Interesting B2B Marketers
Interesting B2B Marketers
Episode 31: Creating a Strong B2B Brand Identity and Executing Effective Media Campaigns | Bill Macaitis
In this episode, Steve chats with Bill Macaitis, a seasoned marketing advisor with expertise in capital-efficient growth models. With extensive experience in advising B2B and B2C companies, Bill offers a unique perspective on scaling businesses with limited resources. Their conversation revolves around two key topics: establishing a robust brand identity in B2B marketing and executing impactful media campaigns.
Bill stresses the importance of creating a memorable brand identity that differentiates companies, going beyond lead generation. He shares a real-life example of assisting a startup in developing a distinct visual identity and editorial tone, resulting in heightened brand affinity and customer engagement. Steve and Bill also delve into the challenges of measuring marketing campaign effectiveness and the value of involving stakeholders in testing creative alternatives. They touch upon the significance of communication and empathy in the workplace, highlighting how connecting with colleagues and stakeholders fosters understanding and support for marketing endeavors.
Join this episode to gain valuable insights from Bill Macaitis on building a strong brand identity in B2B marketing, executing successful media campaigns, and promoting effective communication within the workplace.
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Steve: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26 and interesting B2B marketers. I am excited to have Bill Macaitis on the show today. Bill. Welcome. Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. All right, cool. So give us a quick 60-second background of who you are and what you've been up to lately.
Bill: Yeah, 60-second background. Always have done online companies.
Graduated college, had my first startup, and had no money. Figured out how to grow companies with no money. That was very helpful. Spent about 10 years on the B2C side. Large companies like ij, entertainment News Corp. A couple exits there. And then went over to the B2B side. So I joined Salesforce.
I worked about four years there. Then Zendesk as their C M O took them through an I P O and then Slack as their C M O C R O with an eventual I p O there as well. And now I do advisory work. So I help companies grow and scale with capital efficient growth models.
Steve: That's awesome. Got a great background.
Okay, let's just jump in. We're going into case study number one. This one's all about brand awareness. Take it away.
Bill: Yeah. So I thought those would be a fun one because You know, in my advisory capacity, I work with a lot of companies and they will often come to me right. With, Hey Bill, we got this awesome product, but nobody knows about us.
Right. And I found in B2B too a lot of marketing teams seem to only have their only metric as leads. Which is fine. You know, I, I might say there's a couple other good metrics you should have, but you know, we were a growing startup looking to get our name out there. And, you know, there's two parts of this case study.
The first was like, Hey, how do you create a brand even? What, what, what is a brand? Right? And so I always looked at it as a brand, as a sum of every interaction, every interaction that someone has with your company. It's not just your logo, it's not just your slogan. It's all these little interactions, right?
And so we did two things, you know, as part of this brand awareness push that I thought really helped us. One costs $0, took some time internally, but was not like a big spender, and it's something I always recommend. So what we did is we tried to stand out a little bit. We created a very unique visual identity: the colors of our website, the colors of our app.
We're very bold. They stood out. They looked very different from a lot of the other competitors that were in our space. And secondly, we created a unique editorial tone and voice. And what that meant was, you know, when you were interacting, interacting on the website, or more importantly, interacting in the app itself.
It was fun, it was delightful. It had a whimsical tone to it. You know, most B2B apps are all next except cancel. You know, they're written by developers, right? Yeah, I get it. You know, but you know, we said, Hey, what if we had our best marketer who was super creative, like, write all the dialogue, write all the prompts, right?
Put in little Easter eggs, you know, and we did that. And, and I think that that really helped people have a different perception of their brand relationship with us. Right. You know, it was much, people tended to more, you know, love us versus just, oh, this is a nice app that does this. It was, oh wow.
Like I'm having a, you know, I actually like these folks. I like this app. Right? So that was part one. That's like and, and that works really well, right? When we would measure people's affinity towards the brand, it was always very high. And I think like, That was something that helped out, that was super super cheap.
And I think anybody can do that. Yep. And also I think too, there's a myth that, hey, in B2B land you have to wear suits, you have to talk in acronyms, you have to have. You know, you have to be Spock and have no emotion. And I, I was, you know, spending 10 years of my life on B2C and 10 on b2b, like I found P four people, right?
And they love brands. They love consumer brands, they love B2B brands. So don't be afraid to you're, you're
Steve: missing out. You forgot the one signature item where you have to have a podium in front of you when you speak. It's very
Bill: Seriously. Yes, yes, exactly right. Everything's scripted. So anyways, so yeah, stand out cuz everybody has 10 competitors they are going against.
Right. And most of them and that's another thing too, though, we saw that is a lot of people, the marketing teams would invoke some of that passion emotion, but it would just be on the website. And the minute you went into the product, everything changed. It was like white background, black techs, back to everything.
Boring. Yeah. You know, no delight, no Easter eggs, no nothing. Right. And so, you know, especially for those listening that are in the software space, at least for us in this case study, right. I, if you're marketing, push into the product, push into the software, right? If you just do the website, you're really only getting a couple touches.
Again, if you view it as the, some of all the touches people have with you, but people spend most of their time though in the software and even, even before they're buying it, you know, they're, they're going in the free plan, they're going in the trial, right? So I thought that was a great opportunity to create a brand.
So that was the first part. The second thing we did was a larger media campaign. And I, I've actually had a lot of, you know, clients come to me now and like, hey, like this is our first time doing it, and it's everybody's first time, right? When you start spending a good chunk of money to get your Yeah.
You know, your name out there, your brand out there. So a couple things that I thought worked really well for us were one, we started really small. So we created a campaign. At first it was just static assets, right? And we left home with it. So we did billboards and stuff, but as opposed to just saying, Hey, We're gonna do this massive billboard campaign across the us.
We chose one city and we just, we did, we saturated it. But then we measured, we said, okay, this city, what was the brand awareness before and after? So aided Unaided recall sentiment. We did studies on it before we got a baseline. We also, for the rest of us, had a baseline, right? And then after we ran it, we said, okay, let's measure it in this city, but the control group will be the rest of us.
Yep. Right. Okay. They didn't get the campaign, so, you know, how much did they grow versus how much did that city grow? And you could see, you could, we could, we could kinda like literally plot it out to, you know, a point of awareness cost us X dollars, right? Yep. And then we said, okay, let's, you know, let, let's, then we created a video and we're like, let's.
Let's test this, but now we're gonna run it in three cities. We're gonna run it in places like Denver, Austin and Seattle. And then we're gonna compare it again to the rest of the US or to similar Sister cities, which have, you know, similar demographics. And we would measure brand awareness. We were also measuring pipeline and leads impact two, but again, we always had a control group.
And we saw it move the needle and then we said, okay, like, let's go a little bit more. Right? Yeah. And in each one of these, like, I think a really important thing, at least a lesson for me was. Kind of realizing that, hey, I need to update all the stakeholders on this. And, and when I say stakeholders, I mean really people that have a lot of sway in the company, right?
So you're, you're head of sales, your head of product, your C F O, your c e o, the board, right? Like part of the reason I think we did it and it worked well that way was we are just building up confidence. Because a lot of, like, I, I work with a lot of companies. And the marketing team, a lot of times does amazing stuff, but they never kind of build those relationships externally.
And when 'em happens a lot of people just doubt marketing. They're like, well, yeah, I don't, yeah, like you guys just waste money. You know, I don't know what you're doing this or that, right? Or, oh, that didn't work, right. You're just saying it, you're just showing flashy, you know, stuff. And so I think like walking through and, and showing them hard numbers, right?
In a small way, getting them a little more comfortable, doing a little bit larger. And then eventually we did a national campaign, right? And we tested a bunch of stuff like all throughout the way we tested, like, you know, out of home versus online. We had, you know, two different videos. By the way, that was another thing I learned.
We worked with outside agencies. One of the videos cost a million dollars. One of 'em costs like $50,000. There was a negligible difference between the two as far as the actual end impact. So be careful how much you spend on this creative and how big of an agency you go with. But you know, it was a really fun experience, right.
You know, you have to have a good fit and you have to have the right board and growth. But, you know, eventually, again, we saw, we were growing pretty fast, but what we realized is we could accelerate that growth. And paid campaigns are what they are. They're expensive. You don't always want to use them because if that's the only thing driving your growth or your brand, then.
It's an extensive way to grow, but you know, when you combine that with organic growth, you can help accelerate, you can help capture that market faster. So that was kind of the high level, but happy to go in any detail if you have any more questions on it. Yeah.
Steve: So I'm gonna make a comment too. The market test, I call 'em matched markets, right?
So you're, you're saying here's one market. And here's a comparable market in terms of whether it's size or demographics. I love that approach. I've done it a couple times and the reason why I like it so much is that in each market there's all these dynamics. You're usually having multiple marketing tactics, and it's hard to really understand what you know in one market.
If you're doing five different things, what's successful? Right? And I like the market approach because you, it doesn't matter, right? Its meaning. You know that you're doing a lot of marketing activity and you're getting this net result. So it's the closest I've seen to doing an actual, you know, business metrics on, look, we put marketing dollars in the market.
Don't worry about what it was. We know that this was the impact. And you believe it or not. Right? And I love doing that. We, I've done it with print advertising in the past, and you just say, Hey, here are 10 markets we're in, here are 10 comparable markets. What's the, the delta and the metrics? It is great at sharing with leadership or salespeople because they just, they look at it and they're like, okay, I can't, I can't argue with this.
The metrics, you know, whether it's perception, engagement, whatever it is it, it's just great. Way to do it. Yeah,
Bill: And you know, it's a great point, Steven. The nice thing I found too is it's not like it's a super expensive way to measure it. It's not like, look, I love, you know, deep dive algorithmic, multi-touch attribution modeling.
And we could talk for an hour around that and we would probably lose the entire audience. But still you can spend a lot of money in these different attribution models to try to, you know, prove it. But there's a really simple model. And it's just like having a control group. E, even like, yep. Excuse me.
Companies doing like ABM campaigns. I work with different startups that are doing it. They're asking for my advice on it. I'm like, Hey, all right, you've got a top hundred list. Okay, only do the ABM campaign to 50 of them. The other 50 don't get it right. You have to have that control so you can show the impacts.
Cuz I think the natural tendency of a lot of marketers, myself included back in the day, was, well, we're gonna run this to everybody. Right, and, and then it's really hard once you've done everything, like you said, there's so many other muddying factors that come into it. It's really difficult to tease out, you know, did this cause it?
Or maybe there was like, the competitor did this or we just launched this. Like it gets really hard to prove marketing's effectiveness and that's half the game in marketing is just getting all these other people in the company who all think they're marketing experts to actually believe in what you did actually made an impact.
Steve: I love that. I mean the holdout, so I'm gonna date myself. In 1998, I worked at a bank. Yeah. And I was in a marketing role at a bank cuz I wanted access to data, right? So I'm like, I'm gonna go work at this bank, I'm gonna learn all about data. And they were piloting this new concept, they called it the r m s, the relationship management system.
It's essentially, you know, Of, of high powerful c r m, but then it also had all these layers of financial scoring to essentially say, should we lend this person credit here, or a align of credit there? And they launched it, you know, it was a 90% rollout and a 10% control group. Two years went by. You clearly see the the decision making engine was working and we were making more money on it.
And I think to this day they still have a 1% control group and like, wow, marketing always fights for the 1% control group to just be like, no, this is our justification. Even though we could probably market to those people and make more money off them, like we need it, we need to hold ourselves accountable.
Bill: Yeah, absolutely.
Steve: All right, awesome. Let's do this. Let's jump into case study number two. This one has to do with pricing and packaging.
Bill: Yeah, so I love pricing and packaging. Excuse me. I think it's one of those, it's one of those elements that can really move the needle. You know, a lot of times you'll go into marketing, oh, we're gonna do this and it's gonna give us 30% lift and this 40% lift and this, and, and most of the time it doesn't do that.
But pricing and packaging is one of those things. If you nail it and if you get it right, it can really change the trajectory, both from a modernization standpoint as well as just how fast your company is growing. So this is one I'm gonna go back to my consumer days and. One of the things that, that, that we, that we've been doing, I've been doing pricing packaging a lot, and one of the things that I, I found, and I'm a big believer in, is the freemium model.
I, I know this is you know, a lot of people, it's, it's having debates. Does this work, does this not? I had, you know, been working for Fast, faster growing company, and one of the reasons I think we really tried to think about pricing and packaging is how pricing and packaging had evolved. So as opposed to having a free trial, which I think is, you know, time gated or, you know, user gated, we actually had a true free plan.
And, and in addition, how we packaged it was as opposed to using features is the main packaging. So we have like a good, better, best, you know, bronze, silver goal type of subscription model. We allowed pretty much all the plans to have all the features. And, and that's usually like, I think as a lot of markers as our first inkling is to go, oh, well this one gets this, features this, and the free plan is like, really crippled, where like you barely get to use it.
It's a really hard experience. What we did though is we used a lot of thresholds. So we said, Hey, you know, you get to use all these features, but you know, you only get to use this one this many times per month or this many times per year. Right. And, I thought that did two really powerful things for us.
And the numbers kind of borrowed out; one person was much more likely to upgrade. And what ended up happening was they got it, they started using it, it was a free plan, right. And it really got embedded. They started just using it, using it a lot really into their workflows. A lot of the thresholds we intentionally didn't put in until three, six months down the line.
And you know, I think sometimes there's a temptation, especially in B2B, to get everything super quick. Cause you get a sales team, they need those leads tomorrow, you know? But my experience has always been, whether it's consumer, B2B, people, the journey, they need time to see the value, experience the value before they're ready.
To upgrade. And so by pushing those thresholds further back, people really got, got to love this and use it a lot. Right? And then when they finally did hit a threshold, they were much more likely to convert. It wasn't like three to 5% that you'll see most free to paid. It was like 30 to 40%, which is kind of crazy good, right?
That was really powerful for us. So we got a great modernization. The other thing that was really powerful for us is, It helped us grow much faster. And, and really like thinking about it for a long time, cuz I, I've done a bunch of these, you know, free type plans. I thought the best way to look at it was free users.
So imagine you're the C M O, right? And you have, you only have X amount of employees underneath you. You know, you have a small team, three people, five people, 10 people, whatever it is, and their whole job is to go spread the word about your company, right? Well, when you have a free plan, it's like every single one of those free users is a little marketing independent contractor.
Yeah. That you just hired and you pay them nothing. Right. And all day long they're out there. Again, if they love your product, which is a big element of plg, you gotta make it that. They love it, but they're out there just talking about it and recommending it and going like, oh, you gotta check this one out.
I loved it. Right. And so all the companies And this company in particular that worked with, that had free plans, we would always have really high word of mouth growth, right? Mm-hmm. And you know, and, and that's again, like when you're marketing and especially now, every board is asking you like, Hey, I know we're growing, but how much does it cost to get that growth?
What's the capital efficiency of this growth? Right? And that freemium model, what I found out was free users are good. They're really, especially if you're a marketer, free users are great. Now, I know there's a cost, there's. The bandwidth costs, you know, their support costs. But really, like if you, if you compare that cost against how much it costs you to run that brand campaign, the acquisition study one.
Yeah. How much that ABM campaign you're running, whatever it is, like, and you're getting high cost per lead, like it is much, much less. And so, you know, for us, like those two strategies worked really well having, having a true free plan. Where they have access to a lot of features. So they love it, they're recommending it, and then using the thresholds on a more longer term delay where they get more value and they're much more likely to convert to a paid plan down the road.
Yep. And I
Steve: I think it's great. It's a great case study. I think it's also one you've gotta have a great product because they're, you know, if you don't, and that's maybe where some of the traditional B2B sales. Tactics happen. It's kind of like, no, no, no, you're not gonna get to sit in the car unless you buy the car.
And it's like, no, I, I wanna drive it. I wanna, you know, I remember I was in the market for a car and we ended up going and getting a Tesla years ago, and it was a Friday afternoon. We kind of casually strolled into the store and he's like, oh no, we're closed this weekend. But he's like, do me a favor, like, just take this car and bring it back on Monday.
And we had an entire weekend in the car, and I was like, that's awesome. I'm done. Like, I'm sold. Yeah. You like, just tell me how to order. Like it just was a, you, you remove any suspicious behavior of a sales Yeah. You know, engagement, it's just like them, they believe in the product so much that they're just giving it to me.
You know, and I'm, I'm glad to see that in the industry too. Like, I feel like four or five years ago it was like the credit card barrier. Like, we'll give you free access, but. We're gonna need a credit card. And now that's almost gone. I mean, I feel like you, you can get into a lot of software pretty quickly, which is good to see.
Bill: It's a, it's a much more efficient way to grow, you know, and, and I think, you know, from, from my advisory side, I have a lot of companies to reach out to, do you wanna make that shift? You know, I'm working with several right now, like, Hey, We've gone the old way, which is like, we've hired a bunch of outbound sales reps that are cold calling.
They're really expensive. They're trying to sell 'em into the cio. They're trying to get 'em to buy a wall to wall deal. You know, the deal length is a year plus on those. They're frustrated. It's not predictable. And when they switch to these PLG models, they're like, oh my God, we have this like, sustainable, scalable, inbound growth.
It's predictable, you know, we're growing much faster. People know who we are now. But it's hard, right? It's hard to make that shift and, you know, you have to have the right dnA for the company. You have to have the board and the ceO committed to it. Yep. There's a lot of misconceptions, like, oh, a free plan, we can't do that.
Or if you're in sales, there's a lot of fear, like, well, what does this mean to my quota? Are they taking my sales? It's definitely, you know, an effort to get it to go through.
Steve: Yep. I will say too I'll take the podcast in a negative area for real quickly. It's not a new strategy. This is the drug dealer strategy from years ago.
It's, it's the, Hey, check this out. It's free, you'll like it. And it's kind of like, again, I'm going to a negative place. But it's, it's, that's a strategy, right? It's, it's, we think you're like this so much. Have a, have a take at it. Okay. Anything else on the second case study you wanna share?
Bill: No, I think that's it.
You know, I'll just say, hey, in general You know, test these things out. Pricing and packaging. Yeah. I would say for, for marketers, like if there's one area, I'd even say like, Hey, if you're building on a marketing team and you already have like your, your core, hire a pricing and packaging specialist, or just hire one per, just, even if it's not a pricing packaging specialist, have one person on your team just focus on that because of all the tactics I've seen over the years, that is the one that really moves the needle and not enough people kind of give it the love, attention and the testing that it, that it deserves.
Steve: You know, when, when you first started talking about packaging, I went to the CPG world and it's interesting. A friend of a friend of mine had a, a f he had a guy who started a business and he had a billion dollar exit. It was a big exit for a CPG company and as, as a startup, he had, he probably had the first couple years, it was very, very entrepreneurial.
And the person put, I think a hundred thousand dollars into packaging of the product, and he said at the time it was, it was a ridiculous decision to make. I had no business spending a hundred thousand dollars on the packaging, but he said, I, I know that that packaging got me into some key meetings and ultimately helped grow it to the exit.
So that first interaction with the brand, whether it's software or a physical product, is, is incredibly important. Absolutely. Okay, let's do this. We're gonna, we're gonna jump into q and a. Tell me about your first marketing gig.
Bill: My first marketing gig was right outta college, or actually during college where I just, we did our own startup and I was the head of marketing BizDev sales, you know, and there's like four people.
You're doing everything. I was basically like a business person. But I loved it. And I'm a weird one. Like I always loved marketing. I always loved business and like, in Fifth grade I was reading Fortune, Forbes, and Wall Street Journal. I was like the nerd in the back, right. Just like geeking out on this stuff.
So, yeah. I was really fortunate it wasn't, I was like, what do I wanna do? Like, I always knew it. I was in like entrepreneur clubs and doing all these things. So you know, I I, I, I've always had an affinity and passion towards this stuff.
Steve: That's nice. My, I too kind of got into it in college. A buddy of mine started in your face eyewear.
It was very, very in your face at the time. Right. And, and our whole thing was you know, this is college, so people want sunglasses, especially during spring break. We were able to secure all these partnerships with RayBan. And I was like, this is great. Like we're we're, our sales pitch was go to the mall, let us know what pair of glasses you want, and then we'll order 'em from you at like, you know, 30% off.
So it is, it is funny that, so for so many of us, the hustle does start really early on. And you, you've, you know, you, you said at the beginning of the podcast you initially weren't into b2b. So tell me about that jump when you got into b2b, what was that? The first couple years like?
Bill: Yeah, it was an interesting transition, right?
So I, you know, at the time I was working for News Corp and I was running centralized online marketing for all of their different properties. I was running them like Wall Street Journal, the Fox Sports to American Idol and building up these brands, building up these portfolio websites, getting 'em to, to grow faster and.
You know, I got a call from Salesforce and they were much smaller at the time. They weren't a total startup, but you know, they were kinda like selling this vision of the cloud and, you know, putting your software there. And you know, just hearing, you know, the vision and, you know, talking to Mark, I just kind of believed in it.
I really thought, Hey, this is a good fundamental shift. Right? Like, I'm amazed people are still like, You know, buying software and buying their own servers and installing on it. And this, this model was just so much more a democratization. So I loved it. I went over to it. I bought into it, you know, came in and ran all their online marketing and The website and the opposite, some of the backend stuff.
But it was interesting coming over to B2B though, like you are, initially I was a little shocked, even at Salesforce. I was like, and looking at a lot of other B2B companies, I'm like, whoa, they are using a really dated go-to-market model. Like they're nothing. I was seeing with the more innovative tactics I was seeing consumers, I wasn't singing at all on b2b.
There was no seo, there was no content marketing. There was no advanced hyper-target or retargeting or this or that. Right. Granted, this is like 12, you know, 15 years ago. So really like that was part of my DNA when I came there. And I remember I had a conversation with the engineers and he was like, oh yeah, that's a suspect and.
It's like, what's a suspect? I've never, yeah. He's like, oh, it's a prospect that you're not sure if they're gonna be, you know, very good, qualified to become a customer. They're suspects. I'm like, oh, okay. But, you know, I really enjoyed making that shift and I liked it. Like, I often found, like when I work with different people, people that have done multiple tours of duty in a totally different area or like, you know, someone that worked on the support team that's now on the marketing team just has a completely different perspective and often brings different ideas.
So I really just tried to bring like, hey, The best of consumer, which in a lot of ways is a true inbound funnel. Like you don't have a sales team when you're working b2c. There, there, there is no sales team. You are marketing and sales wrapped into one. Yeah. And so you have to build these scalable engines.
And so coming over to B2B where a lot of companies were only doing cold calling. You know, to build a scalable inbound model where you can now feed all of these salespeople was really powerful. And so, you know, I loved it. I, I will say, I think one of the more underrated things in marketing is like, you have to evangelize, you have to like to educate people.
On, on why you think you should do it differently than the old way. You have to win hearts and minds. You have to spend a ton of cycles on that. Even at Salesforce, there was a point where we weren't doing any marketing automation and I was like, guys, we need to do this. Right? And it took a lot of cycles, a lot of political, you know, calories.
Yeah. Just to try to get that in because it was just different. We hadn't done it right. And, you know, the marketers sometimes I'll say that are really good, but they'll just sit at their desks heads down and never reach out to the head of sales or the C F O or whoever your stakeholders are. Right?
Like, it just becomes really hard to get those, get those big change management projects through. Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. So you're, you're in an interesting position because in your career, what you've done and what you're doing today and helping boards, I mean, you're essentially, You know, you're a marketing ambassador, teaching non marketers and guiding them.
What, what's your advice for, you know, all the, everyone's who's listening on the show, they're all marketers, right? So how can you help them better manage up and, and not just speak marketing to non-marketing people? What, what's a good way to connect?
Bill: I think for me one of the things I try to do is like, Hey, just have a little empathy.
Like, imagine you're probably in the same position, so take your, your CTO in your organization or your head of product, you know someone technical, right? If you just look across to them and you're like, what are they doing? Like, I don't know. They're working on code. Yeah. That person, let's say that there's a CTO that never reaches out.
Never talk, right? So you have no idea what their team does. You have no idea if they're good. You have no idea if they're just like twiddling their thumbs all day, you know? It's kind of frustrating. It's hard, right? So when in marketing, when we kind of just go dark and silent, no one knows what we do.
Now, the CTO has an advantage in that none of us know pro programming or Java or backend techno architecture. So we're kind of like, well, I don't know what they're doing, but I don't really understand it. Anyway, so whatever. When you work in marketing, everybody in the company is a marketing expert, right?
They've all seen ads, they've all priced stuff for grocery stores. Yeah. So they're like, whoa, I know. Marketing, right? So you have a lot of people that have very strong opinions on your job and what you do. And, you know, I found the best way to do that, no matter what level you are, is, like you said, Steve, like manage up, right?
Like, think about, okay, who are, you know, partners that rely on marketing, the product team, the sales team, the finance team. The C-suite, the board, and, and just start having conversations with them. They put up a once a month lunch. Right. Or a virtual meeting, whatever it is, and, and I have fun too. It's good to ask 'em like, Hey, how do you think marketing's going?
You know, what do you like that we're doing? What do you not like that we're doing? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you don't? Okay. Oh, we're thinking about actually implementing marketing automation. Here's why. Like, you know, it's a longer term, but I think it's really gonna help us nurture and develop these leads. So then when they go to the sales, they're gonna be much more qualified.
You're in sales, you hate, right? When you get a lead and they don't even know who we are, would it be great if they actually were like, oh yeah, I know who you are. I'm, I'm ready. Like, let's, let's move, right? Yeah. You know, just spend some cycles there. Spend like 20% of your day. Carve it out to like, educate, evangelize, and, and you'll go way more further.
You'll get a lot more projects than the time if it was just spent purely like heads down, just kind of on that, you know, that task at hand. Yeah.
Steve: What's your experience been? You know, you've, you've probably worked with some leaders who. Completely embrace marketing, right? They're just like, no, I, I get it.
I'm all in. In fact, I'm gonna give you more marketing dollars as a percent of my revenue than like other businesses, right? So how do you approach the people who already love marketing versus the notorious like marketing? Should I even have you around? I'm debating on just hiring 10 more salespeople.
Bill: Yeah. It's interesting cuz you know, if you, if you say marketing long enough, you'll get everyone, right? You'll get all those different personas. I remember I was a zenes once and we had an awesome CFO F there, Alan Black. And I remember at one point he came to me and said, " Hey Bill, if I give you more money, how many more leads could we get?
Right? And that was great. He understood that I worked with another great C E O Mark Jung at ign, and this was in the gaming days. And we were doing this digital front and he was like, Hey Bill, like let's think about what if we did an arbitrage on the S scm, right? Like how much we spent versus how much we can sell in these digital games.
And he got it right? And I was like, yes. Like I know that. I love that. Let's talk about our re and how we can fund this, right? The good and the bad of those personas are that or even a CEO that loves marketing and, and once again, the good and bad is like, good, you're gonna get resources.
The bad thing is that you know, like I've worked with some CEOs, I love 'em, they're all great, but sometimes they're like, they love marketing, but like, hey. Like, I want it this way, it's gotta be this way. Like, I love marketing so much that they're gonna be very in the weeds. And sometimes that's good.
Something that's not good. Like as a CEO, sometimes you don't want to be like writing every single bit of copy on every single bit of ad or email that goes out. Or sometimes they'll frustrate the team cuz they're like, well, which leader is it? Is it the CEO making the calls? Is cmo? Like, how does that work there?
And then on the flip side, you're gonna have sometimes, you know, You'll see it a lot on, in, especially technical startups, right? Or anything that focuses on more like backend or developer software. DevOps stuff is. Other times you have founders that are completely not going to market at all. They're just, you know, they were developers themselves.
They went through the ranks. They're, they're, they're making their startup. And so that can be, that can be good from the standpoint of like, Hey, you're usually empowered. They don't know what you're doing. Or, so you're like, Hey, go do marketing. But on the bad side, They don't know the markings. So I just, I was doing a one-on-one with someone two days ago on a team that I was advising and she was just really frustrated cuz it was like, hey, like I just, like, I killed myself working 80 hours a week.
Like I, I did these things over the last three months that were ganum I would've taken like, you know, 10 people to normally do this. But the CEO was like, oh, well I thought that would take like one day. Right? Like, because they don't know. They don't know what they don't know, right? Like, oh, we're gonna put in multiple such attributions.
Okay, that'll take an hour. Like how long does that take? Right? So, you know, you have to spend a lot of time. I always say, part of your job as a marketer is to educate your, your c e o or their stakeholders on what marketing is, how long things take so that they can be successful. Cuz again, same thing like if I'm all of a sudden turn around and I have a team of engineers or developers, You know, I, I'm not gonna know how long stuff takes, you know, marketing, we're notorious for that.
Hey, backend developer, can you make these changes on the website? That should take you five minutes. Right? And they just kind of chuckle, right? Like, what are you talking about, bill an idiot. So you know, have some empathy and just realize, like, identify which persona it is and then try to, A lot of times I'll tell the folks too, like, you gotta view it as a marketing campaign.
Like you have to go, okay, CEO. What's my content that I'm gonna educate 'em with? How am I gonna nurture it? You know, how am I going to identify their persona, what they think about marketing, what they like, what they don't like, and how am I gonna run cycles to influence that and move the needle on it? It takes a lot of time.
These are long-term projects.
Steve: Yeah. What do you, the, I'm envious of you in a, you, you do a lot of good advisory work for boards. I mean, what's most. Exciting in that is, is it access to the different, you know, you could have a conversation in the morning that is completely different in the afternoon.
Like what, what do you enjoy most about the advisory
Bill: stuff? You know, for me, the reason, so I was in a really fortunate place. I had a number of exits and I was like, what do I do? Do I retire? Do I become a vc, which I had a couple offers there, or do I kind of go down the advisor path, you know, advisor slash board member path.
And I just knew, like when I was going through a lot of these companies, I never really had access to advisors and I really wanted one. You know, I wanted people that could help mentor me or gimme advice or gimme different ideas or tell me what worked or as much as you're hearing the good stories, I have lots of bad stories where things like, you know, cataclysmically like failed when I tried something, right?
And so I wanted someone to tell me like they had that, so I wouldn't do it. And, and so, you know, I had access to a lot of boards, but a lot of those boards, frankly, were very, like, financial folks that had financial backgrounds, not really operators. Yeah. And so I've, I've really loved it, you know, and sometimes I work directly with the boards.
I'll come as an independent board member. Sometimes I'll come in as an advisor and I'll work directly with the marketing team and I'll mentor them and have them think about their go-to-market models. You know, like I just did a deep dive on an attribution modeling session or. You know, our session on pricing and packaging or measuring awareness and how you do it for me it's just really helpful.
Cause I love marketers. I just think that it's a really hard gig. It's a fun gig, but it's a really hard gig. Yep. And, you know, helping them think about how they grow their teams, how they grow the company and managing those relationships is just, you know, really gratifying for me. Yeah. I feel really fortunate to do it.
Steve: What do you see kind of on the horizon? We've talked about automation. We've set a new record for any podcast that hasn't mentioned the words AI in 30 some minutes. So what do you, what do you see as the most exciting thing going on in the marketing space?
Bill: Well I'm not gonna say AI now because that would, that would go down a dark path.
And what's most exciting? You know, I, without saying ai, I would say there's always something new coming out on the go-to market side. And I think, you know, like I get, that's a part of my dna. Like I always just thought there's, you know, you shouldn't just fall in love with one playbook and have that be it.
Like, I love freemium, but you know, there might be a better model that comes out that's just more efficient, that, that, that's better, that helps you grow faster, helps you monetize better. You know, I love products like growth stuff cuz I think it's a little bit newer and different, but, you know, there's always new strategies.
I remember when I was, I got into SEO a long time back. There were no SEO classes or even books. Like, I just had to go and read every single form I could for like two weeks after work until like, yeah, I kind of became an SEO expert. Right. And so, without naming a specific one, I think that there are always new innovations coming out, right?
Whether it's going to market models, whether it's marketing tactics, and you know, just being hungry and staying hungry is something that I think is really helpful for any marketer. Yep.
Steve: Yeah, agreed. Hunger is something you cannot teach. You know, you. You can be really talented at what you do, but if you're not passionate and hungry, you won't go as far as a marketer.
Okay. I've got two more questions for you. Yeah. This next one will be like, you're on 60 minutes doing a lifetime career achievement acceptance. But go back in time, talk to yourself as a marketer. So you, we talked about colleges when you first really were getting into it. What's some advice that you'd give yourself back then?
Bill: You know, the one piece of advice I would probably tell myself would be, Hey, don't believe all the stats. So I remember when I was going through school and maybe it was just the teachers, the classes, but a lot of the business classes were like, Hey, 90% of startups fail. Right, like only 2% make it right.
And it almost paints such a gloomy picture that it was like, oh wow, this is super hard to do. Now I still did my first start right outta college, but even then I was like, oh man, like, you know, the odds are against me. And I just think like now it is, it's a golden age for innovation for startups.
If you're in the software space, the barriers of entry to making a startup are so low now. There's so many great tools. That has democratized access that you can really, you know, make significant traction very quickly. And so I think there's just, you know, awesome opportunity, you know, and, you know, I probably tell myself that and then I probably say, Hey, don't, don't change a lot.
Like yeah. You know, stay hungry. Just try to learn. You know, and, and, and, and you'll do all right.
Steve: All right, so my final question, I have to go AI now since we've been talking about how we can't talk about ai. So, we'll, we'll end on ai. And I'll, I'll try to give you some guard balls cuz the topic is so big, right?
AI can be about generative content. It can be about security. It can be mm-hmm insights. Choose a lane that you think is going to have the most impact from a marketer's perspective. And why do you think that? It's gonna change.
Bill: I'm gonna go generate content. So literally, yesterday I was doing a session with another company and we were doing an SEO in content marketing, which I geek out on.
I love that stuff. And it was interesting because they were talking about, well, how do we create our own content? Should we hire more people? Should we hire interns? And I was like, look, you know, it was a spectrum. You can do that. You can hire people, you can do interns, there's freelancers, there's fibers, there's all that.
But there are a whole host. Of, you know, marketing companies that are focusing on generative content. Right. And, you know, and then at first it was like, oh, well, no. Like they're gonna, you know, the algorithm will know if it's generated or not. I'm like, maybe, maybe not. But, you know, I, I guess my point to them was like, Hey, this is big enough.
Like, I just know I've been an SEO in content marketing long enough that this will radically change that space. And I would, at least if I was an SEO professional, I would want to. Understand, what are the different tools? How do they work? What are the pros and cons? Because your competitors will absolutely start using them.
And, and in this case it was, you know, we kind of ended it where it was like, Hey, maybe we don't use generative AI to create all the concepts, but maybe it's like the first draft. Maybe it's as opposed to having nothing to start working on. Yep. You know, you're like, Hey, here's this key where they come up with a draft.
Right. And then, okay, we're gonna modify this with our knowledge and, and get it going. So I, you know, I, I just think for marketers and especially with SEO content marketing, I think that's gonna have a really big impact. And I would, I would definitely wanna be on top of it. Yeah,
Steve: I agree.
I've played a lot, or, you know, with the generative space. It is, it is amazingly powerful. I think some people will jump into the assumption that, oh, If you're in the content game, it's all about creating the actual content. I think the real power in AI is in the insights, the storytelling, and the structuring, because I, I love using simple prompts to say, this is what I'm doing.
My target audience is this. Generate a list of problems that this audience has, and then I'll just ask them why they have this problem? What are their struggles? And yeah, you have this, this back and forth and you really get a picture of who these people are. And then you're like, I have it. Like, now I have my idea of how I'm gonna structure my content.
And it's super powerful. If you're not playing around with a couple of AI platforms right now, you are, you are missing out. But, oh, well, that's okay. Absolutely. That's okay. Yeah. PE people will, people will devolve and just say, it's not for me. And other people are all in and they're, they're downloading it and playing with it.
So awesome. Bill, I really enjoyed the conversation today. I appreciate you coming on the show. And if people wanna reach out, if they want to use you for board advisory or things like that, what's the best way for them to reach you?
Bill: Yeah, just go to LinkedIn bill Maids you can find me there.
Shoot me a message. Always happy to have that conversation.
Steve: All right. Awesome. Thanks again and thanks everyone for tuning into interesting B2B marketers. Take care. Thanks, Steve.
