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.
