Episode 47: Leveraging Thought Leadership and Podcasts for Authentic B2B Engagement | Mark Colgan

In this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve Goldhaber talks with Mark Colgan, a seasoned B2B sales and marketing professional with 14 years of experience. They delve into Colgan's professional journey from recruiting to co-founding a 20-person PR agency, exploring his hands-on experience in digital marketing and revenue leadership roles. 

Colgan reveals his unique approach to leveraging thought leadership to initiate meaningful conversations with potential customers. He discusses how his strategies of interviewing those involved with Series A funding and using the generated content to reach out to companies have resulted in increased engagement and conversions. 

Further, they discuss the potential of podcasts as a platform for reaching targeted audiences and fostering genuine relationships, including tips for identifying suitable podcasts and how being a guest can boost business opportunities. 

The episode provides a comprehensive look at the evolving landscape of marketing strategies, the importance of understanding your audience, and the value of authenticity in marketing.

Connect with Mark Colgan and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26 on the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast. You sure host Steve here, excited for the show today. Welcome to the show. Mark. How are you doing?

Mark Colgan: Yeah, very good, Steve, really looking forward to sharing a few case studies today.

Steve Goldhaber: Awesome. Yeah, so before we do that, let's just give the audience a little bit of an understanding of your background. So give us a 60-second overview of who you are.

Mark Colgan: Oh, 60 seconds. 36 years and 60 seconds. But so really my professional career has been 14 years in B two B sales and marketing. I started in recruitment, but there's a sales angle to recruitment.

I then moved into marketing and got my first role in marketing as an online marketing manager. That was before there was a digital marketing manager as a job title, and then moved my way into working into revenue leadership roles most recently, running a hundred-person agency and then co-founding a 20-person PR agency as well.

That brings me up to date.

Steve Goldhaber: Nice. I remember speaking of getting started in in digital marketing a long time ago. I will date myself now because webmaster was the only job back when I was Yeah, like starting out after college. It was just like, well, do you wanna be a webmaster? And I'm like, what is that?

I don't even, don't even know.

Mark Colgan: Alright, I just quickly when I studied at university, I studied marketing, but they didn't teach us anything to do with digital. So I bought the book down here, Web Marketing for Dummies, and that basically taught me everything I knew to get a job, and then I learned the rest on the job.

Steve Goldhaber: That's great. All right, let's jump into, what I like most about the show is the case study, so the first one you're gonna share has to do with how to leverage thought leadership and using that to start. Good conversations.

Mark Colgan: Yeah. So this is back in a company that I worked at previously and we noticed that we started to get a few new customers that had recently raised a round of funding, typically a Series A.

And we thought, well, this is a segment that is actively growing and they're looking to invest in the service that we were selling at the time. But we really didn't have that much experience or anybody in the team, on the marketing team to talk about what to do once you've raised a round of funding.

So what we ended up doing was reaching out to people on different sides of the table. So, Two people that had raised a round of funding, and then two people that have worked with companies and multiple companies that have raised a round of funding, specifically a series A. What we asked them to do is to answer a few questions about the challenges of sales when it comes to, once you've raised that series A, what are the challenges that you're gonna face?

What are the successes that you've had, what has worked for you, and what didn't work for you? And then the third question was, any advice that they would share for other people who have raised a Series A and the things that is about for. So we reached out to those four different people, and asked them all the same question.

Then we essentially just edited the videos together as one long-form piece of content, and then we broke them into three separate videos, which were four people talking about each question. So we finally had some content that we hoped would resonate with our audience. So then we began to build a list of potential companies that we knew had just raised our funding because we used Crunchbase and some other databases to find that info.

And we reached out to those people or to those E B F sales, which is typically the title, saying that we have this content we put to put together these thought leaders. Would you like us to send it to you? Never mentioning what we did, not pitching our service whatsoever. We just wanted to get a reply from them.

Once we got the reply, we could point 'em in the right direction of the blog post. And on that blog post, we had a call to action and, and a bit more explanation about what we did. And then of course, in the follow-up, once they had said yes, they'd like it. We followed up to ask them if they have checked it out if they have any questions, does any of it resonate with them?

Yeah. And that's really how we started a lot more conversations than what we were getting with just our normal outbound approach where we were potentially pretty much pitching our service.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's nice. So I, here's what I'm curious about because I've, I've done this for my business where. You know, you try to capture content.

I've asked for quotes, and I've done interviews. I used to do, I used to write blog posts for LinkedIn back in the day, and I would always kind of say, Hey, I'm writing a new piece. I'd love to interview you. Super hard to get some people to wanna be on record. So I, I'm curious, as you did your outreach, what did you sense was like, whether it's a percentage or if you figure it out like these are the people who are just more comfortable.

On camera or recording on a podcast like Navigate, I've always struggled with. Trying to figure out what works best.

Mark Colgan: Yeah, so one of the ways to identify if these people will be comfortable on camera is if they've already produced videos themselves or they've spoken on another podcast. So we mainly reached out to those people that had, and they've already, they are comfortable on, on camera.

And we could see the videos that they've had on YouTube or other podcast interviews that they've been on as well. And then also, I use my network too. So because I had so much experience in that industry, I did have a few people I could call on. The ones that were much more proactive and happy to talk.

Almost like the agencies or, or the, the service providers that helped those companies, which you can imagine why because it's good exposure for them. But I did get a, a couple of VPs of sales or at Series A companies, or maybe they, one of them had been a VP of sales, moved on to a different role, but asked him to talk about his experience anecdotally.

So we didn't ask them to mention it. Specific companies, but we just asked them for their experience of going through that process.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that makes sense. I like the screening tool that you kind of built-in, which was, Hey, they've already done it. They're, they're more inclined to say, yes, I've, in my podcast outreach, I've, I've found the same thing.

Can't always get your dream to guess, but yeah, they've already been qualified 'cause they're comfortable. And I, it's funny how, you know, whether it's shooting video or recording a podcast, there's just a chunk of the people out there who just aren't. Comfortable doing it. They think, they think they're not gonna be good or they don't have anything interesting to say, which is like usually far from the truth.

But it is an interesting psychological part of the mm-hmm. Of getting people to talk. Sometimes they're just like, Nope, not comfortable.

Mark Colgan: Yeah. In, one of my other companies, we partnered with a voice and presentation coach and we offered an hour session with her so she could help. The customers that we worked with just be more confident on the camera and speaking in interviews.

And one of, the tactics or methods that she talks about is the pint and a half effect. So she's from the UK so pints are very popular in the UK. So a pint of beer. And she said, just imagine that you're sitting in the pub with a friend and you've had a beer and a half and you're just talking.

You're just talking to your friend. That's all you're doing. And it kind of removes some of that fear that people have about public speaking. And if you just imagine. You've had a beer and you're, you're talking to a friend. Yeah. It can make the whole experience a lot easier for you to do a good job.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I like that. That's great advice. Pint and a half, that, that still works in America. That plays well. We understand, we understand a pint and a half. So what was the outcome of all this? Like, you know, you're, you're getting good conversations. Are you, are you seeing increased engagement in conversion rates as opposed to when you didn't do this type of approach?

Mark Colgan: Yeah, we certainly did. We actually had a lot of people who were saying thank you and what, what do you do? So they were just curious as to why we were making the effort to send this content across. You know, not thousands of people, but we as an agency at the time, didn't need hundreds of new customers every month.

So we had a lot of people that were interested in finding out more. Really the reason why we were producing this content in the first place, and that led to a number of discovery calls and then a number of customers signing up and working with us.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Where do you think this type of, tactic, it feels like an evergreen strategy, meaning as long as you're authentic and you're initially not trying to pitch, it should work.

Are you seeing more and more people do this? There's less engagement? How? How has this played out over time?

Mark Colgan: Yeah. I think the tactic works. The context is most important, so I think a lot of people see the strategy and they try and replicate it, but they haven't really done the research to find out is this really a pain or is this really a problem that is, yes.

Personas that really care about. So yeah, the tactic, like any tactic can work as long as you've got the right content in this case and, and the right context. So really understanding who your ideal customers are and those buyer personas and what their challenges and responsibilities are. You can easily look at a job description of 10 different job descriptions of your buyer persona, see what commonalities are between all of those job descriptions to see what those objectives and responsibilities are, and then just start ticking off those bullet points and that's where you can create content.

No ss e o research or keyword analysis. Just look for the pains and the challenges that they have.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Love the pain. I feel, I really feel like if you're not leading with pain, it's, it's an uphill battle. You, you either have to have a great relationship with someone to get their attention or. It's, it's super tough, so I like the pain.

Anything else on the first case study before we jump into the next one?

Mark Colgan: Just to share that it wasn't as hard as it sounds to create. It was a few conversations. It was recorded over Zoom. We had a marketing, one of our marketing managers just to cut and edit the videos, but nothing fancy. It was raw.

It was an interview and it's really, really effective. I think personally since Covid and everybody worked from home, the production quality expectations from people have gone down a little bit as long as the content's great. It doesn't really matter that it's not in a studio and you're sitting down having a fireside conversation with somebody.

So don't let technology and, and don't let you know these other things stop you from at least trying it.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's a good point. I do feel like the expectations are lower. Also, the gear is a little bit better. So you really, for. Not a lot of money can pull off a decent studio.

Mark Colgan: Yeah. You know, I mean I'm using my iPhone as the web camera here and I'm just got that plugged into my computer using an app which was 30 or $40.

And the new iOS has released its own app that can handle this as well. And then a trustee Blue Yeti U s B microphone, which cost me yeah. Maybe a hundred pounds, a hundred dollars about five years ago, and it's still working.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, cool. Let's jump into case study number two. This one is kind of related to what we're doing right now on a podcast.

So this case study's all about how to leverage podcasts to get in front of the people that you want.

Mark Colgan: Yeah, so it's, it is for the same company that I was working for with the first case study. One of the things that was a challenge for us was building up our own audience and getting people to sign up for a newsletter because not everybody wants to sign up to a newsletter.

So you put out some content and it kind of goes into the wind and you just hope people will see it. Of course, ss e o can kick in. So what we thought about doing was, well, who else shares the same audience that we want to work with? Sell or offer a different service to that audience, so there's no kind of direct competition there at all.

So we identified a number of podcasts, which had the audience that we wanted to reach, and then we reached out to the podcast hosts, and asked them if they were interested in talking about this topic and this topic, which is related to, again, to that audience. We tried to make those topics as valuable as possible to the audience who are listening because we thought that podcast hosts will care about the quality of the guests and they certainly did.

We also asked the host if they wanted to change anything. Like it wasn't us coming on here to talk about A, B, C, and that's it. So it was very much a collaborative process. This is about four or five years ago now. So not this strategy hadn't been done as much as, as perhaps is now. And we managed to land a number of different interviews on sales-related podcasts.

One interview turned into eight conversations and four of those from the eight turned into customers. So it a really quick r o I. Yes. But what I learned after is that it's, it's not always that quick and it's a sometimes a, a lot of longer game that you need to play.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I really enjoy podcasting as, as a way, obviously just to meet new people, but I agree there, there is some great new business opportunities and obviously you're, you're, you're trying to build a genuine relationship otherwise, yeah.

If it falls apart, but I think that I've never, what, I've been on other people's podcasts or they've been on mine. There's never been a feeling of like, okay, here comes the hard pitch.

Mark Colgan: But exactly. The other thing that's come from that as well is a few years later, people still get in touch for you. Say, oh, I heard you on the so and so podcast.

Talk about X, Y, Z can I just pick your brains or are you still working about company? I need help with that. And I think that's what's great about podcast. You mentioned Evergreen as, as the, the previous strategy, but the podcasting space is completely evergreen too. And what I think is extremely powerful is if when somebody has the challenge or problem and you've spoken about that challenge or problem and you did a good job conveying your knowledge and expertise, most people when if they want to kind of get in touch with you, they will because they can use the fact that they heard you on the interview to start a conversation.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. The other thing too, like I've noticed when people have reached out saying, oh, I just watched that podcast about whatever topic, The dynamic really changes. So if they're coming to me to use my agency, all of a sudden they've already said like, I already know who you are. I get you. Yeah. Like, you don't even have to like, do anything.

I just want to talk. And that's, that's also fun for me. 'cause then I don't have to do the five to 10 minute mm-hmm. Overview of everything. So it's, it's really efficient.

Mark Colgan: Yeah. We, I've had it a couple times where someone says, yep, I get it. I get what you're about. I like what you're about. How do I work with you?

How does it work? Yes. And I mean, that's just such a great conversation to, to lead to, to a sale.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So take us through, like, I want to get a little bit more detailed on, on this strategy. Like what are the, it, it seems very straightforward, right? But give us like the steps that you have to go through to do this successfully.

Mark Colgan: Yeah, I'll, I'll kind of give you like the 80 20, so the 20% of the things that you can do, which gives you the most impact. So when you're trying to identify the, so the steps are research the podcast. Reach out to the podcast, manage the back and forth of the booking, and then turn up and do a good interview.

So four steps there. The first one is how do you find the podcasts that are speaking to the same audience a little bit Like what, what we talked about in the first case study of reaching out to people who have already spoken on those shows. So I would look at who are the other influencers or other people that share my audience, and then just put in their name and then podcast and see which podcast they've been on.

And you can make an assumption that they vetted that, that podcast or that show is right for them based on the audience. And you obviously can double check that. There's a great website called listen notes.com. It's probably the most comprehensive directory of podcasts. It's pretty much free to use as well.

So that way you can actually search for keywords. So if you're trying to get to HR directors, so HR or Human Resources, podcasts, there'll be lots of podcasts with that title and listeners gives you some metadata around each of those podcasts as well. So that's the research step. Can I go any deeper on that Steve, or Yeah, go, go deeper.

Go deeper. I like it. So when you are looking at the shows, one thing that's really useful to do is pull out a couple of guests or things that have been spoken about previously and make a note of those because that's what you can use to increase your, your outreach or the, the likelihood of them replying to your app.

Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: And one thing I wanna get your thoughts on too, on the actual outreach, what I've learned, what I've done it for, for my show is, Three sentences max, you know, like that. That's it for that initial email. What's your experience been like?

Mark Colgan: Yeah, I think rule number one is make it all about the host and their audience.

Rule number two is keep it short as possible. And number three is to remove the work for the host. So how I would approach that is saying something along the lines of, Hey Steve, I saw you had so and so, so influencer in my industry on. Podcast who talked about X, Y, Z. Wondering or curious if your audience would be interested in a different view or another strategy or, yes, I actually disagree with that strategy and here's why Would that be of interest to your audience?

So maybe a little bit more than three sentences. Definitely three paragraphs, no more. But you're making it extremely relevant. You show that you've done your research by referencing a previous guest and, and what they spoke about. You're doing the work for the host. To come up with a topic, of course, listen to that show first, because certain podcasts have certain structure to them as well.

So you wanna make sure that you're not trying to convince the, the podcast host to change their whole structure. And then that call to action at the end is just very, it's known as a soft call to action. Would your audience find this valuable? If you've done that research, you've made that relevant message.

It's there's never gonna be a note to that answer. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's, I like the closing question too. Nothing like a good close in an email. Good, good question. Yeah. All right. What else? What else about the case study would you like to share?

Mark Colgan: Yeah, so from that case study, like I said, I generated customers straight away, and I got lucky with that, to be honest.

But the reason why I was able to convert those customers is because I went on a really, really, really specific podcast, which was about cold email, where the podcast host wants to use, talk through a case study, very similar to this type of format, which was specific results and how you got to those results.

The podcast was quite new. It didn't have millions of downloads. And this is the, the key with this strategy, or, or as, as, as a case study here, is you don't need the biggest podcast. You just need the ones that have the most relevant audience that you want to reach. So that would be something else that I would share about this particular case study.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. Nice. All right. Let's jump into q and a. I want you to tell us about your first job in marketing. What were you doing? Go back as far as you can. I love the childhood stories when it comes to marketing jobs, but how'd you get started?

Mark Colgan: Yeah. Well, funny enough, I went straight from university into work.

I did a placement year as part of my university degree, so that I worked in industry. Then went back to do my final year. And I, I kind of fell into recruitment and I enjoyed it. So I stayed in recruitment for, for so, so long, but I was recruiting marketers in the company that I was working for and there just wasn't that many candidates out there.

And at the same time, or about six months before I'd started playing around with WordPress websites and building a website in WordPress for my dad and for a friend who was a personal trainer. So I really got some hands on experience. I actually saw that I had sometimes more experience with building websites, for example, than the average marketer who was applying for roles.

And around this time there were two types of marketers who, one knew that they had to learn digital but didn't really want to. And then the other type were those who were let's just say a little bit younger, and they were growing into the marketing role as digital became more important. So I knew that my competition was quite low and I had the skills from recruitment to talk my way into that job.

Yeah. And yeah, I was the first digital marketing hire for a data center, design and build company, which is as sexy as it sounds. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: That's really funny. I mean, I think it's great. I've worked with recruiters a long time and it's funny how you really get to, as a recruiter, you get to learn so much every day.

You're learning about people's backgrounds, and I've always admired that of the recruiters that I know is you're just, you're constantly soaking things up. They're oftentimes more knowledgeable than any one candidate. Yeah. Or anyone like C M O, because they just know what's happening in the industry.

Mark Colgan: A hundred percent agree, and I think a lot, a little bit like especially in the UK, estate agents get a very bad reputation. I. Or real realtors in, in the US recruiters also have that same stigma. But there are good ones out there and I think they are genuinely a fountain of knowledge for insights into the industry, what's changing, how the roles are adapting as well.

So I've always looked to partner with other recruiters who serve the same audience as me to see if there are any partnerships that we can come up with as well if, if it aligns with what it's that we're doing.

Steve Goldhaber: One thing I also like about your first job is that you were doing everything and you were very hands-on, and I think sometimes marketers.

Who don't get that experience because let's say they go to a really big company and at big companies, you may need 10, 20 people to actually come together to create something. But I've always admired people who can just either if it's on the side or at a small company, do everything so that you really understand like the difference in front end and backend and tracking.

And it's helped me a lot because I think when I was working at really large companies and I would hear from people trying to like pitch me services. I'd be like, oh, wait, isn't that just as simple as like putting this code there? Mm-hmm. Like, isn't that like 30 seconds to do? Yeah. So you're, you could really kind of see through a lot of, of the fluff out there when I was buying it.

Because you're just, you just knew how simple some of these things were. I agree.

Mark Colgan: We worked with an agency that had a 48-hour turnaround to update the website, and I was just like, I'll just go into the backend and just make a few changes. And then it's like, well, you can't do that because we've custom coded WordPress, which was built in a way that you should be able to just to go into the backend and change the, the post title.

But the way that the agency had built it, took away that functionality. So in the end, you know, part of me moving into that role, we got rid of the agency and I took over the responsibility for most of the stuff that they were doing. So I should have asked for a lot more in terms of my salary, I.

Steve Goldhaber: It is funny when you have when you have that knowledge and you just go, well, just hit publish. Yeah, exactly. Like, well, we'll just look at it on the dev site or what, you know, and it's interesting. Mm-hmm. But I understand agencies sometimes me too, you know, are intentionally doing it or they just don't know any better.

Mm-hmm. They, they were, they were taught that way and I'm sure there's good intent behind it, you know, where it's like, well, we like to have three people QA it. We just don't want one person to push it live. Yeah. So you've been marketing a good amount of time. What. What is it that gets you kind of? Excited these days, you know, what's on the horizon that you're like, this is where it's really gonna be interesting.

Mark Colgan: Yeah, I, I think it's, this is a good question because I think we can get excited by tech new technology and chat, G P T and AI and all of this, like silver bullets that come flying at us as a marketer. But one thing that doesn't change fundamentally is that we are marketing and, and selling effectively to humans and the way that we buy, whilst the buyer's journey has changed, but.

Deep-rooted in psychology is pretty much the same. There has to be some trust, there is some element of persuasion when it comes to selling, but not really nasty and manipulative persuasion, but just using particular tactics to help people make a decision. So what I really, what I really enjoy about marketing is that, As a skill, if you hone it, it doesn't matter what tactic or what industry or what vertical that you are trying to market to because you can always fall back on the fundamentals and then maybe learn the new tools, learn chat G P T or learn TikTok for example.

So that's what keeps me excited about marketing. I have the fundamentals and I get to experiment with lots of new, different tools and yeah, technology.

Steve Goldhaber: Someone I used to work with had a funny saying they'd been in marketing for over 20 years and they go look, Every strategy has already been developed.

There are no new business strategies. Of course, the tactics change, and I always kind of, the, the longer I've spent in marketing, the more I've agreed to it, is you kind of, you see all these different strategies and now it's just when to use them or, or how to implement them differently.

Mark Colgan: Definitely.

Definitely. I think as well, marketing has a. Reputation for relabeling things. So account-based marketing, dark funnel or dark social where they have pre-names from five years ago. But marketing is remarketing their own, their own kind of terminology. So I always find that quite funny. I chuckle to myself.

Well, I wonder

Steve Goldhaber: when the term marketing might go away because the marketers re-rebranded marketing, that never seems to go away. But what's one thing that just drives you nuts, you know, is, is it the abundance of technological choices that. Can be paralyzing. Like what, what, what, just as a marketer gets you kind of like, ah, we gotta stop doing this.

It's driving me nuts.

Mark Colgan: Yeah, so the, there is an abundance of technology and I think really a lot of people try and look at technology and build out a use case. So they look at a tool and go, oh, I guess I could use it to do this. Whereas what they should really do is go, what are the challenges that I have right now?

And where could I use technology to improve that process? That's not what winds me up. What really winds me up being tell in my tone. Now, Steve, International Pizza Day and a company will on this, on LinkedIn or on Twitter, go, oh, we're celebrating International People Day international pizza day, and there's nothing else behind that post or, or tweet other than the fact that it's a day in the calendar and somebody has thought it's a good idea to tweet about it because it happens to be on the 12th of July or whatever it may be.

I just think that's super lazy. The other thing, oh, you got me on one now. Other thing is Valentine's Day and then getting a 10% discount on email verification because it's Valentine's Day. No sense whatsoever, no attempt to tie Valentine's data, email validation. So I just think that's quite lazy marketing and I, I don't appreciate it, as you can tell from my tone.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. At least go to the extent of saying like, we love emails that get delivered. I don't know. That would be the, that would be the easy way. Yeah. But yeah. But yeah, I'm with you. There's a lot of laziness and when I've done my own research for like, what are the days going on in a given month, it just, there's too many.

Mm-hmm. It's not even, it's not even like Ice Cream Day or, or Cookie day. It's Chocolate chip cookie day or oatmeal raisin. It's like, yeah, there must've been a bunch of PR lobbyists who were like, we got you. The oatmeal cookie day gets on the national calendar. Yeah. Alright. That this could be a its own episode on rants about bad, lazy marketing.

What have you looked back on over your career? You would've done differently. You know, like there, there's so many things. When I look at like my first five to eight years in marketing, I kind of chuckle mm-hmm. About things, I've done. What, what about you? What have you, what have you kind of said? Oh man, I totally had that wrong.

Mark Colgan: Yeah. I think for me, I would've been more intentional about building connections or relationships with people. Like I've done that later in my career. But I think I wouldn't have been, or I would, I shouldn't have had that fear of reaching out to somebody who's ahead of me or somebody from who I could learn.

Or even somebody who's. I don't wanna say it beneath me, but just starting out. Let's say I was two years in and I could actually reach out to somebody who's just done and offer some help, because as I've got older and as my network has increased, the more that I've given to my network without expecting anything in return, the more stuff that comes back to me.

And again, I can't say that it's this one conversation I had in July 2006 that yielded this result. But just by freely giving and not being afraid to ask questions and ask for seek help and seek mentorship. Most people are nice people and most people like helping others. So I think I wouldn't have been as afraid of reaching out or thinking that somebody wouldn't wanna talk to me.

Yeah. Because I just started.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's, I can relate to that. I, I think, I remember when I was early in my career, and there was, there was much more of an established hierarchy in business mm-hmm. 20, 25 years ago, where it was like, well, that person is three levels up. Yeah. Things have flattened out quite a bit these days.

And even the idea of reverse mentorship, Is something that sometimes a really senior person would welcome a junior person. You know, like I remember when I was leading social media for people, like the people on my team doing it were like, yeah, like the C M O wants direct access to you because he wants to learn more about social.

So like mm-hmm. Build that relationship. It's good to see that happen. As we wrap up the show, I'm gonna think of one more question, or, you know what, maybe I'll turn it on you. What's the one question I should be asking you? What is, what is something that you wanna share with people in the spirit of kind of giving and educating them about the, you know, the space that you've been in?

What do you, what do you think they should? Really understand.

Mark Colgan: I think I wasn't prepared for this question, but the question is, I think one of the great questions is how do you learn more about your buyers? Because ultimately that's what good solid marketing does. You create a message that gets sent to the right person at the right time.

And for me, it's all about relevancy. But you can't be relevant without really understanding who your customers are and what their challenges may be. And as you mentioned before about the pain points that they're experiencing. In B two B sales and, and decision making. The majority of decisions, I think it's around 70% or it might be 80% of decisions are made to avoid pain or loss than it is to gain something.

So how do we find out what those people's pains are? So using job descriptions, for example, when in the past I've had a saved calendar appointment with a link to LinkedIn jobs in the calendar, and I look at five to 10 job posts every week of my persona that I'm trying to sell to. If our sellings are B two B marketers four years ago, TikTok would never have shown up in a job description.

Whereas if you look at it now, it might do so. What are those changes? What are those patterns that you should be looking for? So those are the things that I use to find out more about my buyers. And then also having been in sales and working in recruitment, which is very pick up, the phone and boiler room esque, I've never, I've never been, been afraid of speaking to people.

And I, I feel like that's been a huge advantage in my marketing career when I worked with other marketers who would never pick up the phone and speak to a prospect, or never pick up the phone and speak to a, a customer or go out of their way to an event and speak to some of the people that they, you know, don't want to sell to that individual, but want to learn about the role and the challenges that they have.

So the advice to learn more is to have more conversations with the people that you're trying to communicate with. Remove the fact that you're trying to sell something to them eventually and just, just have a conversation. You'll learn so much more. Yeah. Yeah. I love it.

Steve Goldhaber: I love it. Alright. We've reached the end of the podcast.

We can celebrate philosophically with our pint and a half. I will always remember the pint-and-a-half advice that I learned today. Brilliant. So I, I really enjoyed having you. On the podcast Mark, thank you for sharing your thoughts and your wisdom.

Mark Colgan: Cheers, Steve. It's been great. Awesome questions.

Thank you.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, everyone. Thanks for joining the podcast today and we will see you next time on Studio 26. Take care.

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