TRACKLIST
Click to skip to what interests you the most.
1: You can’t hide in DTC (feat. Gaetano Nino DiNardi)
I remember the day I saw this tweet like it was yesterday. I never agreed with something so much. B2B Marketing is more like sales with extra steps than marketing. Even the supposed “right” ways to do B2B marketing, like letting your employees drive company thought leadership are carried by sales tactics that don’t scale. Here’s the cold hard truth: most B2B marketing is awful. If it were good, it would reach and inspire relevant people independently, without you having to do backflips. It’s like a car with a broken engine. You never drive it, you’re always pushing it to start with your friends.
You can’t hide in B2C and DTC. In that world, marketing drives results. Marketing, not sales disguised as marketing. There are no influencers you can suck up to all day on LinkedIn under the guise of “content distribution”. There are no industry analysts that do the selling for you. Sales volume is the name of the game. There is no one big account you can close to salvage your quarterly results. You must build brand awareness, create demand, and capture demand at scale. As Gaetano said, perform… or you’re gone.
P.S. If you’re not doing it already, Gaetano is the person you should follow on Twitter and LinkedIn for no-nonsense marketing.
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2: Demand-gen? More like demand harvest.
Most marketers who think they’re creating demand are actually just harvesting demand that already exists to some extent. Very rarely does anyone create demand. It’s different from demand capture. There’s something in the middle, and that thing in the middle is what most marketers are doing. You’re not necessarily pushing a buying-ready person over the edge, but you’re not really moving them from zero demand, either. That’s harvesting demand, not creating demand.
Chances are, if they’re consuming your educational content (yes, even the top-funnel type), then they have some demand for your product. I can’t imagine myself googling problems about cloud computing unless I plan to buy a product related to cloud computing within the next few months.
This is not to attack demand-gen marketers, they’re doing a good job. But the idea of demand-gen is not well represented. Deep down, I think even demand-gen marketers know that. That’s why all the advice about doing better demand-gen is to stack more tactics: launch a podcast, start a newsletter, post on LinkedIn…. the list never ends.
Check out this article that I wrote about this.
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3: Don’t sell the truth.
Like beauty, truth is in the eyes of the beholder. Before you put me on blast — yes, there are some universal truths: laws of physics, math, the Earth being round… I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about how buyers perceive reality. If you want your marketing to succeed, knowing how buyers perceive reality (even if objectively wrong) is more important than your “truth” about it.
When you sell the truth, your marketing messages often fail to achieve your goals (usually revenue goals), because buyers don’t see the world the same way you painted it for them. Sometimes they don’t even see things that are objectively true! Buyers have their own version of truth. You either adapt to theirs or get them to adapt to yours. An example of the latter is creating a new category. Category creation is the purest way of creating a new “truth” for buyers and the market as a whole. It’s giving people people a new, universal way of framing the world. This is why, whenever I work on any piece of content, the first thing I always do is try to understand how my target audience perceives the truth: the topic I’m about to talk about and all its quirks. If you don’t operate in the same perception of reality (i.e. truth) as your buyers, your marketing message won’t be understood or even listened to.
I believe there are many layers our marketing messages go through before they influence our buyers.
What your product actually is —> The objective reality
What you say your product is —→ Communicated (and often subjective) reality
How buyers interpret your message
How buyers perceive your product
The expectations and biases that influence these perceptions
Changing people’s minds is hard. That’s why working at an early-stage startup was one of the toughest experiences I had in my marketing career so far. You’re bringing an innovative product to the market that seeks to disrupt the buyer’s truth, their sense of reality. Yet at the same time, you must align your marketing with the buyer.
A buyer spent 20 years working on something in a certain way, defining something in a certain way; and then you show up with your new flashy product that tells them that they were wrong all along. You tell them there’s a better solution, completely different from what the buyer is used to. Some disconnect between your product and buyer is fine. But if everything is completely disconnected, and there are few things in common between the buyer’s truth and your truth, then all you get is resistance. Your marketing is bound to fail.
The solution is to make your marketing operate in buyer’s sense of reality, their sense of truth. Stop trying to create a new category right out the gate, or promising to disrupt everything the buyer holds dear. Start small. It’s why so many early-stage startups use famous companies as a reference for their own marketing messaging, like “We’re like the Uber for solving X!”. They do it for one simple reason: it’s buyer-centric. They’re using the language that fits how their buyers understand the world.
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4: Ignore popular marketing advice.
Call me a hater, but seeing a giant of the marketing community Rand Fishkin call these people out on their BS filled me with joy. Popular marketing advice was never meant to educate you. It’s meant to boost the engagement and the follower count of the person giving the advice. Blame it on social algorithms that believe engaging content equals helpful content. The incentives are messed up.
Popular marketing advice (or as Rand Fishkin calls it, fortune cookie advice) is the marketing version of a cheeseburger. Eating it makes you feel good, but it’s gonna poison you. That’s why the most popular marketing advice is made of truisms, feel-good one-liners, and oversimplified success stories. It’s the delicious things people want to hear, but not things that are necessarily true or helpful. There was a point where I thought these people offered oversimplified tips because they didn’t know much about marketing. I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they might not be aware that their advice is not very helpful or worse, misleading. Then I realized that they indeed know a lot, but they choose to keep it this way. They know they’re bullshitting, but they just don’t care. As long as it gets them engagement, they’re happy. In a world of fortune cookie advice givers, we desperately need more Rand Fishkins.
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5: Viral brands don’t have real fans.
If you’re into hip-hop music, you’ve probably heard of Lil Nas X and DJ Khaled. These guys are always smashing the Billboard charts. You hear their music on the radio, in the H&M stores, and in bars. They’re amongst the most popular artists today. But if my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you a single person I know that has a Lil Nas X poster on their wall.
That’s because these artists are brands that live and die by virality. They don’t have a big baseline of people who care about them. Their success is predicated on making hits that get many casual listeners to tune in once and never again. Their brands are like a liminal space: it only exists as the small town buyers drive through on their way to somewhere else. They don’t have longevity. They just ride trends, and in a few years’ time, they become irrelevant and forgotten.
Virality caters to casual buyers and audiences. Casuals are an important part of brand growth - especially for low ACV products. In those cases, it’s only natural. Not everyone needs 6-month engagement with a brand to buy. Simply being aware that your brand is one of the most popular ones can be enough. But if you have a long sales cycle and need to build a community, demonstrate expertise, and earn trust among stakeholders that matter, then virality and brand awareness for its own sake won’t get you there.
You can see the symptoms of B2B brands that try to make virality their core strategy. They get thousands of people visiting their website, but no one ever converts. They have 80k LinkedIn followers, but nobody watches their live events and webinars. Their top funnel is filled, but hardly moves to revenue.
The choice is yours: viral but vapid, or slow but sustainable brand growth. Here’s a hint: In longer sales cycles, you benefit from people sticking around to listen to you, instead of having many people that just come and go. I know what I choose.
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6: Being logical doesn’t pay.
“It doesn’t pay to be logical when everyone else is logical.”
- Rory Sutherland
(The visual is taken from Rory Sutherland’s book, Alchemy)
B2B marketing is notorious for being overly logical. This trap convinces us our target market operates on pure reason. That’s why most B2B marketing looks, sounds, and performs the same. As Rory Sutherland says, when you optimize all things to their logical extreme, every bar becomes a brothel, and every website becomes a porn site. It makes sense to talk about your functional benefits. It’s logical to mention your partnership with Gartner. You’re being reasonable whenever keep your B2B marketing “professional” and serious with dark blue branding and pretentious jargon like “supercharge your revenue synergies” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). But it’s the things that don’t make logical sense that often get more attention. Those success stories couldn’t be predicted by years of market research and $100,000 worth of MarTech. Just look at many indie businesses around you. Not all of them make logical sense, but they work. An example of that is Visualize Value. On paper, the business idea is a bit silly: a guy sharing life and business advice, but using oversimplified visuals instead of words. In the illogical reality, it made the founder a millionaire.
It’s hard to dump habits that don’t serve us. B2B marketing’s love affair with logic is no different. Marketing teams would rather waste another quarter on gated e-books than try something different. No one can blame them. There’s too much politics involved for B2B marketing to stand out. The incentive isn’t to build something remarkable, the incentive is to keep your jobs. If you did what the company always does and failed, nobody’s gonna blame you too much. Your decisions were logical and data-driven. But if you try something new and fail, they’ll call you irresponsible. After that, they’ll probably fire you. In most B2B companies, it’s better to fail conventionally, than succeed unconventionally.
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7: Beware of Marketing Terrorists!
A marketing terrorist is a dishonest person who makes extreme and deliberately misleading claims about marketing for personal gain. The extreme stance is there to create a polarizing “us vs them” story. If you do some research on the person’s background, their agenda will be obvious in less than 2 minutes. They rarely have any data to back their claims up. But where they lack in data, they make up in a lot of confidence. Marketing Terrorist’s message is promoted with conviction, loudly, and proudly. Junior marketers who don’t know any better eat it up. That’s why marketing terrorist usually sells some kind of online course to junior marketers and self-starters who can’t see Marketing Terrorists for who they really are.
Here are obvious signs you can look for to identify a Marketing Terrorist:
Their arguments are extreme. E.g. SEO is dead! If you still do SEO, you’re clueless!
Their arguments lack nuance.
They have no data. If you ask them to prove their claims, they will either quote another guru who wrote a book, or use a cherrypicked outlier example
(e.g. Tesla doesn’t do advertising and they are extremely successful!)They try to grow a cult following. Their whole shtick is about the extreme stance they’re promoting. Their real goal is to build an echo chamber community where no one challenges them.
They’re usually solopreneurs or business owners. Extreme messages don’t fly in corporations that sell different products to many different buyers. That’s why Marketing Terrorists run solo, and their extreme message exists to sell niche (marketing) services.
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This article was an experiment. Dumping seven ideas at once should give me faster signals about what resonates with you.
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