081. Niche Channels for B2B: Where You Can Show Up Beyond LinkedIn

Hello, welcome back to Bondefy's DemandGen Studio, where we discuss different topics that help B2B teams grow and improve. So today we're going to be talking about some niche channels for B2B and what platforms you can explore beyond LinkedIn. As a B2B company. So LinkedIn has kind of become the default social platform for B2B, but with that can come saturation and a lot of dependency on an algorithm that you don't control if that's your only channel. So to discuss this topic, I'm joined by Emilio Garcia. As always, welcome. Thanks for joining us this morning.

Hey Miranda, thank you for inviting me as always.

Yeah, awesome. So yeah, to get started, I would say that LinkedIn is definitely still the go-to default channel for B2B for social platforms. But because of that, I think depending on your company and your industry, it can become a crowded space and it can be oversaturated for certain companies in certain industries. So do you have any starting thoughts about LinkedIn kind of being the go-to channel for B2B? And then also if there's any risks that our listeners should keep in mind for relying too heavily on one single platform?

Yeah, I want to— that's a great question. I want to highlight 3 big reasons why B2B brands rely on LinkedIn to begin with. The bigger one is, and it's not just related to social media, is that most companies that are trying to go to market that do not have established presence or relationship with their ICP, they don't have the relationship with their company, with their, the companies that they work with to have a more direct connection. Let's say email, right? If you're established brand, already have a lot of customers, you have already a channel that will probably work very well, which is the channels that clients and prospects have provided for you for direct communication. So you jump into social media to start establishing that reputation and rent or draw from established audiences in other places. Now, why LinkedIn versus other platforms? I think it's a double fold. The first one is that for a lot of brands and companies, LinkedIn is a place where their buyers spend time. Not for every company, right? But for a lot of them, LinkedIn is actually a place where their buyers, potential buyers, spend time online. And so a big principle that we discuss in this and other episodes is that when you're thinking about where to advertise or have some presence, you gotta think about where your buyers are spending spend time and how much time do they spend there. But the other big one, I think, is because it is easier to both segment or target and prove that you're having engagement with your ideal buyer, ideal buyer client, or ideal client profile with your buyers compared to other platforms. That's the only pitfall, however, that I want to highlight, that you can be too dependent on a platform just because it's easier Right. It's natively easier to target or is easier to prove that you're engaging with the target audience that you want to address. So that's what I recommend people to start thinking broadly, because as long as you have a decent enough way of either targeting or proving correlation, obviously LinkedIn is not the only place. And I will argue that for some categories, it's probably not the place where your buyers are spending the most time. Right. Right. Or things like that. So that's what I think you should be thinking about broadly about LinkedIn or about other social media platforms. And the last caveat, super important as well, is that, you know, Miranda, we talked about this all the time. We are not a great example as a company because as an agency, you want to know a lot about all the potential places where our clients might spend time digitally. But for A brand that is not an agency, the best strategy is to start with a channel that has the highest probability of success and really go deep on that one until you get some traction and success, rather than starting with 4 or 5 of them at the same time, because the price of doing that will be that your content will be generic and/or very standard across the platforms instead of being specific. To the platform they are targeting, you will not have the resources. So the other big caveat is, yeah, I think we should talk about definitely about other niches, other places where you can invest, but definitely only after you have dominated one. If in this case is LinkedIn and you have explored all the things and you have saturated your presence there, you have already some traction and you want to change your focus to other ideas. Then these channels that we're going to talk about make total sense.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like what our topic from last month of doing the pillar content framework. Once you have your process and your engine for creating content dialed in, you, you can create content consistently in one channel, then that's when you can branch out and start exploring additional channels. So when we say niche channels, what are we actually talking about? Because I think some people might hear that and assume that we're talking about new platforms, but that's not necessarily the case. It's more about, like you said, discovering where your audience already exists and places that it's not— oh, that isn't overcrowded, and starting to think outside the box of how you can show up in that space. One example that I would think of, of a niche channel depending on your business, might be like a specific industry publication or newsletter, and that definitely would not be an example of a new platform. In fact, it's probably one of the more traditional outlets. So what would you define or consider to be more niche channels for B2B? Yes.

I love the question because you have brought another important, important thing that gets missed, especially in B2B. And I'm the first person to be faulty of that, which is our default mode when we want to influence our audience is to think about places where we can talk to them directly, the company to the buyer. And so if you think about LinkedIn, not from groups, but actually advertising or content that you create on your company page, That's pretty much what you're trying to accomplish. But the other big way to influence your buyers is through other organizations or individuals that influence them as well, right? The more traditional sponsorship or being where others congregate, even if it's tangent to or related slightly to what you do, is, has been super successful across time. And there's a version of that on the digital world, right? If these other platforms that we're gonna talk about, they might be sources of influence because the topics that they cover, the groups or communities that they create might be something that put together your crowd. Instead of saying, let me think about healthcare and companies of this side, what if you shifted and say, What are the organizations, groups, communities that my audience might be paying attention to? And without knowing specifically what industry or function an individual has on that niche platform, I can make a good assumption that a lot of my potential buyers will be there. And obviously we're gonna talk about examples, but I think it's a little bit of what you're trying to say there with magazines, right? Mm-hmm. Magazines. Publishers will not tell you, oh yeah, I have this database that I can share with you. That's not necessarily the point. The point is that the topic of the magazine or industrial publication aggregates a certain kind of, be a person that matches your buyer.

And we talk a lot about using your content and content creation to build trust. And that, that's an easy way to like, you're almost attaching yourself to the trust that's been— the, like, authority that's built with the platform. Like, the, you know, the magazine— the, the authority that the magazine has in the space. You're able to attach your brand to that authority, and it has almost, like, built-in trust with the reader.

Yes.

Um, all right, so let's get into some of the kind of like examples of channels that might be still be considered niche for B2B. Um, the first idea that I wanted to talk to you about is Reddit, or, uh, I think it's called Quora. Is that how you pronounce it? Um, but kind of the more like forum-based channels. I have a couple of B2B Teams don't consider these as like an option for platforms to advertise on because I think a big thing of it is just the intent of the user feels a lot different on those platforms than other. And maybe you wouldn't consider it fully a social media platform, but the intent of the user feels more like they're, it's a problem. Driven environment, like they're there to find an answer or solve a problem rather than consume content. So what are your thoughts on, like, Reddit for B2B advertising? And then also, how would you recommend a company show up in that kind of environment?

Yeah, it's a great question because Reddit and Quora they live in between what we call capturing intent and being present when you have context, right? As some of our listeners know, we are big on distinguishing efforts on advertising between platforms where you can capture high intent and platforms where you can be there because the context is great, but you have no idea about intent. I think that part of what makes Quora and Reddit niche is the fact that they're a little bit of a blend between the two. And you said it very well, Miranda. They are not, you know, they are not context enough that you can identify the users or the people that belong to those platforms concretely because some of them, especially on Reddit, are anonymous, right? The user handler has no information about the person sometimes. And there's a lot of people that spend time on Reddit but never contribute and they never connect with their, with their network. Right. They're just, what gets them together is the topic, not the network itself. But at the same time, they're not fully intent because it's not that, it's not, it doesn't happen that someone is actually going to Reddit and Quora and typing a keyword looking for something at the moment. They're looking for an answer to something. And, and however, the component that makes them social is that those answers have been sourced from other users that are contributing and more importantly than not, get voted up or down depending on the quality, what the community judges is a quality answer. So that curation I think makes them very special. So they are definitely something in between. And just like with other platforms, you can approach them from the organic side or from the non-paid side, and you can approach them from the advertising side. And so just like with LinkedIn or with Google, where your approach on the organic is very different from your approach on paid, Reddit and Quora has different ways of approaching them depending on how do you want to go there.

Hmm. What does the organic route look like for a business on Reddit?

Yeah, again, here I'm going to talk with a lot of— this is not something that we specialize or focus on, right? I will— my experience here more as a user, definitely from the organic side, especially on Reddit, authenticity is the most, especially because technically you're an anonymous person and just you are aggregating value by the quality of your answers. So companies that think I'm going to put there my user as the company brand and I'm just going in and throw some links as answers to our website because we think that will be the answer that people will want, will get either banned or demoted, right? And definitely not get the attraction that they imagine. And truly, you have to be part of the community in the way of contributing value by the quality of your answers. It's a very long game and sometimes do not necessarily translate into impact right away. On the organic side, if you're going to do it as the brand or some employees are going to become members of the community contributing value from time to time, sprinkling a little bit about what your solution or product does, that might be at play, but definitely being super salesy there is punished quite quickly.

Mm-hmm. And then on the paid side of things, would you say that a platform like that, the, the type of ad that you're doing on that kind of platform is more similar to brand awareness display type ad? And then the audience you're choosing for that is, you can almost think of the different forums you're choosing to show it up on is almost like keywords on Google where you're choosing a selection of topics?

I'll say that is a, I will consider an improved version of display advertising based on the criteria that you can click on display, right? If you think about display, big chunks of the challenges are you have little control over the websites that you actually show up. A lot of them are spammy or actual frauds. You, in theory, you can know in advance the categories that you will show up, right? So you can advertise based on topic, you can advertise based on the content itself of the site, or on the interest of the person that is visiting multiple websites. Well, this person likes photography. It doesn't matter what site in particular he visits, he's been visiting some of them that way. So think about display, but the only difference is that you are constrained to that platform, but at the same time, it's very transparent in terms of, okay, if people is interested in accounting, they will be investing time on the accounting subreddit, asking questions or answering them. And so I have a pool of people that are lumped together around a topic in ways that even for display will be challenging to do. Because that's the other part. You can go to that subreddit or that topic on Quora and actually see the kinds of questions and answers that are being created and get a very good sense of what is the topic, right? Is this, is this relevant to my brand? And so that's the part that is, as you're saying, a mix of intent and context because there's a mild intent and there's some diffuse context and that's the opportunity.

Yeah. And it also seems like that's another thing that a B2B team would be evaluating of is, are the queries more user answering questions for you as a, as an individual person rather than a business in a business context? Yeah. So then the other platform that I wanted to touch base on was YouTube, which is a very, a huge, massive, well-known platform, but I feel like it's sometimes still underutilized for B2B. Why do you think that is?

I think YouTube is a mostly misunderstood platform. To begin with, it's technically classified as a social media platform. Which is funny because when you classify it that way, it is the most popular social media platform in the world, right? Is what you think the most social, the most popular social media platform is Facebook. If you put YouTube there, it isn't the, for most. And what I mean by that, let me correct this part. Maybe I'm wrong about the whole world. What I mean is that when you go to a tool like let's say SparkToro that we constantly talked about, a tool that allows you to evaluate where your audience is spending time based on their characteristics, YouTube shows up consistently on, on place number 1. And globally, for a lot of countries, it is technically the social media platform that is the most popular. So that's the first part that is missed from most people. That is, if you consider a social media platform, it's even more popular than Facebook. But the second thing that is sometimes goes under the radar is that if you say that is a search engine, which is also a search engine, it's the second largest one, right? Is Google search, and the second largest search engine is YouTube. Is the second largest, the place where, or where a lot of people are searching for videos. But again, it is this weird combination that it's a social media platform where you can actually search, and a lot of people search content. Or you can think that is a video search engine where a lot of people actually get videos on a, on a suggestion or algorithm basis, similar to what TikTok and your regular reels do. So this combination is super powerful because you have both the ability to target people based on what they're searching. Again, very mild intent. Because nobody's searching there for a purchase necessarily right away. Sometimes for some categories, actually, that's what happens. People are looking for the products there to get reviews, to understand how they work. But also at the same time, it's a great place where if you have a user that is spending time there and consuming content, it gets profiled and you can leverage that either by the type of content that they consume or by the types of channels or videos that you believe or have research on that your buyers consume.

Yeah. It also has the other aspect of similar to, um, like an option you have on LinkedIn where you can choose like a, either a list or an audience of like search terms from Google. And where you're focusing more on like who the audience is and then show up on any video that person is watching. The— but the tricky thing is, I feel like with YouTube is the, the behavior of the users is different from a lot of social media platforms where I would— I feel like in my experience, the majority of YouTube Users aren't logged in there. It's not like a profile that you build and curate like a normal social media platform is. So they're like not yet logged in, using it as a guest. And so when you're using it that way, it is much more of a search engine where you're watching the topics that you're searching for rather than logging into your homepage where the algorithm has your suggestions of of videos to watch.

Yeah. And channels you're subscribed to and your search history. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it is true. In that sense, it is like a very dynamic and flexible TV, which is what people actually use it for. I see it with my kids, right?

Yeah.

It's exactly what you're saying. Most of the time they're not logged in and they're, they have this mix of discovering slash searching for, right? Some days they are into I wanna watch videos about this and they just search for one and they know that it will keep showing up short videos about something that you started with. And sometimes they're just, I wanna discover and to just watch whatever. So yeah, it's a very dynamic tool and you can slice it and it has the same challenge that I was describing with Reddit and Quora that the organic approach is not necessarily an typically is not the same as the advertising approach.

Yeah. So another one that's off of that in a similar vein that I wanted to talk about is connected TV advertising, which that is definitely more on the new emerging platform side of things. And I feel like it's starting to get more attention for B2B, any connected TV streaming platforms, Hulu, that kind of environment and it's traditionally more of a B2C strategy, but it's starting to shift into B2B. Do you see those type, that type of platform working for B2B companies?

Yeah, that change advertising on digital platforms for on video, like traditional TV has been such a massive change, right? Is the, TV, you know, it's a very recent phenomenon that actually digital is taking away a ton of advertising spend in even B2B companies as it does today. And B2C definitely is being shifting because if you go back 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, TV still was the number one channel on ad spend and the number one channel on effectiveness. Which is something that is missing the mix with all the attribution that we can put on digital. TV still was the most effective channel because even when you couldn't prove a lot of attribution, it's a very cost-effective way of reaching a ton of people very cheaply, right? It's just that the cost of entry, a minimum cost, is so high.

Right.

But if you can afford it, there's almost— there was almost nothing as inexpensive per impression or per people touch as TV. And so one thing that is interesting is that people will say TV is dwindling, disappearing. It's not. It's migrating, right? We all live it. What's happening, we spend less time on open TV and cable and where more and more people, even older generations, are adopting streaming, right? And so, and that streaming is becoming again, what I was saying is that streaming is not only your Netflix, your Hulu, your HBO, YouTube is a little bit of streaming as well because it can become something like that. That opportunity there is big for B2C for sure. But for B2B, especially if we can If we can remove this mind block of, oh, it's TV, so my buyer is just, it's a dad or a mom at the moment. It's not the VP of marketing or it's not right now the decision maker. That's the part that I think some B2B organizations will struggle for a little time until some other companies spearhead the fact that it really doesn't matter, right? As long as you have a good handle of— on the audience, even if it's through advertising on connected TV. And again, thinking about the other big unlock is that most people will think that streaming in general is consumed on the sofa of your living room, which is still true for a lot of scenarios, but technically you can watch it on your phone or your computer. And so that, that watcher, that streamer is not necessarily in front of a big TV as people might think, even if they're watching Netflix. It's definitely a niche. It's still, it is still a high barrier channel, right? Because obviously you have to think about the media itself as highly produced. Right? This is still video. There's some expectation of it being high quality and the little platforms or the few platforms that exist are still evolving. So the cost of entry is high. This is still more a manual process than the more established digital platforms.

Yeah, I would say the cost of entry is getting lower and lower for platforms like that because with the introduction of AI, just as a consumer watching it, I feel like a lot of the commercials that come up on streaming services are made by AI.

Or at least enhanced by it.

Yeah. Right.

And the other big unlock I think is, I think I've discussed this before, we haven't personally, we haven't directly used it as Boundify as an agency, but there are a handful of companies that focus on B2B for video ads on, on streaming services. One example is Mountain. So it matters because platforms that focus on B2B will have already that layer of targeting natively that you need if you don't have a strong first-party database of people that you want to target. Maybe we can put on the note shows there that there's some of these platforms that specifically target B2B.

I— one question that popped into my mind when you were talking about the— for connected TV, the person watching it might be a mom or a dad rather than the VP of Marketing at the moment. Because of that, would you say that connected TV is more on the brand side of the spectrum and that your goal is more to create familiarity with the brand name and start to build credibility?

Yeah, love it. Yes, yes. I'll say that that's the other big reason why it's a big blocker, because most people will think about digital advertising as a purely performance effort. And so they can't square, oh, it's digital, but it's not performance. So how is it supposed to, how is it supposed to deliver value? Because not all that you do on digital has to be performance. It can be branding. And so yes, I will think about connected TV mostly as a branding effort, but I'm completely sure, Miranda, that over time it will be able to prove performance. So you have more directed ads to taking action. I wouldn't delude people into thinking that will come from necessarily only the platform's guessing action. Rather, it will come from your own data. I was going to say the same thing for Reddit or for Quora. They have conversion campaigns, right? They have campaigns that are geared toward conversions. But I use this example all the time, right? Part of the reason these platforms can guess or find people that will convert is because they are also tracking users on your website. And so if that user on your website is visiting your site or engaging similar sites from competitors, or industries and they happen to be a user of your platform, then they have a higher chance of converting. And so if you only advertise, that will be the same if you say, well, I really want to focus on Reddit or Quora or connected TV on performance and you ignore brand, then you are shrinking your audience. Yeah, by definition. And I think one of the benefits of, of things like connected TV will be that you will be able to reach a very large set of fresh audiences that maybe you will struggle to reach in other platforms where you have to be more intentional about spending time with them compared to the way that we spend time on TV. Think about it is whatever you call TV nowadays, even if you just watch a TV show, you're, you're seated there almost an hour. A big chance of presenting some ads that rarely can be skipped. And if they are skipped, at least deliver the impact for the first 5 seconds. So that's what makes TV so powerful, that it's very hard to not see the impression.

So clearly there's a lot of options for platforms that you can explore.

A lot of niches.

Yeah. And so when you're assessing where to try and why to go into a certain platform, there's a few things that you can keep in mind. And Gabby and I touched on this a bit in our last episode, but what you really wanna do is step back and assess, number one, audience density. Like, where is my ICP actually spending time? Are they in this platform? Another one is content fit. So what format does my ICP prefer? Would they prefer to read, watch, or listen? And then off of that is scalability. Can I. Can I as a company realistically show up in that space with that content format consistently? Is it— am I able to create it and keep creating it? And then also, what level of intent exists in the channel? And are my competitors there? How much are my competitors already saturating the space? Are there any other recommendations you have for how listeners can assess what the right platform is for them?

No, I think you covered pretty much the way that I think. I love what you're saying because it's very similar to when people say what to do with your professional career, right? You have to find— I forgot what is the name of the term in Japanese, but it's what you like, what you're good at, what the world needs, and if there's people willing to pay for it. If you don't have the four, then you might have a hobby or a vocation or a mission, but it will not be something that will help your career. So content is very similar. It's exactly what you're saying, right? Is your audience gotta be there. The format gotta be, have to make sense to your company. Your users have to be comfortable consuming it. And so if you don't have those elements, you might struggle, but at the same time, be mindful that you will find a lot of people that will crush it on a specific format. Platform and audience because it's the best combination for their company. So you want to start with a thesis or an assumption, test, and if it's working for you, double down on it. And if not, then try another approach. But I think that recommendation that you described there is— it will give— it will get you 80% of the effort there.

Yeah. Awesome. All right. I think we covered everything. So hopefully this, this episode was interesting and helpful, and we will see you next time. Thanks so much for joining, Emilio.

Oh, as always, a pleasure, Amanda. Thank you.

Bye.