August 20, 2024 • 29 mins
The top of the marketing funnel doesn’t need to be mysterious or overly complicated! For many companies though, they think they’re doing top-of-funnel marketing, and while they’re spending money on ads they aren’t growing affinity or an owned audience.
In this episode, James and Benji share the 4 top of funnel marketing tactics you cannot afford to overlook.
Join as we discuss:
Benji: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benji-block/
James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescarbary/
In this episode, James and Benji share the 4 top of funnel marketing tactics you cannot afford to overlook.
Join as we discuss:
- Why video podcasting is a game-changer for reaching wider audiences and establishing thought leadership
- How to leverage original research for creating compelling, data-driven reports that resonate with your audience
- Why companies consistently get newsletters wrong, and how to avoid falling into the same trap
Benji: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benji-block/
James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescarbary/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you want a successful video podcast, you've got to
think for people that do not know our brand, that
are trying to get better at their job, how can
we create content that they would love to consume.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The top of the funnel can be a mysterious, scary
place for marketers. Measuring your effort is really tough. The
higher ups want proof of conversion, show me the numbers,
And even though you know that brand matters, you may
not feel fully confident in what top of funnel marketing
strategy to prioritize or how to justify it. So today
(00:39):
we're giving you the four best top of funnel marketing
tactics and how to use them in your marketing mix.
So we're going to kick off this first one, Benji,
social media is number one. I don't think you're going
to find a whole lot of folks that are going
to argue with that. So when we talk about social
media as a top of funnel marketing tactic, give us
(01:01):
your take on why this made number one on our list.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah, I think it's fairly obvious. I would put this
in the shallow end of the pool, but I would
say allows for extremely wide brand reach. You're going to
get exposure right and direct engagement with potential customers. Growing
affinity on social media, it's fairly easy. We're in the
age of the creator. So if before social media was
(01:28):
about being social, now it's more about being entertained. So
you actually can just create content there that is entertaining,
an educational and draws a crowd. Great way to do that,
provides opportunity for viral content and people can make content
about whatever your product or service is, so there's just
like this community thing happening. And then also obviously targeting options,
(01:49):
there's specific audience segmentation ways that you can do that
organic and paid driving to things. I think social media
as a top of funnel play is an easy way
to put faces to your brand. Like it's pretty much
limitless and the bar to entry is put in an
email and a password and get started. Like it's so
(02:10):
easy to start this play at the top of the
funnel that I don't know how anyone could say it's
it's not social as a top of funnel number one choice.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
The thing that I love about social and the way
the algorithm is working today this interest based graph is
that followers no longer matter. Before you had to put
all this energy into getting you know, one hundred thousand
likes on your Facebook page or whatever, and then you
just got to reach a percentage of the people that
(02:41):
already followed you. But because that the algorithms have changed
so much and evolved so much. I've literally had videos
that get seventy thousand views on an account with fifty
seven followers. It's just there's not it doesn't really matter.
Follower account. A good solid follower account matters in some
(03:02):
ways because it's a credibility indicator. And so if people
stumble across your account and you've got fifty seven followers,
that are not going to associate you with being like
a credible resource as much as they would if you
had fifty seven thousand followers. But in feed, people can't
see your follower account. So if you just create a
really great piece of content targeted at who you want
(03:25):
to target, and it's got a great hook, it retains
people on the video, it drives engagement on the post.
There's dwell time people are hanging out on that post
sharing it, particularly on Instagram. If they're like dming it
to other people, that is a big signal to the algorithm.
And so you can get a million views on a
(03:49):
post with very low follower account, which is just bananas
because it's and I love that because it speaks to
the B to B company that has not prioritized social yet.
But I hope that's the motivation that you need to
hear to start getting in the game, because you don't
need a bunch of followers for this to work. And
that's that's why I.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Love social social as an easy way to create content consistently,
whether that's you choose LinkedIn because you know that that's
where your audience hangs out, or one of these other
social platforms. We're not advocating that you even have to
be everywhere. I think that's a big thing to call out,
Like there is ways to just be strategic about where
(04:31):
you're doing this, but knowing it's a top of funnel play,
this is where people get it wrong. It's like, because
it's so easy, the bar to entry is so low,
you think you can go on there and kind of
just like post about your business and get business, and
people don't know the strategy behind, Like how do you
actually evangelize the problem that you're helping solve? The things
that you can actually help people with, but not in
(04:54):
a way that's like, here's my company website. You are
l like, I think that's the days of are We're
far past them. Go look at anybody that's thriving on
social right now, and you'll see the type of content
they're posting is highly educational or highly entertaining. They're gaining
an audience there, and then they're pushing them to some
of these other things that I think we'll get to
(05:15):
in a minute, James. But they are still top of
funnel plays, but in a way you're seeing some of
these are like, oh, they could also be middle of
funnel plays, and you can see how they lead to
other things. Number two on our list was newsletters, and
I think this is I think this is where I'm like,
social could easily drive to a newsletter, and your newsletter
(05:37):
is still pretty much a top of funnel play if
it's going to be executed correctly. I say that because
now you're building a direct line of communication with a
potential customer, but you can niche down that newsletter to
have a very clear value prop that's like, you want
to follow this newsletter because it's going to help you
be better at this one specific thing. Or it's going
(05:58):
to give you examples of this type of stuff. And
when you do that, now you've taken someone from social
You've put them somewhere where you have their email address.
So now you're starting to own that audience. It's still
top of funnel to us. That's why it's number two
on our list. When you have that unique premise, it
keeps people coming back for more. You have that organic growth,
(06:20):
you have that owned audience, right, but it's still top
of funnel generally speaking. Speak to the power of a newsletter, James,
from your perspective and why you would still label this
as a top of funnel marketing play and a very
important one.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
There are a couple things about newsletters that I think
that I want to talk about here. So don't just
collect emails. So we've started doing this. We started working
with a partner to help us grow the B to
B Growth newsletter, and one of the first things that
had us do was implement a post opt in survey,
so you don't require the survey before they give you
(06:58):
their email address. You want to select that email first
so you at least have their email. But we found
that like eighty five or ninety percent of the people
that give us their email, that next screen they go
to and it's like, hey, we want to deliver you
the most tailored quality content we can. Would you mind
spending you know, thirty seconds and giving us a little
(07:19):
bit more information about you so that we can give
you even better content. It's like an eighty five or
ninety percent conversion that. So people give us their email,
we've got that. Now we get their job title, we
get maybe their company, we get challenges they're facing, we
get things that they would like us to talk about,
(07:40):
stories that they would like us to cover, things they
would be interested in it interested in so asking a
few of those questions. It it makes your owned database
of contacts so much more valuable because it's not just
an email. You actually now have additional data at your subscribers,
(08:01):
which can inform your editorial strategy. It can inform the
kind of partners I love. One of the questions that
we ask is or we were asking at one point,
was what technology are you using or what tools are
you using? And so as you build your list big
enough to where you can start to actually monetize your
newsletter with sponsors, this that kind of data is huge
(08:23):
because you can say, hey, like thirty five percent of
our newsletter subscribers use Salesforce. Hey, HubSpot, you should sponsor
a newsletter because you've clearly got some folks here that
that are not using your product but could be. So
there's a yeah, So there's that. Don't just collect the email,
collect additional data, be smart about the data you're capturing,
(08:46):
and be strategic with what you're asking. You don't just
you can't ask just an endlessly long list of things
or people will tune you out and you won't get anything.
The other thing I'll mention here, we're not like a
we're not a partner with behive in any formal sense,
but I love the Beehive product for newsletters. So the
(09:07):
folks that built Beehive also built Morning Brew, which is
one of the biggest news publications in business media right
now and has started as a newsletter. Now it's got
millions of subscribers across tons of different verticals. And so
the guy Tyler Dank that built the infrastructure for a
Morning Brew from their earliest days is the co founder
(09:30):
of Beehive. And so you see not just in the
features they already have, but their product roadmap but what
they're building, they now, like I now get emails every
single day in my inbox with people that want to
sponsor B to B growth. So before you used to
have have to hire like a massive sales team to
go and sell advertising on your newsletter, and now they've
(09:51):
you know, as our subscriber based grows bigger and bigger
and bigger, those offers are going to start getting bigger
and bigger and bigger because it's correlated with what your
open rate is and your click through rate is, and
so it's really clean interface. You can also promote your
newsletter to other newsletters on beehive that want to do
like a swap, so i'll you know, if some other
(10:13):
you know, there's ten other newsletters that are trying to
reach B to B marketers. We can co market one
another's newsletters. And the best way to market a newsletter
is on other newsletters, just like the best way to
promote a YouTube channel is on the YouTube channels. You're
obviously reaching people that are already consuming that medium. And
so that's my Those are my two cents on newsletters
(10:35):
and why I think they're super valuable and some nuances
to pay attention to as you start to explore them.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yeah. Too many companies are thinking about the newsletter as
like we give company updates, we give It's almost like
you think that someone has to already be bought in
on your product or they know about you at this
deep level before they would subscribe. You can be premise
heavy to get somebody's email address if you're going to
(11:02):
deliver value in the inbox week after week, or you're
gonna show up with something that they would otherwise have
to go search out on their own, and instead it's
just gonna pop up in their inbox. People will subscribe
to that, and it's a better way. In fact, a
lot of companies should just be thinking about let's name
it something interesting as well, and then say that this
(11:23):
is somewhere in the body, just like you would have
a midroll ad for a podcast. This is this This
newsletter is sponsored by your company. That's a very easy
way to get your logo into something where the content
is clearly for the end reader, but your logo is
still somehow in it. And we've been even tinkering with
(11:43):
that with B to B growth, using language like this
is brought to you by Sweetfish, instead of thinking about
like our logo just being like plopped on something and
it looking like this whole thing is a brand, a
brand play. You really want to think about how you're
differentiating your media and allowing someone to stomach your media
(12:05):
and not feel like it's a force to add. So
that's huge with newsletters is getting out of your head
that this is kind of an update and instead you
really could go all the way to the other end
where you could say, eventually, this is going to make
us money. If we're good enough at newsletters, people will
want to pay to sponsor us, and that is a
(12:25):
completely different approach. I think we've spent a lot of
time here on newsletters, James, Do you want to mention
anything else here or take us to number three?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, I the two formats that I've been really liking
a lot lately are curated industry news. So just looking
at what other people on what people are on Twitter
are talking about other creators, media publications, and then combine
those news stories with your commentary. Doesn't need to even
be long, just like take two or three stories and
(12:57):
combine it with your two cents a sentence or two
on why you think this is relevant or not relevant.
Another newsletter that's been hitting my inbox that I've been
really liking is from Corey Quinn, and his emails are
just very short. They could honestly be tweets like now
that you can do like a two utter and eighty
character tweet. I legitimately think every single one of his
emails could be a tweet. And the value per word
(13:20):
in his newsletter is extremely high. I know that when
he hits my inbox, it's not going to take me
three minutes to read it. I can read it in
thirty seconds, and so I tend to. I find myself
opening his emails a lot more. So just be thinking
about that. When it comes to newsletters. I think it's
very easy to just think it needs to be super long,
(13:40):
or it needs to be a company update. Think think engagement.
How can we actually engage the person on the other
end and give them something they want as opposed to
being company first and pushing our narrative or our agenda
down their throat. And I think if your mindset's there,
you're probably gonna get a lot better results with your newsletter.
(14:04):
So third on our list, number three top of funnel
marketing tactic is original research. We are big fans of this.
We've done this before on B to B Growth. We're
about to do our next big original research project project
on the state of video podcasts. The reason I like
original research so much is because it is an engine
(14:26):
for true insights, and insights are the name of the
game for building trust and authority in B to B land.
If you do not actually have something of substance to say,
nobody's going to listen to you. And so original research
is how you develop those insights, asking your market, figuring
out an angle to ask your market something that you
(14:49):
know a lot of people in that market are going
to be interested in learning. And so this is you know,
original research is a mechanism to create mountains of social
YouTube podcast content, so fueling other types of top of
funnel content for you. It can all come from original research.
It also allows you to build really strategic relationships with prospects,
(15:12):
with influencers. I wrote a book called content based Networking.
Original research allows you to do content based networking, building
relationships through content collaboration by collaborating with them on a
report like this. So we're big fans of original research.
What are your thoughts here, Benji, Well, I'll rattle off.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
A few ideas just to give people some context, because
there's different ways of doing and presenting original research. So
you could do this. We see it as an annual report,
so like the state of e commerce in twenty twenty four,
or it's some sort of benchmark study digital marketing benchmarks
for B to B companies. You could do something more
along the lines I drotted down, like customer insight surveys,
(15:55):
so this would come more into like, you know, consumer
preferences in online shopping. So you already have some level
of insight and you've repurposed it into something people can
download a market research report, which would be like emerging
technologies happening in fintech, and you have just all this
research that you've compiled. That again, someone could go out
(16:17):
and do, but you've taken the time to do. People
are going to come to you for that. What I
The last example here is a white paper positioned more
as original research. I think it's we think of white
papers and B to B and you tend to only
like want to go to sleep. But the impact of
AI on customer service, if you position it that way,
(16:39):
even though it's technically a white paper, the thought process there,
especially using a buzzword like AI right now, people will
be interested, they will click, they will give you their
email to download that asset. So with original research, to me,
the opportunity that we don't talk enough about is what
you mentioned before, repurposing what you find in the original
(17:02):
research and giving that those stats or that data to
individuals on your team to share and expand on on
social because you now have a proof point for individual
profiles to share, and then they can double down by
sharing a specific story that they can add. But so
often what happens with these tools is we only use
(17:25):
it as lead gen. We only want people's email, So
we feel like if it's going to live on a
site somewhere and if it's getting email address is awesome.
If it's not, it's a failure. You haven't thoughts through
all the other ways your team could be using this,
and that to me is the value in original research
is if you're going to take the time to make
(17:45):
pillar content like that, what are the spokes of that
that reach people on your team? That are you aren't
even gonna be able to get the ROI fully understood
because you probably won't be able to track all the
ways people can use individual pieces of that research and
the learnings from doing the hard work of something like this.
(18:06):
So this is by far the hardest one on the list,
but if you do it correctly, it positions you as
a leader and it gives you a type of content
you could literally come back to every year. I mentioned
the state of e commerce twenty twenty four. Well guess
what twenty twenty five is coming. So now you have
this state of e commerce at twenty twenty five. You
(18:26):
do enough of these, and there's plenty of B to
B companies that are in different niches that do this
type of thing, and others in the space start to
turn and look and say, oh, when that comes out,
we'll create content about their data points. So now you again,
you're not gonna be able to track that necessarily, but
you sure as hell while other people making podcasts and
(18:49):
posts about data that you had so original research. In
my opinion, James hardest lift, but you can see so
much potential return and you will be looked at in
a much different way when you can back up your
talking points with data. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Two big brands that I've seen do this really well. One, Wistia,
does a state of Video report every year, and then
HubSpot does a State of Marketing. And so if you
want to look at some examples of brands that are
doing this really really well, go and go and just
google Wistia's State of Video or HubSpot State of Marketing
and you can go check those out. So this this
(19:25):
fourth one on the list, Benji, number four, we got
to talk about it because meta, we're doing it right now.
Number four is video podcast. So give us your thoughts
on why a video podcast is one of our top
four top of funnel marketing tactics.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Well like original research in some ways, but without as
heavy of a lift. You can put video podcasts into
these other spaces. So when James and I are recording
this video podcast right now, you're gonna be able to
watch us on YouTube. You're gonna be able to listen
to a on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We're going to
be able to cut those clips into social posts. James
(20:05):
and I are actively having to think about original thoughts
that each of us have and share them. So now
we also have learnings both for our team that are
well articulated and we can share internally but also externally.
We can share this content with people who have specific
questions about our niche who are trying to learn media,
so we have personality led brand. By running a video podcast,
(20:28):
we are able to facilitate actual, good social content on
a regular basis because we release this at a cadence
that's easy to facilitate for us once once a week.
In the past, we've run up to a daily show,
So you can do video podcasts at different cadences, but
there's just so much that a video podcast allows you
(20:48):
to do that. I think it's one of the easiest
ways to get a bulk amount of content, quality content
from subject matter experts on your team and make it
personality led. That to me, puts you right at the
top of the funnel. If you do this right, the
video podcast and your social media starts to play really,
(21:12):
really nicely together. And that's that's kind of the first
thing that I would mention, but anything that you want.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
One of the ways to do that, I think is
through segmentation. So really thinking about proper segments for your
show and making sure that in the segments that we
that you build out, you are optimizing for that personality
to come out. And so just like Saturday Night Live
(21:40):
has different segments. They've got the comedy set that the
host always comes out first and does like a an
opening act, and then they go into the different skits,
and then they always have the news desk segment, and
then so think about that for your show. What are two, three,
four segments that you want to have for your show?
But Benji, what are some other elements that in your
(22:03):
mind make a video podcast successful? Specifically for top of funnel.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I think what we need to actually think about is
what doesn't work, especially in business, because we've seen a
lot of bad examples, So what we know doesn't work
when it comes to video podcasting in business is trying
to tie too closely your business to the show. So
you have to come up to the top of the
(22:29):
funnel and think about the people that are consuming content
to get better at their job or to be entertained.
And you have to think about the fact that you
are competing for time in people's schedule, so your content
can't be in any way and in video podcasts. In
my opinion, James, you can push back on this, but
(22:51):
I really think you have to be very very careful
not to make it too bottom of funnel, and for
most businesses that that's the temptation with their show. So
if you want a successful video podcast, you've got to
think for people that do not know our brand, that
are trying to get better at their job, how can
(23:12):
we create content that they would love to consume. We've
used the language their their favorite corner of the Internet.
I like that phrasing and that terminology. When you start
to think in that way and you develop language around that,
content types around that, segments to your point, James, that's
when you'll start to see a show win. And then
I also think being very like intentional about what platform
(23:39):
you're creating for. So if you're you know you're going
to repurpose your podcast, but you're primarily going to care
about Apple podcasts and Spotify for co hosted commentary, Like
that's a different approach than a actual full on like
this is a video podcast that we're thinking YouTube first,
that like where you need to record that content, how
it needs to be done. It's just a different mindset
(24:02):
to take in. So for a long time in business,
podcasting was like this cool. Ah, yeah, it seems like
a lot of people are podcasting. Now the bar has
been raised. You want to produce professional quality podcasts, and
you want to be able to do that in a
way that's repeatable. And I think that's it. That's where
my mind goes.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
So when you think about measuring the effectiveness of a
video podcast, you mentioned like YouTube first. Are those effectiveness
metrics in your mind exclusive to YouTube or or do
they expand even wider because of all the ways you
can repurpose a video podcast.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Yeah, if you're in a business a business podcast, you
definitely want to be looking at metrics on LinkedIn, So
I would I would not only be looking at YouTube,
but on YouTube, you're gonna look at click through rate, right,
You're definitely thinking about your titles and your thumbnails. You're
thinking about the average view duration, average view percent on
each video and really shooting for a number over twenty
(25:04):
five percent. You want people to be consuming your content,
so you're checking that stat. But the thing that I've
been doing, James, is I've been looking at micro videos
on personal LinkedIn profiles and measuring and accounting for all
the number of comments and the amount of engagement that's happening, likes, shares,
(25:25):
whatever on individual posts from a personal profile. That is
so overlooked for most businesses if they are counting, they're
thinking about their corporate page and they might be measuring
that engagement, but a lot of people are not doing that.
The trickle down effect from having a quality video podcast
is not just the full length video views, it's all
(25:47):
the other things that come from that. So you definitely
want to ensure that you're measuring in some way those
types of stats. You can actually there's several websites that
do this, but they'll all so measure your engagement rate
on these platforms, so like on an Instagram, LinkedIn is
doesn't play as nicely with engagement rate metrics. But that's
(26:08):
another way to also be monitoring your social channels and
the clips you're getting from your video podcast is to
look at the engagement rate across these different platforms. So
I would be measuring that as well. What did I
miss there anything as far as what you'd measured.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
So when now I was thinking about this, I was
thinking average time consumed per episode on Apple podcasts that
in the Apple podcast back end, it tells you what
percentage of each episode was, what the average consumption was.
I think that's I think that's interesting to look at
what's what I like about video video first approach and
(26:43):
video podcast. You're obviously optimizing for YouTube, but by optimizing
for YouTube and average view percentage, you're actually creating a
better audio product too. So even though you're ripping the
audio and you're you're running it to Spotify and Apple,
like on Spotify, you might even put the video there too.
It's you're going to see that tick up in terms
(27:05):
of average consumption on those platforms as well. And another
one that I thought about was number of ratings on
Spotify and Apple. Those are good credibility indicators. If you
go to a show and see the show's got fifty
fifty five star ratings versus a show that's got one
that's to a new listener, that can be the difference
(27:27):
between someone wanting to check out the first episode and
someone going, Eh, they haven't been doing this long enough,
or they're obviously nobody else knows about this show, so
it's probably not that good. So there's some subtle things
there that I think looking at number of ratings, But
other than that, I mean, I think you nailed it.
I think CTR and YouTube thumbnails is huge. We shoot
for four percent or higher. I've actually seen some people
(27:49):
say that it needs to be closer to ten percent,
so we need to have a conversation internally of four
percent really is the right number, but average view percentage huge.
You already talked about that. We actually go for forty
percent on our scripted video essays, shooting from a minimum
of twenty five percent on episodes like this, a more
traditional video podcast. I put number of views, likes, and
non AI comments on social shorts. I'm just getting overrun
(28:13):
with AI bots commenting on my stuff, and that is
obviously not an indicator that you're creating super engaging stuff.
It's just that you've somebody you're on, somebody the radar
who's using AI to leave a bunch of comments and
they're meaningless. So yeah, but I think you nailed it there.
So that's it, folks. So our four favorite top of
(28:34):
funnel marketing tactics to recap. We've got number one social
media duh, Number two newsletter, three, original research, Number four
video podcast. What you are watching right now? If you
have questions about how to get started with any of
these DM either bingji r I on LinkedIn, we'd love
to talk more about this. We talk about this all
(28:57):
day anyway, So you asking us a question would I
promise you make our heart smile. That being said, we
are out
If you want a successful video podcast, you've got to
think for people that do not know our brand, that
are trying to get better at their job, how can
we create content that they would love to consume.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The top of the funnel can be a mysterious, scary
place for marketers. Measuring your effort is really tough. The
higher ups want proof of conversion, show me the numbers,
And even though you know that brand matters, you may
not feel fully confident in what top of funnel marketing
strategy to prioritize or how to justify it. So today
(00:39):
we're giving you the four best top of funnel marketing
tactics and how to use them in your marketing mix.
So we're going to kick off this first one, Benji,
social media is number one. I don't think you're going
to find a whole lot of folks that are going
to argue with that. So when we talk about social
media as a top of funnel marketing tactic, give us
(01:01):
your take on why this made number one on our list.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah, I think it's fairly obvious. I would put this
in the shallow end of the pool, but I would
say allows for extremely wide brand reach. You're going to
get exposure right and direct engagement with potential customers. Growing
affinity on social media, it's fairly easy. We're in the
age of the creator. So if before social media was
(01:28):
about being social, now it's more about being entertained. So
you actually can just create content there that is entertaining,
an educational and draws a crowd. Great way to do that,
provides opportunity for viral content and people can make content
about whatever your product or service is, so there's just
like this community thing happening. And then also obviously targeting options,
(01:49):
there's specific audience segmentation ways that you can do that
organic and paid driving to things. I think social media
as a top of funnel play is an easy way
to put faces to your brand. Like it's pretty much
limitless and the bar to entry is put in an
email and a password and get started. Like it's so
(02:10):
easy to start this play at the top of the
funnel that I don't know how anyone could say it's
it's not social as a top of funnel number one choice.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
The thing that I love about social and the way
the algorithm is working today this interest based graph is
that followers no longer matter. Before you had to put
all this energy into getting you know, one hundred thousand
likes on your Facebook page or whatever, and then you
just got to reach a percentage of the people that
(02:41):
already followed you. But because that the algorithms have changed
so much and evolved so much. I've literally had videos
that get seventy thousand views on an account with fifty
seven followers. It's just there's not it doesn't really matter.
Follower account. A good solid follower account matters in some
(03:02):
ways because it's a credibility indicator. And so if people
stumble across your account and you've got fifty seven followers,
that are not going to associate you with being like
a credible resource as much as they would if you
had fifty seven thousand followers. But in feed, people can't
see your follower account. So if you just create a
really great piece of content targeted at who you want
(03:25):
to target, and it's got a great hook, it retains
people on the video, it drives engagement on the post.
There's dwell time people are hanging out on that post
sharing it, particularly on Instagram. If they're like dming it
to other people, that is a big signal to the algorithm.
And so you can get a million views on a
(03:49):
post with very low follower account, which is just bananas
because it's and I love that because it speaks to
the B to B company that has not prioritized social yet.
But I hope that's the motivation that you need to
hear to start getting in the game, because you don't
need a bunch of followers for this to work. And
that's that's why I.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Love social social as an easy way to create content consistently,
whether that's you choose LinkedIn because you know that that's
where your audience hangs out, or one of these other
social platforms. We're not advocating that you even have to
be everywhere. I think that's a big thing to call out,
Like there is ways to just be strategic about where
(04:31):
you're doing this, but knowing it's a top of funnel play,
this is where people get it wrong. It's like, because
it's so easy, the bar to entry is so low,
you think you can go on there and kind of
just like post about your business and get business, and
people don't know the strategy behind, Like how do you
actually evangelize the problem that you're helping solve? The things
that you can actually help people with, but not in
(04:54):
a way that's like, here's my company website. You are
l like, I think that's the days of are We're
far past them. Go look at anybody that's thriving on
social right now, and you'll see the type of content
they're posting is highly educational or highly entertaining. They're gaining
an audience there, and then they're pushing them to some
of these other things that I think we'll get to
(05:15):
in a minute, James. But they are still top of
funnel plays, but in a way you're seeing some of
these are like, oh, they could also be middle of
funnel plays, and you can see how they lead to
other things. Number two on our list was newsletters, and
I think this is I think this is where I'm like,
social could easily drive to a newsletter, and your newsletter
(05:37):
is still pretty much a top of funnel play if
it's going to be executed correctly. I say that because
now you're building a direct line of communication with a
potential customer, but you can niche down that newsletter to
have a very clear value prop that's like, you want
to follow this newsletter because it's going to help you
be better at this one specific thing. Or it's going
(05:58):
to give you examples of this type of stuff. And
when you do that, now you've taken someone from social
You've put them somewhere where you have their email address.
So now you're starting to own that audience. It's still
top of funnel to us. That's why it's number two
on our list. When you have that unique premise, it
keeps people coming back for more. You have that organic growth,
(06:20):
you have that owned audience, right, but it's still top
of funnel generally speaking. Speak to the power of a newsletter, James,
from your perspective and why you would still label this
as a top of funnel marketing play and a very
important one.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
There are a couple things about newsletters that I think
that I want to talk about here. So don't just
collect emails. So we've started doing this. We started working
with a partner to help us grow the B to
B Growth newsletter, and one of the first things that
had us do was implement a post opt in survey,
so you don't require the survey before they give you
(06:58):
their email address. You want to select that email first
so you at least have their email. But we found
that like eighty five or ninety percent of the people
that give us their email, that next screen they go
to and it's like, hey, we want to deliver you
the most tailored quality content we can. Would you mind
spending you know, thirty seconds and giving us a little
(07:19):
bit more information about you so that we can give
you even better content. It's like an eighty five or
ninety percent conversion that. So people give us their email,
we've got that. Now we get their job title, we
get maybe their company, we get challenges they're facing, we
get things that they would like us to talk about,
(07:40):
stories that they would like us to cover, things they
would be interested in it interested in so asking a
few of those questions. It it makes your owned database
of contacts so much more valuable because it's not just
an email. You actually now have additional data at your subscribers,
(08:01):
which can inform your editorial strategy. It can inform the
kind of partners I love. One of the questions that
we ask is or we were asking at one point,
was what technology are you using or what tools are
you using? And so as you build your list big
enough to where you can start to actually monetize your
newsletter with sponsors, this that kind of data is huge
(08:23):
because you can say, hey, like thirty five percent of
our newsletter subscribers use Salesforce. Hey, HubSpot, you should sponsor
a newsletter because you've clearly got some folks here that
that are not using your product but could be. So
there's a yeah, So there's that. Don't just collect the email,
collect additional data, be smart about the data you're capturing,
(08:46):
and be strategic with what you're asking. You don't just
you can't ask just an endlessly long list of things
or people will tune you out and you won't get anything.
The other thing I'll mention here, we're not like a
we're not a partner with behive in any formal sense,
but I love the Beehive product for newsletters. So the
(09:07):
folks that built Beehive also built Morning Brew, which is
one of the biggest news publications in business media right
now and has started as a newsletter. Now it's got
millions of subscribers across tons of different verticals. And so
the guy Tyler Dank that built the infrastructure for a
Morning Brew from their earliest days is the co founder
(09:30):
of Beehive. And so you see not just in the
features they already have, but their product roadmap but what
they're building, they now, like I now get emails every
single day in my inbox with people that want to
sponsor B to B growth. So before you used to
have have to hire like a massive sales team to
go and sell advertising on your newsletter, and now they've
(09:51):
you know, as our subscriber based grows bigger and bigger
and bigger, those offers are going to start getting bigger
and bigger and bigger because it's correlated with what your
open rate is and your click through rate is, and
so it's really clean interface. You can also promote your
newsletter to other newsletters on beehive that want to do
like a swap, so i'll you know, if some other
(10:13):
you know, there's ten other newsletters that are trying to
reach B to B marketers. We can co market one
another's newsletters. And the best way to market a newsletter
is on other newsletters, just like the best way to
promote a YouTube channel is on the YouTube channels. You're
obviously reaching people that are already consuming that medium. And
so that's my Those are my two cents on newsletters
(10:35):
and why I think they're super valuable and some nuances
to pay attention to as you start to explore them.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yeah. Too many companies are thinking about the newsletter as
like we give company updates, we give It's almost like
you think that someone has to already be bought in
on your product or they know about you at this
deep level before they would subscribe. You can be premise
heavy to get somebody's email address if you're going to
(11:02):
deliver value in the inbox week after week, or you're
gonna show up with something that they would otherwise have
to go search out on their own, and instead it's
just gonna pop up in their inbox. People will subscribe
to that, and it's a better way. In fact, a
lot of companies should just be thinking about let's name
it something interesting as well, and then say that this
(11:23):
is somewhere in the body, just like you would have
a midroll ad for a podcast. This is this This
newsletter is sponsored by your company. That's a very easy
way to get your logo into something where the content
is clearly for the end reader, but your logo is
still somehow in it. And we've been even tinkering with
(11:43):
that with B to B growth, using language like this
is brought to you by Sweetfish, instead of thinking about
like our logo just being like plopped on something and
it looking like this whole thing is a brand, a
brand play. You really want to think about how you're
differentiating your media and allowing someone to stomach your media
(12:05):
and not feel like it's a force to add. So
that's huge with newsletters is getting out of your head
that this is kind of an update and instead you
really could go all the way to the other end
where you could say, eventually, this is going to make
us money. If we're good enough at newsletters, people will
want to pay to sponsor us, and that is a
(12:25):
completely different approach. I think we've spent a lot of
time here on newsletters, James, Do you want to mention
anything else here or take us to number three?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, I the two formats that I've been really liking
a lot lately are curated industry news. So just looking
at what other people on what people are on Twitter
are talking about other creators, media publications, and then combine
those news stories with your commentary. Doesn't need to even
be long, just like take two or three stories and
(12:57):
combine it with your two cents a sentence or two
on why you think this is relevant or not relevant.
Another newsletter that's been hitting my inbox that I've been
really liking is from Corey Quinn, and his emails are
just very short. They could honestly be tweets like now
that you can do like a two utter and eighty
character tweet. I legitimately think every single one of his
emails could be a tweet. And the value per word
(13:20):
in his newsletter is extremely high. I know that when
he hits my inbox, it's not going to take me
three minutes to read it. I can read it in
thirty seconds, and so I tend to. I find myself
opening his emails a lot more. So just be thinking
about that. When it comes to newsletters. I think it's
very easy to just think it needs to be super long,
(13:40):
or it needs to be a company update. Think think engagement.
How can we actually engage the person on the other
end and give them something they want as opposed to
being company first and pushing our narrative or our agenda
down their throat. And I think if your mindset's there,
you're probably gonna get a lot better results with your newsletter.
(14:04):
So third on our list, number three top of funnel
marketing tactic is original research. We are big fans of this.
We've done this before on B to B Growth. We're
about to do our next big original research project project
on the state of video podcasts. The reason I like
original research so much is because it is an engine
(14:26):
for true insights, and insights are the name of the
game for building trust and authority in B to B land.
If you do not actually have something of substance to say,
nobody's going to listen to you. And so original research
is how you develop those insights, asking your market, figuring
out an angle to ask your market something that you
(14:49):
know a lot of people in that market are going
to be interested in learning. And so this is you know,
original research is a mechanism to create mountains of social
YouTube podcast content, so fueling other types of top of
funnel content for you. It can all come from original research.
It also allows you to build really strategic relationships with prospects,
(15:12):
with influencers. I wrote a book called content based Networking.
Original research allows you to do content based networking, building
relationships through content collaboration by collaborating with them on a
report like this. So we're big fans of original research.
What are your thoughts here, Benji, Well, I'll rattle off.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
A few ideas just to give people some context, because
there's different ways of doing and presenting original research. So
you could do this. We see it as an annual report,
so like the state of e commerce in twenty twenty four,
or it's some sort of benchmark study digital marketing benchmarks
for B to B companies. You could do something more
along the lines I drotted down, like customer insight surveys,
(15:55):
so this would come more into like, you know, consumer
preferences in online shopping. So you already have some level
of insight and you've repurposed it into something people can
download a market research report, which would be like emerging
technologies happening in fintech, and you have just all this
research that you've compiled. That again, someone could go out
(16:17):
and do, but you've taken the time to do. People
are going to come to you for that. What I
The last example here is a white paper positioned more
as original research. I think it's we think of white
papers and B to B and you tend to only
like want to go to sleep. But the impact of
AI on customer service, if you position it that way,
(16:39):
even though it's technically a white paper, the thought process there,
especially using a buzzword like AI right now, people will
be interested, they will click, they will give you their
email to download that asset. So with original research, to me,
the opportunity that we don't talk enough about is what
you mentioned before, repurposing what you find in the original
(17:02):
research and giving that those stats or that data to
individuals on your team to share and expand on on
social because you now have a proof point for individual
profiles to share, and then they can double down by
sharing a specific story that they can add. But so
often what happens with these tools is we only use
(17:25):
it as lead gen. We only want people's email, So
we feel like if it's going to live on a
site somewhere and if it's getting email address is awesome.
If it's not, it's a failure. You haven't thoughts through
all the other ways your team could be using this,
and that to me is the value in original research
is if you're going to take the time to make
(17:45):
pillar content like that, what are the spokes of that
that reach people on your team? That are you aren't
even gonna be able to get the ROI fully understood
because you probably won't be able to track all the
ways people can use individual pieces of that research and
the learnings from doing the hard work of something like this.
(18:06):
So this is by far the hardest one on the list,
but if you do it correctly, it positions you as
a leader and it gives you a type of content
you could literally come back to every year. I mentioned
the state of e commerce twenty twenty four. Well guess
what twenty twenty five is coming. So now you have
this state of e commerce at twenty twenty five. You
(18:26):
do enough of these, and there's plenty of B to
B companies that are in different niches that do this
type of thing, and others in the space start to
turn and look and say, oh, when that comes out,
we'll create content about their data points. So now you again,
you're not gonna be able to track that necessarily, but
you sure as hell while other people making podcasts and
(18:49):
posts about data that you had so original research. In
my opinion, James hardest lift, but you can see so
much potential return and you will be looked at in
a much different way when you can back up your
talking points with data. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Two big brands that I've seen do this really well. One, Wistia,
does a state of Video report every year, and then
HubSpot does a State of Marketing. And so if you
want to look at some examples of brands that are
doing this really really well, go and go and just
google Wistia's State of Video or HubSpot State of Marketing
and you can go check those out. So this this
(19:25):
fourth one on the list, Benji, number four, we got
to talk about it because meta, we're doing it right now.
Number four is video podcast. So give us your thoughts
on why a video podcast is one of our top
four top of funnel marketing tactics.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Well like original research in some ways, but without as
heavy of a lift. You can put video podcasts into
these other spaces. So when James and I are recording
this video podcast right now, you're gonna be able to
watch us on YouTube. You're gonna be able to listen
to a on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We're going to
be able to cut those clips into social posts. James
(20:05):
and I are actively having to think about original thoughts
that each of us have and share them. So now
we also have learnings both for our team that are
well articulated and we can share internally but also externally.
We can share this content with people who have specific
questions about our niche who are trying to learn media,
so we have personality led brand. By running a video podcast,
(20:28):
we are able to facilitate actual, good social content on
a regular basis because we release this at a cadence
that's easy to facilitate for us once once a week.
In the past, we've run up to a daily show,
So you can do video podcasts at different cadences, but
there's just so much that a video podcast allows you
(20:48):
to do that. I think it's one of the easiest
ways to get a bulk amount of content, quality content
from subject matter experts on your team and make it
personality led. That to me, puts you right at the
top of the funnel. If you do this right, the
video podcast and your social media starts to play really,
(21:12):
really nicely together. And that's that's kind of the first
thing that I would mention, but anything that you want.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
One of the ways to do that, I think is
through segmentation. So really thinking about proper segments for your
show and making sure that in the segments that we
that you build out, you are optimizing for that personality
to come out. And so just like Saturday Night Live
(21:40):
has different segments. They've got the comedy set that the
host always comes out first and does like a an
opening act, and then they go into the different skits,
and then they always have the news desk segment, and
then so think about that for your show. What are two, three,
four segments that you want to have for your show?
But Benji, what are some other elements that in your
(22:03):
mind make a video podcast successful? Specifically for top of funnel.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I think what we need to actually think about is
what doesn't work, especially in business, because we've seen a
lot of bad examples, So what we know doesn't work
when it comes to video podcasting in business is trying
to tie too closely your business to the show. So
you have to come up to the top of the
(22:29):
funnel and think about the people that are consuming content
to get better at their job or to be entertained.
And you have to think about the fact that you
are competing for time in people's schedule, so your content
can't be in any way and in video podcasts. In
my opinion, James, you can push back on this, but
(22:51):
I really think you have to be very very careful
not to make it too bottom of funnel, and for
most businesses that that's the temptation with their show. So
if you want a successful video podcast, you've got to
think for people that do not know our brand, that
are trying to get better at their job, how can
(23:12):
we create content that they would love to consume. We've
used the language their their favorite corner of the Internet.
I like that phrasing and that terminology. When you start
to think in that way and you develop language around that,
content types around that, segments to your point, James, that's
when you'll start to see a show win. And then
I also think being very like intentional about what platform
(23:39):
you're creating for. So if you're you know you're going
to repurpose your podcast, but you're primarily going to care
about Apple podcasts and Spotify for co hosted commentary, Like
that's a different approach than a actual full on like
this is a video podcast that we're thinking YouTube first,
that like where you need to record that content, how
it needs to be done. It's just a different mindset
(24:02):
to take in. So for a long time in business,
podcasting was like this cool. Ah, yeah, it seems like
a lot of people are podcasting. Now the bar has
been raised. You want to produce professional quality podcasts, and
you want to be able to do that in a
way that's repeatable. And I think that's it. That's where
my mind goes.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
So when you think about measuring the effectiveness of a
video podcast, you mentioned like YouTube first. Are those effectiveness
metrics in your mind exclusive to YouTube or or do
they expand even wider because of all the ways you
can repurpose a video podcast.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Yeah, if you're in a business a business podcast, you
definitely want to be looking at metrics on LinkedIn, So
I would I would not only be looking at YouTube,
but on YouTube, you're gonna look at click through rate, right,
You're definitely thinking about your titles and your thumbnails. You're
thinking about the average view duration, average view percent on
each video and really shooting for a number over twenty
(25:04):
five percent. You want people to be consuming your content,
so you're checking that stat. But the thing that I've
been doing, James, is I've been looking at micro videos
on personal LinkedIn profiles and measuring and accounting for all
the number of comments and the amount of engagement that's happening, likes, shares,
(25:25):
whatever on individual posts from a personal profile. That is
so overlooked for most businesses if they are counting, they're
thinking about their corporate page and they might be measuring
that engagement, but a lot of people are not doing that.
The trickle down effect from having a quality video podcast
is not just the full length video views, it's all
(25:47):
the other things that come from that. So you definitely
want to ensure that you're measuring in some way those
types of stats. You can actually there's several websites that
do this, but they'll all so measure your engagement rate
on these platforms, so like on an Instagram, LinkedIn is
doesn't play as nicely with engagement rate metrics. But that's
(26:08):
another way to also be monitoring your social channels and
the clips you're getting from your video podcast is to
look at the engagement rate across these different platforms. So
I would be measuring that as well. What did I
miss there anything as far as what you'd measured.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
So when now I was thinking about this, I was
thinking average time consumed per episode on Apple podcasts that
in the Apple podcast back end, it tells you what
percentage of each episode was, what the average consumption was.
I think that's I think that's interesting to look at
what's what I like about video video first approach and
(26:43):
video podcast. You're obviously optimizing for YouTube, but by optimizing
for YouTube and average view percentage, you're actually creating a
better audio product too. So even though you're ripping the
audio and you're you're running it to Spotify and Apple,
like on Spotify, you might even put the video there too.
It's you're going to see that tick up in terms
(27:05):
of average consumption on those platforms as well. And another
one that I thought about was number of ratings on
Spotify and Apple. Those are good credibility indicators. If you
go to a show and see the show's got fifty
fifty five star ratings versus a show that's got one
that's to a new listener, that can be the difference
(27:27):
between someone wanting to check out the first episode and
someone going, Eh, they haven't been doing this long enough,
or they're obviously nobody else knows about this show, so
it's probably not that good. So there's some subtle things
there that I think looking at number of ratings, But
other than that, I mean, I think you nailed it.
I think CTR and YouTube thumbnails is huge. We shoot
for four percent or higher. I've actually seen some people
(27:49):
say that it needs to be closer to ten percent,
so we need to have a conversation internally of four
percent really is the right number, but average view percentage huge.
You already talked about that. We actually go for forty
percent on our scripted video essays, shooting from a minimum
of twenty five percent on episodes like this, a more
traditional video podcast. I put number of views, likes, and
non AI comments on social shorts. I'm just getting overrun
(28:13):
with AI bots commenting on my stuff, and that is
obviously not an indicator that you're creating super engaging stuff.
It's just that you've somebody you're on, somebody the radar
who's using AI to leave a bunch of comments and
they're meaningless. So yeah, but I think you nailed it there.
So that's it, folks. So our four favorite top of
(28:34):
funnel marketing tactics to recap. We've got number one social
media duh, Number two newsletter, three, original research, Number four
video podcast. What you are watching right now? If you
have questions about how to get started with any of
these DM either bingji r I on LinkedIn, we'd love
to talk more about this. We talk about this all
(28:57):
day anyway, So you asking us a question would I
promise you make our heart smile. That being said, we
are out
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