Building a B2B Marketing Strategy That Will Actually Work

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.

Hey, what's up? This is Dave Gerhart and you're listening to DGMG Radio. I want to give you a really simple framework to think about marketing, especially this time of year. A lot of people are doing planning and it's really three things. It's goals, strategy, and then tactics. I think I've fallen victim to this. I see a lot of people in the group ask questions about it. A lot of people email me directly. And there's literally an infinite number of things you can do in marketing. But remember that ultimately the goal of marketing is to drive sales or to make sales easier. And so for me, regardless of what you're doing, especially this time of year, if you're doing planning, it starts with goal, right? What's the goal of marketing? And if you don't know that question, you can't answer that in a vacuum you can't answer that just in the marketing room. Marketing has to have a fundamental purpose inside of the business. So what is the goal of marketing? This could be for annual planning or it can be for a campaign that you're running right now. Hey, what's the goal of this thing? So first is what's the business goal or goals that we want to drive? For example, we need to generate $1 million in new pipeline in Q1. Great. But this is where there's so much nuance in B2B marketing and marketing in general. That's not enough to answer the question because how are you going to actually go and generate that pipeline? Well, that's where it comes down to this is the strategy. So is your strategy going to be you have a named account list, you have 100 huge accounts that you're going after, or do you have more of a free tool and you want to get everybody into your freemium funnel and you want to get thousands of trialers? That's where, that's the assets strategy. That's where the strategy is going to vary based on the goal. And so this is why marketing, like has to have a seat at the table with the CEO, with the chief Product officer, with whoever else. Because fundamentally, you can't know what to do in marketing unless you know what the company strategy is. And so if you are at a very enterprise focused company where you're trying to only get a hundred customers this year, but each customer is going to spend a million dollars, that's a much different marketing strategy than we want it. Like hello bar, a free, you know, tool that you put on your website. It's a much different marketing strategy. So first is goals, then is strategy, then comes the tactics. How are you going to actually do that? So I think this is the perfect time of year. Whether you're doing planning or you just want to revisit things to go and question what is the company goal? What, what is our marketing strategy and what, what's a set of tactics going to be together? Foreign.

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 research. 24. 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, 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 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 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to 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 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 dollar. They use 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 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 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.