In this episode of the B2B Brand180 Podcast, Linda interviews Drew Neisser, CEO at CMO Huddles, podcast host, business coach and author. They discuss the challenges CMOs face in a recession including budget cuts, the importance of brand reputation, and the role of AI. Drew shares insights from his extensive career and explores current industry trends, providing practical advice for navigating economic downturns and leveraging new technologies.

03:03 Challenges and Strategies in B2B Industries

05:47 The Evolving Role of the CMO

07:59 Navigating Budget Cuts and AI in Marketing

15:02 Addressing the Hidden Recession in B2B

16:36 Effective Strategies for B2B CMOs

More About Drew:
http://www.cmohuddles.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewneisser/

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

Linda Fanaras: 

I’m Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand 180 Podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency, where you’ll learn all the latest tips on how to grow your business with branding, strategy and other lead generation. Today, I am super excited to bring in Drew Neisser. He has had a large career specifically working for some big agencies and he founded Renegade in 1993. So he’s won just about every every possible award out there regarding creativity and marketing effectiveness. He’s written some books and which I’m sure he’ll share a little bit more. But what is great about Drew is, is he’s really going to bring us some insight today around B2B marketing and strategies that really do work. And one of the bestselling authors. bear called him one of the strongest B2B marketing thinkers in the world, which he says makes him laugh, but what makes his wife laugh. But I’m actually going to ask him a few questions about that. So welcome drew. Super happy to have you here today. Thanks for joining in.

Drew Neisser: 

Thank you. The last four years have been a joy ride doing CMO Huddles, which is part of the way I’ve really become this B2B expert. So, anyway, thank you for doing this. I know how much work it is to do a podcast, so I really appreciate being on your show.

Linda Fanaras: 

No, I love having you here. So is there anything else you’d like to add about your background today?

Drew Neisser: 

Gosh, you know, I am I’m a passionate marketer and I’ve been interviewing CMOs for well over 10 plus years probably, I think it’s I’ve lost count. It’s over 600 and that is like my mana. That’s how being able to talk to CMOs, interview them, go through their case histories has really given me a pretty profound look at it at the, the challenges CMOs face, particularly in B2B and also. As a coach, which I do more and more of both in the capacity of CMO Huddles as that’s if you think about it as a large coaching group, but also one on one.

Linda Fanaras: 

Awesome. So my first question really to you, Drew, is why do you think you were defined as one of the strongest B2B marketing thinkers in the world? That’s a pretty big statement.

Drew Neisser: 

You know, I, I so I just sent Jay a copy of my book and Jay has been on my podcast a couple of times, but I tell you what, almost once, maybe once a month some I’ll get a praise for something. Someone will send some nice feedback and my wife will say, That’s because you’re one of the strong and she can’t quite get it exactly right. So we have this big chuckle over it. You know, I have been told that it is when someone makes you accomplishment, just accept it. I’m one of those folks who of course struggle with that. But anyway I’m delighted that Jay said it. I, I think my book Renegade Marketing, 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable Brands really resonated with him. And we had enough conversations and we’ve spoken at certain events together that He has a sense for my insight, I guess.

Linda Fanaras: 

that’s phenomenal. So tell me on the B2B side, there are many, many different types of B2B industries out there. Which ones do you think are doing well? Which ones are, I don’t want to say failing, but maybe not doing so well. What’s your, what’s your thoughts on that?

Drew Neisser: 

So I’ve got thoughts and then I’ve got research. So on the, on the research side, I could just hear, we did a study of 121 B2B CMOs earlier in the year, and 69 percent think their industry is in a recession. So that’s, you know, that’s almost seven out of 10. The only ones that didn’t feel like they were in a recession tend to have some AI component that was keeping them moving. And, you know, going back to that study for just a second. The thing about it is that when your industry is a recession. Your budget gets cut. It gets harder to do it. Buyers are much more likely not to buy or stretch out the deal cycles. And we saw all of that in the data and CMOs are forced to cut their staff and along with their budget. So you just have what I would describe for most as the most stressful period in recent memory for these folks. I mean, 61 percent feel this is the most professionally challenging period of their time. So. There’s like two economies out there. They’re sort of B to B in general. And then there’s sort of the AI folks. And I can say there’s a little bit of growth in health tech and a little bit of growth in, but there’s no growth in MarTech. So everybody’s, it’s a share battle. So anyway, we all need interest rates to go down and And, and when that happens we’ll, we’ll have a lot more happy B2B marketers.

Linda Fanaras: 

I guess I’m wondering is manufacturing versus energy versus other things. Do you, did you take, do you have any data related?

Drew Neisser: 

So, you know, in general sense, obviously things like solar are doing well, but they’re, they have supply chain issues. So, cause one of one of the huddlers in our CMO Huddles community is works for for a solar company and their growth is restrained by certain factors. So they should be doing well. Martech. Is not as a general rule is not doing well at all. And that’s any kind of thing that helps a marketer you know, do their marketing more efficiently or measure more things. So, in terms of manufacturing again, look at, you know, you have to look at it on an individual basis. These are still growing, but Tesla isn’t right. There’s pockets of success out there, but it’s pretty spotty again. I think if you threw a dart at a B to B company, chances are you’d hit one that was not doing as well as they did in 2022. Right?

Linda Fanaras: 

You know, I’d love to talk more about the CMO role because I’ve been around the block for a while, so things have just become more and more complicated for the CMO in so many different ways. There are so many different ways to market today. There are so many different things to track. It’s hard to know what’s working and what’s not, and it’s becoming more confusing. So I’m just, from your perspective, why is the CMO role more challenging now than

Drew Neisser: 

ever before? So you’re right. You hit on a lot of the things. I mean, besides the media choices and the technology and the splintering of it you could go to almost any category and you would probably find 50 competitors in it. So there’s too many companies chasing the same, the same customers. It’s very few brands have any kind of mind space, which is really the objective of, of all of our marketing. So. The job has always been hard, and one of the primary reasons that folks don’t acknowledge is that less than 20 percent of CEOs, and it doesn’t even matter what size company it is, in B2B have any experience in marketing.

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s interesting.

Drew Neisser: 

And so you have executives who are making decisions on budgets and where to allocate budgets who have no idea how, you know, how the sausage is made, so to speak, how a marketing plan is put together. They also don’t really have a sense for what differentiation looks like. And so, and how long it takes. And that’s a real problem because, and by the way, this, company, this couldn’t ha managers control the budg P. N. L. They know what d doesn’t work that way in have a lot of disconnecti CEOs. I write about this a lot on LinkedIn. You have CEOs who say, just spend money on ways to get me leads. That’s all they want. It doesn’t work that way. If you don’t understand how marketing works and how brands are built as a CEO, you are doomed to be frustrated with your CMO.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right. Right. Yes. Like it’s cast a wide net. It doesn’t work that way.

Drew Neisser: 

Right.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right. So when it comes to that CMO role you know, and they are looking at difficult, challenging times, how do you think they should go about maybe cutting their budgets, looking at staffing You know, or go to market plan and how does AI plan into all this now? Sure. Because that’s a whole other element that I think, you know, marketers are dealing with and trying to navigate that in the most effective right way possible.

Drew Neisser: 

So cutting the budget’s really an interesting thing. And I’ve seen this and we’ve had lots of conversations in, in CMO Huddles about budget cuts. And typically what happens, let’s say it’s a 10% cut. They’ll look for the low hanging fruit in their staff. They’ll look at their low hanging fruit with quote, the underperforming media. And. They’ll pretty much stop there and they’ll just cut those things. And, and what we talk a lot about is you really need to start again and say, I have a new budget, which means I have to focus my budget in a different way. I can’t reach as many people. I don’t need as many staff, but what happens is they don’t build from the new plan. They just cut where they are. And so what you end up having is they’re still spending too much on MarTech. Okay. Like, you’d be amazed anytime you see that number go over 10%. In my mind, it’s too much, but it’s at 15 or 20 percent after a cut. And part of that is long term contracts and so forth. But that’s part one of this is you gotta, you gotta look at your MarTech and you gotta cut it because there’s no point in having 15 percent of your dollars, not going to something that’s, that’s going to reach or to, or to generate demand or, or at least enhance your brand, something.

Linda Fanaras: 

Exactly. Exactly.

Drew Neisser: 

So that’s part one. Part two is rethinking your staffing. All right. So we have a smaller staff. And we have a smaller target audience and we hopefully have a more focused program. Are we suffering at the right way? So you gotta step back. You can’t just simply say, well, that person’s only been here three months. We can get rid of them. And that person is not really performing very well. And so that’s the post cut planning process needs to be rethought. That’s part one of this. I’ve got more thoughts on, on the CMO playbook that will get them through this period.

Linda Fanaras: 

And on the staffing side too. I mean, there are alternatives. You’re right. It’s not just, Oh, they just started. Let’s cut them. It’s really analyzing. What needs to get executed and how to best execute that in the most cost-effective way possible. And that might include contractors or working with very niche agencies and other strategies like that.

Drew Neisser: 

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Right. So you could think about, all right, well, we’re doing a lot less of this. Do we even need to have that in house anymore?

Linda Fanaras: 

Exactly. Or is that costing us too much money to execute? Would that be more effective outside using a different strategy or tactic?

Drew Neisser: 

And so you also asked about how AI is and this is a real problem in the industry right now. So there’s a perception out there. Well, AI could just create all your content. So you don’t even need content staffing and nothing could be further from the truth because AI generated content on its own is useless. Absolutely useless. I’m not saying that there aren’t a million ways of using A. I. To generate better content, but that’s not necessarily getting rid of your best writers and this relates right to the C. M. O. Which is They’re looking at chat GPT and these tools solely as content generators. And to me, that’s so problematic because that’s the low hanging fruit of this thing. And in truth, most of that content isn’t going to be what you, what’s going to help you really differentiate from What will help you differentiate using these tools for sales enablement to create the widgets that you couldn’t create before that you’d needed a programmer and you had to wait for your it guys and all that. You can figure out how to create these widgets, which actually be T and a heartbeat.

Linda Fanaras: 

So

Drew Neisser: 

Suddenly, if you have a big idea and you know this from running an agency, when you have a big idea, you can iterate against it. Right? So we have this big idea. Okay, now let’s iterate. How many different ways could we execute the same idea and bring it to life from a sales enablement from a customer experience? All that. And that’s where it’s mind bogglingly cool. That’s part one. Part two is using AI for strategy. So it’s really an interesting time and I, I think that you could probably use a generative AI for just about everything. And and I find myself doing that more and more. I find that like we have a, we support a group of CMOs in transition and there’s some amazing things that you can do from an interview prep standpoint, from an analysis of your questions and the answers from how to deal with tough questions to practicing, to creating your, it’s unbelievable how how effective that’s that is. So, anyway, there’s no such thing as a CMO who isn’t embracing these things. It’s just a question of how.

Linda Fanaras: 

So to your point on that, and I think AI is a, is a really good example because, you know, some companies do not want to touch it. Other companies are using it for everything, but from a marketing perspective, to your point, I think it’s a great opportunity to use AI for ideation, maybe to be able to build up, you know, concepts around strategies that could be a little unique and not the same old, just to, just to start that process going, obviously it writes content. We know that. It writes, you know, can write very generic content, and to your point, you want to get A writer that can actually sort of make it into something unique and different and not just generic content. So it does provide a great purpose. It’s just how do you use that in the most effective way possible,

Drew Neisser: 

right? And how do you get it? The usage beyond the CMO, I mean, I think CMOs need to be using it. They tend to be some really jump at it. Some just delegated and I, you know, that’s unfortunate cause they don’t get to see possible that way. That’s a funny moment because when you say that there are companies that don’t want to touch it, it reminds me in the year 2000, three of us from digital land went to visit craft and the whole marketing department said, Hey, there’s this internet thing and you got to get on it. And none of the employees at craft at that time had access to the internet because the, the, you know, the head of the company was afraid that everybody would look at porn, you know, I mean, it was hilarious. And, and so, you know, they ended up being way, way behind. They caught up. They figured it out, but there’s some first mover advantage to be had.

Linda Fanaras: 

Absolutely. So I’ve heard all kinds of things in the B2B space, you know, looking at the economy, looking at the emotions that tie into the stock market, looking at all different types of areas within the B2B space. Do you think there’s a hidden recession right now?

Drew Neisser: 

Oh my God. Yeah. Oh, I, I don’t think there’s any doubt. All you have to do is you sit down, have a one on one with a CMO and this came out in our research, but ask them how is your deal cycle longer or shorter than it was six months ago or a year ago?

Linda Fanaras: 

Longer.

Drew Neisser: 

That’s number one. Is your close rate better or worse than it was 12 months ago? Right. Worse. Right. And so those two things alone, and then how many, Deals. Did you think you were going to do where the customer didn’t buy anything? Right? All of those are clear indications. And you know, how many of the head layoffs, like 50 percent in our survey in March had had layoffs. I know that number has gone up. And that’s the company and 41 percent had layoffs in marketing. So I don’t think there’s any doubt that in B to B, particularly like in SAS there is a session, a recession. Again, there are always exceptions to all of these things. I mean, there’s some companies that are killing it. Out there. I suspect many of these other companies will turn it around because there’s, you know, recessions are a sentiment. It’s an emotional feeling. I’m not going to buy now because I’m worried about our business tomorrow going to happen. When the sentiment gets better, people make purchase decisions. And so they’re more risk averse than they usually are right now. So, yeah, it makes sense.

Linda Fanaras: 

The, the buying cycle is longer too. It can take longer. It seems to be taking longer now as well. Yeah. Instances, some industries. So what do you think’s working for the B2B CMOs right now?

Drew Neisser: 

Well, you know, this is the thing that, that I, I emphasized in the recession report, the hidden recession report that we did. I gave three things that I think CMOs can do right now to not just protect their job, but deliver more for their companies. Part one is think about expanding the role. So we call it CMO plus and find that thing that you can grab, whether it’s internal comms or corporate comms customer experience or customer success. If that’s a separate thing, add that to your portfolio. Because one, it makes. your salary and so forth, that much more efficient to the organization, but two, it will get the CFO, the CEO, the CRO to look at you slightly differently, more as a business professional and less at, Oh, just the marketer. So that’s part one. Part two is focus. You know, I mean, let’s face it. The definition of strategy is what you say no to. And what I see when I see most B to B plans is what we call the peanut butter effect. Too many targets, too many message, too much splinter, no resonant, big idea. And they’re losing the battle. They are not known for anything. They’re, you know, they’re, they’re trying to, and they’ve sliced and diced their target and their message. The point that they don’t have a brand, they don’t stand for anything. So idea concentration, number two number three is obviously AI implementation beyond content. And then number three, four is really rethinking spending

Linda Fanaras: 

less

Drew Neisser: 

on MarTech. the swing over the last four years has been 90, 95 percent quote demand gen, 10 percent on brand and really got to fix that and you know, don’t use the word brand, use the word reputation because that seems to be less fluffy and people understand that. But the point is that if you just keep sending emails and go to the vents and expect your brand to grow, you’re going to have a problem.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah. So getting more and more cluttered every minute. Absolutely. So this, so I have one final question. This one’s super easy. And I’ll let you, I’ll let you share a little bit about your book.

Drew Neisser: 

Oh, sure. Thank you. Just happen to have a copy right here. Randy Martin, 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable V Brands. What I love and I, you know, we’ve gotten lots of folks to write reviews about it and they, what they enjoy are the stories. It’s what we remember. It’s also sort of part of the book is the medium is the message. If I, if this was boring, that’d be a problem because this is sort of B2B marketing. I’m talking to marketers. And I really wrote, I just included. I don’t know, 60, 70 different stories within here, some of which are really dramatic. And like one of my favorite stories in the book, cause I had the privilege of naming the tough book for Panasonic and launching it. And the way we launched it was when we got the first prototype from Japan, we ran over it live for, you know, good morning America from the equivalent of CES with a Hummer, a 6, 000 pound Hummer. So it was, and you know, you could just imagine the engineer sweating, but you know, it’s, it’s the kind of story that I include in the book to sort of inspire folks. strategically and simply to do marketing that makes a difference.

Linda Fanaras: 

Think out of the box a little, right? Well, everyone, I just want to take a moment and thank you for tuning into the B2B Brand 180 podcast today. We hope that you found the insights and strategies shared to be valuable and actionable. Thanks so much, Drew. That was great to have you here today. So I would love for you to share how businesses can get in touch with you, how CMOs can get in touch with you.

Drew Neisser: 

Sure. It’s Drew Nizer on LinkedIn. I have a pretty big following there. Or you can go to https://cmohuddles.com/ and you, you can find me there. And feel free to, you know, after, after Linda’s podcast, you can also check out https://renegademarketing.com/.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah.

Drew Neisser: 

Particularly if you’re a B2B person.

Linda Fanaras: 

Perfect. And we’ll also include all your information in the comments as well, Drew. So that should be great. I’m Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand180 Podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency. You can visit us at https://mill.agency/ or https://lindafanaras.com/ or you can just connect with me on LinkedIn. I’d love to take questions, so feel free to ask any question you’d like. Thanks again for listening to the B2B Brand180 Podcast.

In this episode of the B2B Brand180 Podcast, Linda interviews Senthilkumar Subramanian to discuss his five-step Jumpstart SEO System.

Senthil shares his success stories of ranking over a hundred keywords on Google and generating over a million dollars in revenue for his previous businesses. They delve into the importance of SEO, the common mistakes businesses make, strategies for choosing the right keywords, and the fundamentals of creating outstanding content. Senthil also provides insight into the technical aspects of SEO and offers practical advice for businesses to enhance their search engine rankings.

01:23 The Importance of Google Rankings
02:58 Strategies for Competitive Keywords
05:39 Understanding SEO Fundamentals
06:44 Common SEO Mistakes
08:39 Creating Outstanding Content
10:21 Long Form vs. Short Form Content
11:26 SEO Maintenance and Best Practices
14:04 Backlink Building Explained
14:41 Simplifying SEO Terminology

More Info on Senthil:

Website (& Freebie Download): https://www.seowithsenthil.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/senthilkumar-subramanian-ba02a783/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/senthil.kumar.96387/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seowithsenthil

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda’s Books:

Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

In this episode of the B2B Brand180 podcast, Linda interviews Chuck Aikens, Founder of Tymoo and content marketing expert, to discuss effective use of AI in B2B content strategies.

Chuck shares insights on the essential foundational work required before leveraging AI, including understanding target audiences and answering critical strategic questions before writing prompts. He delves into the concept of micro-segmenting audiences, optimizing metadata, and generating authentic content.

Linda and Chuck also review practical advice on using AI for crafting compelling headlines, FAQs, product descriptions, and social media posts.

Chuck also introduces his Tidal Wave Content platform, a comprehensive suite of training, coaching, and processes that helps brands create consistent, engaging content across multiple channels using AI-assisted tools.

01:28 Foundational Work Before Leveraging AI
03:53 Micro-Segmenting Your Audience
05:27 Using AI for Metadata and Content Creation
07:48 Balancing Brand Voice with AI
09:39 Quick Tips for Using AI in Content Creation
15:02 Long-Form Content Strategies
16:55 Tidal Wave Content Concept

More About Chuck:
-LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckaikens/
-Tidal Wave Content: https://www.tidalwavecontent.com/
-Deciphering Digital Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@decipheringdigital
-Consulting Website: https://chuckaikens.com/

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda’s Books:

Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

Linda Fanaras: 

Hi, I’m Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand180 podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency. Today, I am excited to bring in Chuck E. Atkins, founder of TAMU and a seasoned expert in content marketing and leveraging AI. He has two decades of experience in website development, SEO and digital marketing, and he’s going to bring us a wealth of experience today, particularly when it comes to content strategies and how to really use AI to elevate brand presence. And connect more effectively. He has this concept called title wave content platform. It’s a suite of training, coaching and processes that also help brands create consistent, engaging content across multiple channels using a I. So welcome, Chuck. Great to have you here today. I’d love for you to share with the audience a little bit about yourself.

Chuck Aikens: 

Well, Enda, thanks for having me. a little bit about myself as it relates to what we’re talking about today, I had a search so called SEO and content agency for about 15 years in Denver, Colorado. sold it a few years ago and have been out just working directly with brands still in the content marketing space, which can include social media and email. But yeah, that, that’s a little background. It’s all I’ve ever done. I even not to date myself, but I was even doing content is Google came along many, many years ago. So, been been at this for a long time.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah. So you’re a true expert. That’s great to hear. I think we need to talk a little bit more about the foundational work before actually leveraging the I tools. And I think this is where a lot of businesses and marketers may go wrong. It’s really how to use a I in the most effective way. Can you speak to the audience about that a little bit?

Chuck Aikens: 

When we first heard about Chad, GBT, or if you use a different a I tool you go to the prompt and you start asking it to do things to see what it can do. And, you know, some people started with planning their vacation or doing a recipe or something personal. And some folks jumped right in and started applying it to their work to their job, to their brand. And it’s okay to start at the prompt and play along and see what happens. But, but these foundational documents that are needed. For a, for a business, for a brand, or are things like who’s your target audience? So what kind of guidelines do you want to give AI when it’s writing? What are your value props? What is your product and service? This concept of giving it some direction so that it can help you. As an AI assistant is, is fundamental. So there’s a lot of work to be done before the prompt, anytime that you’re trying to, to do something for your business or your brand. And it’s okay to start in the middle, kind of get acquainted with it. But to really use AI as a marketing assistant, you have to have a strategy, you have to have intention, you have to have a target audience. And that, those foundational documents are the starting point. Actually, the starting point. That I teach and coach is your customer, is your target audience and often micro segmented down into multiple. and target audience depending on exactly what you might be doing with your tasks. So that’s a little bit about the, the foundational documents and what is that ready, fire, aim aim first you know, before you fire off the prompts.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah, exactly. And I think also it’s important for our audience to realize that when you do look at tools like AI, you almost have to look at it from the Perspective of Okay, first of all, I need to train a eye into your point, Chuck. Okay, who is my audience? Who’s my target audience? What am I trying to communicate? And are there any specific niches that you really need to cater to instead of coming back with generic copy? So I love to talk about micro segmenting the audience because I think this also helps to really develop content that is much more in line with what the marketer business or client is looking for. So can we speak about that a little bit? I think that’s an important thing to tackle today.

Chuck Aikens: 

Yeah. Well, one one simple way for B2B to micro segment is to just to think about the different roles that might be involved in, in the, the buying committee at your ideal client profile. So, maybe there’s the CFO, maybe there’s the salesperson, maybe there’s a product manager, the CEO, like all of these all of these different folks you know, that they’re different roles at the ICP. So you could micro segment by role. With a B to B, I often will have each one of these personas built out. Now it, since I’m, since I do a lot of persona work, I will say, and we’ll talk about this at the end, but I, but I have a, a persona building tool that if you answer some quick questions, you can make these personas fast. And the reason that’s important is if we’re talking about. Having maybe four or five personas into the buying committee of your target client, like that takes work. So how can we do it faster? Maybe you micro segment by industry. So you have a persona in, in this vertical that you’re targeting versus that one. If you have to message our market to different folks that becomes a persona that becomes somebody that you can personify that way. When you go to work with A. I. It knows who you’re trying to talk to,

Linda Fanaras: 

right? Right. And it can be very, very targeted as far as the communication and messaging is concerned. You know, there’s a lot of different ways to use A. I. You can use it to generate customer journeys. Yeah. Email, social media. I mean, the list goes on. But what about when it comes to actually creating metadata? How do you recommend our audience to use AI in a way that helps to identify maybe Yeah.

Chuck Aikens: 

And that’s a great question. So, you know, the, the most important piece of metadata you’re going to have in, in a piece of content is going to be the page title. So what, you know, like a lot of people will go to a prompt and say, write my page or write my post or write my email,

Linda Fanaras: 

you

Chuck Aikens: 

There’s an entire thought process or prompting that can go into the 60 characters that make up your page title and where the keyword is placed. And more importantly, what is the keywords you’re targeting?

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Chuck Aikens: 

The, you know, how, how competitive or you know, popular is that, is that keyword or does anybody even type it? Maybe they don’t, maybe they don’t even search it. So there’s this concept of having, using AI to help create ideas for your page title metadata that can be used as that, that leading indicator to Google about what the content of the page is about is it is one way to put the metadata the other way. And this is a little advanced, but you know, you can, you can use AI to help understand how to make the content more helpful. More comprehensive because while the alt tags and the title tag metadata is important, it’s also about all the different words that you use. Because if if a piece of content has a thousand or 2000 words, what are those words that are being used? You want AI can help you with that. What four or five or six topics should I cover? Okay. You can ask AI that to make sure that you’re creating a helpful, useful piece of content because that, that’s what Google’s doing is they’re going through your copy and saying, Hey, is this deserving to be in the top 10? Right? If it’s going to be in the top 10 and page one, it better be helping your target audience. That is what Google cares about. Most their last big algorithm update, which was in March of this year, was called the helpful content update. That is the benchmark. They don’t care if you use AI. It better be helpful. It, it better be adding and contributing to the search experience for your target audience.

Linda Fanaras: 

that’s a great point too. So thanks for sharing that with our audience today. So if you were to take you know, I guess the question is, is trying to balance, you know, a unique voice that a brand has. the authenticity of using AI in a way that maybe is generated in a very, like, what I’ll call common way, because it often comes back with a very similar language. So how do you start to balance using that brand’s unique voice and actually being able to leverage AI into a way that can help build out effective content.

Chuck Aikens: 

Yeah. One of my favorite techniques at the moment is to actually conduct video interviews of people that either are in the brand that they’re the person that created or owns the brand works for the brand or somehow is associated when, when you start with a video interview and you get the sound bites and the authentic language and nuances that that a human brings to the table. Then as you go to use AI to build out that content to write something, you get such a better piece of content that is authentic because it started from a human perspective. Now I can do that with written word and people can talk into their phones. There’s different ways to start with authentic content. But by far, my favorite is to just jump on zoom for 45 minutes not to belabor, but, but, but typically a 45 minute interview with someone who understands and is passionate about the brand, not even passionate, just understands it can result in, in multiple pages of content for the website or the blog. Social media clips, video clips. Just what is it that you know? What is it that you want to talk about? If I start there, the content ends up being so much more authentic and real than if you start at the prompt.

Linda Fanaras: 

No, that’s good. So I would love to run through. I’m going to kind of quiz you and say, you know, how do you use a I to generate content for X, Y, Z. And I’d love for you to give the audience maybe 123 sentences. Real good solid takeaways, make sure you do this or make sure you don’t do that. So do you mind if we get stuck? What can we go for it? Quick, quick

Chuck Aikens: 

answers. And yeah, let’s run

Linda Fanaras: 

through it. So, all right, first of all, I would love you to tell us how you would use AI to craft compelling headlines. That really entice the user to click.

Chuck Aikens: 

Yes. So, I actually would not start there. The way to get a headline usually happens after the content is written. Now, I’ll think about the hook initially. I will ask AI to say, hey, what is the hook that might be used on a LinkedIn post or, you know, something in social media? And that will be an opening paragraph. Even if I have that hook in the beginning, once the content is written. I’m going to go back to AI and say, rewrite the hook. Okay. The hook is usually a little bit closer to the end of the process.

Linda Fanaras: 

Okay. All right. And how would you use AI to generate maybe a helpful FAQ?

Chuck Aikens: 

Oh, that’s a great. So if you have your persona and one of the things that we do with the persona immediately is figure out the pain points. And the problems to be solved and, and the value props with those items. I can use that data, usually with a product or service page and create seven FAQs that I love putting on homepages because it really lifts up the SEO. But the writing of a question, Followed by an answer. When you have your target audience, your brand promise, your value props, the things you’re trying to solve is is something that AI does really good at. So a real simple prompt with those inputs should give you a lot of FAQs.

Linda Fanaras: 

Perfect. So how would you approach writing product or service descriptions using informative and persuasive?

Chuck Aikens: 

So, so the biggest thing I would do there is, is as you write your prompt, you know, act like a copywriter, just gets into, to general marketing and messaging. That the thing that I see most people do is write in first person,

Linda Fanaras: 

just

Chuck Aikens: 

asking AI to use active voice, write in second person and use simple language will improve almost every product. Our, you know, our service page of B2B because we’re, we’re always, I mean, most websites, it’s all about I and what I do, not what you receive. So just, just taking your copy that you probably have and saying, please rewrite this in second person in simple language, don’t use long paragraphs, bullets, like making it scannable. Usually improves the efficacy of the product page.

Linda Fanaras: 

So how would you help our audience uncover competitive data in a few sentences?

Chuck Aikens: 

Yeah, so competitive data usually what you’re looking for is you as a brand or your competitor should be trying to establish topical authority on something relevant in your industry. What do you stand for? What are you talking about? So what AI can do is it can crunch a lot of data really fast. So I use AI to look for trends in content. And maybe even opportunities across the industry. If I were looking at four or five competitors to see what are they covering? And often it’s not very targeted and succinct. Sometimes it is, but I would be using that to say, you know, if I talk about this aspect, of what’s going on in the industry. Then I could establish topical authority, which will help in search and uh, you know, even in the eyes of, potential clients, perfect.

Linda Fanaras: 

And then social media, I know a lot of companies use. AI for their social media can be very generic sometimes and just regurgitate a lot of the same things. How do you get that to be a little bit more creative and unique?

Chuck Aikens: 

What I’m going to do most of the time, and let’s just say, since this is B2B, you know, we’re talking about LinkedIn, which is long, longer format than most social media platforms. Really, I’m always trying to go from, super long format. So let’s say a video transcript or a blog post down into the smaller LinkedIn post. Again, if we’ve, if we’ve done things like video interviews and thought leadership and informative content in our content waves, all of a sudden that is what informs the LinkedIn post. So I’m not just randomly looking for a LinkedIn post. It’s because it’s part of a wave of content where the LinkedIn post Is just one outcome, just like, you know, an excerpt for an email might be, or you know, a, a quick a quick video clip on YouTube. If, if you have a good content strategy, ultimately the social media content will show up as unique and compelling and engaged audience. If you just start at the prompt, trying to make a LinkedIn post, it will not work, right? It’ll, it’ll sound like everybody else is putting out there. You have to stop for a second and say, what do I want to be a topical authority on? That’s interesting to my audience and what is my wave of content going to be about?

Linda Fanaras: 

Okay. Once you do

Chuck Aikens: 

that, it can flow so much easier and the LinkedIn post becomes so easy to write because it’s on strategy. It’s on, it’s on target.

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s a good point. So, the last quick question would be on long form content. Could be a blog, could be an article, could be a white paper. What are your thoughts on how to best do that?

Chuck Aikens: 

Yeah. So, so think of it as, as a building process meaning that what I teach and what I, when I, when I’m working with a brand and, and making a long form content, you start with an outline and then each part of that outline, often three to five topics that make up the long format content, those are individual writing exercises. And then once you’ve built out the, the topical things you’re going to cover in a, in a long format piece, then you can back up and write the opening. You can write the conclusion. Then you write your hook. So the, the idea is to start with a topic. Understand the helpful subtopics that should be covered. Write each one of those individually, which you can use AI for to create the base copy. Then start working on your intro and your close to tell the whole narrative. And then go and tie it all together and enrich it with quotes and, you know, and images and things. So, most of the time people, they start and say, Ooh, I’m going to, I’m going to sit down and in one shot. I’m going to create this this long format content, and it’s just the nature of trying to do that. No wonder we get writer’s block. There’s too many things going on. But when you understand how to construct it just from a copywriting or an editorial process. It becomes so much easier to produce it because you can follow a 5 step process. It’s a method and an approach that, is more effective. And, and AI can help, help with that. It can help you with an outline. It can help you identify the subtopics. Does it mean you still don’t have to write? Right. And you don’t have to, you don’t have to contribute in unique ways. But boy, it’s so much easier when you, when you can use a tool as an assistant to kind of get you started.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right. So I’ll just wrap up here with this thing called title wave content. It’s a concept that you have that really helps brands create more effective strategies. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Chuck Aikens: 

Yeah, the first two steps inside a Tidal Wave content is one, do your foundational documents. I have three tools that I built on the website. Quick sign up. There’s no pitch. There’s no money to be paid. You can make your persona brand promise in your voice and tone. From that standpoint, the second step is to start thinking about your first strategy. Whether it be informational. Which is high frequency and low effort, or if it’s going to be high connection and and be really rich pieces that you don’t do whatever the strategy is going to be, that’s usually done in a in a one hour session. And that’s the starting point. And I do offer a one hour session to work with somebody to help them get started, and then from there, who knows? They can do it themselves. We can do it together, I can do it for ’em, but that’s the concept. The Tidal Wave is creating a wave of content that once you say, Hey, this is what I want to be producing, it’s not as much work to be consistently producing content that’s gonna engage with your audience because you understand what you’re trying to do and how to do it. And then it’s just like having a personal trainer or somebody to remind you to say, okay, we’re going to do this two or three times a month. Time to get out of bed and do some writing today it’s having the processes and the checks and balances. But first and foremost, are you doing the right thing? Is it going to work? And you know, whether it’s the optimization that needs to be done. or the research that goes into it to make sure you can truly be a topical authority. that starting point is what Tidal Wave is trying to figure out.

Linda Fanaras: 

So we can wrap up. I think that’s a great ending. and I know you offer our custom training session. So I’d love you to close with how individuals, maybe a little bit about today. training and then how individuals can actually get in touch with you. Chuck.

Chuck Aikens: 

Yes. You can find me on LinkedIn at Chuck Akins. You can go to Tidal Wave content and sign up. But yeah, the offer is right now a couple of times a week. I’m doing a 90 minute session. It’s it’s typically two 50 for anyone listening. We’ll do it for a hundred bucks. You know, throw me a hundred dollars on PayPal. Just you know, I can’t do it for free, right. We’re all in business, but yeah, if you’ll go through and build those three foundational docs takes about an hour, then we get together and, and, We start working on your, on your content wave how you and your brand could better reach out to your audience through a strategy. And it’s not super complicated. But we have to have conviction and then commitment to that strategy to see it through. Guaranteed, you’ll learn a few tricks about creating content with AI that’ll be helpful.

Linda Fanaras: 

Perfect. Thank you, Chuck. So I just want to take a moment and thank our audience today to, for listening in with myself and Chuck at the B2B Brand 180 podcast, we covered a lot of things on AI. And if you would like to connect with me directly, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn at Linda Finaris, or you can just go to lindafanaras.com and feel free to ask any questions that you may have. And if there’s anything we can do for you, we were happy to help. So thanks for listening to the B2B Brand 180 podcast today and have a great day.

In this episode of the B2B Brand180 podcast, Linda speaks with Naomi Soman from Storylogick Consulting about enhancing email marketing strategies to drive growth. Naomi, who has a wealth of experience in hyper-growth startups, shares insights on dispelling email marketing myths, personalizing emails for different stages of the funnel, and accurately targeting various buyer personas. The discussion includes practical advice on leveraging CRM data, using visual language in emails, and customizing email content based on recipient actions. Naomi also provides tips on managing personalized email campaigns and standing out in a crowded marketplace.

01:44 Common Misconceptions in Email Marketing
03:31 Understanding the Email Marketing Funnel
05:04 Personalizing Email Campaigns
10:48 Effective Research Methods for Buyer Personas
17:19 Standing Out in a Crowded Marketplace

For more information about Naomi please visit https://storylogick.com/

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda’s Books:

Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV

Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

In this episode of B2B Brand180, Linda interviews Dane Frederiksen, Founder of Digital Accomplice, to discuss how to implement a repurpose-first video production strategy, which he calls the “Video Octopus” method.

Dane highlights:

-The shift from text-based marketing to remote video.
-The ease of creating valuable video content using AI tools and remote platforms, which can significantly enhance marketing strategies.
-Current trends and technology to simplify video editing, and the ‘video octopus’ method for repurposing video across multiple channels.

The episode encapsulates how B2B marketers can leverage strategy, remote video and AI to stay ahead in the evolving digital landscape.

01:45 Challenges in Video Content Marketing

03:20 Trends in Remote Video Content

04:55 Building a Video Content System

09:39 Tools for Easy Video Creation

14:06 The Video Octopus Method

For more information about Dane, visit his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalaccomplice/

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda’s Books:

Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV

Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

In this episode of the B2B Brand180 podcast, Linda interviews Mark Albert, CEO of Media Advisory Experts. Mark shares his extensive experience in broadcast journalism and offers valuable insights into B2B media training, storytelling, and overcoming stage fright. He discusses strategies for earning media placements, the importance of building thought leadership, and how to effectively communicate with journalists. Mark also provides practical tips on public speaking, handling tough interview questions, and best practices for dressing for on-camera appearances.

02:03 Tips for Overcoming Stage Fright

05:20 Building Thought Leadership and Earning Media

10:17 Handling Tough Questions and Ambush Interviews

15:01 Preparing for Scheduled Interviews

26:40 Public Speaking and Media Training Resources

For more information about Mark, please visit https://www.mediaadvisoryexperts.com/

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

In this episode of the B2B Brand180 podcast, Linda interviews Alessandro Bogliari, Co-Founder and CEO of The Influencer Marketing Factory. Alessandro discusses the value of influencer marketing. Alessandro also addresses common misconceptions of influencer marketing, the significance of a data-driven approach, and the benefits of long-term partnerships with influencers.

Tune in to discover how brands can effectively leverage influencer marketing to build trust and drive growth in today’s digital landscape.

02:59 Influencer Marketing Basics

05:51 B2B vs. B2C: Navigating Influencer Marketing

12:39 Success Stories and the Power of Authenticity

15:27 Building Strong Influencer-Brand Relationships

17:35 Global Growth Strategies for Influencer Marketing

20:00 Analyzing Success in Influencer Marketing Campaigns

21:43 Overcoming Challenges and Embracing Continuous Learning

23:35 Closing Remarks and Contact Information

More on Alessandro:
https://theinfluencermarketingfactory.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alessandrobogliari

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

 

Linda Fanaras: 

Hi, I’m Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand180 podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency, where we talk about branding and growth strategies that are designed to help your business grow. But before I start, I just want to thank you for listening in today. And if you like what you heard, please hit like, share, or subscribe. I’m super excited to bring in Alessandro Bogliari and he is a digital entrepreneur and growth marketer. He’s serving as the co founder and CEO of The Influencer Marketing Factory. It’s a global agency and they specialize in influencer marketing. So we’ll be talking about that today. They work with many different brands and helping them launch campaigns, whether on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, and he is recognized for his expertise being a member of the Forbes Agency Council and the Fast Company Executive Board. So thank you for joining me today. I would love for you to spend a couple minutes and tell us a little bit about yourself before we get started and start to talk about influencer marketing.

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Yeah, thank you for having me. Absolutely. You know, I breathe influencer marketing, social media, everything that is related to these, you know, every single day I’ve been doing that for almost 10 years now. So I’ve seen influencer marketing, social media changing, I was there when Vine was discontinued, you know, I saw musical.ly becoming TikTok. I saw the first version of YouTube where you were able to upload videos and basically just watch the few videos that were online there, and so, you know, quite excited about it. Originally from Italy, as you can easily hear from my accent, I live in New York City. I was before in Miami, where our headquarter is still based, and so I’ve always been fascinated by social media. By commerce online, by, by influence, right? So as a term, it’s something that’s been around for ages. These days it’s just on social media, but it’s one of the oldest things, if you think about it. And so what happened is that around, eight, nine years ago, I got into influencer marketing because I was fascinated by this new thing. At the time it was still quite new. And I was working on the informational side of things. And then after a couple of years. I was like, I think that this might be a very interesting opportunity to open, you know, an agency that will focus on short form videos. That was the beginning. We’ve been one of the first to in TikTok. And so basically that after that, you know, we got amazing clients like Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music Group. They wanted to launch songs and new artists and TikTok was the perfect, you know, medium at the time. And then of course you will also open up to YouTube as well and everything. But basically the main idea behind the agency and my work was like, this is a serious business. It’s not just anymore, you know, kids in front of a screen, dancing and lip syncing. There is money involved. Therefore, brands will want to see ROI behind the campaigns. They want to see why they should put money. And so I wanted to say you have great content, you have influence, but you also have a data-driven approach. And so basically that’s why I co-founded The Influencer Marketing Factory.

Linda Fanaras: 

It’s interesting just for our audience today, because our audience does, is comprised of a lot of B2B companies. So how would you explain in simple terms, what is influencer marketing for those who may not even know what it is, number one. And number two, why is it so important for brands today to embrace that?

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Influencer marketing is, is more than just influence, you know, right? So basically when you imagine that what I say all the time is these one of the last time that you went to a restaurant or you watching a movie, most probably you, you got it for a friend from family, someone that you trust. And basically what is happening with influencer marketing, it is that instead of just listening to celebrities’ endorsement that were very, very strong in the ’90s and the 2000s, right? These days, a lot of new generations, but not only them, they believe more in someone that is relatable, right? So similar to a friend of yours that would tell you like, “Hey, what do you do? Like I bought this pair of shoes. Do you like them?” Like, “Oh, yeah, sure. Tell me more about them. Where did you buy them? Oh, at that store on that—” you know, whatever, whatever. And instead of having a friend that, you know, meet him in person, you have like these sorts of friends that you look, like, you know, after you look for that are influencers, content creators that have a certain, you know, opinion. Usually they have knowledge about something. And so basically, when you’re doing influencer marketing, you are getting the influence, right? Of these people. So these usually have like an organic reach to an audience that follow what they say and they buy things that they, you know, like a promoter, you get content. So very good content that is not made by, you know, necessarily polished, perfect type of content, but it’s maybe something a bit more raw sometimes. And these days that type of content works because it’s more relatable and more authentic. And then with that, we also get comments. And what I say it is that, you know, the comment section of an— I call it like a real time feedback focus group, basically. You can get every information about what people think about your product about your service. And that is like a very transparent type of conversation happening because they have nothing to lose in commenting positively or negatively. Right? So basically you have all these and then you also get the trust, right? The trust factor, because if no one knows about your company, but someone as a middle person, so the influencer is talking in a positive way about it, you’re using that trust as a bridge between you and the final customers. So again, once you get that, you get all everything included in the price of an influencer marketing campaign. And to answer your second question about why it’s crucial.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Everyone is on social media these days. A lot of influencers have a lot of like, you know, power when it comes to influence the others. And if you do not adapt to these days and you continually like being blind to what is progress and new things happening, the moment that you do not adapt right in marketing, you die in any way. So you have to understand that it’s not maybe for everyone necessarily, but I would all the time suggest go out there, experiment with things before saying it’s not my cup of tea, but if that is the case, these days, a lot of marketing budget is being shifted by from traditional media to influencer marketing.

Linda Fanaras: 

Do you see many companies, business to business companies, using influencer marketing versus business to consumer type products?

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Of course, it’s still a minority compared to B2C. You see, it’s way easier, you know, selling shoes, selling, you know, we have a lot of beauty products that is super simple, right, to manage. B2B we’ve done campaigns in the past. We still do, you know, I’m talking about, you know, pharmaceutical devices, SaaS softwares and so on. And, you know, it’s a bit more difficult because for instance LinkedIn, it’s amazing, but it’s still missing, you know, demographics data. It’s missing, you know, place where to find, you know, influencers, right. And, content creators there. So it’s still missing, I would say the tech component and the sort of like, you know, very good database about B2B brands. I mean, there are things out there, you know, but it’s not, of course, as important as B2C. But with that said finally, I would say there is a myth that B2B doesn’t work well with influencer marketing because actually, if you find someone that has a very strong community and usually in the B2B community, right, people that have an audience, it’s usually even a stronger community because if you’re into B2B and you have only, let’s say a hundred people following you, but those hundred people maybe are decision makers in, their company. And therefore one person in B2B might bring you the same revenues of a thousand people buying a $5 product, right? So different approach, but absolutely an increase in the past year of B2B businesses looking for influencer marketing.

Linda Fanaras: 

And you see a lot of success with that.

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Yeah, because you know, these days there are so many. Like, you know, there are still, you know, display ads, there are still a way to like, try to, acquire new customers. But again, these days, people don’t want to buy into companies. They want to buy more into people, other people in the, in the company values. So of course the pricing of something is important, but you also want the trust that you want to, there are so many software these days, right? Why should I go with that one? Yeah. Is it a present thing? But maybe not only. What if the influencer that is telling me this is telling me that this, you know, customer support of this business is fantastic. There is a big, like, you know, leverage for me to understanding, like, okay, should I go with that one because they have these amazing, you know, customer support that maybe I didn’t know display ads. But if someone in a YouTube video is telling me like, “Hey, by the way, I love this, you know, business because of that reason.” And if I trust you, right, as an influencer in that, I might be more inclined to go and check out the website from, or like, you know, even becoming a customer. That is the main difference is the trust.

Linda Fanaras: 

What do you see as trends that are happening in the economy over the next few years and how relating around influencer marketing and how do you think businesses should capitalize on them? Because things are constantly changing. So, as you’re well aware, so, how can, how can businesses stay on top of that and maybe position and use influencer marketing to help their company grow?

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Absolutely. So first, first of all, I know that it’s common sense, but I say all the time brands should stay on social media, like every, every day, just understand what is happening. You don’t have necessarily to jump on every new trend. You don’t want, that’s what I say all the time. Not because a trend is happening on TikTok, not because a video is going well on YouTube, you should necessarily replicate that, right? Like you, you should understand when to jump on something and when not, but no matter what, be on social media every day to understand what is happening, because the best way just to be there. Instead of having someone telling you what is happening because you have still that bridge and sometimes, lost in translation, yada, yada. So always better if you spend as a business time on it. And the second, I would say that we’re noticing more long-term partnerships happening, so in the years that we had a lot of, you know, one-off activations, right? With one influencer, another influencer here, another influencer there. But I would say then these days, we’re getting back to, for some brands, to a sort of idea of like, you know, ambassadors, right? Someone that can be with you for one year. They might, you might pay them a bit more for exclusivity. You might pay them for media rights, but they’re going to be more involved throughout the year or years with your product instead of just spending one time, one activation. Because again, there are so many influencers out there and sometimes one, only one message is not enough. The person that you are hiring should maybe repeat the same messaging two, three times a month for one year. And believe me, that is going to stick more, right? Compared to only one activation. So that I think that is up like long term partnerships with influencers you know, compared to the one-off type of activation.

Linda Fanaras: 

That makes total sense. I do have a question about misconceptions around influencer marketing, because I think that a lot of clients have a lot of misconceptions. They don’t really understand what it is or never mind how it works. So what are some of the things that you run into from your clients relating to influencer marketing? Like what are the things that you have to address?

Alessandro Bogliari: 

I would say the idea of the direct and immediate ROI. That is a bit of a myth because even if you can track, you have to think about the user behavior when it comes to social media. You cannot treat social media and influencer marketing as you would do for, let’s say, programmatic, right? You go, Google Ads, you put $1, you have your ROAS, right? More or less based on historical data. There is a sort of like, you know, math and science behind it. You can somehow, I buy something, it’s there in the cart. When I, when I purchase the event, fire it back. And now I know that someone purchase something thanks to that specific ad. When it comes to influencer marketing, even though you can track everything, because if you put like, you know, tracking pixels on the thank you page you know, there are so many new integrations also with e-commerces you know, and so on. Still, the behavior is a bit different. Once you are on social media, you’re not necessarily ready to buy because you’re not looking for that specific product. You might, you know, get something that is like pushed in front of your eyes. And so sometimes it works. Sometimes you might save it in your cart, right? And then maybe you buy it after a month. So you still are able to track that depending on the attribution model that you’re using. But long story short, many people think that, “Oh, I’m going to, you know, I’m going to see results the same day. I’m going to see results the day after, the same week.” Sometimes it just takes a bit longer because again, the user experience and the journey of the sales cycle there and the, the purchase cycle might be a bit longer because I might just, close Instagram or TikTok, and then maybe I’ll come back later, and then I remember about the product. So just a bit less immediate and that’s the only thing, like, do not expect necessarily sales the same day. It could also happen, you know, but what I mean is that in France and America, as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, like, it has so much more. It has the content, the trust, the influence, the reach, and it’s not necessarily all the sales as you would expect, again, from, you know, a banner that you create and you purchase.

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s great. Do you have a quick success story you can share relating to one of your campaigns and why it was so successful?

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Yeah, absolutely. One that I selected is like, it’s, it’s O-Cedar. You know, it’s the big brand that’s primarily known for, for like, you know, mops and cleaning app, right? That one is an interesting one because you know, it’s to show you how social media these on social media these days and thanks to influencers, you can basically promote different types of industries that are not necessarily again, you know, just the beauty and fashion. So in this case, we’re talking about one of the, I think, biggest moments in hashtags on TikTok that is called #cleantok dedicated to people that love cleaning. They give you cleaning hacks and basically we were, here’s where we said, why don’t we do, why don’t we take things that are like, you know, very mundane, like, you know, just like cleaning your apartment, make it a bit more fun, right? Why don’t we do something like there is something called like Sunday resets. Where basically people film themselves and they just clean everything in their apartment. And they’re happy doing that, but, and this is the interesting thing and fascinating for me about social media. You have audiences that get relaxed watching that type of content. So basically what is that you’re watching? You know, similar to those that you know, satisfaction videos, right? Like that you have usually, you know, for many people that cannot maybe, you know, sleep and people at 2 in the morning on YouTube are watching this, you know, like, you know, type of videos. It’s the same concept for #cleantok. It was like, let’s do something that can make you like, you know, be more relaxed. Let’s take something that’s not exciting because it’s cleaning your apartment. Let’s make it a little bit more exciting, right? Less boring as a task and let’s show like how you can integrate you know a cleaning tool and something that is not the typical advertisement about like, “Hey, look how, you know, clean it is now.” It’s more about let’s have fun with it. Let’s, let’s do a challenge behind that, you know? And so, yeah, I want to just to show that again, something like cleaning and #cleantok, it’s a good moment. And if you, if you do it well, you can have not only views, you can actually have purchase going back to what we were saying before. You have something that people want to see, because after they do see that. And it’s not on TV with super polished, perfect content that you might be like, yeah, of course it is a studio behind that. I don’t believe that. But if I see someone my age or someone with a family, with kids, it’s relatable. Like, Oh, wow. Also last week, my kid, whatever, threw something and spilled something on that type of carpet. And they are doing basically the same. It’s so relatable because it’s so simple, authentic. They’re not only going to watch it. I’m going to, I’m going to most probably buy, right? That’s why it works.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right. Yeah. No, that’s great. So I just want to take a moment here and thank our audience for listening in. And if you are liking what you hear today, please hit like, share, or subscribe, or feel free to provide a review to the B2B Brand180 podcast. I would like to know what you think are some key factors that contribute to building a strong and lasting relationship between the actual influencers and the brands, that real connection. How does, how do you get that to really work?

Alessandro Bogliari: 

So first of all, selecting the right influencers is crucial. What I say all the time, is that better to spend a bit more time in finding the right ones instead of rushing it. Because if you don’t do that part well, then it’s going to be a domino effect of problems. So first of all, find them well based not only on demographics, but also based on their professionalism, right? You want someone that is getting back to you, someone that has a good communication, someone that is taking that seriously, right? You’re, you’re giving this person money and they also want to work for you and with you, therefore you want to find someone that is going to be a good partner. So first of all, that is one. A very clear, I would say as a, like a scope of work, right? Something that is going to be very clear, what to expect in terms of like deliverables, right? So basically deliverables means how many Instagram stories, how many, will you add a link in your bio? If so, for how many hours or days, you know? So ensure you’re on the same page about what to expect in exchange for a monetary compensation. And then I would say also, you know, alignment on values you want to work with like the influencers want to work with a brand that they care and they trust, the same should be also on that. And the last one, I would say also, creative freedom. That is very important. You don’t want to go to an influencer or to a content creator and tell them like, “Hey, this is the script just to repeat it word by word.” That is not going to fly because, you know, if you’re, if you’re buying into the audience of an influencer, they are there for their tone of voice. They’re there for their style, right? Their personality. If you try to silence that, and you try to make that person just basically a person repeating as a part of what you want, it’s not going to work. People are going to notice that, and that post is going to flop. So I think a good communication between their style, your guidelines, to try to find a middle ground, but primarily would say trust the influencer because they are one, they know their audience, they know. What works and what doesn’t on social media.

Linda Fanaras: 

Okay. No, that’s, that’s fantastic. You’ve scaled your agency and I’m wondering what kind of strategies have you implemented to help grow The Influencer Marketing Factory globally?

Alessandro Bogliari: 

We’ve been remote since day one we, we started the company at the end of 2018. Totally bootstrapped company, and basically at the time we were like, how can we start global from day one with a mindset and approach to the world of influencer marketing? Not only being in the US for multiple reasons. One, because of not just for the business opportunities, but to be honest, also to understand what is outside the US. Learn from other cultures, make an example, like the thing that I’ve been looking what is happening in China, Indonesia and other countries for years now. And they’re so like, you know, they are so advanced in many technologies and how people use social media, thinking about social commerce in China that you have to learn that. So from the one remote from number from day one. Being remote also helps you to find the right talent where they are. It helps for barrier language because not every, in every place you speak English, you need a person with the same language, the same understanding of same culture. So that was like very important for us, I would say. And, and you know, so understanding each again, each culture, each, each location, trusting, like, you know, trusting and caring about people, you know, that is when, when I co-founded the company was because I was coming from a very toxic experience, unfortunately in the past. And I was like, let me show you that we can do a marketing agency where you do love working where of course it is work to do, but you don’t go in and be like, I hate my life. I hate my job. I hate this. And so I think that like, you know, caring about the people that also goes behind just asking about work, but also really building a relationship. We have a tenure of our people that some of them, they are still with us after, like, you know, since the beginning. And they, you know, like we have a proudly, we have like a Glassdoor page with five stars, you know, basically. So all these, it helps a lot, I would say. And when you start caring, when you start building a relationship, when you are, what’s coming and opening to feedback and so on, even if it is not easy sometimes, I think that was making a huge difference between an agency with a good tenure of people and what we call them revolving doors agencies, right? Basically every single month. People in, people out, that it doesn’t have for the culture. So for us, culture was, was very important from day one.

Linda Fanaras: 

How about the analytics when it comes to influencer marketing? How do you, you know, what type of analytics do you use? How do you decide whether that’s a successful campaign, not a successful campaign?

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Yeah, it totally depends by the final goal of the campaign. Is it brand awareness? It is conversions? It is sales and purchase? It is a combination of the both? So first of all, you have to understand which are the final goals. What are the KPIs from the client? And once you have that, it depends also not, not just by the agency, but also is the client tech savvy enough to track things and help us when needed? Let’s say that they have an app, we can help with the setup and understanding like how many signups and downloads they got. If this is an e-commerce and they are able to put certain tracking pixels or whatever the user, we are able also to see not only how many sales they, the influencer campaign, like, you know, produce, but also who exactly brought that in? You know, every influencer will have a dedicated link with UTM parameters, and we’re going to be able, you know, with analytics and other tracking tools to see these three specific people brought in a decent amount of visitors that became this amount of sales. We can help up until a certain point. Then of course the company on the other side has to set up certain things in order for us to help us out. But, for some companies it’s brand awareness. So metrics such as, you know, views of the campaign, likes, shares, saves, and so on. Others instead for them, a good successful campaign, it is, what is the revenue behind that? What is the average ticket, you know, both thanks to the campaigns and so on and for other it is, you know, for apps, of course, it’s going to be downloads of the app and sign up and so on. the moment you can track, you should track.

Linda Fanaras: 

Would you share, can you share some of your, I guess, your biggest maybe obstacle or failure that you’ve encountered on your entrepreneurial journey and just how you overcame it?

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Yeah. So I don’t know if I overcame it yet because it’s you know, like when you own a business, right, you also see also so when, when you own something, it’s always a lot of ups and downs. So I think that every time that you think, oh, I got it. Then after a few days, I was actually like, maybe I didn’t get it, right? You think that you understood a hundred percent and then every day you’re learning something new. I would say that in my case, a couple of things that one coming from Europe at the beginning, when you build a company LLC, everything is new. You’re learning about not only the law, not only the economics, but also the culture, right? Coming from Europe where many things are different when it comes to business and then you get it to the US. Very competitive market. You have to learn how to basically how to, how to swim, like from one… to the other you know, and so that was like quite a, quite a challenge, I would say. But we, I always love doing out of the box ideas. So even without the budget at the beginning, we were able to get a very good market share. But the other things that I think, you know, you struggle with it is that, you’re scaling, like all the time and every time you learn something at the beginning, when you start, you think that, yeah, of course, I’m just going to add a few more people, right? Then you scale, but with an agency, you have to every X amount of you know, steps that you have to completely change the infrastructure. And sometimes it might be just a bit difficult because it’s time consuming, you know, they have to do it, but at the same time. You have the priority that is your client work, right? Try to navigate that. I think it’s a bit of a challenge and I am personally still learning a lot. So I would say that that is like the main one. And, but that’s also what I, what I like of being an entrepreneur. You never stop learning. So it’s never, it’s never boring for sure.

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s a fact. Awesome. So I just want to take a moment and thank our audience for tuning into the B2B Brand180 podcast. We hope that you found the insights and strategies shared today to be valuable. And thank you so much. It’s, this was great. It was great to hear about the influencer marketing strategies that you have found that have worked. I would love for you to share how the audience can get in touch with you and where they should connect with you. And I’ll let you take it from here.

Alessandro Bogliari: 

Yeah, absolutely. They can connect with me on LinkedIn, just my name. You can find me there. On our website, theinfluencermarketingfactory.com. You can find case studies and a lot of resources, reports, infographics about social commerce, the creative economy, influencer marketing. We just went out with a new virtual influencers report. So very interesting to see also virtual and digital influencers. What is the future of that? And so, you know, you can connect there. And I also host a podcast called The Influence Factor where we, you know, I interview creators, brand marketers, and other people in the industry to understand what is the, what was the past, what is the future, what is the future now, you know, present and future of influencer marketing.

Linda Fanaras: 

Awesome. You shared a lot of great insights. So thank you so much. So again, I’m Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand180 podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency, and you can visit us at mill.agency, or you can go to lindafanaras.com or just simply connect with me on LinkedIn. And thanks again for listening to the B2B Brand180 podcast.

In this episode of  B2B Brand180,  Linda  interviews  Neil Rogers, a  sales and marketing professional and owner of Rogers Marketing.

Neil shares his journey from working behind a bar to authoring the book ‘Bar Tips’, emphasizing the value of learning about people, organization, and sales in a non-traditional setting. Neil introduces the concept of ‘positive activity,’ combining mindfulness with productivity to see solutions instead of problems, rooted in his personal experiences. Neil and Linda  discuss how businesses can apply positive activity to improve their marketing efforts, stressing the importance of getting one’s mind right, practicing gratitude, and the effectiveness of tangible marketing touches in a digital world.

Neil’s LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-p-rogers-cas-68a4a22/
Neil’s company website:  https://rogmark.net/

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

 

Linda Fanaras: 

Hi, I’m Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand 180 Podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency, where we talk about branding and growth strategies. Before I start, I just want to take a moment and thank our audience today. And if you like what you heard, please hit like, share, or subscribe to help our channel grow. And today I’m excited to bring in Neil Rogers. He has a great background in sales and marketing. He’s worked with a large variety of clients and verticals, including pharma, biomedical manufacturing, logistics, financial, and the list goes on. And he’s also the owner of Rogers Marketing. So welcome Neil. B2B Brand 180 Podcast. Thanks for joining me today.

Neil Rogers: 

Hey, Linda. Glad,

Linda Fanaras: 

glad to be here. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So I would love you to give our audience a little bit of an introduction from your words about yourself.

Neil Rogers: 

Well, I’m a the seventh of eight of an Irish Catholic family. Grew up outside of Boston went in kind of had fits and starts after high school, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life and wound up behind the bar and learned a lot about people, about organization, about, you know, proper greetings, proper send offs how to understand products, how do I, how to manage my time. And essentially on looking back in a retrospect said. Well, it’s a lot, a lot, a lot about sales. So I then through COVID as a COVID project wrote the book bar tips. And a lot of that as we, as we talk, if we talk a little about that kind of, kind of dovetails with my whole story. So, yeah,

Linda Fanaras: 

that’s, oh, that’s great. I’m looking forward to digging a little deeper into that. So, you know, Napoleon Hill wrote think and grow rich. If you can’t do great things, do small things in a great way. Why does that quote mean so much to you?

Neil Rogers: 

Because going back to my early roots, coming out of high school, I was 17 years old. Again, as I mentioned, the seventh of eight of a kind. Irish family. And it’s not like it was today where we’ve got our kids mapped out from DNA right up until they’re off and even then beyond, you know, sometimes. And I just became a philosophy that I just adopted that just once one foot ahead of the other. You know, I flunked. I mean, you’re talking to probably the only person, you know, that flunked out of two community colleges. So, as an example. So, at some point in time, I had, I decided, okay, I better get serious about this stuff or where am I going to go? And that’s the philosophy I took. So, when we read Think and Grow Rich, I think it’s about 15 years ago now, I was like, oh my goodness. So, a lot of this stuff that I wrote about, I innately did, you know, it was just, and some of it came from, I guess it couldn’t be the way, you know, it wasn’t really something that we were, we were encouraged as kids growing up. Hey Neil, just, just get a little better every day.

Linda Fanaras: 

But as

Neil Rogers: 

I, as I went out and created my own philosophy and figured, okay, do I want to be a loser or do I want to be something? Well, if I tried to take something on all at once, I got frustrated and I, and I, and then all of a sudden it’s like, wow. The heck with that. Let’s move on to something else. So I just, I developed the philosophy of, well, it turns out to be do small things greatly, but I just called it, just take one, do the one right next step and just inch your way forward. And I did. And here I am.

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s awesome. I know. I always talk about incremental improvements, right? Yep, no. And you all go ahead. Nope, we’re not. So what is positive activity? What prompted you to create it?

Neil Rogers: 

Positive activity is the marriage of two things. One, it’s about, where are we now? My daughter was a division one athlete and played lacrosse in college and she had a career ending head injury

Linda Fanaras: 

Oh boy,

Neil Rogers: 

and spent her natural senior year home with us in post concussion syndrome And this was not too long after you know, the the the 2008 bust And so our business still hadn’t recovered all that well. So we were feeling a little squeamish about that. And obviously we had her at home, we had all these things going on. And one of the things she was so severely injured that she really couldn’t drive. So this, this accident happened in October. She drove again in July.

Linda Fanaras: 

Okay.

Neil Rogers: 

We, you know, she was, she was not reading and not driving and whatnot for a long time and, but she was listening to books and listening to things like Eckhart Tolle the power of now and said to my wife one day, Hey, would you, would you, does this, there’s this conference up at the, I don’t even know what it was called at the time, Clarion or the crown plaza here in Nashua.

Linda Fanaras: 

Oh, yes.

Neil Rogers: 

And it’s about mindful behaviors and what, would you take me? Laurie goes, sure. So we took her. So she’s walking around and Laurie started to get into the conversations with these people and talk about the law of attraction and mindful behaviors and, and all of that. So we. Started to adopt those things into our lives. We’re disciples of Sean, Sean, a core is happiness advantage. We’re also for agreements people.

Linda Fanaras: 

So all of

Neil Rogers: 

these books that, you know, when I, you know, when I talk to people like you or anybody that I’ve been interviewed and I bring those up, everybody just nods their head. Oh yeah, that’s a, that’s the one we use. And so we then took some of those, So some of those philosophies or the actual chores, that they outline and we put them into our lives. So we do, you know, so things like we, we. We’re both, we’re all yoga people. We meditate, we ever, we do the gratitude practice. We do all the things, four or five things every day to get us, our minds right. So the ditty that goes along with positive activity is, it is the practice, because we are yogis, right? It’s not, nothing’s a perfect, the practice of getting your mindset into a place where you are in creativity. So now you’re open minded, divergent thinking. Creatively thinking so you no longer see problems. You only see solutions and all this stuff started ringing true as to how we had been operating a lot to begin with, without the, you know, the actual practices, right?

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Neil Rogers: 

So, and then you have, once you’re in that creative mode and your solution providing, Now you can be productive. Now you’re in that productivity. So what are your productivity steps? So the ones that we have in the initial foray of positive activity, our business development steps, you know, here are the seven or eight things I’ve been doing for 37 plus years, both from when I was in the food business and when I was in the apparel footwear business. So we’re in the promo business for the last 27 years and it’s been the same things. And that has propelled our business. Whenever I got off of those things. That’s when I, that’s when it went south or we didn’t do as well. And so, so in this case, you know, it’s again, seven or eight business, business development practices, but I use it in, I use it in my personal life. I use it for my music.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah.

Neil Rogers: 

So

Linda Fanaras: 

how, how would you I mean, since this is a channel for our B2B clients or B2B listeners, how do you take that theory around positive activity? How do you apply it? To somebody who’s either in a marketing department, running a business. Somebody that handles the finances. I mean, can you articulate to our audience today, what type of value would that bring to those individuals when they’re, when they’re working?

Neil Rogers: 

Well, the first of all, getting your mind right. And I think it’s a big topic today is paramount to starting off your day. If you’re starting with your head. In your emails, it’s not a good place to start in our view. Right. You know? Right. Get your mind. Right. Be be ready for the day. Shift your mindset to be happier.’cause we control most of our own happiness. Right. It’s not the stuff. It’s not the stuff we have. We just by shifting and thinking about three things that you’re grateful for in the last 24 hours, if you can intentionally recall something that that really, really was awesome. And articulated on a journal, you know, you start getting, you’re in that place. So now you’re in that place. You’re in productivity. What are your productivity steps? That’s up to you in our world. It’s about business development. Well, you know, how are we going to get new clients? How are we going to keep the ones that we have? How are we going to grow within them? And we have campaigns set up for each and every one of those.

Linda Fanaras: 

Okay. We

Neil Rogers: 

use digital, but because we’re in the promotional business, we’re big advocates. Of lumpy mail. So if you want, if you truly want to get noticed and believe me when I tell you, every day I get the next person that wants to sell me leads. From scraping LinkedIn calling me Neil P I guess we’re real friends. And it’s like, I always just say, does this really work? It can’t work. Can it, can it really work? And so this week I got caught on a, on an appointment with somebody else. I go, you don’t have an agenda for this, do you? You just wanted to get me on the phone and try to sell me something. This is not good. So anyways, I asked for an agenda each time now. so if you’ve got, as an example, if someone is new, a new territory, new business, new product set, they’re out in there, they’re networking, they’re going to chamber events, they haven’t going to cocktail parties. wherever they’ve got their talk track. They’ve got their 32nd commercial, whatever you want to call it now, just because, so this is it, this is, this certainly would be in a referred situation just because this person enjoyed your conversation and thought you were smart and you’re funny, or you might, they might be remotely interested, does not mean they’re sitting, waiting by the phone for you to call or your magic email. You better get in queue and you better systematically market to them. We believe. At least in the bare minimum of the seven theory, seven touch theory that you have to have seven significant touches in order to get somebody’s attention. And in this world, you know, it’s, it may even be beyond that, you know? So, so it’s and so that that’s, so that’s, in a referred situation. So even your customers who you currently have, if you want to sell them a new product set or something, I’d respect them. And I make sure I’m just going to call, Hey, you know, obviously you can call and try to get an appointment and see them, but absent of that, get them into, get them into queue, direct mail and I’m not selling direct mail today is, was up in 2023.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah. So just, just speak about the, you know, the seven steps or whatever the case may be. Can you give the audience some examples let’s say you meet somebody in the elevator. There may be potential, there may not be potential, what would be what would you envision as part of those steps?

Neil Rogers: 

So let’s say we do get contact information, so I would, I would clearly, I’m not opposed to digital, I just don’t want it to be the, be everything. Certainly a follow up email, certainly great, you know, it was great to see you, yadda yadda yadda. Here’s what, here’s what I, here’s, here’s some of the things we talked about. Love to chat with you another time, but just a little, just a little follow up, simple follow up. I’m not talking about again, just, you don’t have to get all creative and whatnot. Just do it quickly. At least within 24 hours, otherwise they’re going to forget you.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right. Right. Real

Neil Rogers: 

memorable.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right. And

Neil Rogers: 

then beyond, then obviously you, the most obvious thing is that you want to have proper contact information in order to do all this.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Neil Rogers: 

Then sure. Why not leave them a voicemail? You’re going to get voicemail most of the time.

Linda Fanaras: 

So leave them a

Neil Rogers: 

nice voicemail. Don’t bug them. Do not be, don’t be overbearing. And then, then somewhere in the next two weeks, 10 days, make sure they open up a piece of mail from you. We send things like this, simple pen with a QR code on it. This is my bar tips. Find these ones I give out to waitresses and bartenders and all that. And you might well imagine the QR code goes right to my, right to the website to buy my book and but the whole notion is, is that it’s going to come in some sort of dimensional mail.

Linda Fanaras: 

You

Neil Rogers: 

want to have tracking because once they have it, you want to talk to them. Within 24 hours. A new thing I’ve, I’ve discovered that we can do with QR codes and that is we have a new product that we’re working with merge bots where that QR code takes you to a merge bot and then the engagement starts the analytics from that, from what I’ve heard from my research with this vendor is staggering that the length of time people go back to that, to stay engaged, for instance, in this, in the, in this certain presentation he made was, it was where somebody gave out something like this at a trade show 90 days later, they were still talking to the bot.

Linda Fanaras: 

So basically. You know, you have seven touch points and does that happen over a certain period of time or not necessarily?

Neil Rogers: 

Sure. I mean, I think it’s really up to the business, we usually do two a month, right. And then hopefully, you know, you get contact,

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Neil Rogers: 

Some sort of engagement, but we also, we always have the piece, the resistance is a last ditch box, which is completely. Decorated with their logo outside with multiple things inside with the stuff with your one sheeter that you want to walk through. And then the hope is right, Linda, we got them before that

Linda Fanaras: 

we bring

Neil Rogers: 

the box with us. We take them through it and then leave them with all of the fun

Linda Fanaras: 

swag. So you try to touch it, touch them at least twice a month.

Neil Rogers: 

Yeah. At least, you know, from a, from a physical standpoint and then, you know, the digital stuff we don’t like to, I’m not a big, I mean, some of these, this, the stuff online now, it just staggers me. The amount. Of emails I get from one group, one person.

Linda Fanaras: 

Have you done any studies around the success rate?

Neil Rogers: 

All of what we do and what I’ve written about is anecdotal. I just go from my experience and how we’ve grown most, most people I’ve tried to get, you know, direct mail in and of itself has got, you know, a decent response rate, nobody. And I’ve tried my darndest to find somebody that’s got tracking, get, get data on lumpy mail. Even in the, even in the, our, even our associations, they’ve really not, not done a good job of tracking that.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Neil Rogers: 

I can just tell you that, you know, again, it’s, it’s from my, our experience and our success. You know, nobody’s going to get mad at you because they opened up and you gave them a mug.

Linda Fanaras: 

Of course. So you’re, so you’re 7. touch point process is typically like a physical product. It could be a direct mail, or it could be a pen. It could be a mug. It could be box of cookies. Is that accurate?

Neil Rogers: 

Anything dimensional. You want them to open because it gets open. You know, it’s think of it as you’re the multiple emails you get is the same thing as you get multiple. pieces of mail that have got you just toss them. I mean, we do it. I mean, I think the average person does. And again, I’ve got no data on that, but I’m just anecdotally saying I toss this stuff. And so we know that when people, here’s one, here’s an example for you. You can’t see my name. So here’s something that we do every year. You can’t see it all that well, but my name is on that, on that beer, dough, whatever. And people wait for these every year. It’s, it’s the digital age, right? Nobody uses paper calendars every year. Every year. We’ve got at least a handful of people that call us, you guys sending the calendars this year? You think it’s the thing we get most thanked for and it’s the cheapest thing we’ve ever done.

Linda Fanaras: 

Awesome. Well, before I get to my last question, let me, I just want to take a moment and thank the audience. For listening in today. And if you like what you are hearing today, please hit like share or subscribe. So is there anything else you’d like to share with the audience before we wrap up today?

Neil Rogers: 

Yes. I’ve got a beautiful one today because I’ve experienced it today. And if you buy my book, bar tips, everything I needed to know in sales, you’ll, I learned behind the bar, you’ll get this little tip. It’s called taking ownership. When a business problem arises, so, the guy who, who was my mentor in the food business, you know, I’m chasing him around trying to follow him, get all, get, cause he’s tops of the trees in the, in stack rankings and all that, what the magic magic, magic pill is. And he he said, after all this other stuff, and he’s kind of a little bit of a wise guy, but you got in front of him, a chef or, or hotel manager, whatnot, he completely changed. In the end, he said, Neil, if you learn anything, nothing else from me, remember when anything goes wrong, start here. What was my role in this? How could I have done better? Did I give the order right? Before you start in those days, it was, it could be the warehouse person, the guy in the truck did it. That customer service girl doesn’t know what she’s doing. Who looks good in that? Nobody. You know what? Let me just. And if you can solve that problem without them even knowing. All of that. Now, nobody looks bad. Just go solve it.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right. Don’t,

Neil Rogers: 

don’t, don’t argue about it. Don’t this don’t get in the back and forth. And if you’ve got one bar, if you want one bar story before we go, the, the great example of this was Dennis Mayer. I worked at a place called Kia’s in Boston. Yeah, I

Linda Fanaras: 

know where that is. Yeah,

Neil Rogers: 

I opened it 42 years ago.

Linda Fanaras: 

Okay.

Neil Rogers: 

And Dennis was this guy way too smart to be hanging around with us pouring drinks, but he was working right to my side. And I heard this woman came up to the bar and asked for a vodka martini, extra dry. And for your audience, a vodka martini, extra die is vodka. All right. So Dennis poured it just the way he always does. Puts it, you know, ice is down the glass, pours it over ice, strains it into the glass, puts it down in front of the woman. This isn’t dry enough. Of course, Dennis walks by me and he goes, I’ve been doing this 15 years. Haven’t put a drop of vermouth in a drink yet, in a martini yet. So what does he do? I sit down a glass, puts it in front of her, pours the vodka. Not, not, not in a showy way. Not in a look at me way, not look at, no, no he just poured it so that she could see. Put it over, poured it into the glassware, put it in front of her, and she goes, that’s the one. So, the lesson here is, he could have gotten a beef, he could have told me his story, he could have, you know, the same story he told me. And then next thing you know, the other customers are hearing this and the place lost two ounces of booze.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Neil Rogers: 

That’s it.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Neil Rogers: 

So,

Linda Fanaras: 

so these are the

Neil Rogers: 

types of things that we talk about. They’re not, they’re not nationally studied or, or I’m going to show you a backup with all this data, but I tell you what, you talk to a bartender about this when I hand out this book.

Linda Fanaras: 

Well, people

Neil Rogers: 

that are in sales that worked in the hospitality business. It’s like, Oh yeah. I remember that. So

Linda Fanaras: 

that’s good.

Neil Rogers: 

So this is the pearl of Wisdom. Okay. Okay.

Linda Fanaras: 

Awesome. Thank you. So thanks very much for sharing your insights with our audience. Can you tell them how to get in touch with you?

Neil Rogers: 

Sure. It’s a Neil, N E I L at positiveactivity. net and that’s where you’ll find me, my book, my program, and Yeah. So there you go.

Linda Fanaras: 

Great. Well, thank you for tuning in to the B2B Brand 180 podcast today. We hope that you found the insights and strategies shared to be valuable and actionable. Again, I’m Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand 180 of Millennium Agency. You can visit us at mill. LinkedIn. It’s a couple of books I’d love to share with you. You can pick them up at Amazon. One is called claim your white space, why it’s critical to your business success. And the second one is passion plus profits. Build a powerhouse brand that sells. And just as a reminder, if you like what you heard today, please feel free to like, share or subscribe. for listening in.

In this episode of B2B Brand180, Linda interviews Frank Husmann, CEO and Founder of Maxiality. They discuss effective branding and growth strategies in B2B, focusing on authority marketing. Frank shares his experiences as a SaaS founder and B2B tech advisor, highlighting the importance of showcasing expertise to establish industry authority. They talk about the challenges of standing out in a competitive market, building trust, and using content to develop authority. The conversation also covers offline marketing, podcasting, and the evolving role of SEO in B2B marketing. Frank offers practical advice for businesses looking to implement authority marketing strategies.

01:42 Diving Deep into Authority Marketing

05:39 The Evolution of Content in B2B Marketing

10:30 Building Authority with Unique Strategies

25:42 Leveraging Offline Tactics in a Digital World

27:31 The Future of SEO in B2B Marketing

31:31 Final Thoughts and How to Connect

More on Frank Husmann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zinspiratie/

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/
Linda’s book, Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

 

Linda Fanaras: 

I’m Linda Fanaras, host of B2B Brand 180 Podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency, where we’re going to talk today about branding and growth strategies that are designed to help your business grow. But before I start, I just want to thank you for listening in. And if you like what you heard, please hit like, share or subscribe. So today I’m excited to bring in Frank Husmann from Maxility. and he is an internet entrepreneur. He specifically focuses in on the B2B industry and then tech marketing. So that’s going to be exciting. And we’re going to be talking about a new subject today. He’s a former SAS founder. He knows all about the challenges and pitfalls of growing a company. So he will help you learn how to grow your business through some different strategies, particularly In the authority marketing space. So welcome Frank to the B2B brand 180 podcast. And thanks for joining me today.

Frank Husmann: 

Thanks for having me, Linda. Really excited to be here. Yeah, cool.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah. Great. So let’s start out with a quick introduction. I’d love for you to tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

Frank Husmann: 

Yeah. So like you mentioned in the introduction, I’ve been in a SaaS entrepreneur for about five years and sold my SaaS. I think it was about three years ago now. And after that, some people called me about maybe some help about their SaaS. And that’s how I ran into, yeah, advising B2B tech companies mostly. And what I help them with is just most of the time it’s marketing, but it’s also sales related. And especially these days they go hand in hand right now. So yeah, that’s that’s the short version of where I’m coming from and what I’m doing right now with my agency right now. So yeah. Helping B2B tech companies to to grow.

Linda Fanaras: 

Excellent. So we’re going to talk about authority marketing, and I guess I’d like to start out with a real simple question that you could help our audience with. What exactly is authority marketing and how do B2B companies actually benefit from it?

Frank Husmann: 

Yeah. Authority marketing is about showing your expertise in your industry through your ideal client profiles. And when you show your expertise long enough, and that’s, it doesn’t mean years and years. No, it can be done in about six months or so. You’ll become the number one. In your industry. So you become the authority in your industry. And there are many different tactics to do that. And it is especially important right now because of well, a couple of reasons. I think, well, there are about three reasons. One is that there’s so much content right now. No one knows who’s the real expert behind it. So that’s one problem. The AI part is a problem because so many people are using AI now and that makes it a bit weird. So how can you be the source of AI by showing your expertise, for example? And the third one is that in B2B, we’re shifting from more of a lead generation approach where everyone was focusing on those three to 5 percent people who are in market right now for your. solution for your product or service to more of a demand generation approach, where we also focus on the 95 percent of people who are not yet in market, but will need to make some sort of a short list at some point. And hopefully when you establish authority in your industry, you’ll be on that short list or maybe on the top of the list even. So you’ll be on the radar when they are going to make a choice.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah. And I, I do, I like what you’re talking about there because I think authority marketing, particularly in the B2B space, it’s really important to build trust. And with everything changing after COVID where more businesses have gone remote and businesses have grown more nationally, just things have changed substantially. It’s important to be able to build credibility and trust as quickly as possible. And having that authority marketing, you know, in place as part of your strategy can absolutely help. That process. That’s a great insight. Right.

Frank Husmann: 

I think one of the most important three things that any B2B marketeer can do is to build trust, to build trust and to build trust. I mean, that’s at the day what we need to do.

Linda Fanaras: 

And it’s so hard to do that today over a zoom call or anything like that. They’re, you know, everybody’s looking at

Frank Husmann: 

Yeah.

Linda Fanaras: 

thing.

Frank Husmann: 

And especially with tech companies, because I mean, these tech companies usually create software and of course they do other things as well, but it’s software. You can touch it, you can ship it, you can box it. Right. So, I mean, how can you build trust in something that you can hold and can grab? That’s, that’s definitely a challenge when there’s not only one competitor in your, in your industry, but probably nowadays there are at least 10 different competitors in your industry or even more probably. So how, how are you going to be different in that and how are you going to show the expertise? And these are the interesting things that, well, there are so many B2B challenges actually, but these are the ones that are also interesting.

Linda Fanaras: 

No, and that’s a good point because I mean, I’m sure you do too, but I get inundated with a lot of, you know, products in the marketing space and it’s hard to differentiate exactly why is this one better than the other? And unless I have heard about the product on from a larger brand perspective, it’s like, they’re all the same. Frankly. So it’s important to, to your point, improve your authority in the space in order to help build credibility and build trust. You know, AI, you did mention you touched on AI a little bit and there is so much AI generated content out there and people are grabbing onto it. Some people, some companies are a little nervous. There’s, you know, You know, issues around that, as we are all well aware, but in the B2B marketing landscape, how do companies stand out with this type of content that’s just being pushed out there automatically through software platforms and other things that just make it so easy for companies to, to do this.

Frank Husmann: 

Yeah. So I think when we rewind a little bit, we used to create white papers based on three, three blogs written by an intern maybe, or someone who Googled something, right? I mean, that’s what maybe 50 to 60 percent of the B2B companies did. Right. And of course there are other companies who interviewed people who made really great white papers. There are two, thankfully. But it was usually a mixed bag. Let’s put it in a nice way. Yeah. So you’d run a LinkedIn campaign with a lead form and you’ll get about 100 leads from that and you’ll hand them over to sales and sales will call them. And after two months or so, they will get back to you and the sales will say, Hmm, those leads, they weren’t really that good. Right? So you go back to, we’ll create another white paper and then the cycle goes again and it goes again. And it used to work more or less because about one in 100 maybe would lead to some sort of a proposal or whatever. But nowadays the, the acquisition cost has gone up way high and everyone knows that once you enter your email address into something, you will get spam bombarded or stalked by someone or some automated process. And so we all know how it works. So that’s the second point. And the third point is that the buyers right now are used to a self service buyer journey. So that means that before they even want to talk to sales, they have, they want to know what’s going on with the company. Can we trust it? Can we trust the product? Does the product really help my pain points? Does it really do what it has to do? Well, so many other things, right? But at the end of the day, these questions have all, have already been answered and they know a lot more than speaking to a regular SDR who knows maybe is six months in the company and doesn’t even know that much because the person already saw a podcast, whatever did their research. So. These are some other challenges that we got right now, and which is a bit of a convoluted answer to your question about the content part, but yeah, I wanted to point that out as well. So circling back to the content part is, I think that what we used to do, so this is what we used to do, the white paper part, and what we also used to do is we’ll, we’ll start with an SEO keyword list, right? So someone created a keyword list and At some point you would need to create the 10 best reasons to install a CRM for your, I don’t know, plumbing business AC, whatever. These are all just generic, generic content, nothing new, but we all, everyone did that. So everyone thought that they had to do it as well. And that’s what lots of marketeers are still doing, to be honest, just. It’s, it’s, you can also call it checkbox marketing, right? So newsletter, yes. Send a tenant of two blocks this month. Yes, done. Four posts on LinkedIn done on the company page. So it’s, that’s more of a, yeah, you can call it checkbox marketing. So when you turn it around and now I’m really coming back to the question about content is we need to create content that resonates with your audience. We need to talk about the pain points that they’re facing. We need to talk about the feelings that they get when the solution is installed that we’re providing. Right. We need to show that as well. Don’t tell it. How can we do that? Well, it usually starts with the founder or the founders or some subject matter experts in the company that we got can be consultants as well. It can be salespeople. Anyone who has knowledge about the pain points and the problems about the ideal customers that we are facing and that we’re talking to regularly, hopefully. And when we interview these people and the way that we do it is we just interview them once a month in an hour, we’ll create content for a month based on that, and that helps just snowball everything. And when you do that consistently and amplify it with LinkedIn ads, you will become the number one in the industry pretty quickly because everyone will notice you. It’s a different approach because I mean, at, in the whole content marketing, inbound marketing HubSpot playbooks that’s more, that’s actually has been the white paper route and the create as much, much blogs as you can

Linda Fanaras: 

Yes.

Frank Husmann: 

whatever subject, even related ones that are not really related. And you’ll have a lot of traffic. Yes, of course you’ll have a lot of traffic, but I think we are now going from a more It’s not about the quantity anymore. It’s really about the quality. So it’s actually, we would have to talk about lead quality, not even the number of leads, we have to talk about lead quality and how do we end up being a sales qualified opportunity and how much have we as marketers attributed to the actual revenue?

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s good. And I think authority with the authority marketing component. Even utilizing AI to write articles or blogs or so on and so forth. The depth of that can be what? It’s the depth of that is often not there. So it requires, you know, I think individuals or businesses to make sure that they take the time and effort to not just allow an AI generator to generate a blog or whatever the case may be, or social media posts, it needs to have valuable content that is credible. And I think Making sure that it’s all part of our integrated in that process will help differentiate whoever is trying to build authority. So I was wondering how B to B companies can leverage their unique point of view and expertise to be thought leaders, you know, in the space and actually use that to attract, you know, maybe give me some examples or case studies that you could share that you think, Hey, you know, this is one way that it was done. This has worked really well for this type of company. I’d love to get some insight on that.

Frank Husmann: 

yeah, sure. No, I’d like to talk about real examples. So, but before we start about building the authority or creating the authority it’s important that you’ll have some sort of strategy, right? Cause I mean, you can try to. We can go again, the route by creating as much content as we can and amplify that. But I mean, that’s not, that’s not what we want to do. So first of all, we’re going to talk about what’s the point of view? What is it that makes you unique? What is something that you disagree with? And if we know the point of view of you as a founder or, or the company as a whole or a specific mission or whatever it is that makes you stand out. We’re going to amplify that in every interview that we do. So that’s one thing to make you stand out. And the second thing is. Data is really important as well. So, you know, we’re not talking about cases as well,, every company has so much data especially tech companies, but still it doesn’t even matter what company, because. If you’ve been around for, I don’t know, six months, a year, many years, you will have so much data about the people that you’ve worked with, the companies that you work with, why don’t you do something with that data? So that’s the second part, because it needs to be credible, so you, you know, your own unique point of view. And use some data as well. We can always use data, but make sure that you. At least work something into it that can back things up. So don’t do the generic stuff because at the end of the day, how you, whatever, all this, how to, and the, the 10 reasons before.

Linda Fanaras: 

15 ways to 10 reasons. That’s yeah.

Frank Husmann: 

no, it’s just, you can Google it and you can ask that GPT and it’s already there. So it makes sure you have your own point of view use your own examples from your own experience. It makes it more human as well and relatable and and use some data. And it can even be statistics at some point that you just get from someone else or whatever, but. Preferably from your own organization or your own insights. So these are the things to start with. Then you have to know about what content pillars you want to talk about, right? Cause if you’re in a specific industry, the specific things that you want to be known about, known for, so that’s, that’s what we do upfront and then. We’ll create a lot of questions that are related to that. And some of them are around the question that they get in sales calls or FAQs after sales. But also the insights from the industry. So it’s, it’s a lot, a lot of questions that we got and what we do is, and that’s more tactical, so one hour every month we’ll be in an interview, we’ll record the interview on video, and we’ll use that interview to create blog articles, a newsletter, we’ll create LinkedIn posts as well. We’ll use the videos as well for that. And we’ll put it on YouTube as well, the longer ones. And after one month, I have to start, we’ll analyze what was best and we’ll use that for the coming month. And we can use it for webinars as well. And we’ll amplify the best content by LinkedIn ads. And that’s also a two part strategy. We’ll use a cold layer and a retargeting layer. And that’s the actual way we do it to build authority. And now back to the cases where, what we talked about, we had a client and we were working with this for only three weeks and based on the LinkedIn post. He got known it for a company that was actually giving trainings to their specific ICP. And he got asked to be there and just do a couple of them with them. And this was exactly in their ICP. So it’s like, I mean, no cold calling, no, no, no outbound, nothing. He was just actually going to be at the ICP and talking directly to them. And when you talk that way, you, yeah, I mean, it was really easy for him to, to deliver value and get leads from that, from this trainings as well. So, and that’s the quickest way that we’ve ever seen results, to be honest, because mostly it takes some time, of course. I mean, you don’t build authority overnight. Yeah, it’s three to six months, like I mentioned before, for actual results. And what are the results that we’ve seen? Shorter sales cycle, definitely because people see you more. So you’ll be on the short list and over and over again, people will see you. The second one is we’ll definitely deliver more inbound leads by hand raisers, people who are in ICP, because usually when you create a lot of content, You’ll get people who are not in your ICP and that’s the whole the, the, the, the, the, you shoot a lot of bullets, right? But you’re not, not really attracting the right people that you want. Not, not with the bullets. It was a metaphor, right?

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Frank Husmann: 

But anyway, so yeah.

Linda Fanaras: 

no, that’s awesome, Frank. I was just going to say for our audience, because they might not know what ICP means. So, it’s the ideal customer profile. So I’ll usually determine what that is. based on who’s buying from you. So it might be a certain size business, certain title could be anything related to, you know, in a specific industry. So you definitely want to, as part of your marketing strategy, make sure you have defined your ICP in great detail.

Frank Husmann: 

One thing to add about the ICP part is that some, some companies that I talked to don’t even know what their ideal client profile is. I mean, they just, I mean, everyone with a heartbeat to sell it. Right. That’s definitely a challenge. Some of them know what their ideal client profile is, and it’s really broad. It’s from 80 to 80 years, eight to 80 years. Male, maybe, or female, whatever, it doesn’t matter. And they all live in the United States and they work in B2B. So that’s also really broad, right? And I mean, I’m saying this with a, I’m jokingly, but still, I mean, your ideal client profile is something that you have to check upon at least once a year, and you have to be really, really specific about it. And it’s, this is a hard exercise, really. Because it’s not only about the industry, about the number of people who work in there, about the revenue that they got there, but it’s also about is there some trigger that will lead to a buying opportunity? For example a funding round in the tech space is important, but also someone, a new hiring role. Like for example, there’s a CRO, a customer revenue officer in place, and there wasn’t one before. But also maybe they installed new software. You can all. These things are all available publicly. And he used that to create a better ideal client profile. And yeah, well, anyway, what I’m trying to say is make sure you have an ideal client profile and make it really go deep and make sure you check it at least once a year because these things change.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah. You want to drill that down as much as you can. Not always does everybody fall into your ICP potentially, but it allows you to be a little bit more prepared. picky as you grow, especially. So I did want you to just repeat one thing because I think this would be helpful for our audience just to hear it and maybe steps. So if they were trying to do a multifaceted campaign, which you spoke about, what you talked about the video and the blog and then this and that, what can you speak again? I just want to make sure that they kind of got this, what would be some of the components of that first layer then to then go back and do the remarketing to the second layer? I just want to make sure everybody

Frank Husmann: 

Yeah, sure.

Linda Fanaras: 

wrapped their head around that if you don’t mind discussing that again.

Frank Husmann: 

And maybe as an introduction to this whole approach is that I, I’ve been a SaaS founder, like I mentioned at the start of our conversation and the way that we created our inbound leads, our leads was inbound, creating lots of blocks and that were, and guest blocks as well, and, and lingo. S SEO O was our number one channel. Google was our number one channel, organic so paid, we never really got around to working it. And I heard that from a lot of SaaS companies, to be honest. And of course, a difference about. Size but there’s so many nuts and bolts that, but anyway, I hear that a lot. But like I mentioned before, the whole B2B marketing space has been changing a lot. The, I mentioned the focus from not on, not, not so much anymore on lead generation, but also on demand generation a lot. So, since there’s a lot of changes going on, that’s one. And And there are more channels than ever because for example, five years ago, or maybe a bit longer, we only had Google. That was the number one channel. But now we have, I mean, we can go to YouTube, right? Yes. We, we. In the past, we could go to YouTube as well, but there were so many interesting things that you could learn right now from your industry. And it doesn’t really matter what B2B industry you’re in. We have LinkedIn, of course we have Discord, Slack communities. We have school communities with a K. We have, well, anyway, we have WhatsApp in the, in Europe, they’ve got many WhatsApp groups that that people are inside as well. Facebook, of course, is still there. And that’s called dark social, dark funnel, whatever you would call it. So it can be tracked. It can be traced. That’s why it’s called dark. So there are so many different channels right now that people are active. And in the tech space, that’s the last one I’m going to emphasize that you will have these comparison websites like G2 and Capterra, and you can just compare if you want some sort of software based on reviews. So there are many more channels right now where you can be active and we can, and can be seen. That was this is a problem for companies who are still relying on the old playbooks by just blasting, blasting and blasting with, with content. That’s generic. So this is a long introduction to what is the actual playbook that we’re using? What are the tactics that we’re using and why we’re using it? Because. In the past, we used this as well, but it’s not working anymore. So that’s why we tried something else. And and we just started by interviewing people, interviewing founders, and we actually started with myself because I wanted to have, to create better articles and not, I wanted to stand out basically. And I thought, why not use video to do that? And the good news is also that the things that we’re doing right now, we couldn’t even do two or three years ago because the technology has advanced so much. And the AI part is one of the things that we use a lot. For example, transcription services. I mean, you can just record this video and you’ll have a transcript and it’s nine out of 10. It’s really, really good. It didn’t, it wasn’t in the past. And you can use that to create smaller clips as well. And, and some of these things are really quick, quickly. So you can create a lot more content and distribute it on more channels and repurpose it. We couldn’t do it in the past. So back to the recipe, the playbook, what we do is. We interviewed the founder for one hour a month. We prepared, of course, we’ll do it on video. And based on that video, we’ll create an R a couple of one or two articles, a newsletter, and we’ll create about eight to. 16, depends on if it works, LinkedIn posts and for organic reach. And we also create a couple of YouTube videos. So we have content for a month. We always aim for content for a month. And when we publish the organic content after one month, we’ll analyze. What worked and what didn’t work based on engagement figures most of the time. So it can be a number of likes and the number of reactions. We have some sort of formula to calculate that. And when we know what works, we’re going to amplify it with LinkedIn ad campaigns. And these LinkedIn ad campaigns are completely in the ICP, in the ideal client profile. So we’ll definitely be targeting the people that should be your customer at some point. And we do that in two layers. The first layer is a cold layer. So that means that the first campaign is actually going to people who are cold to you. They don’t know you yet. And we’ll, we’ll put the videos out there that are more generic, not really generic, but are, really trying to amplify the, the problem that your ideal client profile, the customers, ideal prospects are not really seeing yet. So we’re trying to educate them, showing that, making them aware that they got a problem. And in the second layer, we’ll retarget the people who have interacted with that specific ad, that video, we’ll retarget them to a more of a. a demo or an offer that that will be more commercial and we’ll also add some more cases and testimonials in there as well. But there are those are not really fancy campaigns and they can be doing done with a budget of about 500 to 1, 000 every month. Which is not a lot for B2B.

Linda Fanaras: 

So I’ll just take a real quick minute. I just wanted to thank our audience for listening in today. And if you like what you have hearing from Frank, please hit like share or subscribe. You can also provide a review, which is also fantastic. So I have, I do have a few more questions for you. So, Are there any other tactics that you would recommend for B2B companies that we did not cover yet?

Frank Husmann: 

Well, this is the thing that we specialize in cause we know it works, but I do advise to, well, there, there’s so many tactics that could work and, and it, we call it go to market strategies. Right. And this is the one that I’ve seen that really works well right now. But what you can also do is of course and, and it depends on the phase you’re in, how, how is, is there demand for the things that you do, right? Cause in B2B sometimes there is not. The demand is hard to capture from Google, for example, if you’re in a new category. One year ago, people wouldn’t even search for AI tools, for example, or almost not. So that also depends and we all hate the answer. It depends. But anyway what could also work is I’m a big fan of, of being a guest on a podcast, that’s one. And I’m also a big fan of creating your own podcast. Cause the good news is that you can create intimacy with people that might be your customer at some point. So you can. Just invite a possible customer to you and talk with this person because they’re in the same industry. Right. And, and that’s really great. When I look into the future and I don’t have a crystal ball, but I do think that most companies will have some sort of a podcast video podcasting studio set up in a couple of years from now. And if it’s not this year, it will be indefinitely a couple of years. Why? Because you can create content really quickly. And you’ll have video as well. And you can also create intimacy with people that might be at some point your customer. And maybe last, lastly, it will be that when you do that consistently, you will become an authority as well because people look up to you because you put so much knowledge out there for free.

Linda Fanaras: 

Exactly. And Frank, I will say like these types of forums are great because, I always leave learning something new and I’m sure you probably leave some learning something new too. So I think from the audience’s perspective and I, and, and from my perspective, I always like to provide them with content that’s different, maybe something that they’re not going to read about it in a sense. Standard blog or, you know, so to be able to provide this on more of a personal level and professional level, I think it’s great for the audience and also great for us to be able to provide that type of education to our, to, to the market. So

Frank Husmann: 

And it will make you stand out as well, because when there are 10 CRM systems or whatever, 10 suppliers or whatever, it will make you stand out. And it may be your personality, even if everyone is going to do it in three years. But I mean, let’s look at it as some, as a, as a Netflix show or whatever, you know, you can just, you can create your own

Linda Fanaras: 

Style. Yeah. Yeah.

Frank Husmann: 

and attract the customers that you want.

Linda Fanaras: 

Absolutely. So are there any underrated tactics that maybe we could talk about that we haven’t yet that are in the B2B space?

Frank Husmann: 

My number one underrated tactic is going offline. If you believe it or not,

Linda Fanaras: 

What do you mean? What do you mean by that?

Frank Husmann: 

well, I’m just completely online. So it’s even hard for me to say go offline. But what I mean by that is there are so many things that we can do offline. And one of the things that’s easy to do is just send a letter through the mail, believe it or not, like an actual physical thing that you put inside a mailbox, right? And just a blank envelope and people will open it because they go like, whoa, this is, I don’t recognize this at all. Not, not nothing fancy. And when you call that person after a week, they go, yeah, I received this letter. I didn’t know what it was. Right. So they’ll. It has to be a good letter, of course, you need some copywriting skills, but that really helps to open up doors. And the second thing that I’ve also been doing, I do this, especially with partnership programs, it go offline is to add some sort of a gift inside of it, and it can be anything that, that, that works that resonates with the audience, can be something funny. It can be something weird. I I also did a Like a small toy that you can buy in a kid’s toy store. And if you pour water on it, it will grow. And the thing around it was grow with, with us, something like that. Right.

Linda Fanaras: 

Okay. Yep. Yep.

Frank Husmann: 

And when we called those people, they loved it. They said, yeah, I gave it to my kids. They really loved it. So they remembered it and loved it. So, I mean, try to do something different is basically what I’m trying to say by going offline. And the third thing by going offline is, and it depends, of course, on your region. If you’re going into the whole of the U S it’s going to be a bit different, but You can go offline by using round tables in Europe. There’s a lot of round tables going on. What does it mean? You’ll just invite six people or maybe 10 people, and you’ll talk about things that are going on inside your industry. No cameras, no photos, nothing, no blocks afterwards, but just talk about the things that are going on. If you do that every month, and especially with B2B with long sales cycles, you will get some clients out of it, most definitely.

Linda Fanaras: 

So my last question really is, so how do you see SEO evolving? With beat him in the context of b2b marketing and sort of before to like fast forward a little bit. How does that going to all work? Because everybody’s busting out content through a I, you know, some are keyword focus. Some aren’t. I mean, what do you think?

Frank Husmann: 

I love this question. So a bit of a short story. I, I, I, I, my background is actually SEO. Before I started my SaaS, I was an SEO consultant. I worked for many SEO firms and agencies as well as a freelancer. So, I know a little SEO I’ve had about, I don’t know, tens of websites as well in my portfolio and sold a couple of them last year before every update went went public. down with the traffic and stuff like that. And that’s my playground. It’s always been my playground. Cause I like to fiddle around with, with Google stuff and see what works. So when I talk about SEO with my clients, it’s battle tested. I know what works and what doesn’t work. So when that whole AI thing blew up, of course I had to test what works and what didn’t. Yeah. So long story short I.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah,

Frank Husmann: 

has a problem. First of all, when you Google anything, I don’t know, Linda, how happy are you on a scale of one to 10 with the results? most of the time it’s, it’s not that good, right? So you have to skip a few pages, maybe you’ll find something, but it’s interesting. Let’s put it that way. Right. So that’s problem number one. Then problem number two is of course, everyone, like you already mentioned, everyone is blasting out content. We already had this whole content avalanche going. Now there’s even more by using AI. So they just rolled out an update. I think it was, they started a couple of weeks ago. It now started another spam update and there were so many websites, especially publishing websites that went down to almost zero traffic. And it really, people who made a living out of that, creating this not so well written, well researched content, let’s put it that way. So, yeah, that’s what’s going on. And the third problem that Google has is for B2B at least is that there’s so many different challenges, challenge channels that we already talked about. Right. So, people orient on their problems, the things that they want to know on different channels as well. So that’s the third problem that I got, they probably got more, but these are the things that affect SEO, because that was, that’s the question, right? So. How do I see SEO evolve in that past? To be honest, the advice of SEO people was always right for the, the person who’s interested in, don’t write for Google, right. For the person who’s interested in, in the subject, I think that that’s, that’s even more important. And how can you do that? Ask questions, interview people speak to your customers, speak to prospects. And if you’re an SEO marketer, or if you’re. challenge with a task of making sure you got more organic traffic from Google. I think that’s the one thing that you should have been doing in any way, but you have to do it now even more. And the second thing is you have to show your expertise, your authority and trustworthiness even more because Google finds it more important. How can you do it? Interview the people in your organization who noticed things, make sure you have quotes from them as well. And some data to back it up. If you do that and don’t focus so much on the keywords anymore, of course you can do some keyword research. That will definitely help you to stand out and to make sure that you will don’t have a problem with any updates in the past, but if you would ask me for any B2B marketeer right now. Who is starting in a new position. Should you focus on SEO? I would say, Hmm, nah, well, it’s interesting, definitely, but don’t focus on it too much because you can build that expertise, that authority in, in the different ways, I

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Frank Husmann: 

quicker and, and make sure you got results by actually what I’ve been talking about right now by doing authority marketing.

Linda Fanaras: 

And SEO takes a long time.

Frank Husmann: 

Yeah,

Linda Fanaras: 

if you launch, and if you launch a new website, then it takes even longer. Then you have to almost, I don’t want, you have to start over, but sometimes it feels that way. Awesome. Thank you so much, Frank. I think I think that was my last question. So I don’t know if you have a final tip that you want to provide anybody or did you think you

Frank Husmann: 

Nah, well, anyway, the final tip will be if you’re in in the B2B space and you probably are because you listened to this podcast and I would Cheers. I mean, maybe just try to do a video interview and it can be hard if you start because no one likes to see him or herself afterwards, you might get some friction in there. I mean, what you’re going to, you want to have me on camera or something? Just try and do it for, I don’t know, a couple of months, maybe, or even just one time and see what you can learn from it and experiment with it. And you will notice that you will get really some different results than you’ve had in the past, to be honest. So just try and experiment with it.

Linda Fanaras: 

people love that personal. component to marketing anyway. So to be able to put a face with whoever’s putting content out there or whoever’s building authority is great. So that’s great. Thank you so much, Frank. Thank you for everybody for tuning in today to the B2B brand one 80 podcast. You’ve. I hope you found the insights and strategies shared by Frank to be valuable and actionable. I would love for you to take a moment and share with the audience how they can get in touch with you.

Frank Husmann: 

So thank you for having me. And if you want to know a little bit more about authority marketing, you can go to maxxielli. com. I’ve got a free video training actually over there. So you can just walk through it and do it all by yourself. And like I mentioned before, experiment with it. And if you want some help, I’m happy to just look at your strategy right now for free and just schedule a call. And we’ll check out if we can if you, if I can help you with anything. I’d love to share my my knowledge.

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s awesome. And we will include all your information in the comments. So, and I will just say the website is M A X I A. L I T Y in case anybody wants to head over there now. And again, I am Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand 180 podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency. And feel free to visit us at mill, M I L L dot agency, or you can go right to Linda Fanaras. dot com. And just, or connect with me on LinkedIn. We re recently released two books. One is claim your white space, which you can find on linda fanaras. com and passion plus profits is our second one. So thanks again for listening to the B2B brand one 80 podcast and hope to speak to again soon. Thank you.

In this B2B Brand180 podcast episode hosted by Linda Fanaras, Armando Leduc shares insights on the intersection of storytelling and business growth. Armando discusses his transition from the film industry to founding Leduc Entertainment, emphasizing the power of authentic storytelling in business communication. He offers practical advice on overcoming camera shyness by focusing on the message rather than personal perception. Armando further explores storytelling as a tool for engaging audiences, detailing a narrative structure that enhances content relatability.   He also touches on mapping the customer journey and nurturing referral partnerships through personalized engagement.

02:09 Overcoming On-Camera Nervousness
04:21 Mastering Storytelling for Business Success
12:27 The Power of the Customer Journey in Business Growth
16:08 Incorporating the Five Love Languages into Business
18:09 Unlocking the Power of Referral Partners
19:02 The Magic of Personal Touch in Business
19:36 Decoding the Love Languages of Business Relationships
21:01 Revolutionizing Customer Engagement with Personalized Videos
21:40 Mastering the Art of Referral Requests
23:28 Leveraging Partnerships for Mutual Growth
24:26 Expanding Your Network Through Strategic Partnerships
26:44 The Blueprint for Turning Content into Revenue
30:48 Armando’s Journey from Tactics to Storytelling
31:37 A Glimpse into Armando’s Acting Career
33:27 Closing Thoughts and How to Connect

For more on Armando:
https://www.leducentertainment.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/armando-leduc-16ba4940/

Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/
Linda’s book, Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

 

Linda Fanaras: 

Hi, I’m Linda Fanaras, host of B2B Brand 180 podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency. And where we talk all about branding and growth strategies. to help your business grow. So before I get started, I just want to thank you for listening in today. And if you like what you hear, please hit like, share, subscribe. Today I’m excited to bring in Armando Leduc, a rising star in entertainment. Captivating audiences. He is a performer and has been a performer and continues to be a performer in Hollywood and TV. And he has earned admiration throughout the years of, of his career. And he has a super busy schedule, but he loves to connected to his new Orleans roots and he supports the community. He’s an artist. He’s focused in on helping clients with. Work through their customer journey and businesses and helping build that referral partner journey. So we’re going to talk about a few different things today. So I’m, I’m excited to tie in a lot of different things. So Armando, I would love for you to speak a little bit about yourself. Tell our audience you know, a little bit of your background.

Armando Leduc: 

Sure. I don’t want to get too much into it because I really would love to like build some value and, make sure that when they hear this, they can take it and go, you know what, I could apply this to my business. But just to give you guys a little bit of background. Um, I, you know, Army brat grew up in Germany moved to new Orleans to pursue my film and acting career. And I’ve done over 50 television and film projects decided I want to get behind the camera as well to tell stories cause I love telling stories and writing scripts. And so I started my company, LaDuke entertainment in 2016 and have been doing corporate. you know, videos, but more along the lines of like, story based content and things that really move the needle forward and authority building and brand building and all of that through video specifically. So that’s it in the next couple.

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s great. Because having that film. career and expertise and tying that into storytelling and video connects really great with our B2B audience. So I’m looking forward to talking a little bit about this. So I’ll, I’ll start my, with my first question that I had, because I’d love to hear about some practical strategies that people or individuals can use to master that on screen camera. Nervousness that they get or get, get over that nervousness and come across with confidence and have a strong presence. It could be even in virtual meetings. It could be in presentations or it could be even on, on camera. Any thoughts around that?

Armando Leduc: 

Yeah. I think one of the things that you have to really think about when you’re on camera is getting away from your perception of yourself and more about what the messages that you’re trying to convey and how you’re helping. And if you can put it out there. In that respect, it, it sort of takes the attention off of you. It’s easy to say because I’ve also taken acting classes and I’ve been in improv classes. And if you really want to learn how to be irreverent and really let go and just be okay with who you are I would take some improv classes like improv classes will really make you. Irreverent, because you’ll fail and you’ll be all right and you’ll not even die. Right. And so you’re just like, whatever, I’m going to get on camera now. And, you know, I’ll speak my truth. And what’s great about, I love podcasting in general is because you’re just answering questions, you know, and that’s what social media could be like it just Q and a, you don’t have to do dance videos. You don’t have to do crazy things. You could just answer questions about what you know, and about your truth and your experience. And when you think about those things, You know, it’s, like I said, it sort of takes away from your nervousness and who you are and how are, how am I being perceived and how am I being judged? You know, all of that stuff just kind of goes out the window when you realize it really doesn’t matter. Life is short and you should speak your truth because it matters. Your opinion matters.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah, that’s great. They always say that speaking and flying are the two biggest fears, right? So if you could take the focus off yourself and just focus on maybe what the message is and how you’re going to, you know, what the communication is to your audience, that’s important too, which ties us into the storytelling piece, because I know that’s one of your strengths. Can you talk a little bit about how you may tackle storytelling Any strategies behind that that you can share with our audience that you think would be helpful?

Armando Leduc: 

Sure. So when you’re thinking about story, storyline and storytelling, you want to think about how, how are we setting it up? What’s the setup, the backstory, right? Why, who are we following and why should we be following this person? And if you think about the protagonist in, at, in, in his space or her space, right at work, at home and at play. That’s how they usually set up a movie, right? How is this person operating at home? How are they operating at at work and how are they operating at play? Because they’re different, right? How your personalities change, then what happens? The inciting incident. The thing that sets the movie in motion, the, the thing that changes their life. And now they have a choice. They either make the decision to go on the journey or they don’t for movie sake, they go on the journey. Right? Right. Right. So the inciting incident happens, they go on the journey and it’s conflict after conflict after conflict after conflict. And it’s the overcoming of those conflicts that keep us engaged and Oh, how are they getting out of this one? And Oh, how are they getting out of that one? Cause you never going to see a movie where. Everything’s going right. That would be a very boring movie.

Linda Fanaras: 

They want

Armando Leduc: 

to see right at every turn, there’s something happening, they’ve got to come up against something, someone, you know, they’re running away from something. There’s always some sort of conflict. And if you think about when you’re creating content And the story of how you overcame your obstacles and the things you’ve learned as a result, those are things that are more interesting, when I’m doing my webinar, when I open my webinar off, I always start with the backstory of. Let’s meet Armando. He’s in his thirties. He’s an alcoholic. He’s a pothead. He’s broke. He has no direction in life. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He has, you know, he’s broke. Did I mention he’s broke, you know? And so, and I set it up, right? So it’s this guy. And and he’s and he’s the desire is that he wants something more from his life. I want to be, you know, I want to make my name proud and I want to be and I want to have a family and I want, you know, a wife and kids. And if I continue along this path, I’m never going to get where I want to go. And so the old vehicle that I lived in was I was just trying everything out. I I was a singer, I was an actor, I was a bartender. I’ve, I’ve had over 75 jobs by the way’s had over impressive five. That’s impressive. Yeah. I dunno if it’s impressive or if it’s sad, you know, it was just, I, I wanted, like, I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just, I knew that there was something there. Right? And so then what happens is you get the call right? Some, the entire incident. Right? Something happens to you that changes you. And so I moved to la. And I was sitting in, in a, in a parking lot cause I had this job called Jesco. And I would, you know, those infomercials where they’re like showing you how to chop a kitchen thing. That was me. So I would do this commercial and I moved to LA to pursue my acting career. And I noticed that I was not pursuing my acting career. All I was doing was working. And I was like sitting in this parking lot, just. Crying feeling sorry for myself and I said, you know what I want to go home to New Orleans And I want to make a movie and I knew that I could make the movie here and it was called bourbon whiz It was the Wizard of Oz meets Bourbon Street And I came home and I filmed the movie and I was like, I knew that I needed to finish this film, this independent film so that I could get the credibility that I could finish a project. Right. And I was like, Oh, I’m going to be a movie producer and not going to be a movie producer because there’s no money in it unless you have, you know, unless you have the connections. Right. I rebranded to LaDuke Entertainment because I knew that Sketchy Characters Productions wasn’t going to be it, right? So that was, so that was the call. Then the guide comes in, your Obi Wan Kenobi, the person that guides you through, through this journey. And luckily I, I grew up with a guy in, Georgia who has a, who built an eight figure law firm in Atlanta.

Linda Fanaras: 

Okay, like a

Armando Leduc: 

40 million dollar law firm and he saw what I was doing and he was like, Oh, hey, I’m starting this new company called eight figure firm and I’m teaching attorneys how to scale their business to eight figures and I’m like, that’s awesome. You know, he’s like, shoot content. And I was like, great. So I, I went in and started shooting content. He showed me like the whole process. He’s like Armando, you have a seven figure business. You just don’t know how to get there. I was like, what are you talking about? And he’s like 2, 500 a month. And I will mentor you. And I was like, you kidding? At that time I was making like 20, 000 a year. But you know, I was like, I, something had to change. I needed to do something. So I did, I started mentoring with him and like the first month I started working with him, I had a 30, 000 a month and I grew my business to half a million dollars. And then I grew my business to seven figures. And it was like, ah, okay, success leaves clues. You know, and so now, as a result of learning and I had a guide and going through, I created my own system, and now here we are on the outside of it. This is the achievement externally. Externally, making all this money, it’s amazing. Internally, I grew confident. As a person, I’m happier. I’m, you know, I’m no longer an alcoholic.

Linda Fanaras: 

I’m no

Armando Leduc: 

longer doing drugs. I’m no, you know, I have a family. I have a daughter, I get to make my own schedule. I’m traveling where I want, you know, so that’s the story, and so when you guys are thinking about, Story. And when you’re thinking about creating content, think about those, that framework, right, work at home at play, what’s the inciting incident. Who’s your Obi Wan Kenobi. How are you going? You know, what were the conflicts? What were the thing, the obstacles that you had to overcome? And then at the end, the achievement, not just externally, but internally. Right. Right. And if you follow that framework, every single time when you’re creating content, you’ll keep people engaged. People are gonna, yeah. Great. Now what? And then what happens? They, they get caught up with tactics. They wanna share Tactics and tactics aren’t something that, like exciting people are, are, are going to remember. But if you can wrap the tactic in a story

Linda Fanaras: 

Mm-Hmm. they

Armando Leduc: 

will always remember it.

Linda Fanaras: 

Right?

Armando Leduc: 

That’s why fables work so well,

Linda Fanaras: 

right?

Armando Leduc: 

It’s a, it, you know, the lesson of Goldilocks and the three bears, the lessons of all of those, nursery rhymes there. That’s why they’re ingrained in our heads because they’re a lesson intertwined with the story.

Linda Fanaras: 

And what I like about what you’re saying is that I B2B companies go to create video, it is definitely more tactical, to the point. on the boring side. But what you’re really saying is, Hey, let’s bring in that challenge that Barrier, how are we going to overcome it or, or it could be a conflict to your point. And then how is that going to be, who’s going to come in and save the day and how does that all work? So you’re building that kind of emotional connection where you wouldn’t normally do that if you’re just shooting a regular video. So you’re building that storyline and that’ll honestly, it ties all back into just. marketing and building that emotional journey and that emotional connection with your audience, because otherwise they’re not going to remember it, if you don’t create that story around it. So I like what you’re saying. And I think it’s important for our audience to really hear that. Because it is, it is easy, especially for B2B companies to be very focused either on their cook, their company and how great they are or their products and what their features and benefits are. But really how does that. Impact the audience. What are the pain points? You know, what kind of scenarios does it create and who can come in and save that? So those are all awesome. Those are all great points. So I love how you’re putting that together. So I know you do a lot with the customer journey. Yeah. And I also building like referral partnership because you’ve built obviously a successful business. I mean, I really love where you started and now where you are today. And I can see how it’s all tying together. But I’d love for you to speak a little bit about the customer journey, maybe the referral partner journey, making sure you keep clients happy, you know, how, how all that kind of comes together in a very succinct way.

Armando Leduc: 

Sure. Y’all please take notes because if you implement this, it will change, it will change your business. I promise. So in one day, I lost 30, 000 worth of revenue a month, like, like that. And what happened was we scaled really quickly, very fast. We didn’t really have our operations in order because we never mapped out what we call the customer journey. Right. And it’s, how are we taking our clients from A to Z? What are the touch points in between? And as marketing folks, we work in the background a lot, but our clients don’t necessarily know that we’re working right. Right. They know. And then at the end of the month, they’re like, what am I paying for? Right. Like you’re, you’re charging me 7, 000 a month. What am I paying for? So what we, and, and, and that would, that’s what happened. We were starting to get bad reviews. Clients were leaving, they were angry, they were confused. And so I had two choices to make. I could fire everybody, you know, scale my business back down, or I could really grab my people and say, Hey, we’ve got to sit down and we’ve got to map out our customer journey everywhere from leads. becoming clients, then the client journey itself, like how are we delivering our deliverables and then post client journey, like how are we doing surveys and, and making sure that we’re doing a good job and how we can increase our customer service to a level. And so. We did that. We mapped everything out and at every single touch point, we have a video that they get throughout the process. So when we’re in development of their content, they get the, we’re in development for your content video. And what that means, then they get a pre production video. Hey, we wrote out your scripts. We wrote out your topics. This is what we’re doing right now. Here, here they are for approval. Hey, get, get ready for your shoot. This is what you’re going to need. Get, get a good night’s rest. Don’t drink alcohol, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s the, you know, and that’s a video. Then we get there, we give them a gift, right? Every single time. Then the day after they get what a great shoot video, then they get another video. Say, Hey, we’re, we’re in, we’re in a editing phase. Then here are your, here are your videos for you to look at and then mission accomplished, and then we rinse and repeat. So what happened was we started to implement that and we would share these videos through email and text, not just email. Cause like a lot of these people are busy, but they would get these videos through, through text and now they know where they are in the process. It’s like the Domino’s pizza tracker at N I did not have to. Chase them for money. All my invoices were paid right, right then and there. They knew exactly where they were. They knew exactly what they were paying for. The customers were super happy. We started getting higher referrals. Retention rate went up, revenue went up, you know? And so it all because we mapped out the customer journey and we just inform people at every single point where they are and why they, why we’re justifying why they’re spending the money, right?

Linda Fanaras: 

Right.

Armando Leduc: 

Right. So here’s, here’s the secret sauce. You’ve read the book the five love languages, right? Yes. Okay. I said, why are we not incorporating the five love languages in Our journey, right? Like, sure. We’re going to tell you where, where you are in the process, the Domino’s pizza tracker, but how are we really going to solidify our relationship? Cause some people like gift giving some people like quality time. Some people like acts of service, admiration, words of affirmation, right? Even touch, right? Like, like I have clients that love hugs. I’ll tell you, you know, the United States, America in general, they have this lack of, like, touch. They’re not, you know, they’re not enough touch in our society. I come from Europe and Latin America where, you know, where we kiss each other on the cheek and there’s a lot of hugging here’s not so much, but so be careful with the touching, you know, make sure that it’s, it’s all consensual. But but at every point we said, Hey, how can I create a list of acts of service for, for them? How can I create gift giving that matters to them? Right? Like who cares if I give you a gift that. I don’t give them swag that says the Leduc entertainment because nobody cares. Right? Right. Like a ticket to a ball game that they like a ticket to a concert that they, that they like. I invite them to golf. I invite them to dinner. If they like quality time, I give them words of affirmation. Oh my God, these videos that we’ve been making for you, you look amazing in it. Awesome job. I leave them testimonials. You know what I mean? Like I follow, you know, I try to comment on their posts, you know what I’m saying? Like at every I’m infusing the five love languages. I’m telling you the retention and the referrals go sky high and now I’m, I’m able to upsell on other products because we’re, and we’re intentional about it. Like we have a tracker that we go, okay, hit them with that. Hit them with this. It’s not like I have to think about it. I have a tracker every week. I’m hitting them with a different touch point like that. And so I was like, huh, great. Clients is great. Leads are great. Why am I not doing this for referral partners? Because if referral partners can get you, I mean, off of one client, we know a referral partner. We, we have a 360, 000 worth of business from one person. And like, we didn’t do anything for him. We hadn’t done anything for him. We like, we took, took this guy for granted. I was like, no. Referral partners also have to have a tracker and we also have to hit them in those ways. Are we leaving them reviews? are we listening to their mm-Hmm webinar pitch? Are we referring them business? Are we doing this? And then all of a sudden we start getting more referrals. All of a sudden things start happening and it’s just like, wow. That was just incredible. So now everything that we do is just like super intentional according to the customer journey. And it’s mapped out so that I don’t have to do it. My team knows, Hey, it’s Monday. They get hit with this Tuesday. They get hit with that. When’s they get the hit with this, you know? And it’s just like, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, super, you know, super intentional. It’s not automated. And my COO is like, you need to automate this process. And I’m like, you’re missing the point. You can’t automate. You can’t automate. Love, connection, humanness.

Linda Fanaras: 

You can’t. No, you can’t. How do you know? I mean, every person is different and each one has something that makes them tick. I mean, are you just hitting them with each one of the five love languages and saying, OK, well, today I’m going to tell him how, you know, How great their post was. And then tomorrow I’m going to send them a gift. So you’re just really rotating those love languages. Is that correct? Not really knowing okay, this person likes gift giving.

Armando Leduc: 

You’ll know, you’ll know after, after a month or two, what they like, because they will let you know, like, Oh my God, if you’ve given them a gift. And they’re going on and on about it, then you know that that gift giving is their love language, right, right. If words of, if, if they really love words of affirmation, they will let you know, oh my God, you’re so sweet. That was so great. And then you’ll give somebody words of affirmation and they won’t respond, and you know Right. You’re like, ah, didn’t, they didn’t, don’t care. You know what I mean? So, yeah. But yeah, you have to, you have to kind of cycle through enough times, but here’s the thing. They still appreciate the touch point because it’s not, I’m not touching them with, Hey, here’s another upsell. Hey, I want your money. Hey, can I sell to you? You know, it’s like, you know, Every time we reach out now, it’s like, Oh, what now? You know what I mean? Like, it’s almost a surprise.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah. It’s like you’re giving them attention. You know, the attention, you know, is phrased. So I do, I want to back up a little bit because when you were talking about the different milestones and you would send them a video with, okay, hey, we did X, Y, Z, here it is. Are you sending them like a loom video or just a basic? It’s pre recorded. It’s just a prerecorded video.

Armando Leduc: 

Yeah. And you know, I mean, we’re a video production company. No, I know. It’s easy.

Linda Fanaras: 

They could do a loom video or something like that. You could. Absolutely.

Armando Leduc: 

A hundred percent. Like, it’s, even if it’s just you, as a matter of fact,, the happy birthday videos that I send are from my phone. They’re not professionally done because I want it to feel like, Hey, I thought about you. Hey, happy birthday. You know what I mean? And then I also send out the referral request with their permission. I’ll say, Hey, Linda, you know, I, do you like our services? Sure. Awesome. I’m going to, I know that if I put you on the spot right now and ask you for a referral, you probably won’t know anybody, but if you don’t mind monthly, I might send you a video or a message saying, Hey, if you know anybody that needs our services, Okay. Can I ask you? And you’ll go, of course. And so I send, I send these videos out monthly and I’m like, Hey, see, it’s time for the monthly referral request. You know, it’s the lifeblood of any business. So if you know anybody and they’re like, yeah, so and so, you know, so I make it, I make it more fun. So it’s not so awkward, but people forget. I think a lot of business owners, they’re always on the hunt.

Linda Fanaras: 

Yeah,

Armando Leduc: 

or outside people that they forget about who they have in their pipeline,

Linda Fanaras: 

right? And

Armando Leduc: 

so if you cultivate those relationships, you can get referrals all day that are hot leads. So and so is going is vouching for you. So if they’re vouching for you, the likelihood of you converting them into a customer is high. Instead of trying to always be out there, not to say that you shouldn’t be prospecting, we prospect all the time, but if prospecting is all you’re doing, you’re missing out on like hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue,

Linda Fanaras: 

right? I mean, you think about it because I think you see owners, entrepreneurs. Salespeople, they tend to be more on the hunter side. So they’re always looking for the next, next new thing, person, whatever, rather than looking back and saying, okay, whoever I already spoken to, what’s already in the pipeline, who can I reconnect with? So it’s a great, that’s a great point. So before we go to the next question, I just want to take a moment and thank our audience for listening in today. And if they, if you like what you heard, please hit like. Like, share, subscribe. And what I wanted to ask you about incentivizing, or maybe, you know, we talked about nurturing these partnerships, but is there a way to incentivize them so it’s mutually beneficial for both parties? Have you thought about that or have you ever instituted anything around that?

Armando Leduc: 

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a 10%. Yeah. I got a 10 percent affiliate marketing, you know, finders fee thing. So whenever they send me a referral, I, I, you know, yeah, I’m definitely paying them 10%. But I’m also thinking about like joint venture webinars and, you know, things like that, that like, Hey, how can we, I’m always thinking about how I can make them money. You know what I mean? I’m always thinking about how can I bring them value, you know, and so that way they’re all like, I shower them with value. So referrals for them is like, Oh my God. Yeah, for sure. Please, you know, you’ve done so much. So I try to always be on the giving side.

Linda Fanaras: 

You know, the other area that’s interesting on the partnership side is you can use customer referrals, but there’s also opportunities where you have vendors and part or other types of partnerships that you can leverage as well. Have you done any work in that area? Do you capitalize on that at all? So let’s say you have a vendor and maybe they’re at a, you know, you’re, you use them for some of your services, maybe building out partnerships or cooperative marketing strategies that can help build up a referral base that way.

Armando Leduc: 

Absolutely. Yeah. So we have, you know, I’ve got an SEO. SEO guy that I refer business to. I have a fractional COO CFO that I refer business to. I have a fractional CMO that I send business to. I just met a, I just met a girl that does online courses. Like she creates your online course. So I want to start sending her business. I got a girl that writes books for you. She’s a ghostwriter. So I send her So, yeah, I’m like, yeah, constantly

Linda Fanaras: 

and then obviously that comes back to help you too, because I’m assuming they’re referring to you as well.

Armando Leduc: 

Yeah, I think it’s all, I like to think of it holistically in terms of. Sure. We’re going to create content for you. We’re going to establish brand building your videos, anything that you need on that front, like podcasting and stuff, but then like, what else, right? If we build you up to this authority, what else are you going to do? You got to get a book. Got to be doing webinars and you have to be doing and you have to be doing online courses, right? And then you get podcasts, speaking engagements, and you get speaking engagements, and then you keep growing from there. But I always tell everybody they. Everybody wants a shortcut. They just want to go to the ads, the ads, ads, ads, ads, ads, but they have no depth, right? Like they just want to reach out with, but they have no depth. And so if you, if somebody comes to do research on you and they don’t see anything because you have no depth, then your credibility goes down. It doesn’t matter how many times I see you in an ad, I’m not going to buy from you because I don’t trust you, but you had testimonials. You have. You’re active on social media. The videos look good. What you’re saying matters, right? And then it’s all that all builds up together brand wise and you explode. You exponentially grow your business.

Linda Fanaras: 

And that was going to be my next question because taking sort of organic content, whether it’s podcasting, videocasts, blogs, articles, turning that into revenue. How can our audience turn that into revenue? Is it just building it up organically, slowly? Do you have any strategies?

Armando Leduc: 

So here’s the strategy. I called it content into clients. So what you want to do is every month, you’ve got to be, if you can get to a post a day, a real, right? Like video posts a day, I would do it and make sure that it’s across all platforms, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, the whole nine, be doing that on a consistent basis. One, it’s going to reinforce who you are, right? So if you’re telling me that you’re the greatest at this and you’re posting it, well, you, there’s going to be a disconnect if you’re not So what happens is you create the content that reinforces who you are, gives you the confidence, your, your videos get better. You get better at doing video, Now you’re building a brand. People are seeing you. They like you. I can’t quantify organic social to a number because with ads you can go, Hey, this many people saw your ad, this many people converted, this many, blah, blah, blah, blah. But with brand building, it’s different because it’s, it’s a long, it’s a long game. but it’s more powerful because when you have the brand, that’s when you can start commanding those 000 price tax, right? To go speaking, to go do this. And so it, once again, I’m talking about depth, if you don’t have the depth and if you’re not putting out You know, content where you’re answering questions and people view you as the expert, your competition’s going to take it. And so that’s what I, that, that the strategy is create the content first, put, you know, get, get yourself a podcast. Invite people to it. I mean, Linda, you, you, you, you got it, right? Like, right. You bring people in, you get to learn from other people. They, they you you’re building your brand with other people. You’re tapping into their follower account and their subscribers. So it all starts working together in tandem. And then once, once you have a, just a bank of videos, right. Like at the end of 2024, right. Would you rather have 300 videos or 10? Right? Like, of course you want to have 300, of course that’s just, you know, that’s how you’re going to get there. And so 2025, another set of videos, 2026 my mentor last year, last year said, Armano, I’m going hard on social media. I’m going to start posting three to seven times a day. And I was like, dude, that’s crazy. What are you talking about? And then this year I’m like, Why didn’t I listen to him? Why didn’t I listen to him? It’s content. It’s just it’s a volume game, right? Right. if you can crank out as many videos as possible, you will win.

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s awesome. So Armando, I’d love for you to just tell our audience, maybe a couple of quick things. Top takeaways. We talked about a lot of different things. Storytelling, how to be on camera, building a partnership, referral base, any top tips for our audience just for takeaways. Then I’ll ask you a fun question.

Armando Leduc: 

Sure. Sure. I think I think that if you infuse the five love languages into your touch points with clients, with referral partners, you will grow your business really, really fast because referrals will come. Like naturally it’ll be, it’s crazy how, how immediate it will work. So if, if you’re looking for quick ROI and you’re like, Hmm, I don’t have the money for ad spend and you know, do videos and all of that focus on the people that, you know, create a tracker to like create these touch points that are like love language based. You’ll, you, you will, you’ll, you’ll grow your business so fast.

Linda Fanaras: 

That’s awesome. And you want to talk about your book

Armando Leduc: 

content into clients. So I’m doing, I’m on a rewrite because I was doing tactics the first go round. Like the first ebook is, it’s all tactic based. It’s all like, this is what you do. This is what you do. It wasn’t wrapped in, in story. And so this time Yeah. The second edition is wrapped in story. It’s more about like, okay, how sure I’m going to give you this tactic, but why does it matter? Right. And how did people achieve the outcome as a result of that tactic? Not just, Hey, you need to do this. So, so yeah let do good entertainment. com and you can get a copy and. Super easy and you can find me. I, I do webinars weekly too. Okay. Great.

Linda Fanaras: 

Great. Great. And that last, just for fun, before we sign off today, I know you are on Lords of the street back in the day. You want to talk a little bit, just to share. Anything you want to share on that?

Armando Leduc: 

That movie was my first lead role. And I was, I played the I played the villain in the movie. Santiago Rodriguez was the guy’s name. I was a drug Lord. And DMX was in the film. So many wild stories. Anyway, I can’t get, I can’t get too crazy about all of the stories, but I will say at the end of the movie, You know, there’s a scene where DMX is supposed to shoot at me. He hits a gas a gas like valve or whatever. And then I, and it’s five o’clock in the morning and we’re in the middle of like nowhere, Louisiana at this airport. And he won’t come out of his trailer because he doesn’t he doesn’t have his, he doesn’t have his medicine, his, his medicinal herbs. And we’re like, we just got to get this shot, man. So somebody had to drive to new Orleans to get his medicinal stuff. Brought it back. And then we finally got, you know, we finally got moving. So it was it was an interesting set to say the least when you’re doing in like, I wouldn’t say it’s indie film because there’s, there’s actors in there that are known, but they’re not like a list celebrities or more like, you know, D list celebrities. So think shortcuts get There’s a lot of shortcuts. There’s a lot of Yeah. Things, but like, it was my first, it was my first big role, so I was like, yeah, I was there for it. I was like, whatever you need me to do, I love it. I’m just here.

Linda Fanaras: 

I’m, I’m in. Yeah, I’m here. It’s awesome. I’m so

Armando Leduc: 

happy. Yeah. So it was it’s a fun time. I, I, I view those, I view those times fondly.

Linda Fanaras: 

Well, thanks so much Armando. That was fantastic. You really get a lot of, gave a lot of great insights to the audience. So I would love for you to share how businesses can get in touch with you.

Armando Leduc: 

You can find me anywhere, Armando LaDuke. I mean, if you Google me, I mean, it’s a lot of depth. So, LaDuke entertainment, you can reach out to me. You can reach out to me on any of my social media platforms for any questions. That’s why I love doing these. Cause I get to meet a bunch of really cool people. So yeah, reach out to me if I can help you. That’s great. Let me know.

Linda Fanaras: 

Awesome. All right. So I wanted to thank everybody for tuning in today to our B2B brand 180 podcast. And we hope that you found the insights and strategies shared to be valuable. And again, I’m Linda Fanara. Host of the B2B Brand CEO of Millennium Agency. And you can find us at mill. agency or connect with me on LinkedIn. And again, just to help our channel grow, we’d love for you to hit like, share, or subscribe. Thanks again and happy marketing.

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