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Content Curation and Account-Based Marketing
57 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, we welcome back Scott Rogerson, CEO of UpContent. This time we're talking about more than just curating content. We're discussing content curation's role in account-based marketing (ABM).
Scott shares his insights and tips on:
- using curation tools to listen for actionable content -- sales triggers -- as well as listening for news to keep your team up-to-date on target accounts
- leveraging curated content in social media to attract and engage with your target accounts
- how to incorporate curated content into an account-based microsite, blog, or newsletter
- what tools to consider for ABM-related content efforts
- and more
Also, don't miss Scott's answer to his just-for-fun question. It involves a protective mother giraffe!
Connect with Scott online:
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Transcript
Introduction to B2B Mix Show
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B Mix Show with Elena and Stacey. In each episode, we'll bring you ideas that you can implement in your sales and marketing strategy. We'll share what we know along with advice from industry experts who will join us on the show. Are you ready to mix it up? Let's get started.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hey everybody, Stacey Jackson here. And I'm Elena Jackson. We are the co-founders of Jackson Marketing. And in case you still haven't heard, we are also sisters. Stacey, what are we talking about today?
What is Account-Based Marketing?
00:00:32
Speaker
Today we're going to talk about ABM, but we're not just talking about the broad topic of ABM. We are going to talk about how you can leverage
00:00:41
Speaker
curated content to make the most of your time and effort when it comes to Account-based marketing and selling well, I know what are your thoughts on abm and content curation? So I think one thing that is Important to note is that over the last couple of years? I think abm has really been like a hot thing and is really starting to take off with a lot of companies so I think that
00:01:10
Speaker
when you're considering doing ABM, you need to also consider the whole content curation piece of it, because you don't want to always just talk about yourself, right? So I think it's really important to think about that as part of your strategy. If you're looking at doing ABM, or maybe you're already doing ABM, but you're not including content curation in that process. Yeah, and curation
00:01:36
Speaker
Even if you don't just talk about yourself in the content you create, curation just brings an additional air of credibility, especially when it supports what you're saying. So I really think if you're not using curation with your ABM, you might be missing out on some benefits.
Meet Scott Rogerson of UpContent
00:01:54
Speaker
And today's guest knows all about curation and he's got some thoughts on curation when it comes to ABM. Alena, why don't you introduce today's guest?
00:02:03
Speaker
I would love to. We actually have a repeat guest and his name is Scott Rogerson. Before founding up content, Scott was the CEO of a marketing agency where he saw firsthand how difficult and time consuming it is to manage and measure a content curation strategy, which sparked his idea to start up content so he could help others take some of the pain out of content curation.
00:02:28
Speaker
Up content, for those of you who don't know, is a content curation platform that helps communications teams discover and share trustworthy content to measurably increase engagement and reduce manual workflows. Up content's proprietary Discovery Engine services news and blog articles
00:02:46
Speaker
based on customer criteria and presents them in a collaboration-focused platform to help infuse a company's distributed expertise in the review and approval of articles. The platform makes it super simple to distribute content via social media profiles on your website, in newsletters, and more. In fact, our company,
00:03:06
Speaker
Marketing uses up content to populate our website's What We're Reading section and find curated content to share on social. Scott, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me back. I've been looking forward to this for some time.
00:03:20
Speaker
Yeah, we're glad to have you here. So today's topic is really more focused than just content curation.
Customizing Content for ABM
00:03:28
Speaker
We're going to talk about account-based marketing, and that's one of those big topics over the past few years and something we've heard our customers talk about. And with ABM, marketing and sales teams have to get super focused on very specific sectors or even down to specific target accounts.
00:03:45
Speaker
And that requires creating a lot of content that's specific to those sectors or targets, which also means a lot of time energy focus around marketing to those specific companies and even the very individual stakeholders at those organizations. And what we've heard people talk about when it comes to ABM is that traditional inbound and content marking tactics can be modified with ABM. And that's why we're talking to Scott today to talk about
00:04:13
Speaker
how curation can be used with ABM. Yeah. And so Scott, what do you think some of the biggest misconceptions are when it comes to content curation and ABM?
Misconceptions in Curated Content for ABM
00:04:23
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's a great question. And particularly over these last few months where a lot of the ABM process has moved almost entirely to digital. A lot of us are finding ourselves trying to rethink how we approach those target accounts. And, uh, you know, to step back a second and we think about ABM and the why,
00:04:42
Speaker
There was a very interesting report from Gartner. I think that just came out maybe a few weeks ago, talking about why ABM is important. And you know, two key takeaways that I found from that report was that the number of decision makers now in selecting your service or your product has increased from, you know, five people or so, maybe in the mid 2000, you know, 2015 time period to now it's closer to 10.
00:05:10
Speaker
people being involved in that decision process? And how do you convince all 10 to say yes? It's hard enough to try to convince two to say yes or one to say yes. And then more importantly, each one of those relies on an average amount of five pieces of information or five pieces of content to help them come up with that decision. And you as the person trying to make that deal happen are rarely involved in helping them select those five, right? You know, most of the time,
00:05:38
Speaker
they're making up their mind before they even talk to you or at least they've made up most of it. And so when we think about how content curation plays in, I think a lot of organizations still succumb to the feeling that the use of articles written by other people is part of that kind of filler approach or I'm trying to appeal to the masses and so I'm going to share some
00:06:02
Speaker
USA Today article that everyone should like and get that out on my social profile, where really curation can be best used to help you address your finite amount of resources. Instead of trying to create something for each one of those decision-makers, you can find great authoritative, well-written pieces of content that already talk about those problems.
00:06:26
Speaker
and get those to those right people and then drive everyone back to the original piece that's going to bring those 10 people together and help them realize that what you're providing is the right solution. So I think that's one big area.
Engaging Decision-Makers with Problem-Solving Content
00:06:41
Speaker
The other area as well, and I think Elena and Stacy, you've probably seen this as well, whether it's curated or original content, which is what the topic should be that you're writing about or that you're sharing about.
00:06:53
Speaker
Please don't make it 100% about your product, like the very small center of the target. If I'm selling rubber fittings for pipes, you're not going to find a lot of articles out there about rubber fittings for pipes that are created on a weekly basis. And most likely, the people who you're selling to aren't only interested in reading articles, even if you wrote them, about
00:07:18
Speaker
rubber pipe fittings, right? What they want to understand is what problem does that solve? And do you understand the issues that their industry is facing so that you can understand how your product fits within their problem and provides the solution? And there likely are a lot of great articles around how those fittings are then used in the larger solution. And finding those articles through curation can be really important. So not just focusing on your own area.
00:07:47
Speaker
And then finally, the third area that we've seen happen all too often, but I think is changing. As you mentioned in the intro, historically curation was just social media. And I want to find articles. I'm going to put them on my LinkedIn profile. And then everything else is original content only or direct outreach or my outbound campaigns. What we've seen particularly over the evolution of the last four months is that third party articles can do a heck of a lot of good.
00:08:16
Speaker
your email campaigns to re-energize those lists of contacts who you've already vetted and identified as being part of key accounts and give them a way to stimulate their re-engagement with your brand and with your services through using third-party articles in kind of a more periodic email campaign like a weekly digest or as part of those drip campaigns to avoid the
00:08:41
Speaker
This is me again, once again asking you if you'd like to set up a call,
Content Curation for Business Intelligence
00:08:45
Speaker
right? But instead using those third-party articles to get those contacts to engage. And so I think those are the three most common areas that we've recently seen.
00:08:54
Speaker
challenges come up because of people just approaching the idea of content and particularly curated content in maybe an incorrect way. So let's talk about some of the right ways that smart marketers and sales teams who are doing that account based marketing and selling could use a platform like up content when they're curating and incorporating that in their account based marketing efforts. So one thing that comes to mind to me is that
00:09:22
Speaker
The right kind of tool could be great for listening, for the right stories to share, or even news about those target accounts, as well as aggregating the right content that the sales team needs to be sharing with those target accounts. Can you tell us more about how a team might use up content or a curation platform for that?
00:09:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think you hit on two really key areas. And if I should have mentioned a fourth one in that last question, which was focusing only on the external use of curated content and this idea of using content for a listening approach, kind of that internal business intelligence
00:10:01
Speaker
Sparking a reason for outreach is a great use even if you're not actually sharing that article with that person you know hey stacy you saw it you recently published in forms great article wanted to exchange these ideas with you are you open to having a deeper conversation right like.
00:10:21
Speaker
That's something that's going to catch your attention because who doesn't like to know that the work that they've done to be a part of that announcement where the. Have the earn media opportunity has been noticed by others that's going to grab attention you're going to get an open on that you're going to get engagement back regardless. Also monitoring that account competitors and understanding what the environment is that they're dealing with.
00:10:43
Speaker
And depending on where you are in that relationship, possibly having that dialogue as well of what's going on within the industry in which they play so that when you do have that deeper conversation, you're not only showcasing that you know your service and product, but you also know what they're dealing with. And it's that critical overlap between what
00:11:03
Speaker
you would like that prospect to have read before you spoke with them, but possibly more importantly, recognizing what that prospect wished you would have read before you spoke with them so that you have that context for that conversation. And so listening is a great way to do that. Beyond social and email, getting those articles as part of an intranet site, maybe onto a Slack or a Twist or a Microsoft Teams channel to alert everyone in the organization what's going on so that they feel more equipped
00:11:31
Speaker
when they're executing their efforts from an outbound outreach or even inbound process so how would you recommend someone use like a curation platform like a content to curate content for specific target accounts or sector for social media.
Enhancing Social Profiles with Curated Content
00:11:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a little birds of a feather piece of that, right? Where at first, particularly if you're a part of a sales team and you have a specific sector that you've been assigned and your goal is to really work on generating new demand and new leads from that sector.
00:12:05
Speaker
One of the things you're going to want to certainly be doing is showcasing on your LinkedIn profile or your social profile of whatever sector that makes sense, that you understand what's happening in that sector. And so that when that person receives the email from you, if you're doing an outbound campaign, what's one of the first things they're going to do if you get past the initial spam folder or the block folder and make sure that your copy is still good is that they're going to go onto a Google search and type in your name or go to LinkedIn and type in your name.
00:12:34
Speaker
And what they're going to want to see is that not only does your email showcase that you have an understanding of who they are and what they're all about. And it looks like it was truly personalized for them. And with ABM, that personalization is important. But when they look at your profile as well, they're seeing that same person. They're seeing that expertise in the solutions or in the challenges that they're facing.
00:12:56
Speaker
And so making sure that you have that connection. Maybe that you have shared articles that are talking about those accounts that you're working on, or at least engaged with the postings that those accounts have been doing. So that, again, there's that connection there, and that people are seeing those touch points. The old, it takes seven impressions before they actually remember ever talking to you, or ever seeing your brand. Getting those seven impressions now digitally through those engagements is important.
00:13:23
Speaker
And you're not going to be writing each of those articles in those accounts. Maybe the end goal is to drive someone to an owned piece, but particularly if you're on the sales side, your end goal is to get a conversation to happen. And one of the best ways to do that is certainly sharing original content, but also sharing those third-party articles that help to provide context and reinforce that it's worth reading that original piece.
00:13:47
Speaker
I like those points that you have with the social media, and I think a lot of people, when they think about curated content, and you mentioned this before, think of it solely as social media, but there are some cool ways that people could implement curated content, maybe for a microsite or some sort of page on their website.
Microsites and Web Pages for ABM
00:14:06
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit more about how you've seen or what any recommendations you have about using curated content as an ABM tool for maybe your website?
00:14:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And there's a lot of, it goes back to that credibility factor, right? That is their context. And one of the challenges with maybe your main website and your main domain is that you're trying to address a number of different industries or personas. And we've all seen those accounting firms or consulting firms. I've been a part of a number of them where the group as a whole addresses a lot of different industries and does a lot of different things for a lot of those industries.
00:14:44
Speaker
But as your key account there's only maybe two or three of those things that i actually care about and i'm not taking the time to figure out where those are and so finding a way to entice me to have another experience with your brand or with you specifically we've seen a lot of interesting implementations of scott the.
00:15:05
Speaker
no account executive having his own micro site that not only again showcasing my expertise and who i worked with and maybe some testimonials or customer voice of how great i am to work with from people that are also in the industry right if i'm coming from.
00:15:23
Speaker
The pipe fitting side, I don't really need to see the candy shop e-commerce review. It doesn't really do a lot for me. I don't want to see that, but that's relevant to what I'm trying to accomplish. But then also showcasing again, what am I reading? What am I interested in? Is this somebody that I could work with?
00:15:40
Speaker
With only 17% of the time now spent amongst those 10 people talking to those actual suppliers, you have to make sure that that other 83%, they're getting everything they need to make that determination and not self-select out of discussing that with you.
00:15:56
Speaker
And so giving them a place that you own, not necessarily just my LinkedIn profile, but truly an owned property, like you were saying, a microsite, that I can control the look and feel, I can control the experience, and possibly most importantly, I can control the tracking analytics and attribution to know what happens on that page, which is key from a critical perspective in how I approach that account tomorrow or how I approach that contact within that account tomorrow.
Newsletters: Expertise Without Self-Promotion
00:16:25
Speaker
Yeah, and another way that people can kind of use curated content is in newsletters for their ABM, right? Absolutely. And it's again.
00:16:36
Speaker
Are you relevant to me? Do you know what you're talking about? I know you know your product. I know you know your service. I'm sure you're very confident in the value it can provide your customers. But do you understand who I am and what I'm trying to solve and going back to that historic sales model? I don't really care about your solution until I understand that you understand my pain.
00:16:59
Speaker
and that you feel like your solution can solve my pain. It could be the best thing in the world, but if I don't have that problem, I don't care. And so can you use this newsletter to not only use it as a sales channel, but showcase yourself as a resource. So if you're not having that account maybe isn't having that problem right now, that doesn't mean that you just kind of throw them away and go and buy your next list and try to pound through it again.
00:17:23
Speaker
but how do you continue to nurture that person likely through providing them what they want to be reading and really focusing on those newsletters not as a look how awesome i am look what else i wrote this week but here's what i think would be valuable to you sometimes maybe that is something that your organization has crafted.
00:17:44
Speaker
in most cases, particularly on a weekly basis, it's probably not. It's probably what else is happening in that industry, and can I showcase to you that this is valuable information? And if you don't want to read it this week, maybe there's one that's a good one, maybe next week you'll want to read four of those articles, and then you'll expect it the next week. And so when you do have that problem, not only is my email easy to find because you've gotten
00:18:08
Speaker
52 of them over the last year, but it's also near the top and you've seen that name and you've seen that organization come up consistently. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it gets you Recognized and you kind of stick out in their mind because they've started to get familiar with who you are Exactly and it's a great way for those other nine people in that decision-making circle to also learn about you. Mm-hmm
00:18:32
Speaker
Because the one thing that's always up and is most easy to do is hit that forward button to a colleague. And so if I see a great article in this newsletter, I'm not going to go through the effort of copying that link and sending it along to Stacy. I'm just going to forward the whole email to Stacy and say, hey, there's a great article in here.
00:18:49
Speaker
And now you're exposed as well, Stacy, to the brand and the information. And maybe you'll click subscribe and get it for yourself as well. And now I know the information of two people and you've organically subscribed. So of course you would expect then maybe an outreach three weeks later saying, Hey, I saw you subscribe. What do you think of this newsletter? It's much better than can I sell you my product right now? Right. Hey folks, let's take a break to hear about today's sponsor.
00:19:20
Speaker
And we are back. And to be able to do all this, you kind of need the right technology.
Tech for Personalized Email Newsletters
00:19:26
Speaker
So talk to us about the ideal technology so that you can leverage curated content with ABM targets. So like for email, I know you wrote a, there's a blog post about on your site about transforming your email newsletter into a personalized service. So talk to me about some of those technologies that you guys use and what people should be doing.
00:19:49
Speaker
for email. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So for email in particular, you know, one of the things that we've realized both when I was running the agency and also now is that either fortunately or unfortunately, there's no like one-step-fits-all, right? Here's the best.
00:20:06
Speaker
tools that you should be using. But what we've seen and what's worked really well for us recently is a tool that was mentioned in that post called rasa.io. And what's really exciting about that tool and how it works with up content is that our team can still approve articles that we believe are going to be valuable to our audience without having to go through the process of specifying which segment of the audience is this valuable to. And the reason that that works is because
00:20:34
Speaker
What Rasa.io does is it takes all of that information, all of those articles that we've approved, and in a personalized way, we'll send out the four to Stacy that match both what she was interested in last and what we've approved. And then Elena, you'll get your four or five that match kind of what your past interests were.
00:20:54
Speaker
And so it's actually personalizing down to the individual level without us having to go through the whole process of creating individual personas for our email and then trying to figure out who's and what, and then saying, well, Stacy's kind of 80% this and 20% that, so which one should we put her in? We don't have to really worry about that. And it's okay for us not to put a ton of effort into that specificity on the newsletter side because it's just a service for Stacy and Elena. We're not trying to get
00:21:20
Speaker
a sale from those emails. It's a process of getting them to feel like we're providing value, we know what we're talking about, maybe they could approach us with a question, and we can rely on the rest of our more true funnel to handle that. One of the important things that we mentioned in that as well is that there are tools like another partner tool of ours
00:21:40
Speaker
we work with called Sniply that makes it easier to prompt that reader for what that next step should be when they're ready to make that step. And so not a big pop-up that prohibits me from scrolling past it and I have to somehow find the magic X that
00:21:55
Speaker
is white on white so I don't find it and drives me insane. But instead, it's the tiny little overlay at the bottom that as I'm scrolling through just sits there for me. And if I'm ready to take that next step, I know exactly what makes sense for me to do. That overlay can be
00:22:12
Speaker
customized for each type of article that you're sharing. And so that way it's more of a native flow and it just addresses my laziness of not trying to want to think about what I should do next and just asking you to tell me what I should do next. So that conjunction of those tools together has been really successful for us and for a number of our customers who have used that same setup. If you're utilizing something that's HubSpot to do that type of effort, certainly be successful there as well.
00:22:42
Speaker
Mailchimp is a great tool to get started. It's got a ton of features and is very low cost. And then even if you're utilizing some of those, when we say quote unquote, you know, enterprise, because all those tools theoretically could be utilized at the enterprise, but traditional enterprise tools like Pardot,
00:22:58
Speaker
or Marketo, you can still accomplish it there as well with the nicer areas around Pardot, Marketo, and HubSpot being that all of your analytics are then in one space as well, which obviously is important from an ABM process. I read that blog post and I immediately went and signed up for Rasa because I thought that sounded really cool. I've already started toying with it. It is cool. Yeah, it's a lot of fun and it's a great team. Yeah.
00:23:24
Speaker
Yeah, when I needed help, they were very helpful. So that's great. Shout out to you guys at RASA. So another thing that I think a lot of people might drop, maybe drop the ball is the wrong word, but anyway, they don't necessarily know what I.
00:23:40
Speaker
deal technology they should be using for sharing curated content, either a social selling or in an employee advocacy way.
Tools for Social Selling and Employee Advocacy
00:23:49
Speaker
What are your recommendations there? Oh, wow. There's so many out there as well as I'm sure we've all experienced when we started to try to peel that onion of what tools we should be using there all the way from if we have a smaller team and we don't really need anything beyond just
00:24:05
Speaker
a policy and giving the right opportunities for that team. If I have a 10 person team, I don't necessarily need to sign up for an employee advocacy program. I could use some of the tools that I'm already using rather than add one. We've seen very successful social selling activities occur with the creation of a Slack channel and associating your approved articles to that channel.
00:24:26
Speaker
and then asking people as they are already in Slack all the time that if they see something of interest, share that out with the recommended post or modify the post. All the way to one of the tools that we really like is Hootsuite's Amplify platform, mostly because it's embedded as part of their main Hootsuite product so that I can manage my company profiles as well as approve articles for social selling. As an advocate, I can get it on my mobile phone, I can get it on
00:24:56
Speaker
desktop, tablet, whatever I need to do, whatever is most comfortable for me. And then I also get all the leaderboard gamification activities off of that as well. And those are for, you could have the largest teams on that and be extremely successful. Funnel Amplified is another great one, particularly if you are interested in the email and the social selling as well as the microsites coming together under one umbrella. It's a great tool to manage all three.
00:25:26
Speaker
dynamic signal we work with, LinkedIn Elevate has been a great technology and they're now doing some interesting things and moving it to company pages and we'll see how that evolves. And there's just many out there, but I think the core piece isn't necessarily the highway, how those articles get distributed. You need to make it seamless and there's a number of great ways to do that. But what's really important and where we see programs fail
00:25:52
Speaker
is that they're going back to the old school way of just delivering their own stuff because they're afraid of what delivering other stuff with that process looks like. Are they opening themselves up? If it was important, I would have just written it myself. That mentality, that's not what your employees are interested in sharing.
00:26:09
Speaker
You know it's nobody's job responsibility to be using your employee advocacy program no matter how many amazon gift cards you offer to make that happen so how do i make sure that the employees and i think about them first what are the articles that they want to be reading what do they want to be sharing how can this advocacy program.
00:26:29
Speaker
be almost a news feed for them with the articles that they're interested in and take some of that burden off of them of having to go and find those articles themselves as well as where we've seen the most success is that that director manager vp level who is a subject matter expert in that particular.
00:26:47
Speaker
Industry or service area is the one who's giving me approvals of what articles are best into the marketing flow and so that way. Everybody that works for her is actually getting a window into what she's reading and what she's engaging with and that makes me want to open it up so i can see what he's been looking at and what is interesting to her and get her perspective.
00:27:10
Speaker
And on top of that now, I have the option to share that to my social networks or use it in an email to my prospects. And now it makes me look like a rockstar, too. Those are where advocacy programs take hold. And myself as an employee, then I don't really care if my company wrote it or if somebody else wrote it because I'm just going there for great stuff. And the blend then naturally occurs from there.
00:27:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's important, like you said, you don't have to add in new technology if you have a small team. I think that's important to know because it can be overwhelming if you have tons of different technology and you're constantly adding new things. So that's
Microsites for Industry-Specific Marketing
00:27:50
Speaker
key. Yes. So when it comes to like creating an ABM centered microsite or blogs and things like that, what are some tools that people could look at for that? Yeah, there's a number of things there as well. And I think, you know, to your point, Elena,
00:28:04
Speaker
You probably have a technology that can solve that problem for you without having to go out and buy something else. Even starting with just, I'm going to create a page that's dedicated to a certain industry that I'm working on right now. And maybe it's not part of your main page nav, but it's where you're sending people to. And those email campaigns are talking about,
00:28:25
Speaker
We've been following the latest trends in Internet of Things, and we thought you might be interested in it. Here's one article. If you want to see others, come to this What We're Reading in IoT page. It just links to a new page on your current domain. If that's something that you already are comfortable with creating,
00:28:41
Speaker
you probably can accomplish that without having to invest another dime in technology. And most of the cases, those are true. There are some awesome tools that let you get those pages up quickly. Unbounce is a favorite of ours. We've used it for many years. It's very easy to throw something up that looks great, test it out, get it on its own page, and do your analytics off of it.
00:29:05
Speaker
Webflow is an awesome tool if you're doing something a little bit deeper, or if you're going about creating your whole new site and you want to have that opportunity as well, that's a nice tool to use. But again, HubSpot, solid. We've seen a lot of interesting uses, particularly on the personalization side with a tool called Uber Flip, which allows you to bring and kind of personalize the original content in certain pages based upon who's visiting that site and what they're engaging with. And yes, you can infuse curated content.
00:29:34
Speaker
into that as well. So again there's just so many out there and I think it is less about the tool you're using because that's going to be you're going to be able to find that for you and a number of those tools let you get started for free. It's more important to think about the process of that prospect and of that account and put yourself in their shoes. You've bought something for your organization before as well. What did you wish those companies would be providing to you? All of those friction points and frustrations and
00:30:01
Speaker
big forms that you have to fill out to get those pieces of information, probably not the way you want to go for those target accounts.
Reducing Decision-Making Friction with Easy Access
00:30:09
Speaker
You already know who they are. You don't necessarily need all that information. So stop requiring people to fill that out to get the information that you want them to have. Because if they don't get it from you, they're going to get it from somebody else, or they may end up just making the wrong choice because they didn't have it.
00:30:23
Speaker
Instead, make it easy for them to get that information. Make sure you are focusing on building that relationship and not just shoving data down their throats. Make sure that it's valuable to them to visit the site, that they're not just hearing about how awesome you are, but you're giving them information that informs their decision. I think those microsites can be a great way to do that because you're directing them right to something that looks like it's been ready for them.
00:30:49
Speaker
If they want to go back to your main page, they can, but I don't think you'll see a lot of that happening, right? They're going to get what they need off of that page and then go away and take that information and move further down their decision making process. And their experience was that you've been almost created just for them. And that's a great feeling in the eyes of a prospect who wants to make the best choice.
00:31:11
Speaker
So Scott, are there any other like standout solutions technology in your mind when it comes to leveraging curated content for IBM? I think the one area that we're seeing grow in terms of importance is the internal communication side of things. And so we're seeing a lot of curated content now being utilized in, you know, all the popular chat tools that are out there.
00:31:37
Speaker
again, because people don't want to add yet another tool to their stack. And so they're like, well, where is our, when you think about your sales team, where are they already spending their time? And it's going to be hard to get them to go to a third or a fourth or a fifth place as part of their daily
Integrating Curated Content into Sales Workflows
00:31:52
Speaker
process. Right. I mean, we get the traditional, right. I want to close deals all day. I don't have time to manage my social account or send out emails. I'm on the call, I'm on the phone, I'm closing deals. Well,
00:32:05
Speaker
True, right? But where are you spending time doing that right now? Are you in Salesforce? Are you on Slack?
00:32:11
Speaker
if wherever they are, wherever they're spending their day is where you want that content to be, because that's the only way it's going to get used in the way you want it to get used, like it or not. And so that's a great way to start and thinking about, is there an intranet page that everybody goes to to kind of monitor the status of the opportunities or look at a leaderboard or look at their dashboards? Can we put curated articles about the key accounts or the key sectors there as a widget? We've seen a lot of like SharePoint integrations.
00:32:40
Speaker
Can I have it in Slack or in my chat tool so that when a new article happens, it's sitting right there. My sales team already knows how to use that tool. They're comfortable with that tool. They're getting it on all their devices already. I don't have to reinvent the wheel or ask them to sign into something else. And it's right there. And when they see that article about new IOT innovations, they're like, Oh man, this is going to be great. And I know exactly who I want to send this to, you know, copy the link and send it in a normal email through normal Gmail, right?
00:33:09
Speaker
Hey, maybe it works great. And if that continues to work great, then you can add more layers of technology and more layers of process. But the last thing anybody wants to do is make all those investments, get everything set up, and then realize that nobody's coming to the party because there's no interest in doing that. Everything current state is fine. How do we make the current state even better without making a lot of investment?
00:33:34
Speaker
and then we'll know exactly where new investment is needed versus just buying everything and trying something new. Good point. So before we get to our just for fun questions, do you have any other tips or advice that you'd like to leave listeners with when it comes to ABM and curation?
00:33:51
Speaker
I think the biggest piece that we've run into, and this was just learned by doing perhaps made sense and should have been obvious to us, is that when we were initially focusing a lot on the ABM side, it was kind of like an IBM side, or just individual-based marketing. So we found one person in the organization. We thought they were going to be the key decision maker. And so our focus was on that person.
00:34:17
Speaker
they like cheetos so we're gonna like try to somehow convince them that we like cheetos too and make a connection like that but really the where we started to see the most success is when we were making contact with both kind of key decision makers in sales and marketing and content and digital experience and the website side and so at some point when they passed each other in the physical halls back in 2019 or the virtual halls today
00:34:43
Speaker
There was some conversation about, wow, you guys, you're talking up content too. Hey, I just heard about up content. Oh, me too. That's when we started to see things really come together. So finding ways to have touch points with each of those individuals of that six to 10, but making sure it's not sending out the same email to those 10 people, because that's the quickest way to get yourself.
00:35:05
Speaker
in trouble because that same virtual hall conversation then works against you because everybody got that email, especially when you're sending it out and maybe somebody's getting an email forward to them because someone's on vacation and then they get two of that same email. So that's not ABM, just sending it to 10 people in the same organization, but really customizing each of those 10 to what you think they care about, that's going to get them to want to talk to the others. I think that's really important.
00:35:29
Speaker
So the just for fun question, you've been on the podcast before, so you've been asked what your dream job would be.
A Giraffe Encounter Story
00:35:39
Speaker
So what is something interesting that you would like our audience to know about you or the company up content? That we wouldn't find on the website. Yeah. Well, there are interesting things about me. I don't know if I would want people to know them, however.
00:35:58
Speaker
So I'll go with my traditional one, which is also bordering on things I don't want people to know, but somehow they have shaped my life. So when I was Panama City Beach, Florida, this was like 1997. There's like a petting zoo there, if anyone's ever been there. And one of the areas, it's like a real petting zoo though, like Tiger King style, I think.
00:36:21
Speaker
Oh well. Oh my gosh. Yeah, but they had giraffes, not tigers. And so you had to walk up this huge platform area and you could like put a little quarter in the slot. Maybe it was a nickel then, I can't remember. And you could get food and you could feed the giraffes and there was like a big giraffe and a little giraffe and I wanted to like feed the little giraffe.
00:36:39
Speaker
And apparently I ticked off the big giraffe while I was doing that. And the big giraffe picked me up by the hood of my sweatshirt and like hung me over like off the platform then like over the actual cage area. And it felt like forever that that was happening. It was probably only like
00:36:55
Speaker
you know a couple minutes and i just remember looking down in my like mom running around like crazy trying to find somebody and then my dad just taking pictures of me hanging there totally cool of course that typical bad thing right yeah exactly so so that's wow that's the thing you won't find on the website
00:37:16
Speaker
Oh gosh. So that's a good one. Scott, thank you for sharing that and for taking your time to talk with us today about content curation and ABM.
Connecting with Hosts and Guest
00:37:29
Speaker
So if our listeners want to connect with you or getting more information from your company, what's the best way for them to get in touch?
00:37:37
Speaker
Yeah, direct is fantastic. Certainly you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter or just email me directly Scott with two T's at upcontent.com. All right. And we will make sure to include that in the show notes. And if you want to follow or connect with me or Stacey, you can find us on Twitter Stacey at underscore Jax. That's S T A C Y underscore J A X. And you can find me at Elena underscore Jax. That's A L A N N A underscore J A X.
00:38:07
Speaker
And if you're not a Twitter fan, you can always look us up on LinkedIn. And finally, don't forget, you can also leave us a voicemail on the Anchor mobile app or on our anchor.fm show page. So make sure to go follow Scott and we will see you next time. The B2B Mix Show is hosted by Stacy Jackson and Elena Jackson of, you guessed it, Jackson Marketing. If you need help with your B2B inbound marketing efforts, visit us at JacksonMarketingServices.com.