#85: A Message for B2B Marketers - Hang In There

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike, and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more.

This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Demandwell. Building an effective SEO keyword strategy is especially challenging for B2B SaaS marketers, since the highest intent terms that we have often have low search volumes. And don't even get me started on how hard it is to do this with SEO if you're taking a category creation approach. If you go after the right keywords, though, your SEO can drive demand, but it's a delicate balance of relevance, intent, competition, and being able to listen to your market as an Exit 5 listener. Here's some help with your SEO you can schedule a keyword feasibility assessment to determine if your market, category and audience have the search volume and intent required for SEO to be a successful channel for your business. Schedule your free assessment right now@demandwell.com keywords that's demandwell.com keywords and get yourself some SEO help. You don't have to do this alone.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit. Exit. Exit.

Hey everybody, it's me, Dave, your loyal podcast host here at the Exit 5 podcast. Just thought I would do a little different. Little short episode. Just want to share something that I wrote earlier in the week because one of the cool things about running Exit 5 is that every week I'm talking to thousands of, probably not thousands, hundreds of marketers, messages, comments, emails, watching what's happening in the community, conversations. And one of the things that I've shared recently is that I am noticing more people than ever working in marketing, at least in my career last 10 years, that are more stressed out, burnt out, frustrated with work and than ever. One of the early signs of that was seeing the rise of anonymous questions in the community and a trend of them kind of going up over the last three months, but also more anonymous questions with people venting about work, ranting about their boss, about their company, et cetera. And I just want to read something that I wrote just to maybe if this is you, give you a shift in a reframe, let me. You know, I'm the marketer, I'm a marketer. I can always try to reposition and reframe things. And so I wrote something earlier in the week that I shared in our newsletter, but in case you missed it, I just thought I would read it here. And the subject was hang in there. Here's what I wrote between Exit 5 and some companies that I'm involved with. I can tell you that right now stress and burnout in marketing is higher than I've ever noticed in my career so far, at least for the last 10 years. And it makes sense as to why the economy is slumping. That leads to fewer companies wanting to spend. Marketing gets cut in all different areas. Our friends and colleagues are being laid off and we're being asked to do more with less. And we're stressed, burned out and questioning what we're doing and revisiting our career paths almost across the board. This is the case right now, with the exception of AI companies, which I joke about. You want to grow faster? Go quit your job and join an AI company. Most B2B SaaS companies are having a tough go of it right now, but maybe there's an opportunity for you to learn something new and acquire new skills during this time. So zoom out and look at your career. Are you going to be working at this one company, this one job that you're in right now for the rest of your life? Probably not. Most of you that are listening to this podcast are from a different generation. I've grown up working in tech and in marketing, and I worked at about five companies in eight years. First, my parents worked at the same company for 40 years. But if you're listening to this podcast, my guess is you're in a field where you're going to jump around. You're not going to work at this one company forever. So you got to zoom out. And even if things are not going great at your company and in your job right now, is it possible that you can maybe take a longer term view and see what you can be learning right now? Can you think of it as if you're being paid? Hopefully you're still being paid. You're being paid by your company to acquire new skills. I know we're told not to be selfish, not to think of ourselves, but this is a moment where you kind of have to do that. So take the money that you're getting from your company and think of it as an opportunity to be paid to acquire new skills. Here's an example. Maybe you've never done a rebrand before, but now you're being asked to do it and you were before frustrated because your company's asking you to do it on a shoestring budget, but maybe can you flip that and see it as a positive and say, all right, you know what, I got to figure out how to get this done with no budget and I've never done a rebrand before. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to add this to my resume and my list of experiences for later. Maybe you have to sell to a new ICP and a new customer that you don't have any experience marketing to.

Great.

Maybe now you can add another layer to your depths as a writer and a content creator, or just as a problem solver. Hey, I don't know anything about this industry. I got to go figure it out. Maybe your boss is an absolute pain in the butt, but the CEO is great and the company's in a great market and you like the industry. And so even though you go on to go work for somebody else, maybe you can kind of just take it on the chin right now, Learn from others around you in the company and in your industry and just kind of ignore that pain in the ass boss for a bit. So take a minute. I know it's hard to do it, but just take a minute, zoom out. Try to see your career 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the road and look at this moment in time and think of the next 6 to 12 months while we ride this out. Hopefully 6 to 12 months and see it as a skills acquisition period and see where it takes you and see what you can learn. So continue to work in your current job, but see it as if they're paying you for your development and maybe that can change how you think about your day to day and maybe just will give you a different frame to think about your job for the time being, especially if you're in a company right now where growth has slowed. So hang in there. All right? I hope that message resonates with you. And also just a quick plug. If you have not joined our Exit 5 community, we're back, we're open, we're taking members again. It's been growing like crazy. I'm getting so many messages lately about the new community. It's awesome. We made the switch off of Facebook into our own web and mobile app. You can come and sign up right now@exit5.com and if you're listening to this and you're not a member, it really is risk free. We have a seven day free trial now, gets you full access to the community and all the content in there. So you can sign up, check it out, get the seven day free trial and decide that this is not for me. Or maybe stick around after the trial and then there's an option to pay monthly or annually. But I think when you hop in there right away, especially if you work in B2B marketing right now, you will see why there are thousands of members and why in my opinion, as I keep saying, I'm going to put this on a billboard as according to Dave, that's me, this is the number one community to be in for B2B marketers who thanks for continuing to listen to the Exit 5 podcast. It's been about 60, 70 weeks in a row we've put this podcast out and now I'm really starting to see the growth and see the response. So it's also just a message to anybody that's out there creating content. It takes time, consistency and commitment matter a lot. And that's why we're here right now with the Exit 5 podcast. So enjoy your day, enjoy your week, whatever you're doing, go to exit5.com and sign up for our community. If you're not already seven day free trial, I'm in there. Send me a message.

Bye.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit 5 podcast.

If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates.

Plus we have a community.

A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community.

We have a job board.

We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day.

So check it out.

Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost.

All you got to do is just.

Upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch.

Today's episode is brought to you by ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift, at Privy and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved.

A lot and they're not actually just.

An SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors. Understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks, and you can even understand how much or your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research24.7 site monitoring, real time analyt, backlink tracking, brand mentions.

You name it, you can do it.

All in one place. With Ahrefs. It's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself, one of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool, which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus, um, you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you got to go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today. Go check them out. Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2, half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's gonna be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing. And that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next doll marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026.

It's not a sales pitch from them.

But this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap, and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.com officehours that's paramark.com office hours.