Rise of Modern Day Distribution in B2B

With nearly 10,000 martech brands who all have content teams running similar playbooks, how do we stand out? How do we separate? How do we make sure our content doesn’t fall victim to internet purgatory? The answer is going on offense with your content. It’s identifying the right channels where your future customers are hanging out and delivering your content in a way that resonates.

Join Brett McGrath, VP of Marketing at The Juice, for a discussion with Jeff Coyle on the rise and fall of content factories and how being proactive with your content can lead to breakthroughs for your brand.

Show Notes

Defining Content Syndication

Brett likes to separate traditional syndication from distribution because it’s very much a numbers game where syndication brings you a certain number of leads. From his experience, and other marketers he has spoken with, “those numbers didn’t really convert to anything. And while they look good in a marketer’s KPIs, they didn’t really result in much.”

So when talking about content distribution, it’s more about quality than quantity. “We’re thinking about how can we facilitate the exchange and relationship between content piece gets created, and marketer wants to go promote that to the right people and then The Juice. Creating that network of right people and making those matches.”

Account Based Marketing Defined

For Brett, account based marketing (ABM) is more of a buzzword than anything else. In fact, the ABM process is how we should approach marketing in general, “this is the expectation.”

The way he sees it, when someone fitting his ideal customer profile (ICP), visits his site, “let’s try to gather as many signals and insight and information we can about the brand and see what pieces of content are resonating with them.” He sees the B2B marketer as being an investigator, “as marketers need to put on our research hats and formulate our data and synthesize things” to provide sales with intelligent recommendations. In this way, “the likelihood of sales reaching out and making a connection and having a conversation with those accounts go up.”

Thoughts on Content Factories

Content factories whose primary focus is churning out content with a spray and pray approach are a lost cause. According to Brett, “That’s a waste of money. That’s a waste of time. That’s a waste of brand opportunity.” Instead, he sees an opportunity in distribution, exploring channels and investing time in “building relationships and making those one-to-one connections in those channels.”

Understanding the Performance of Content Channels

Every channel is different in terms of audience, content format, and why they prefer that channel. A piece of content may be wildly successful in one channel but an absolute failure in another. As Jeff sees it, “The channel is something where a measurement of performance needs to be evaluated channel by channel. And that, if you’re not doing that, you’re missing the whole purpose of all of the content… every content item can have one to many purposes and the purpose connects to a channel.”

Repurposing Content as a Part of Syndication

When asked about how he thinks about repurposing content as part of syndication, Brett offers an example of The Juice’s first ebook on “turning down the volume on quantity content and turning up the volume on quality content.” At that time, the company was small and unknown with a product that had been live for only three months.

Instead of producing an ebook with just his views, Brett curated a variety of people’s perspectives on content quantity versus quality. When it came time to launch the ebook, The Juice leveraged the power of those individuals and their networks to help distribute content in the market.

Involving them in the promotional strategy and making a key stakeholder in the process doesn’t need to be complicated. It can be as simple as “creating some special graphics that make your contributor look like a marketing superhero.”

To maximize the value of that B2B content, look to repurpose parts of it across different platforms and mediums. Like Brett says, “you find topics and those topics become podcast episodes, and then you take little pieces and you create chunks that you distribute on, on Twitter, and you can share them on LinkedIn.”

What do you do when syndicated content doesn’t perform?

Unfortunately, not every piece of content is going to meet our performance expectations, now matter how much work we put into its creation. Brett doesn’t worry if a piece of content doesn’t perform well right away. According to him, “if I’ve done the homework and know it’s a topic that will resonate with the audience, I don’t lose my mind.” However, “if there’s a trend of something I’m saying or producing or doing, that’s just getting no response. then typically I’ll probably put it on the shelf and move on to the next one.” Still, Brett feels that “we move off of stuff too quickly in B2B marketing when something doesn’t work right away.”

Jeff notes that sometimes you need to create content to tell the story that you’re an expert and understand the buyer journey. “It may never be. A lightning rod for entrances, organic entrances, but it is required for wayfinding.”

Something to keep in mind next time you’re in this situation.

Featured Guest

Brett McGrath, VP of Marketing @ The Juice, Host of Modern Day Marketer, Host of Stacking Slabs Podcast for Sports Card Collectors and Investors

Brett has spent 12 years in the B2B SaaS industry in various marketing functional and leadership roles. He wakes up every day thinking about messaging and positioning, sales alignment, demand generation, and content creation. He is highly focused on building out go-to-market strategies that elevate the organization’s brand and develop sales pipeline. He’s results driven and believes it’s all about bringing in the right people.

Brett writes about modern day marketing, brand building, content distribution, and content marketing.

LinkedIn Twitter

Takeaways

Once upon a time content marketing success was predicated on the ability to produce an enormous volume of content. But not any more and rightly so. Brett offers an example of the 10,000 martech companies, each with their own content marketing department. As he explains, many are still following the content factory approach of churning out content. “But because everyone’s doing it, most of your content and that investment is going unseen and falling into internet purgatory.”

To combat that issue, B2B marketing needs to approach content from “a lens of focusing more on quality and less on quantity,” according to Brett. As Jeff says, “this is where bad, low quality SEO content falls apart. If you build a high, low quality SEO content, which you should never do by the way, you would never distribute it and expect it to be successful.”

Resources

The Juice

Scott Brinker’s Martech Infographic

Transcript

Jeff Coyle: Hello, welcome to another MarketMuse content strategy webinar in our content strategy webinar series. Today’s discussion is gonna be it’s about one of my favorite topics, distribution, content, syndication, B2B, fire journey, all that fun stuff. And it’s called the fall of content factories and the rise of modern day distribution.

I’ve got a wonderful expert here. Who’s gonna speak about the way that he views content distribution and getting more out of the money that you invest in building those raw materials, those content raw material. A little bit of housekeeping as per normal. If you have any questions put them in the box, send them to us, ask us almost anything.

If you want to know, you know what record is behind my guest’s head, I’m sure he’ll pull out a few if you ask very nicely, but that would be an example of a question that wouldn’t fit in the flow of our conversation. So we probably hit that one at the end. If you ask a question that is relevant to our conversation, we may be able to weave it in to our discussion.

Awesome. Cool. Number two, you’re gonna get this replay in the next few days. Listen to it, share it, post it on social while you’re at it. Go to MarketMuse dot com and in the top navigation, there’s a link for webinars. It has all of the contest strategy, webinar, archives, amazing sessions from people like Andy Cadena.

Pam diner on sales enable. Nick, Ubanks talking about keyword research, really just a treasure trove of anything that relates to content strategy you’d ever want. All right, cool. That’s the housekeeping for today. Now I’m gonna introduce my amazing guest. He’s from the juice. He’s the VP in marketing Brett McGrath.

Thanks for joining us today. Tell us a little bit about the juice. And I think about the juice as changing the way we think about B2B content syndication. What’s the mission for them. And then what’s your mission? How did you get involved with that work?

Brett McGrath: Yeah we are looking to create a better content discovery and distribution experience for B2B marketing and sales pros.

So when we say discovery and content discovery, I think, just think about like anyone in their role when you’re in a jam, you’re looking for a piece of content. The first thing we do is go to Google. You search for a topic you. Served up a bunch of typically unhelpful blog posts, you land on one, you are, you realize there’s an ebook.

You want access to the ebook. You have to fill out a form before you can open up the ebook. You’re getting hit by sales people and you’re in a sales cadence. And then when you finally get around to consuming the ebook, you realize it’s not that great. We all go through that. And so what we’re trying to do is eliminate those obstacles that exist, and we’re doing that.

Building the largest library of B2B sales in marketing resources on the planet. So it’s free to join. You can sign up at the juice, hq.com become a member. And then on the distribution side I think when I’m excited for this conversation, the set it and forget it mentality with our content, those days are over content.

There’s a lot of commodity content out there. A lot of people have content teams doing the same thing, and we really. The distri dis content distribution as the way to cut through the noise and stand out and make those connections and make your content investment worth it. So we’re really focused in, on using content distribution and powering marketers to connect their content with the right people who are eager to learn and grow on our platform.

So that’s a little bit about the juice. I got involved. I’m a career B2B marketer. I’ve worked in almost every marketing function imaginable. Have served a lot of different verticals was eager to get back into the fold of marketing, to marketers and our CEO. So you could say he’s a pretty good salesman.

He sold me on joining the squad before pre-product pre-product team. And when I jumped in, I, I really loved the idea of, and the problems that we were looking to solve. As a marketer, without a product right out of the gates, for me, it was like, alright, we’re gonna be talking about content.

Let’s start creating content. So spent the last year and a half really on this exploration and trying to uncover what are the components that make up the modern day marketer. And so through my investigation of that started a podcast modern day marketer, create content for the modern day market.

And get awesome opportunities like this to talk about topics like distribution.

Jeff Coyle: Awesome. Yeah. A controversial take is I think everybody who is in marketing should have at least one role that markets to marketers. I think it creates. A different level of awareness and skill development and required because when you’re marketing to Mar to marketers, it’s a whole different world.

Versus if you’re, if you go from, industry specific or into manufacturing, and you’re not actually marketing to marketers, it can really change the way. I’ve seen so many people in their careers just skyrocket from having a, even if it was a short stint at that I’ve cemented my entire career.

In content syndication one of the first people who were syndicating eBooks and white papers to anyone in 1999. I’m really excited about this discussion as well. So let’s talk about more of that, the nuance of content syndication. So for anyone that’s not familiar with it, how do you define content syn?

How do you think about the byproducts of that? So what happens, the data that’s created? How do you turn that into valuable, actionable things for marketers, how, and, you talked about that traditional search, organic search view, dated content lead gen lead contact experience as being it was the norm for a long period of.

The initial content, syndication vehicles tried to syndicate that experience. But now you have intent data. Now you have other syndication distribution. How do you think about it? Just for someone that has never even heard the word content syndication hasn’t even thought about it as part of their vehicles?

Or their channels.

Brett McGrath: Yeah. So I think first to hit it on the head, like what really, what we’re trying to do and how I’m trying to talk about it is separate. Traditional syndication with distribution. And I’m trying to do that in the way we’re communicating, because so much of the syndication play.

And I was a marketer who invested a lot of my budget on syndication, where it was like, you would, you’d pay, five to 10 K to a syndication provider and give them your asset and then you’d wait a week or two. And the next thing you know, it, you get a CSV file with a bunch of names. In a list and then you’d upload it into your CRM allocated to sales, and you’d wa wipe your hands of it and say, you know what?

Like I did my job. I hit my lead total for the month. A lot of the times in my experience and marketers that I’ve been talking with, what happens is, those numbers didn’t really convert to anything. And while they look good in a marketer’s KPIs, they didn’t really result in much.

So what we’re trying to do from a, when talking about distribution is to think about it from a lens of focusing more on quality and less on quantity. We’re not promising our customers that we’re gonna give them a thousand new leads per month, just because we don’t believe that’s the way we’re moving in marketing.

So what when we’re thinking about distribution, we’re thinking about how can we facilitate the exchange and relationship between content piece gets created, and marketer wants to go promote that to the right people and then the juice. Creating that network of right people and making those matches.

And it’s not matches in to say, Hey, someone goes and reads your new blog post article or consumes your podcast or watch your new video. And you should go call them right now and follow the up on them because they’re a warm lead who wants to see a demo of your stuff. We’re really beginning to try to talk about what are the things.

That we can be doing as marketers to create better experiences by taking an, a, one of our most important pieces of, or wasn’t one of our most important assets like content or content, and really work with other members of the team sales product to gather the insights, intent signals, and then. Really great experiences on the other side, when we’re trying to make those connections with them so much, like when we have a new piece of content that we’re creating, we publish that on LinkedIn, we publish it on Twitter.

We might go to Reddit, whatever your channels of choice is, we really wanna be one of those channels for for B2B marketers who are thinking strategically about building out a content distribution.

Jeff Coyle: No, that’s a great setup, cuz I think that it adds a, an option, right? It adds an option for any type of business.

When you do have a an active syndication network to publish you, your, I like the way you think about it as an additional channel. How do you so there’s been, co-ops in the past. That are, where somebody will acquire, whether it be non personally identifiable cookie data, and it’ll be on a bunch of publishing sites, and you will get information from those. And it might say, Hey, Boeing is looking for a CRM system. Boeing has read some articles about that. Those company level leads. I think I, I started calling them that in like 2002. But there was company level, focus of intent. How do you differ from a co-op where, you know, you don’t, it’s a black box, there’s 50, 60 publisher sites that are high volume and, XYZ person from Boeing, five people from Boeing read articles.

That are yours. They read articles about the topic. How do you differ from that experience?

Brett McGrath: Yeah, so I think a big thing to hit on is when we, I talked about that form experience that we all go through and, inevitably when we fell out a bunch of forms, our information goes to providers and it gets crawled and all of a sudden it’s everywhere and we’re getting all of these calls and that we don’t want we don’t wanna create that experience for our members.

So when our members sign up to be a part of the JS, we’re through the onboarding experience, we’re asking specific questions about them because we wanna on the back and use that information to facilitate a really great experience for them. That makes sense. And. There the sea of content in B2B is endless, right?

We’re our audience and the audiences that we’re trying to reach are overwhelmed by the amount of content, but we’re using that data to try to create a better experience once they become a member of the juice. And then on the backend for brands, we’re not we’re not trying to say one thing to one group and say another to another group.

We’re not giving out email addresses. We’re not giving out names. Members on the platform, but what we’re doing is sharing information at the company level. Things like if someone’s searching for a topic that your brand shows up you’re gonna, you’re gonna see those intense signals. If someone follows your account, you’re gonna see that those intense signals from a brand perspective.

And so we’re trying to provide that additional level of information at the brand level. That from a content perspective, that marketers might not have had access to before, but in turn allows them. Run a more informative account based marketing program, align better with their sales team, create a better experience on the backend for those audience members that they’re trying to reach.

So that’s how we’re facilitating the exchange of data and making sure that when we’re communicating out on what’s actually happening, that we’re not in conflict with what’s happened before and whatever’s been a catalyst to To lead to maybe less desirable experiences from syndication or other providers in the.

Jeff Coyle: now I love it. I it’s take, it goes away from seeing leads as a commodity, that CSV file experience. But it also exhibits in my opinion that you’re using best practices that any site. So whether you are B2B B2C, whether you’re selling socks or whether you’re selling, a million dollar software packages should be thinking about how can you better understand your audience on your.

Even. So if you think about it you might have a hundred people come to your site that are, non personally identified. You don’t have their, they haven’t dropped the lead yet. There’s so many ways of saying drop the lead. I love drop the lead though. And. You should be looking to identify as many of those users as you can, to understand what company they come from.

Understand who they are. And so now you’re taking that and just increasing the exposure in that market. And so what do, you should have technology on your website that knows that somebody from Boeing is on your homepage, whether they become a lead or not because that’s really informed.

And I love the example that you gave of that informing. Account based marketing plan. How do you define account based marketing and the outcomes of like strategy against account based? Because I have my own kind of three level funnel of ABM, but ABM is such an awesome buzzword.

Everybody defines it differently. How do you think about it? Like when you get informed that let’s say Boeing, I’ll just name some other companies north Oak Groman. Spirit and American airlines all happen to yeah. Create intense signals. What do you do? I’m using a, an easy, that’s a tee-ball right there, but yeah.

What do you do when you get that kind of. . Yeah,

Brett McGrath: I have to comment on the account based marketing buzziness of the buzzword to me like maybe it was how I was raised as a B2B marketer and working for really smart leaders, but I’ve seen this quote and I actually remember a day vividly when.

I was in my early days as a marketer and one of our senior leaders walked in and account based marketing was just getting off the ground. And maybe it was a level of sophistication that enterprise sophistication that I grew up in. But I remember our senior leader walking into the room and an article came up and there was this conversation happening and him just saying Isn’t this just marketing and I, that always stood out to me.

It’s yeah, it’s this is what we should, this is what we should, this is the expectation. This is what we should be doing as marketers. In your example, like if a a target account or someone that fits our ICP comes in I think for. For me, it’s it’s an investigation. It’s and that’s how I like to think about my role as a marketer.

It’s an understanding of, okay this brand came on our site, this brand’s consuming our content. Let’s try to gather as many signals and insight and information we can about the brand and see what pieces of content are resonating with them. Where are they going? And. Much this I’ve used this word in other podcasts and stuff, and people are like, really, we wanna talk about this, but I do wanna talk about this, but there’s it’s a research component.

I know research might be boring and we hated research reports growing up. But I think we as marketers need it. Put on our research hats and formulate our data and synthesize things together before we even go to sales and say, Hey, go call this account sales. I think the more we can inform sales about everything we have found as from an account level, and then can provide recommendations to sales, the likelihood of sales reaching out and making a connection and having a conversation with those accounts go up.

So often we as market. Think about things as all right, we’re gonna do this thing. And then all of a sudden it’s gonna become a close one new business opportunity, cuz what we’re doing is so great. I think what we, what I like to think about is there’s these small stages and these small steps. And if we take a step back as marketers and figure out.

What are the kind of what is the pieces of the bridge that we can put in be in between each stage that will lead to us, getting to the other side and us getting to the other sides, winning in new customers. Like we need to spend our time there. So that’s really what I, how I like to think about it and what I think we’re trying to facilitate other marketers to think about too.

Jeff Coyle: I love it by the way, I believe. Similarly that it’s very important regardless of how your sales and marketing teams are set up, that the research on the lead, the research on the company has a clear, responsible party or else it won’t get done. And who can do it best. Doesn’t always mean isn’t always connected to who should be doing it.

Totally. And that’s something to be thinking about building a dossier effectively. Or like a, a full research report like you described on this company can help to strategically accelerate and increase the deal. Flow, increase the sales cycle or decrease the sales cycle time and win rates.

But the key is what if the salesperson cannot digest that research. So there’s an actual research component. What if they don’t change their process? They just do the same thing they’ve always done. And there’s this sassier they could have worked from. One of my team members, he’s our one of our head of professional services.

Roy. He actually, we were talking about this topic yesterday and he said there’s trigger and response sequences that have to go into this. So this company is an airline company. What do you do? When they, when you have that company, if you don’t have that trigger response as part of your research.

So you have. and then almost all of your, choose your own adventure. Playbooking you’re missing huge opportunities. I love the way that you describe that ABM often gets Sy anonymized with personalization, right? So it’s I’m marketing towards Boeing. I need to focus it all on that company.

Yeah. That’s one approach. There’s also industry. So you’re looking at anyone in this industry should get marketed to this way. There’s also other types of ways to group companies. So when you’re making decisions about what content to create, if you have intent data, like one would get from juice, you can say, okay, we know that exec, marketing executives in shoe industry read this stuff.

So that’s what we need to do is make more of this stuff. If we. Those types of people it’s like bringing it to them. And I love that example. One trick in content. Yeah. One trick in content strategy for ABM though, is understanding the channels and that’s what you do. So I thought that was interesting.

Yeah,

Brett McGrath: totally into comment on that. Like literally right before this call I have my weekly connect with our sales leader, Kate, shout out Kate, if you’re listening. And we were talking about this and we were talking about, wow, we’re we are officially launching intense signals next month.

And but we were talking about what we have access to our own intense signals and how are we gonna use to. Work with it and decide what to do. And what does the strategy look like? And we were just pulling it up and we were looking at accounts and we were looking at one account specifically, and they were engaged in content that I was creating around distribution.

So like for us it’s well, why wouldn’t we reach out to those individuals or connect with the right people around a topic. We know that. Curious about in something that we do, it’s just, it creates a better experience for the person on the other end. And it makes our company look like we’re not only eating our dog food, we’re taking the time to understand what they actually care about.

I think, yeah, this is a topic. I know you and I, from our pre-call we could probably riff on forever.

Jeff Coyle: And, but I like the way you talk about it, cuz it is. For lack of a better word, it’s the crutch of marketing. And then the crutch also of sales is punching towards the same target. And leads has often been the crutch of marketing and demos have often been the crutch of SLGs B2B.

So sales led growth, B2B tech B2B and in certain cases cart completes for B2. Depending on the market. And that’s not good, it’s not good at all. And because what it does, you get all this information and what do you, do? You still try to do anything you can to book a meeting, right?

Without having used that information. So that’s just something to grow on. Everybody needs to go through that journey. I think, to really understand how to get the most out of the money you’re spending on marketing, cuz you’re spending all this money. So tracking back to the content side, the creation of content and the cost of content and con I love the way you described like inundated or flooded with content, but if we were flooded with, and every content item was performing well, that’d be great.

So is it just that the content factory and the volume is MIS judged or is it the fact that we’re not tracking our own performance? When we publish an article, every. Are we just saying, I want to, spray and pray is my goal. And I think that’s the reality. How do you think about that?

Brett McGrath: Yeah there’s some compelling statistics that we through our research we’ve pulled out from some pretty substantial providers. So like one would be. Last year, 119 billion billion with a B are spent by CMOs in B2B on content marketing. Another one would be 60% of marketers say that they create at least one new piece of content each day in our space.

MarTech Scott Brinkers MarTech infographic. There’s nearly 10,000 C. On there this year. I can tell you right now, every one of ’em has con is doing content marketing and they’re all investing deeper in content marketing programs. I think the good thing about that is if you’re in a content marketing role, there’s good job security there.

I think the bad thing is we are over, we’re overwhelming the people that we’re trying to reach. If everyone is doing that. Everything is falling on deaf ears. And it’s really difficult for the people that we’re trying to reach to get content to the people that we’re trying to reach. We are talking about it in a way.

If you’re, if you take the content factory approach and I’ll be clear to anyone listening content, factory approach is the old way that I was raised in how content marketing works, where it’s like, all right we’re gonna churn out this piece of content with a bunch of keywords in it.

We’re gonna publish it at this time and Google’s gonna like it, and they’re gonna pick up on it. And then we’re gonna move on to the next one and just keep churning and churning. And this is creating a lot of content. But because everyone’s doing it, most of your content and that investment is going unseen and falling into internet purgatory.

That’s a waste of money. That’s a waste of time. That’s a waste of brand opportunity. And that’s really where we see the opportunity in being distribution, where it’s, how can we go on offense with the content that we’re creating? And go explore the right channels. And hopefully the juice can be one of them for anyone who is interested in on this exploration, but how can we go explore those channels and invest our time in building relationships and making those one-to-one connections in those channels.

So that when we do have a piece of content to share it there’s meaning and significance behind it and you’re creating brand connection. So that’s how I’m thinking about it. And in that. In that content factory, bad to distribution being good. Way. I have found that a lot of B2B marketers know that they should be focusing on distribution.

But they don’t really know where to start or how to start or when to start, which I think is fun. It’s a fun opportunity for me as a marketer, because I can put on my education hat and just share perspective through content that what I’m learning from other people and share how we’re thinking about it at the juice.

Jeff Coyle: No, what it does is it forces it’s a forcing function of channel equals performance. The channel is something where a measurement of performance needs to be evaluated channel by channel. And that, if you’re not doing that, you’re missing the whole purpose of all of content. So your create content, it may be content you have to build to tell the story.

You’re an expert. It may never be. A lightning rod for entrances, organic entrances, but it is required for way finding maybe they land on one page, they way find to the other. It illustrates you understand the buyer journey, right? So every content item can have one to many purpose and the purpose connects to a channel.

All right. Sorry. We’re you said education hat. So I’m just getting into, I’m getting into the fun stuff, right? I’m waiting for you to get the chalkboard. Yeah, I’m about to draw this, but the key miss there is your factory can be a surgically striking, beautiful factory. That’s operating at 40% efficiency, right?

You publish 10 articles, you get four organic search winners, Bravo that’s great. All 10 of those items could actually be channel specific winners in syndication, or none of them could. So you have to evaluate, and maybe they’re all social winners, or maybe none of them are, you have to understand all the channels can compound, or you can do them as individual derivatives.

This is where bad, low quality SEO content falls apart. If you build a high, low quality SEO content, which you should never do by the way, you would never distribute it and expect it to be success. And that’s where this whole thing gets into. Oh we need to measure our content quality by how well it’s differentiated.

How well it connects to the purpose and performance by channel. That’s the way I love to hear the way you describe this. It’s to say, why would we build this at all? Has to be answered. And then how are we gonna get the most out of it? And I love that you said most people don’t know how to start content syndication it’s by understanding that purpose.

is by channel, right? You may have a content item that rocks social. You may have an item that rocks in a content syndication network. It may not be in its same state organic. So how do you think about repurposing as part of syndication? Is it, this is it two separate disciplines and both of them just happen to have the same problem.

So how do you go into that and think about repurposing? , I’m spending $10,000 on an ebook, and that’s cheap these days, I’m gonna spend $10,000 on an ebook. And last year my plan was I have it as a landing page and I put some ads on my site. What’s how does that change with the juice?

How does that change with a good repurposing strategy? How do you equate those two things and how are they. .

Brett McGrath: Yeah. I, you were, you cut out for me for a minute there. I think I think I picked up on your question. So in terms of repurposing an ebook, in a, in the, from the old versus new perspective that I’m talking about, is that kind of the essence of your.

okay. Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: Basic repurposing for channels. And then how does content syndication add another layer to repurposing concepts?

Brett McGrath: Gotcha. Okay. So yeah. My, my thought process and I’ll just I’ll share a real example. We decided last fall to do our first ebook at the juice and the ebook was. Turning down the volume or turning down the volume on quantity content and turning up the volume on quality content.

And my, my, my strategy on creating this piece of content was I’ve got my own perspective, but there’s a lot of people that I’m meeting out there in the B2B world. So how can I curate other people in market to share their perspective on qual, quantity versus quality when it comes to content? Really good piece, really smart marketers contributed to that.

And when we had the deliverable all put together you’ve gotta launch and we always want to, launch with the bank. So for us, it was okay. We’re a small company, hardly anyone knows we exist. They don’t know anything about us. We’re just starting to get our message. Out market. Our product had been live for three months.

So what we did was we leveraged the power of those individuals and their networks to help distribute content in market. So making them a part of the promotional strategy. And making them a key stakeholder in the process. So making them feel like they were a part of launch and you can do that by, spinning up some special infographics or special graphics that, make your contributor look like a marketing superhero.

And that’s what we did. And then we gave them, this is what we’re doing, and this is how you can help. And so that initial push. What did great for us, right? It brought new members to our platform made new people aware of who we are and what we do, and that initial. Through the help of other individuals was a distribution strategy.

That’s worked for us and we’re gonna continue to do now when you have a piece of content, that’s that robust with so many insights and perspectives. I think it’s, what can you do to maximize this? So going back on it, you find topics and those topics become podcast episodes, and then you take little pieces and you create chunks that you distribute on, on Twitter, and you can share them on LinkedIn.

That’s our model in what we’re doing. Obviously for me, it’s one of those things I’d always, I always wanna be doing more. And it it depends on your size marketing team and the resources that you have allocated. But I think the punchline is just because you spend all this $20,000 on an ebook, don’t just launch it and just expect it to sit.

Like I can I went back to that ebook. Yesterday I’m writing an article and it’s dropping tomorrow regarding modern day demand generation. And I referenced that. So I’m still trying to get mileage out of it now, I think for us, we used the juice and we used our own channel to promote it as well.

So I think it’s always trying to find additional layers and finding opportunities with each piece of content that you’re creating and making sure. You don’t have a set in and forget it mentality because it takes us a lot of time to create these pieces. So let’s spend as much time as we do creating these pieces as we are promoting it.

And so I think no matter your role in marketing, we’re all promoters, especially if you’re a content marketer, spend time figuring out where you can land those pieces in what you can do. Remix share, ask people to help you promote. I think the more we’re doing that, it’s just smart market.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah I you’ve, you nailed it.

The hardest thing is getting started with repurposing. Same with content syndication. I think one way I’ve seen this work is force yourself. If you are spending more than end dollars of investment on a page, make sure that it goes through. 1, 2, 3 levels of repurposing playbooks, document, those playbooks and, force yourself to at least get to a particular level.

You’ll never do everything you could, you can always repurpose if you’re smart at it, if you’re real good at it. And just keep going infinitely. The same thing goes with syndication. You’re finding channels. There’s always more that you can do. But just getting started saying, okay all of my pages that I create have to get this tier of repurposing and they have to go out to these channels go right.

And make sure that you hit those bios. And then if which ones are working, add to that and continue on. So I love that being disciplined is the hardest part. And how that manifests is you’ve got, you did a webinar. You didn’t even transcribe the thing you just don’t have that discipline.

You rather, you might as well have not done it. Let’s skip to a few and let’s bounce into a few questions and then we’ll bounce back out into a few other elements of our conversation that I like. Juice for B to C good question. I have my thoughts on content syndication in B2C.

What do you think?

Brett McGrath: The, like from a, using the juice from a B2C perspective. Is that the question? If I am a

Jeff Coyle: B2C? Yeah. If I’m a B2C company writing content is I always say a is the juice appropriate? B is content syndication appropriate? That’s the hard question.

Brett McGrath: So I think I think NA.

The con the people who are using the juice to, to learn and level up professionally do B2B marketing and sales. And that’s their focus. I think there, there is an opportunity though. Like there are, they are consumers of. everything right. I’m I don’t just do B2B marketing all day and night. I’m a dad and I buy product for my daughter and I collect records.

And so I, yeah, I think there’s there that there is I’ve we haven’t spent any time thinking or talking about that. But that I’d love to know your thoughts. Jeff, what do you think?

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, I think if you are willing to PLA, if you understand how content marketing will work for your business, you will be seeking channel.

The advertorial in B2C is a historical legacy product, right? If add placement of any kind, if you are trying to build content that tells stories and you’re getting it out in channels, then syndications appropriate, right. Micro sites in B2C is another example. Pharma B2C. All of those people have content engines and wish they could have additional distribution.

It may not be, perfect for the juice today or any one of these re any of these kind of point providers. But you’re looking for content syndication. You’re looking to build content that tells a story that you’re an expert in the buyer journey or their lifestyle. It depends. Can you say B2B B2C can be.

Fast booming consumer goods. It could be all the way up to, something else selling homes or something like that to individuals. So obviously it’s a little bit questionable of, will it be a fit for you specifically? However, B to C buyer journey, content strategy, expertise, focused content that focuses on personas.

Syndications extremely important. That’s what all the best brands are doing. They’re figuring out ways to become machines. Red bull is the number one content producer in the world. I think that’s still valid. It’s true. And, look at your favorite brick and mortar store and what they’re doing and how they’re getting to, look at a wonderful content.

You. performance firm like, like home Depot, for example. And yes, it’s hugely valuable, hugely appropriate. All right. Here’s another one coming in. And by the way, thank you. Who great question. Let’s look at there’s an there’s a, I’m gonna, I’m gonna just stack on question two on one from Carl and thanks Carl for the question.

Any tips on cold calling and prospecting? Second question, how much content is too much content I like as the answer, the first one first. So yeah

Brett McGrath: So I I think from a prospecting and cold calling perspective, I think just going in, in back to this like research conversation we were having there, we have such this like transactional burn and turn mindset because we’re measured from a B2B perspective on.

Quantity based KPIs typically. And I think for I, I’m hoping that we have a shift and a shift more around things like attaching sales and marketing success to pipeline and close one new business and zooming out a little bit because I think the more we do that, the less transactional we will get with our behaviors.

And so when I think about cold calling and prospecting, I look at. I look at the juice and I look at what we’re building in our platform. And for me, I’m trying to connect with marketers to be guests on modern day marketer, our podcast. And I want content people on there and people to talk about their strategies and what they’re talking about and explore different topics.

I might be a marketer, but like I am reaching out to a lot of people that I’ve never met before. I think for me, the way I go about that is I leverage. Content and what they’re putting out about themselves, about their philosophies, about their companies, and I’m going into the juice and I’m searching their names.

When I search someone’s name, what happens, all the content that they’ve ever created pops up. And what can I do? I can understand what topics that they create around and what they’re passionate about and what are those topics that align with what we talk. And I can pull those pull insights and information from the individual pieces.

Now, if I reach out to them which outreach would you rather have? Jeff? Hey, I’m Brett. I have a podcast called modern day marketer. You wanna come or be a part of it or? Hey Jeff, I’m the VP of marketing at the juice. I was searching your name and our platform and a piece you wrote for MarketMuse on content distribution popped up.

This is something we talk about on the show. Like I’d love to explore it. I think our audience would benefit. My guess would be like, if I played back something that you already produced that exists out there, your likelihood of responding is probably gonna go up. So I think we it might be positioned as cold calling or cold outreach, but I think it’s on us to go do the homework and I.

The, as we dig into it, there’s so much informa. I put out so much information about myself and I can’t stand the fact that people reach out to me and wanna sell me their stuff. And literally I ha I publish three new pieces of content every day that I talk about what I care about. And all you have to do is go reach in and dig in and find those pieces and use them.

That’ll resonate with me. And there’s a li better chance to make a connection. So I’m going on a little tangent. I’m on my soapbox, but I think. content. People share a lot. And as salespeople find that information and use it to your advantage, cuz I think the more you do that, you’re the better connections and the better conversations you’re gonna have.

Jeff Coyle: The the MarketMuse team members that are listening to this are like Jeff really likes spread. No, that is, that’s basically how I, I’ve been saying that for a very long. You have to know to processize. That is tough to put that into a process is tough. So you have to know like how much work could you do, and then just keep back peddling to say, what’s my meets minimum for a great email.

What’s my meets minimum for a value driven note. Where we go, unfortunately in, in the sales side is we’ll try to build something that can be cut and. And, or we’ll try to customize a little blurb or something like that. We’re all guilty of it. But if you go, we one level deeper, you described it.

Dave call one of my favorite trainers in value selling he’s at value. selling.com says, show him that you know him. And you just described that, it’s read my last three blogs, mention one of them and you’re likely to get a response silly. And that’s an example of showing that, ’em, you gotta create, and there’s a three, there’s a thing called three by three.

You’ve probably seen like where you’re spending or the eight minute. What’s it. The eight minute eval and, but figure out I have 15 minute quick audit. That’s what I do. I have 15 minute quick audit. I can tell you everything. I can tell you more about your. Then you likely know in 15 minutes, why wouldn’t I do that?

That’s how I’m prepared for every discussion and I can make it make you feel like it’s oh my gosh, does he work here? Because of, you build that process, it shows that you care. In my weird situation, I actually do care cuz I’m just like really passionate about it, but I love the way that you described that.

So awesome. I think we answered the other question. Of consultative selling in that. Yeah. You better be consultative when you’re selling, because deal sizes go up when you are. And sales cycle speed goes down. We also had a message for from a particular person named Jonathan that you may know he said you can use the juices for cold calling and prospecting content.

and so go check that out as well. There’s our C there’s our CEO hard at work

Brett McGrath: marketing in the, in, in the webinar

Jeff Coyle: channel. I love it. That’s a multi-channel, it’s a chat blasting chat blasting webinar, Jonathan. Thank you. I love what you guys are doing. So let’s getting back to a couple other questions that, that popped in that related to channel and repurposing.

What’s the playbook for. Putting something out into content syndication that doesn’t perform. So what do you learn from that? If you put something in, it’s just, it’s not getting the volume that I expect or even enough to make it relevant so that people are like, Ooh, wow, that’s a great channel. What do I do in those scenarios?

How do I improve my performance? In, in a syndication.

Brett McGrath: Yeah. So I typically I don’t try to lose my mind over something that I’m passionate about, that I know the market through. If I’ve done the homework and knows it’s a topic that will resonate with the audience I don’t lose my mind off of creating something on that topic that doesn’t perform right away.

And I try not to. Leave it just from one, drop off. What I like to do is I go back and I like to look at the content, whether it’s a conversation, whether it’s something I wrote and I like to read through it again and think about, are there words, is the headline bad? Are there different ways that I could be talking about this thing?

That’s in my head right now. And when it’s, I’m creating a piece along with that topic, I try. Try to reposition it a little bit and then go again. A lot of what I we’re doing at an early stage is it’s throwing something up at the wall and seeing what sticks by no means. Do I have all the answers to content distribution, but I might, I wanna share what I’m learning along the way and understand that sometimes stuff might fall off the table.

So I like to look at myself in the mirror and evaluate myself and then try it again. Now, if there’s a trend. Something I’m saying or producing or doing, that’s just getting no response then typically I’ll probably put it on the shelf and move on to the next one. But I think so often we move off of stuff too quickly in B2B marketing when something doesn’t work right away.

What I have learned over my decade plus of experience in this space is that the more that we you say. and it’s gotta get boring to you because when it finally gets boring to you, that probably means you’re not promoting or saying it enough. So that’s how I think about it is try, just try to stay and evaluate and you’ll know, but just have the confidence to move away from it or have the confidence to keep going.

And you’ll know, just based on a consistent response along the way.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah. This was. Age ago, probably like 10 years ago. I’d it’s like most B2B marketers think in two dimensions. You will, if you think about repurposing, you’ll go to three. So that’s where you take your underperforming piece and you realize, Hey, this, I tried to do this two generally for five audiences.

I should put out five for five audiences. Then I, my matrix goes over now I’m 3d. This has been magnified by bad SEO. Oh, they’re gonna hate me. A lot of them do already. They already hate me where but no, I’ve been in the search space for 24 years as scary as that sounds.

And when someone says one keyword per one page or one topic for one page, they are ignoring the fact that you might focus on different audiences, roles, industries. So your guide to you. Pharmaceutical supply chain. You need a beginners, you need an expert. You need one for this type of company, that type of company and all of that contributes to the power of your site and the performance.

In it’s this, that, that is now how you do search best in organic. Now you have this massive content, all about a topic and it’s growing your authority right now. Authoritativeness is the new buzzword in SEO. It’s always been the case. It’s just now people are quantifying it. Guess what? It’s even more the case in syndication because you’re not bound to one.

You, you can many to one. So build once the raw material spin a whole bunch to appropriate audiences, think about differentiation. And then you might be able. One of the tricks and I’m not sure if it’s the case with juice, content syndication, is this worth the price of admission for this?

This discussion is they want lots of content cuz it gives them more opportunity to market it. So you may be able to put together and can I submit, five or six versions of a. That or reworked for industry specific, for example. So can I put out my CRM guide and then my CRM guide for breweries and my CRM guide for music producers?

Can I upload those introduce and I

Brett McGrath: would, yeah, I would love, that’s. I would, the more customers that we’re talking to that think that way it creates a better experience for what we’re building at The Juice. It’s quality over quantity.

Jeff Coyle: , that’s the trick. And I think that if you have a failure, reinvestigate it in all channels.

So think channel, instead of thinking one word, one page, the days of one word, one pager are long, long thought. So what would be someone’s typical experience? So they would sign on as a. What’s the prospect experience for somebody who might become a paying customer like somebody who would be syndicating their content, how do they start that?

And what’s that journey to becoming a paying customer of juice and what would someone expect and how is that different from other content syndication platforms?

Brett McGrath: Sure. I would hope that so we talk about we’re helping marketers with audience growth, brand awareness, content distribution, and demand generation.

Those are like our four. Catch all buckets of things that we can offer with our platform. And if you look at my content, those are typically areas that I am focused in on. So I’d hope that you maybe see our piece of content somewhere in the universe, but if you came in and you were interested in becoming a customer of the juice, first thing we’d probably have you do is claim your brand page on the juice.

Our product team shout out. Did an absolutely incredible job out of the gates of aggregating brand pages in pieces of content and using a platform like G2 as a reference point. And typically that’s what we would suggest is claim your brand page, and there’s a free version of that. And that is, you can make sure that.

Your your imagery gets updated. Your all the easy changes on your profile, get updated and you can do that. And I would suggest anyone out there who’s listening. Go check out. If you have a brand page at the juice, go look for it, claim it. If you don’t, there’s an, there’s another experience there where you can ask to have a page and we’ll work through you through, with you there.

But once you do that then we wanna start talking with you and understand what you are why you’re interested in what, the types of things you’re doing and exploring that. And we have a we’re working through pLG model right now. That’s not available, but that’s something just as a team, we understand people like myself and several others don’t wanna necessarily have to talk to salespeople and they just wanna do it themselves.

So we’re working through that right now. But what we wanna do is make sure you understand the power and the people who are on the platform, learning every. And also understand that the juice will help automate your distribution, but also like I every day go in and when I have a new piece, I publish it myself manually because I’m trying to get it in the email that goes out to everyone who follows me.

So yeah it’s it’s claiming your page having a conversation with us, us getting you onboard. Easy have amazing customer success team, shout out cat. But yeah, we’re also working towards that product led growth experience where you can sign up be a paying customer and not talk with anybody.

Jeff Coyle: Awesome. I look forward to watching that journey as being a product led growth. person. And if you’re not familiar with product led.com and that whole team, then partners are theirs and product led summit for years, go check that out and read about, Ramly John and all those folks who are doing amazing work.

But no, that’s gonna be exciting for you all. That’s gonna be an interesting next phase and Juice is based in Indiana high alpha company. Is that. Yeah.

Brett McGrath: Hi, alpha. Yeah, we are part of the high alpha venture studio year and a half old. Indie’s a great tech city. I came from the exact target is where I grew up and learned how to do marketing.

And then I thought it was normal. Join a company outta college, be high. Go public and then be acquired by the biggest, one of the biggest software companies in the world. I thought that was normal. I realized a decade later, not normal. Yeah, it is a great community for tech through that acquisition.

So many amazing businesses have spun up and high alpha is awesome. And it’s great to, to be supported by their resources, but yeah we’re excited about what we’re doing and what we’re.

Jeff Coyle: exact target was a big customer of mine in my history. I sold a lot of leads to exact target in my days.

that’s fun. You probably,

Brett McGrath: they

Jeff Coyle: indirectly, I got my hands on ’em at some level. I’m sure that’s pretty wild. Awesome. I think, just thinking about content indication differently is that huge takeaway. And you certainly can and should be focusing on content performance and organic search.

Building expert level content repurposing. But if you’re not thinking about syndication or if you are, and you’ve tried other channels I, there, it would be wild not to think about it. It’s been a significant success story for MarketMuse in syndicate error content. It really makes you think hard about differentiation, which is the core of MarketMuse it’s don’t copy your competitors.

Always consider what’s special stuff you bring to the table and when you’re doing syndication it shows you real quick if you’re derivative or you’re truly providing unique value. So Brett, thank you so much. I did have a question to come in and said will you pull a record out and show us one.

I don’t know if you’re got, if you’re if you’re lobbying, maybe a favorite. Okay,

Brett McGrath: so here we go. We’ll do this.

So hopefully you’re all familiar, but one of my favorite bands, and this is a record that is like timeless, but here’s fleet Fox’s first one. So if you’re down with some awesome music fleet foxes, I’ve got all their stuff and just the harmonies man. It’s what I’m all about.

Jeff Coyle: That’s awesome.

I’ll give you the last word. And thank you folks. We have two offers our demo shoot me a note, Jeff, at MarketMuse dot com. If you wanna personalize demo in that discussion, I’m typically finding your top five pages to update that are gonna have the most meaningful impact on your business.

What pages should you create? What topics should you be focused on? Or one of my team members is doing that Worth, about an ounce of gold just that. So please take that opportunity. Anyone has that opportunity, so shoot us a note and go sign up for the juice. Obviously we’ve said the word juice more than I probably ever will on a webinar.

And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you want people wanna reach out to you, Brett. And then please plug your podcast again. Go subscribe. It’s. I listen

Brett McGrath: to. Yep. Yeah. Appreciate it. Jeff, modern day marketer, new episodes drop every Monday and Friday. Definitely sign up for the juice, become a member.

If you’re interested in learning more about distribution hit me up. There’s my to, but honestly the easiest way to reach me is DM me on Twitter. If you want more information, I’ll get you connected to the right resources. And there’s my handle there,

Jeff Coyle: right on. Enjoy your.

Enjoy your fourth. It’s been such a pleasure to chat and connect and see a record. I get questions about my posters, cuz I change ’em up all the time and a lot of music related ones. So I had to follow up and ask, actually ask you to pull that record out. So I appreciate you and appreciate what juice and all the questions.

Thank you to the audience everybody today. And

Brett McGrath: cheers. Thanks Jeff.