky voice, even though it's like, I don't know if they actually reached back into his like old journals or something. Probably not. I think they just thought about like, what could it be? And then created that, but.
00:05:10
Speaker
It also makes me think that even professional personal brands sometimes are a personification more than reality when it comes to what that personal brand is, especially the most successful ones have usually taken three or four aspects of true reality of a person, but like over exaggerated them. Like Gary Vee's a good example on how much bravado he has. And I'm like, I wonder what he's actually like in real life. Yeah, intense.
00:05:38
Speaker
And it's interesting because you gotta believe multiple people are working on the Gary Vee personal brand that are not Gary Vee. You see the trend, I think, especially on Twitter again,
Balancing Audience Growth and Product Promotion
00:05:47
Speaker
where it's, oh, I'll sign with my initial tweets that I actually wrote. And so you're like, oh, that means all the other tweets are not actually written by you. And so I do think big professional personal brands like that lose their personal touch because it's not one human writing it.
00:06:02
Speaker
It's weird. I just feel like people have a lie detector for that sort of thing. Like we can spot for some reason, instantly, whether this is an authentic human writing their real thoughts or whether it's part of a, more of a machine. That's interesting. So do you, you say that you can't hire someone to write things for you, even if they're like rehashing things that you've said before, or maybe pulling from like a keynote that you've done or I don't know, past media that you've created.
00:06:31
Speaker
I think that you can, but it does mean that you're going to be always one step behind where the original thinker is. And we see this at Refine Labs. Some of the most interesting content from Refine Labs is on State of Demand Gen.
00:06:49
Speaker
our podcast because it's like Chris's latest up-to-date thoughts. He talks for an hour and a half every single week, so you're getting like his raw, unfiltered, this is exactly what Chris is thinking about right now, and then we rehash that content in a lot of places, but if you want the most up-to-date stuff, you should come to Demand Gen Live, and it's always Chris's original thing. The one thing that extended teams cannot replicate is original thinking.
00:07:14
Speaker
Absolutely. I totally agree with that. I find that at most what they can do is just help you cover maybe more ground or more channels by splintering off what you've already said. Because we all know like you might be able to hit it big with one LinkedIn post, but it's kind of, you want to get some more mileage out of like really good original thinking or thought leadership as cringy as that term can be.
00:07:35
Speaker
And that's why I think we have a real advantage over a lot of other brands at Refine Labs, because not only do we have Chris, who produces a ridiculous amount of really great original thinking that we can repurpose and be on a lot of channels, which, by the way, you should do, right? I'm not, this is not a diatribe against repurposing content for lots of channels. It's a great thing to do. It's just that you can't replicate original thinking. Somebody has to be doing that and producing it.
00:08:01
Speaker
But in addition to Chris, we've got 10, 20 people that work here that do a lot of their own original thinking. And sometimes we don't completely agree with Chris, right? We have our own thoughts on things. And we have replicated original thinking by actually having additional people inside of the company that are doing original thinking and that like to do it and publish in their own voice.
00:08:23
Speaker
Yep, so you're taking a lot of the core philosophies of Refinery Labs and Chris, but putting your own twist on it, and that's 100% authentic at the same time, but still echoing the company kind of ethos. Yeah, because we hire for philosophical alignment, and one of the compelling reasons to join Refinery Labs is you've done it the old way before, and you felt the pain of that, and you want to be part of this new revolution. So the people that want to apply naturally or philosophically align, we
00:08:53
Speaker
It's one of our criteria in our interview process, so everyone believes the core tenets of what the company believes, but it's very authentic when people can put their own spin on it through their own lived experiences that are not the same as Christmas. So obviously, Refine Labs is an exception to those companies that are doing a fantastic job of creating content and building a substantial audience. What do you think other B2B companies can learn specifically from solo creators when it comes to building an audience where B2B companies are missing?
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think the first thing that comes to mind is that I think company pages or brand presences tend to be quite conservative in what they're willing to say, whereas personal brands or individuals are willing to be a bit more controversial. And at the end of the day, the most interesting content is something that people might disagree with.
00:09:51
Speaker
And so companies can be more open about letting their employees have controversial opinions and putting them out there because it gets engagement. It's interesting. It starts a conversation. But a lot of company brands won't take a stance themselves. And so I think there's three levels. Some company brands will not only not be controversial on their company comms, but they'll also shut down their employees from being controversial.
00:10:19
Speaker
Other companies will be very vanilla on their company profile, but they will allow their employees to express their views, and then some companies also take a point of view, a strong point of view, on their company profile. And so Refine Labs is in the third category, but if you're in the first category, you can move to the second category, and if you're in the second category, you could consider moving into the third category.
00:10:40
Speaker
It's funny that fear I find only grows more intense the larger the company is. I know Sweetfish a couple of times, I've gotten on some sale pitches with like Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies as scrutiny. Every piece of content gets on your, I don't know if we're going to be a good fit because if you have to literally approve every single line of every single podcast, I'm just gonna.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's not the best way to build an audience, but at the same time, they're that protective because they've been sued a few times and they've hired some lawyers. Yeah, I can totally understand it. And it's part of the reason that early stage smaller scrapier companies have an advantage when it comes to audience building and
00:11:20
Speaker
It's interesting because a lot of big companies have advantages that those small companies don't have, so audience growth could be the secret weapon that these small companies can use to
Audience-Driven Product Development
00:11:30
Speaker
compete against larger companies.
00:11:33
Speaker
Or are they going to just acquire the ones that have already built an audience, right? Lovespot did not too long ago with the hustle. I wonder if there's more plays or I haven't seen anybody do this yet, but I wonder if there's almost like a play where you create like a separate LLC that's owned by the company, but it's branded separately with a skunk works team to build an audience and then pull it in once it's hit like a media market fit of some kind. I haven't seen anybody do that, but I'm guessing that'll come. I love that idea. I think that's super interesting and de-risks it for the company.
00:12:03
Speaker
So there's probably a lot that can be learned from solo creators for B2B companies. But have you seen practices from solo creators that you think companies should avoid or maybe just can't do because of the nature of being a company versus a person?
00:12:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's, uh, that's interesting. I again think that this varies a little bit by platform, but on LinkedIn in particular, I find it very strange when company pages comment on my content. I, I think as an individual, you can use the comment section, especially of, of large creators profiles or just people you want to connect with, maybe their prospects.
00:12:42
Speaker
to form a relationship with them, but I do think it comes off a little bit cringy if a company page does that. On the flip side, I'm seeing, again, mostly in B2C, company pages take advantage of the comments section on TikTok, and it just seems authentic there. So there's kind of culture codes for the different channels that you have to stay in line with when you're deciding what you can and cannot do authentically as a company page.
00:13:07
Speaker
Funny that you articulated that. It's making me think I've felt the same way. There is a common culture there because I know we've all complained to airlines and had conversations with them on Twitter, but we don't do that on LinkedIn. Hardly ever talk to companies on LinkedIn unless you happen to give them a shout out and then their company page shows up and be like, Hey, thanks for the shout out. It's probably like the only stereotypical place where a page shows up. That's huh. Yeah, that made sense.
00:13:32
Speaker
Yeah, and Refine Labs gets shoutouts all the time on LinkedIn where people tag our company page, but I think it's a side effect of the individual personal brands and not necessarily
00:13:44
Speaker
an effect in and of itself of the company brand. So I do feel like our company page does really well on LinkedIn, but it's absolutely bolstered by the personal pages. I don't know if you would have as much success going out and just trying to build a company page if you weren't at the same time investing in personal pages or allowing your employees to build personal brands.
00:14:06
Speaker
That's interesting. Cause I know to build engagement specifically on LinkedIn, I find in large part due has to do with the amount of engagement you're giving to other posts. So it must be hard for a, usually it's hard for a company page to build an audience because you're not usually out there commenting, but if you are again, that's not the norm on LinkedIn. So I guess the only way to really build a company page is if one, you're, you started it and have such a large audience that you can just comment on it, which gets it in front of all your audience. Like.
00:14:35
Speaker
I know Dan Murray has done a lot with his marketing millennials. He just utilized his own personal audience to comment on his marketing millennials posts to then flood that
Complementing Personal and Company Brands
00:14:44
Speaker
post with traffic. I'm sure it's a little bit of the same with you guys, but at the same time, you've created such an ecosystem that it lifts the page up with everybody else. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about the engaging with others posts as the, as a way to increase the reach on your own posts and how that's might maybe a handicap that
00:15:04
Speaker
company pages have, but it's probably true. I also do think that the algorithm more generally treats company pages differently than personal pages, and I just think personal pages, regardless of that person's individual engagement, just get more reach, and I think you're always going to face a little bit of an uphill battle. It's interesting, we've talked a little bit about how the personal brands complement the effort on the company page, and I think there is a, like, a siphoning effect where
00:15:28
Speaker
Each personal brand has these followers and then they understand that all these people that seem to have great ideas are part of the company page. So they come back to the company page and maybe they follow the company page. You're almost siphoning followers from personal pages into the company page.
00:15:42
Speaker
And then, but then the same effect goes back outward, right? Where it now, if you join Refine Labs, your personal brand almost gets a boost because people know Refine Labs. So there are certainly people that have followed me because they're following Chris Walker and Megan Bowen and they're like, Oh, this person's creating content and they're from Refine Labs. So I should follow them. I've definitely seen that at Sweetfish and it's partly why I was able to grow.
00:16:05
Speaker
my own following was just, and I think it's also just relationally. Once you've joined the team, now other people who have following at Refine Labs are commenting on your stuff, which also enhances it. So it's like brand recognition of who you're working for, but also you've joined a community officially. And now just through that relational tie, it's going to, it's going to grow an audience. It's kind of an interesting dynamic. I will tell you what though, Chris Walker never likes or comments on
00:16:32
Speaker
team members post solely because they're a team member. He only likes your comments on it if he really likes it. So if Chris has engaged with somebody to post from inside of our team, it's because of the post's own merit. He's very strict about that. I believe it. Getting Chris Walker to comment on anything is very difficult.
00:16:49
Speaker
I think I've gotten it once, maybe twice. And only when I've had 50 other people at mention him in the post comments or something like that. Then he finally shows up and he's like, actually, this is what I think. You try to weed him into it. But yeah, he's, I remember hearing him talk about that too. He's very particular about what he comments on because that's almost like content in it itself.
Refine Labs' Content Strategy and Original Thinking
00:17:09
Speaker
His comments get a massive amount of likes on the post and it lifts the post, but he's almost like proving a point by commenting its content for him. So it's an interesting play too.
00:17:19
Speaker
When it comes to audience growth, like how much do you think a marketing team should actually focus on growing an audience versus promoting a product? So I think this audience growth thing, it's an up and coming topic. I hear people talking about it more and more, either acquiring audiences, building it, doing content marketing in such a way to grow influence, grow reach and engagement, right? People are calling them building engagement teams. I just found out from Panda Doc, they're sectioning off a whole part of their marketing team for it. What do you think the balance is there between just growing an audience and promotion?
00:17:50
Speaker
I think this is a really interesting question that you could take in a couple of different directions. So I'm going to take it in two different directions. I'll start by just from the perspective that you have a company and you want to promote your products. Should you promote your products or should you grow an audience? And I think
00:18:09
Speaker
If you grow an audience, you're acknowledging that at any given moment in time, a very small segment of the population of your total addressable market is actually ready to buy something. And so by building an audience, you can start to accumulate a following that is part of that total addressable market, whether they're ready to buy or not.
00:18:30
Speaker
And if they're engaged with you and they like your brand, at some point in time, your hope is that they will become ready to buy, and then they will think of you first. And that is, in my opinion, the best strategy. So audience growth at the end of the day is product promotion, but you're just acknowledging that the right time to promote a product for someone is not necessarily right now.
00:18:55
Speaker
On the other hand, I think there's a very interesting thought process that some people are building an audience before they have a company. So they figured out how to build the audience and then later they figure out how to monetize. And so you're building an audience of engaged followers because you have a point of view. And so by the time you launch a product, you already have a brand and it almost de-risks company building in a way.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah, it just takes a little bit. It takes a little longer, a little harder. But honestly, I find that there's a growing trend even saw there's a great book published on this topic, it's called the embedded entrepreneur, essentially build a community and an audience first, then use the audience to build a product with them, because then it's easier to get the product market fit when you have a bunch of people willing to give you feedback, especially if you have hundreds or 1000s of them willing to talk to you. So I think that is a growing trend.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's very interesting to think about how those companies evolve. I think you're seeing some of the LinkedIn content creators that you and I quote-unquote grew up with, Dan, like the class of 2018 or 2019, whenever we all started posting, starting to monetize their followings. So I think a lot of people start with a, either a service or an educational product, like a course.
00:20:12
Speaker
And then once people build a service business, a lot of times they figure out that there is one automatable, repeatable thing that they're doing all the time and maybe they build software around that. So it's almost like audience, then service, then product is a very low risk way to evolve a business.
00:20:30
Speaker
Absolutely. I had a great conversation with Joe Polizzi, who's the founder of the Content Marketing Institute and the author of Content, Inc. Yes, that's the name of the book. Just a few months ago, he switched, he used to teach marketers how to build content, recently switched over to talking to creators who have audience how to build companies, because that I feel like in talking to him, we decided that's like, it seems like the tides are starting to turn.
Audience Leveraging for Business Building
00:20:56
Speaker
It used to be the people with the money
00:20:57
Speaker
had a lot of the control of what was going on. Hence, creators would build this audience and then they would get paid just a little bit of money for people to get in front of them and sell their stuff. Now, creators are finding out like, oh shoot, I can utilize this attention to actually build a massive company and do it for a fraction of the price of what you would have taken to do it before because now I have the attention of so many people.
00:21:18
Speaker
And now creators, Mr. Beast is like the flagship creator doing this. And only because he's so young and has gotten so much attention that he's launching whole restaurants and interesting businesses out of his, out of the attention that he's gained. But I feel like that's probably going to be more of a thing in the future where the less advertising they'll need, they'll depend less on advertising and we'll just be launching their own companies more and more often.
00:21:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting. I wonder how often the same person has both of those skill sets, audience building and company building, probably not very often. So in the past you had great company builders employing audience builders, and now in the future you might have great audience builders employing company builders. Potentially a good opportunity if you're more of a company builder than an audience builder to carve out a niche.
00:22:09
Speaker
It's true. I recently came in contact with a mom blogger that has a massive audience, probably an email list of millions.
00:22:16
Speaker
And they built the whole manufacturing set. But I walked, I just, a friend asked me to just give some marketing input. And there was clearly, there was so much money left on the table. Just looking at their website, I'm like, you haven't hired a marketer yet. They have a company of probably like a hundred people, 200 people. There's not a marketer on the team. You're like, there's a lot that can be done here. It's just that your audience is so strong that you could literally just throw products at them and they buy it because they love you so much. And it's a great distinction you make that audience building and marketing are not the same thing.
00:22:45
Speaker
Yep. They're different. Although audience building is a great skill for any marketer to have. And it's been very interesting for me to learn how to build an audience on LinkedIn because once you've built an audience on one platform, certainly other platforms are different and have their own challenges. And maybe your skills are not a hundred percent aligned with what works best on that platform, but you do.
00:23:10
Speaker
Acquire this baseline knowledge of how to build an audience that is transferable from channel. Absolutely It's like playing an instrument or at least that's what I hear people say it's once you've learned how to play one instrument It's easy to play others. I haven't played one. So I'm taking that their word for that but
00:23:25
Speaker
found that to be true in other topics. To come back to the original question, you were in charge of a different, you inherited a B2B SaaS company with maybe 30 marketers. How much of that team would you dedicate to audience growth versus product promotion? Or would you put all audience growth and just let people figure it out for themselves? Which is where I feel like Refine Labs is. I hardly ever hear Refine Labs talk about its service offering.
00:23:47
Speaker
Every very only when it's in context and as an example, is it actually? Yeah, it's interesting Refine Labs is the example because almost all of our product promotion happens during the sales process which you don't see unless you are in the sales process and I would argue that Refine Labs may have slightly over corrected for audience growth versus product
Tailored Content Strategies
00:24:09
Speaker
promotion. I don't think we think about
00:24:11
Speaker
product marketing enough and we're starting to think about it more and we're starting to scrutinize our sales process more and we hired a director of sales and I've got a product marketing position open on my team so we are going back in the other direction a little bit but for us the opportunities for upside in our revenue creation process have more to do with our product promotion than our audience growth because our audience growth is already
00:24:35
Speaker
crushing it. For most companies, I would imagine that there's more upside in audience growth than in product promotion. Most companies are better at product promotion. So if I were to inherit a SaaS company, I would first look at what are we already good at and where is the upside to determine where I want to invest. But if it was a blank slate, I would then assume that there's not a lot of audience yet. And so I'd probably go about 30% product promotion, 70% audience growth.
00:25:04
Speaker
And the reason I would even focus 30% on product promotion is because I think you need to do some of the foundational product marketing work. I'm just going to bucket that under product promotion, but you need to understand your customer, what problem they are solving, that you are solving for them and what the top, you know, benefits of your product actually are, not just what you think they are. And.
00:25:27
Speaker
You need to do some of, like your homepage needs to be in order, right? A couple of key pages on your website need to be in order and that's product promotion. And then the same research that you're doing to fuel the product promotion is going to help you on the audience growth. But if you do no product promotion and you do a hundred percent audience growth, you're not going to end up capturing a lot of the demand that you generate.
00:25:50
Speaker
Makes a lot of sense because if they show up on your website and have no idea who you are, what you offer, they might know who you are, but they can't understand what you're offering. Then they won't even hit that contact button or request the consultation. So you've been at Refine Labs for a while now and I'm curious to hear what are some things that you've learned about audience growth since working at Refine Labs and working closely with that team that you didn't understand before. What insights have you gained? Yeah, it's interesting. I think,
00:26:18
Speaker
It has been interesting to see the inner workings of the Refine Labs content machine. And I think a lot of people probably assume that Refine Labs has some secret formula to content production that makes our content really good.
00:26:34
Speaker
And to some extent that's true. We have really good processes for post-production and we ship content every single day. Our podcast goes out three times a week. And because of that, we're always at the top of the podcast feed and we get more organic distribution on the podcast, right? So like quantity is a strategy and processes enable that. But at the same time, I think a lot of companies assume that's the secret sauce. And if they can do that, then they will win. A huge part of it is just.
00:27:04
Speaker
Chris is an amazing original thinker. He comes up with incredible ideas at an extremely rapid pace. And so he's a great personality to build content pillars around. And so if you don't have that particular superpower inside of your company, then our content strategy is not the best content strategy for your, you need to build the right content strategy for your company and then build the processes around that. Sweetfish strategy.
00:27:34
Speaker
is totally different than the refine lab strategy, but also very effective, right? You don't necessarily have Chris Walker or a Chris Walker inside of your company. And that's why you have B2B growth and you, and you leverage all kinds of thought leaders that don't work in your company and it's extremely effective, right? So you figure out what works for you, but there's not one set of secret formula processes that are going to transform your content engine.
00:27:58
Speaker
It's interesting, I think because of the, this success of State of Demancia, naturally we have more people coming to us wanting to do a podcast. Chris Walker is like podcast. So naturally, like people have shown up to Sweetfish because they see Chris Walker in the LinkedIn feed. They see us in the LinkedIn feed and they reach out to Sweetfish. Usually we're doing more of an ABM approach when it comes to podcasting. And obviously we reach out to thought leaders and talk to lots of people all the time, like yourself.
00:28:21
Speaker
But more people are saying, no, we want to do the demand generation. And I have to walk them through what kind of thought leadership do you have? What kind of points of view are you ready to go at? And then part of the process actually is walking them through, developing those points of view, because most people haven't realized that's what powers the state of demand. Gen is a lot of strong points of view.
00:28:40
Speaker
and new ones all the time. So I actually think somewhat it's a harder way to do it. But obviously, like for building an audience, it's much greater if you hit if you have points of view that really address the main pain points that the audience is facing, which I think Chris has had a lot a number of them with the dark funnel with lead scoring not working as well as everybody would have hoped for and a number of different things.
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah, and I think I've watched this evolution of Sweetfish and how you talk about what you do. And I think the different approaches to podcasting, the ABM approach, the demand gen approach, is a relatively recent thing that you've started to put out there and organize your website around. And it's really smart, right? Because you're clarifying for people using your expertise in the market.
00:29:30
Speaker
what the different approaches to podcasting are, because people aren't thinking about it that way. They don't even know they should be thinking about it that way. And it really helps you be a consultative partner in your sales process. So I think that was a great marketing move by Sweetfish that I was taking notice of from the sidelines.
Exploring Content Strategies for B2B Growth
00:29:45
Speaker
I'd like to end with just one last question. Is there anything that you feel like is missing for audience growth development in the B2B community that you feel like people should know about? Yeah, I've been thinking
00:29:56
Speaker
about just company strategies to audience growth, reflecting on that a little bit lately. And we've already talked at length about the personality centric approach where you've got the Chris Walker and a bunch of content. He has a strong point of view and that becomes the content pillar. I think there's another approach
00:30:17
Speaker
which is more of the editorial-centric approach. And I think this is where you curate data and research, and you have to produce a lot of original insights about your market, but you become more of a news source and less of a source of opinions as a brand. And because the personality-centric approach is so viral right now,
00:30:45
Speaker
I think a lot of companies are focused on that and think that it's the way that they should go. But if I were starting to build a new audience on behalf of a company tomorrow, I would think very hard about should I go personality centric or should I go editorial centric and make that a very deliberate decision. I don't think there's enough content out there today about how to build the editorial centric version of this. And if you'd like a recommendation for a future guest on this podcast, I think Tom Wentworth from Recorded Future
00:31:23
Speaker
taking that approach. And I feel like that's going to be a common play maybe five years from now, but it's fairly expensive to hire journalists to go and do it. I honestly feel like good marketers aren't too far away from journalists, especially in this like interview podcast kind of format. You're having a lot of the same behaviors of journalists. Of course, journalists are going to be a little bit tighter and a little bit more well-trained and better asking questions, but we're not too far off from it. I think a lot of people will move
00:31:41
Speaker
something very interesting in that style.
00:31:48
Speaker
I almost wonder if you can straddle both. Essentially, I haven't seen it done a lot on LinkedIn or on podcasting, but on YouTube, I certainly have a number of YouTubers I follow that are journalistic in nature, but their personalities in it, so the questions they ask are the things they interject into the stories interesting in the way, and I like to follow them. There's a guy that focuses on borders and maps, his name's Johnny Harris, and he's just an interesting YouTuber, but he's very much a modern-day journalist, a multi-hat journalist because he's editing and doing all his own video footage and all that kind of stuff.
00:32:18
Speaker
I still think there's probably a place for that. For the person who likes to ask questions and then go and find it out because they're not the expert yet. They can be the student and they're figuring it out, but very much in a journalistic fashion. Yeah, journalistic fashion and then I think also the use of data.
00:32:38
Speaker
I think this is especially applicable to SaaS companies. SaaS companies generate an unbelievable amount of data and I think employing people that are great at analyzing and visualizing that data and then having a marketer put together the editorial components of it and packaging it up for distribution would be a very interesting play that would play well with the journalistic style to roll up into a great editorial content approach.
00:33:07
Speaker
Absolutely. That's such a great point. It's something we've been trying to do here at Sweetfish, but the packaging of it, it's so much more work than we ever thought. It's a lot of
Conclusion and Farewell
00:33:15
Speaker
work. MJ, thank you so much for joining me on the attention podcast. Where can people go to learn more from you? I am on LinkedIn. I post a couple of times a week and I'm on there as MJ Peters. So that's the best way to connect with me and my DMS are open. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me down.