#107 - Anthony Kennada - AudiencePlus - Why Owned Media is Content Marketing 2.0

Sales, marketing, RevOps, and customer success. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview top revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale more effectively. Revenue Today is sponsored by RevGenius and RevRoom, and we're on a mission to build trusted spaces for curious revenue professionals who are collaborating on the future of B2B GTM. Hey everybody, really excited, uh, to welcome you back to Revenue Today. I have a very special guest today, multiple-time chief marketing officer for numerous unicorns. And now CEO of a soon-to-be unicorn, or maybe in a couple years, Audience+. Anthony Canada, nice to have you today.

Jared, thanks for having me on.

This is super exciting, like what you're building. You're one of a small handful of startups, like I'm above the moon excited for because you're really reimagining go-to-market. And one interesting thing that like, I know you have a pretty controversial take on content marketing and this is a big part of your MO. Help me understand what it is. Can you unpack that?

Yeah. So thanks for having me on. And you're right, content marketing traditionally as we've thought about it in the B2B context, has really been kind of focused on driving or creating content for an algorithm, creating content for Google to rank our blog posts. It didn't matter if it was anything that a human wanted to read, as long as the algorithm could pick it up, you know, have us rank on the first page of that key term, drive qualified traffic to the site, turn into inbound leads. This is the whole, you know, inbound kind of motion that we've been living in. But what we've sort of forgotten about is creating content for humans and maybe not, um, forgotten about, but we've certainly deprioritized it, um, in the name of driving better, more and better SEO. And the way people are consuming content today is fundamentally changing. They're listening to podcasts just like this one. They're watching, you know, short-form video clips in their LinkedIn feed. They're joining live streams with their favorite kind of creators or folks that they're, you know, following. So our job in marketing has to evolve. Do we need to do the SEO work? Yes, it's table stakes, but our ability to actually break through the noise and capture the attention of our audience, which is ultimately the biggest currency that we need to sort of unpack in this kind of new era that we're in, depends on our ability to create more editorial content in formats just like this one, podcasts, videos, live streams. Um, that make us much more relevant as a brand and help us kind of break through the noise pollution that, that exists in the content world today.

Yeah. How'd you come to this conclusion?

Yeah, a few ways. Um, you know, I, I'm not sort of a classically trained marketer. I got at Gainsight, I kind of got dropped into the head of marketing role and had to kind of figure it out from a first principles perspective. So I didn't come up in kind of the paid you know, world or whatever. So, you know, we did a lot of things on first principles based on just radically serving our audience. And for us, it was customer success professionals. And so we created content written to help them do their job. And it wasn't just us creating the content. We found members of our community and had them publish their content on our sort of blog at the time or our property. We hosted an event, uh, kind of counterculturally very early in our operations as a company, just to have more discussion around best practices versus our products and these types of things. So I think it was sort of a series of happy accidents. Um, but that kind of became my playbook in B2B, this idea of like building thought leadership, facilitating the exchange of best practices, helping serve people and using our channels and marketing to do that at scale. Isn't just like the right thing to do to help people in their jobs, but fundamentally it actually drives demand as well. It drives pipeline creation. It drives our ability to impact business. And yes, we have to do some of those kinds of tactics. And I think that I'm not saying like, forget about all of the other stuff, but from an 80/20 perspective, I put 80% of my time focused on actually scaling human connection and value creation and relationship building. Using our content efforts.

I love all of that. I, you know, what I'm finding today with this human-to-human push, which, you know, I don't know that it ever was around before SEO, right? Like, it's just, I think people were numb to it. So today we're getting to this point of human-to-human community is, is a big deal. Yeah. And community lives in a multitude of places, right? Right. It lives on social, it lives in Slack groups and Discord groups. It lives on Mighty Networks. It lives so many places.

Yeah.

The more human-to-human things get, uh, and, and in the process, more content's being created organically, right? Like it's not just like a start and finish podcast. That's pretty straightforward from a creation standpoint. A blog post is a bit more straightforward, um, from, from like a search standpoint and all of that. Uh, an event, sure, you could repurpose it if it's digital.

Yeah.

If it's in person, you could do that. But all these conversations are happening and they're content too.

Yeah.

And they're usable content. How can you best leverage them?

Yeah.

When they're not happening on audienceplus.com.

Yeah.

To your benefit.

Well, a lot of, to your point, like being where our audience is, is critical. Um, and so. being actively engaged in these, we refer to them as rented channels. So places where we're renting an algorithm in order to get access to our audience. So on LinkedIn, it could be on YouTube or Spotify or some of these content networks or even SEO, you know, to your first point from an SEO perspective, like that is still a space that our audience kind of occupies. So we have to be there and we have to have a presence and You know, be able to kind of contribute to the conversation, understand the context of the discussion, which could of course help feed, you know, the content creation process. I think what's sort of countercultural or kind of what we're proposing is new in this world is historically we've kind of interacted in these channels a bit kind of through a lens of like corporate marketing. Like, hey, we got to build our followership on our company page on LinkedIn. Hey, we need more Twitter followers. We need to like, You know, whatever. And that's good. Like, by no means is that like, from a community management perspective, like, not— I don't want to diminish the impact of that.

Although sometimes we don't really draw that correlation from another 10,000 followers to new business, right?

Exactly, exactly. And we try to, right, we try to infer it and say, okay, if we post X amount, that would turn into Y engagement, which would then translate into today, organic traffic to the site. Which is impossible to actually like fundamentally tie to a specific post on LinkedIn or something, but we aggregate it and we guess and we do our best. And I think that's a part of the challenge. And especially in this kind of macroeconomic climate we're living in where CFOs and FP&A folks are kind of holding our feet to the fire on marketing impact and the resources that we use to actually go and generate that impact. So that I think the new thing that we're saying is one, We need to like fundamentally understand how pipeline is generated and the cost that it takes to do it. We need to run more efficiently as a marketing team, less resource, but still have kind of a massive impact. And to do that, we can't just infer. We have to know. That's where I think the change is. And the new thing that I'm there, the inspiration I think for this new wave of marketing in B2B is actually ironically the consumer media industry. Because they think about those channels a lot less from a community management perspective, but integrated into their go-to-market. It's actually like a demand function for consumer media companies. And the way, the one way to think about it is they're sort of using short-form clips, like video clips or podcasts, kind of conversations just like this, kind of trimming down, you know, a quote or something interesting. And you put it in these rented channels with the intention of driving people to an owned property. They use this language of a subscription, right? Like we want to drive subscribers to our owned audience because if we do that, then we get access to that engagement data. And from that perspective, we can tell a much more clear story on how that engagement drives revenue. So that's where I think this change is. It's not that everything has to happen on your property. We have to have an active strategy in all of these rented channels, but it's no longer just about like vanity metrics, right? Of like driving followership or engagement. It's fundamentally about deplatforming that audience into an owned audience of subscribers.

Yeah. You know, it's so funny, the consumer media example, I think they're phenomenal at it and I agree, but I'm not sure they're like, and I'm thinking the old school ones. Are like super as tactical, like against goals as you think. They're just people that are really good at social media driving people. But I love looking at consumer media for B2B. It tends to happen no less than 3 years to 5 years before. Yeah,

like

there's a lag when I fully went in to B2B SaaS again. I had been running sales at a marketing agency prior, which was B2B2C, e-commerce marketing. I'm like, wait, there's really no influencers here? Like, what's happening? This is weird.

New paradigm for us.

What's that?

It's a brand new paradigm for us for sure. And, you know, I guess when I say consumer media, even though I think there are analogies to draw, I wouldn't think of like the, I don't know, NBCs of the world. I think about like the Morning Brews, the Barstools, the folks that are, you know, this sort of new wave of media. Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon's company, Liquid Death as a CPG business, the work that they're doing on the audience building side. So that's sort of, I think, the reference that worked. Yeah. Pointing to. Yeah.

You know what? I don't know how much you know about Liquid Death. What are they doing right?

Yes. That's—

I mean, this is a company with like a negative name, Liquid Death, not Liquid Life. I was joking around with the person in the, you know, downstairs, you know, about this awful branding. Mediocre at best. But they're a unicorn.

Yeah. Yeah. Multiple, uh, and they sell water,

right? They

sell the most commoditized product on planet Earth.

Yeah.

Period. Right. And when we're out here trying to sell, selling like marketing software, sales software, accounting software, or whatever, they're selling water and how they've been able to actually build that valuation is 1,000% on their ability to build an audience around that. that idea or the brand or whatever the community that they're sort of building. And for them, you're right. It's, you know, I don't want to say irreverent, but it's definitely like a thing. Like you have to want to like belong to that thing. But they've launched like merch around it. They create these like crazy video campaigns.

They're putting ad spend behind the merch that they launched, which is ironic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. They're definitely pushing it. There are a bunch of ad execs, I think, that actually started the company. Um, but what's genius about it though is like, there's this idea that they have or this point of view that Liquid Death has. And it's, again, I don't know what exactly, how to exactly describe it. It's death related, I guess, or just aggressive, like whatever. Um, but they've sort of pinned it against something that is almost the opposite of water, which I think to your point is like life giving, not death creating. And they're having fun from a humor perspective. And just, they're very kind of, don't take themselves too seriously. And through that, they've built this sort of cult following behind that brand. And so now when you're at the store, if you belong to that tribe, you know, and you see Liquid Death or Fiji, you're going to grab the Liquid Death again. And that's, I think, contributed to their success. So that's, I think, the lesson for B2B companies is, you know, again, your product can very much be commoditized. I think All SaaS products are on this path to commoditization at some point. But it's this idea of having a strong point of view, building an audience around that point of view, that sort of becomes the moat that you have around your company that goes so much bigger than just the bits and bytes that you're building on the product side.

Yeah. And what's interesting about Liquid Death, as I'm quickly bringing myself up to date with their marketing strategy, at least from their website, They don't have a ton of content that they're leveraging on their site. There's just hype, and I and I believe it's it's socially driven, which is kind of the antithesis of you know where your head's at, right? Because aren't you? I don't want to say picking a fight with paid social search, but like what's what? You know, what's relevant about owned media like today? And do you think the B2C companies are really— B2C,

yeah,

are doing as much as they can?

Yeah, I mean, I think it depends, by the way, on what page you're on. I mean, I think on liquiddeath.com, it's like a bunch of videos of their content campaigns. There's a merch kind of store there, and there's— you almost don't see any cans of water. You don't even talk about the product. It's all content and sort of quote unquote thought leadership. Um, and then there's this, this call to action to like sell your soul, I think is what they refer to it as, but join their community. And so sign up, subscribe, be a part of our owned audience is sort of the invitation there.

Mm-hmm.

So, um, I, I view that as 100% applicable to, to the B2B playbook. We're not doing enough of it today, but I think it's sort of the signal of, of kind of what's, what's next. You know, you mentioned sort of picking a fight with social and paid. Um, on the social side, again, the fight isn't necessarily that we should not do stuff on YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever. It's actually the opposite. We really should. It's more of this realization that the algorithms that are designed on these platforms are designed to throttle your reach based on interests of that network or platform and not your own. Our interests are actually misaligned. And so, for example, if I post a link to a blog post or an event invitation or a webinar or whatever on LinkedIn, I'll get, you know, a fraction of the impressions I would get if I played by the sort of algorithmic rules and wrote content in a certain way and kept people on property. So that there's sort of this just changing relationship with social and that we have to just acknowledge and play by the rules, but then also figure out how can we leverage those rules in our favor as a brand. In order to build that owned relationship with our audience. Paid, you know, again, we talk about efficiency in 2023, paid media, paid marketing is ultimately for almost every company, the largest line item in the marketing budget and the one that's the most scrutinized by finance and FP&A. And if we're being honest, as we sort of look at sort of the cohort of pipeline that's generated from paid media, It's not the cohort that has the highest conversion rate all the way through to revenue. It's good. We, you know, we can kind of buy the sort of top of funnel conversions through that channel. But if you look all the way through, it's things like brand and content and organic and website contact sales. Like those are the ones that ultimately are the ones that, um, have a higher propensity to convert to revenue. So that's causing a lot of folks to say, well, shoot, you know, what if we reoriented sort of a fraction of that paid spend towards brand or towards owned media? What would happen? Because the cost to serve on owned media is actually not that much. So what we're seeing is companies like Airbnb going on the record saying that's exactly what they did. They moved budget away from search marketing to owned media, and now they beat their earnings 3 quarters, I think, in a row. And they're contributing that sort of efficiency to why that's happening. So that's the learning I think is paid is great from an amplification channel in the right sort of context. It's a great way to distribute maybe some of your content on LinkedIn to specific target accounts or personas or whatever, but it sort of comes second to this bigger idea of building an owned content strategy, building an owned audience, because in that world you don't have to buy an audience or rent it from social. You can have a direct line of communication and distribution into that audience.

I hear you fully. Like, it's funny because Coming from the e-commerce world or B2B2C, paid was often the first part of go-to-market.

Yeah, totally.

You create a box in direct-to-consumer or B2B2C, like, you know, retail, the direct-to-consumer retail. There's a very clear line ROAS and you can give it an extra month to see what falls in. With B2B, you don't have that luxury at all. Like, I remember hearing, I think it was, uh, in a metadata ad, they're like, we analyzed $64 million in ad spend the last year. What we realized was it generated $38 million in revenue. It did that. I'm like, did you just say a number less than your spend? That's a negative. And, and, and I get that there's other things, and sure, there's a 90-day deal cycle and an ACV of this that, that's going to require more. But at the end of the day, who the F cares? Like, like you, you, you would've done better, I think, if you kept it in your pocket. Is, is the content marketer the most important hire today?

Certainly for an early stage company. I mean, it's always, I think it's always been sort of a single digit hire in marketing. You have somebody that's creating content, somebody that's distributing it usually are the first 2 roles kind of coming into that team. So I think absolutely it is. Um, the, the question is, how are you leveraging your content team? Um, are they spending all of their time building pillar pages around some keywords that, again, good, good stuff that has to happen? Or are you spinning up an episodic kind of podcast series like this? Are you listening to the changing conversations happening in your industry in 2023 around efficiency and all of the conversations that all of our customers are kind of struggling with and creating content to serve them? Um, are we thinking about our own customers and the way that we can leverage content to help, you know, kind of firm up a renewal or drive kind of more advocacy, whatever? I think content is, I've referred to it as the oxygen that makes the marketing kind of function even work. Like without content, everything just kind of stops. Um, so yeah, I think it's super important. I would just Probably say like it's a function that needs to be not redefined, but thought through in this new context of value creation beyond the SEO kind of past that we've came, we've sort of inherited in B2B. You know, we've, and a proof point of that is content almost always rolls into demand gen and it's great. I think I'm not proposing it should change, but that's sort of kind of the mindset. from a content perspective is it's a sub-function of digital marketing from an organic traffic generation perspective. And again, there's some truth there, but I think that companies that are able to take more of that editorial focus, focus on the customer, build an audience through their content, it's going to be probably the most valuable skillset for B2B marketers moving forward.

Where do you think it should align in the marketing department? Content?

I'm okay with it in demand. What I would, and kind of going back to the original kind of conversation is like this, everything we're talking about here can't be this like side project for, that's like a brand initiative around generating more awareness. Like a lot of folks do that and, you know, more power to them, typically larger scale companies who can afford the luxury of building, building out a brand and editorial team. But this has to be, in my opinion, integrated into our go-to-market framework. And through that demand typically carries the budget, carries the charter. to build an audience, to monetize that audience, turn it into pipeline. So I think I'm okay with it in demand, but I think we have to make sure that they have the charter of saying, hey, we're gonna take on more of this audience building, audience engagement motion as a function of driving growth for the company. And what's really exciting is a lot of companies are now making that transition.

Yeah, we think about it like growth. Like there's so many, There's so many loops that could be created as well, right? With content, having a community of 35,000. I'm like, okay, one, we need to have really good stuff out. 2, if we launch an article a day or whatever, a piece of content a day, 1 out of 20 needs to be us writing it. 19 out of 20 needs to be our community writing about it. Totally. And we need to be Critically curating.

Yeah.

What's good and try to be as objective as possible and thought leadership driven and thought leadership. I'm gonna try to define it because sometimes it's it's got to be an eye to the an eye to the future that isn't yet written. I think is is is a big part of thought leadership and like what we're talking about now is like like. What's been written is this. Yeah. An eye to a future that hasn't been written. Yeah. It aligns.

I think that's it. And I think that the strength of leveraging your audience to actually contribute content under your own sort of banner is so powerful for both parties, right? For the audience member, it's like, I, from a professional brand perspective, get to contribute my voice, my thought leadership, my point of view. of view through a channel like what you guys offer that can reach so many more people than if I just posted it to my own LinkedIn network. And just aligning my professional brand with you is actually quite meaningful for me now. For—

Well, that's another part of it, right? Like creating— so meaningful for you, but in our situation, creating what's meaningful for the writers that might be outside of that to encourage that and create that.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. What exactly, what else can we do to kind of serve the contributors, the writers, you know, as part of, and kind of incentivize in a transactional way, but to get them to want to write for us, um, and that sort of thing. Um, but, but the point I'm trying to make, it's also really good for you, um, as the brand, because it's not just us out here, like proclaiming like this future vision, you know, that you're referencing. But we've got 35,000 others that believe it too, and they're lending their voice to this movement. So this is a safe place. You know, this is a, this is for the community, by the community. We're leveraging the brand equity of 35,000 voices and, and years of experience to actually move this, this, this industry forward. Um, that's so much powerful than just us as a single brand out here, like publishing content every day.

I love how you said that. You know what word we're working our way into our mission? Because it has to align with everything.

Yeah.

The word that we're starting to work our way and, and we, it, it, uh, we just launched RevRoom and, and this is actually part of that mission, but I'm gonna bring it into RevGenius too, is the word collaborating.

Collaborating. Yeah.

Right. Do you think that content should feel like you're collaborating with the person that's consuming it in some capacity?

I think that makes it so much more real and approachable and honest. Um, you know, this idea of saying that we're all writing the pages of the history books for our industry, right? And, and as a, as a brand, what we can offer up here is resources for creation of that storytelling, distribution of that storytelling, um, and sort of that rallying call behind that mission that unites all of us. There's something really powerful about that. Um, but yeah, there's, I think by, by taking that collaborative approach, we're basically saying that we as a small company, whether a media company, a SaaS business, whatever, We, you know, are intellectually honest enough that we don't have all the answers, but we are committed to defining the answers and learning from all of the doers and all the people that are, um, are out here kind of, um, learning. So whether it's collaboration or I think you use the language curation, I think is, is another good word. Um, that's certainly, I think the, uh, you know, that's the path forward that I think is going to be stickier in the market than just a corporate brand with corporate blog pushing like company updates, you know, every couple days.

Oh my gosh, that the company— either the company does, or who raises their hand with no quality, with no curation. Yeah, does. And now I'm curious, you've, you've run marketing at some, man, like, like fundamentally space-shifting Companies, which is a big credit to you. Like,

what

were some of the lessons you learned that brought you here today, like with, with this content and, and, and own media push?

I think first was, and I hinted toward a little bit on the Gainsight story, but kind of bringing first principles into the marketing job. We, we were, I was on a call the other day where Justin Gray in Revenue Capital said that fundamentally marketing's job at the end of the day is to create value and to scale relationships. That's ultimately what we're And so with that as our true north, you know, rethinking some of the more traditional channels in the playbook that we think we have to do coming into a job, right? Oh, I've got to spin up my outbound SDR function. We got to do the SEO thing. We got to start hosting a bunch of webinars and there's some truth in there, but using that sort of true north to actually guide the decision-making and not resting on just the popular kind of things that people are saying to do. So, um, so I'd say one is first principle. Second is just the power of community and, and audience building and all of these things wrapped around an idea more than our products. I know it's kind of controversial. I think our products are extremely important. We wouldn't be a SaaS company if we didn't have product at the end of the day. Um, but our customers or our prospects or folks within our audience who are trying to get a job done. They're trying to get promoted. They're trying to solve some problems. They're trying to provide for their families or whatever. Everyone's got sort of their own, you know, mission that they're on personally. But your job is to deliver products that can accelerate that vision, but also content and events and community and this sort of sense of belonging to this kind of broader, broader mission as well that kind of helps people along in that journey. So investing in brand. I don't know what to refer to it as, thought leadership, owned media, like whatever, use, choose your buzzword of choice to help serve them on their journey through their careers. Last one's maybe more of a personal one, but like, I think just the relationships that you make along the way as an executive with, with the teams that you're building, the partners that you're making across the ecosystem with your leadership team, your board. I've found that that is like the number one currency for CMOs or any executives or anyone really in their career to, you know, to be successful is to maintain those relationships, build them, and pay it forward to others as you are sort of scaling your own career, knowing that someone took a chance on you along the way and being able to kind of, you know, do the same for others.

Thank you. So Audience Plus now?

Yeah.

What can you share about it? I know it's not officially launched. Like, how are you using all of that to go to market? We could talk about that to start and then peel back, you know, what you're doing to help with all this.

Yeah, so we're a SaaS company that's kind of operating in pseudo-stealth mode. I don't know what to call it anymore, but we haven't revealed too much yet about our products, but we've been in market for about 5 months building an audience around this idea of owned media. And we've been doing it by creating a ton of content. So we've got everything from like a newsletter to 4 different episodic kind of video franchises, a podcast, you know, written blog posts that come out every week and events, 2 events that we do every month. So we're producing a ton of content, trying to resource this industry around owned media. And the intention is for us to actually, you know, hopefully by this spring, be able to launch our product to the world. Um, and again, like I think a lot of things, it was a series of happy accidents that landed us on that strategy. It wasn't like from the beginning we said, hey, we're going to go build an audience and then launch a product into that audience. But the—

That's a big question because that's becoming like a hot—

It's a thing now.

It's a hot thought leadership piece, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the lesson to your point on there's like a 3 to 5 year lag in B2B land comes from, from e-commerce or from the D2C world. Like, I think of Amanda, formerly the founder of, or the founder of House of Wise. You know, she built this amazing community of people, of women, and then launched her products into that community and had tremendous success. We see that all over the industry now. And so I, again, you know, sample size of one, but what's interesting for B2B companies is if you can do the same, if you can have a compelling point of view, start producing content and build an audience around that, that idea. When you launch your product, A, the market is going to be a bit more appreciation or understanding of what you do and why it's important and why, how your products fit into that broader picture. Um, 2, you'll hopefully have a list of prospects that you can, you know, start marketing into, um, versus the standing start off of like a Product Hunt or whatever, which is fine, but, you know, I think a little different. Um, and 3rd, you'd already established some brand equity as a thought leader in that space before you've even turned the lights on to your sales or go-to-market promotions. So that's, I think, the powerful kind of opportunity with, I don't know, building in public is that, I think that's the phrase folks are using, but being out there, putting yourself out there, not being too worried about honestly like competitors or anything along those lines, building just authentic relationships at scale through your content and media. And then over time launching your product into that audience.

But you didn't put in category creation in there, but you're somebody that created, I don't know if it was you or who at Gainsight created the CS category. Like,

yeah,

I, you know, when we spoke prior, you had some controversial to some opinions on category creation, right?

Yeah. I wrote a book on category creation and I often talk about if I were to write a second book, it'll be called Don't Create a Category. Only because I think we've gotten so just like fascinated by category creation at the board level, at the investor level, you know, CEOs are pushing their CMOs, hey, we need to go create a category. And I think for many people that actually have to create a category, There's like no way out. Like you, the only way out is to create the category. Um, that's what we found at Gainsight. Uh, there we had a product that did not compete with Zendesk from a customer support perspective or Qualtrics from a customer experience perspective. There was a gap and there wasn't, the world had never seen technology to actually go solve that specific problem set. And so we had to evangelize the problem in order to get people to even understand the context for why this product should exist. Yeah. And that's where customer success was sort of born. Um, and again, at Gainsight, right? Like, or excuse me, at AudiencePlus, you know, owned media is something people know about. We've read about it in our textbooks. It's sort of in the back of our heads, but it hasn't been, at least as I've understood it in the last decade, like something people were talking about. So we're out here trying to talk about it and establish why this is a problem, um, with hopes of introducing a product that, that folks can use to solve that problem. So, um, I think that there's no other way through, right? There's no own media platform, you know, G2 Grid today or, uh, uh, Gartner Magic Quadrant or anything. Um, so that's where—

So you're foreshadowing category creation. Is that what you're saying?

I mean, we're doing, we're doing it, right? Like we're doing the thing. And I think, um, what's cool about it is I think the tactics are fairly similar in that, you know, Create content, build a community, people who believe, host the event, launch the podcast, like do the stuff around this idea. But I do think that companies that have a pretty clear path to disrupting an existing market shouldn't be tempted to go out and create a category. Just build an audience around your unique point of view. Use the same tactics that you would, but use it through the lens of like a disruption playbook. And you'll, you're probably fine. You don't need, like, it's a very hard, long road on category creation. It's not glamorous, um, despite what the headlines, you know, might, might read. So, um, that's where my point of view is changing. And it's not that, again, category creation is a bad thing. It's just a means of survival for some companies versus like a shiny object for others.

It's, it's kind of a way to explain, uh, what would be unexplainable is pretty much what you said. Like, Like, what is it? Is it Zendesk? No.

Yeah, exactly. Like, that's where the tension was in the early days.

Something, and I can't explain it. Okay, it's this.

Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, Christopher Lockhead and others have done such a good job kind of, you know, evangelizing this, but basically this idea that there's a problem that you're marketing. You're not just marketing your solutions, you're marketing the problem. That's an important element of category creation.

I love it. And soon the head of content's gonna be the head of owned media.

Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, I see it. I can totally see it for sure. Cool.

I mean, probably at your company to start, but then, you know, trickling out.

Yeah, there is a human component to audience building, category creation, whatever. Yeah, I think celebrating a persona, championing them, helping them you know, feel that there's a brand out there in the marketplace that's fighting for them, that's trying to advance their interests within and outside of their organization. So I do think uniquely category creation has a very, to use your language, human-to-human kind of emphasis that you don't always get in more of the product-led kind of motions.

One thing that I just picked up on that's like super intriguing about what you're doing you know, with the idea of like head of owned media versus head of content.

Yeah.

Um, depending if you speak to 5 different companies about what content owns, you're gonna have 5 different answers.

Yeah.

Like on some companies it'll be like, oh, the blog. Other companies, social will be included, right? Like, um, others, events will be included, but not social. And, and, uh, you, when you say the head of owned media,

Yeah.

You're simplifying it, aren't you? I think this is like super interesting.

And it quantifies it, which is really nice. Like I think owned content is sort of the means, right? Just like with owned media.

Sure.

Media is the means, but the sort of, what is it? The means to an end. The end is effectively building the audience. And so I think what you can say is you can hire a head of, you can take your content marketing leader, transform them into a head of owned media and say, we're gonna measure you on your ability to build an audience around customer success or whatever your topic is. Yeah. Right? Whatever your practice is. So that's quantifiable. It fits into the funnel. Like we can have good conversation about how all of that engagement then translates into pipeline creation. And that's, I think, a very easy way to take content marketers who traditionally struggle To prove the impact of their effort. Um, not because it can't be, but because we're inferring it using web analytics data, like 1,000 impressions of this blog post. And then I think there was some correlation on that week to traffic that might have led to this, and we're guessing. But I think if you can tie content marketing to a number around audience building, man, it's just so much easier to tell that impact story for that role.

And then, and then you get the, the word that we're all searching for that's a challenge is called alignment.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Much easier. Like, like, oh, uh, what do we need to hire an event person or whatever? Yeah, I, I, I got this. This is under me.

Totally, totally. Like, that's an audience build. Actually, events— I just wrote a post on this— like, one of the biggest, best ways to convert a, a group of maybe like readers or viewers or visitors into actually subscribers, events are such an important part of that. So yeah, I can totally see events fitting into the own media in a broader context for sure.

Now, how does all this turn to pipeline and to revenue?

Yeah, you know, this is so, this is the part that I think is so exciting is like, well, let me start with the bad part, bad news before I get to the exciting news. We've been measuring marketing through an MQL construct traditionally, right? MQL is a leading indicator to pipeline creation or pipeline coverage or whatever you're sort of measuring your team by. And MQL is one of the most like abused and manipulated metrics possible. Like you can change sort of some of the levers or whatever, um, and run a paid campaign, throw a bunch of dollars at AdWords, and then artificially pump up our MQL number. And we're out here high-fiving in marketing and sales is missing the quarter, uh, or whatever the case is. That's sort of the reality of where we've sort of come from. Something people aren't Willing to, I'm not willing, but not quick to talk about. But, you know, back to the alignment issue, creates a huge misalignment between marketing and sales. And at the end of the day, it's wasteful, you know, resources. So what a lot of companies are doing, which is really, really exciting, is they're shifting that metric to be less about this arbitrary MQL number and more about audience engagement. Thinking about, okay, so if we've built an owned audience, now we're creating content, not just to drive people in. But to serve the people that are in our community or in our audience today with thought leadership, again, through the lens of content marketing, podcasts, media events, live streams, webinars, whatever. And looking at the signal and the behavioral data around engagement as a leading indicator to pipeline creation. That's ultimately what we found is engagement is a much better metric than some arbitrary, like, firmographic fit type stuff that we've done. Traditionally. So, um, I, what's really exciting about having this through the owned lens is being able to tie that connection point from engagement to pipeline in a very linear way versus inferring it by using some of the, some of what we refer to as like organic, typically the top of funnel. Um, so that's, that's where I think this is exciting is, you know, especially for CFOs or marketing ops teams, maybe they're listening, thinking like, How are we gonna tell this story to finance? It's, well, we have all the data. We now will have all of the engagement data in one place that we can leverage to connect, to tell that kind of connection story to pipeline.

It's gonna simplify so much now. Dark social, dark funnel, all of these areas which are very real, very impactful, very potent. Heck, I run something in the dark, so to speak. Yeah.

Yeah.

Myself. And I'm very bullish on that. But how do we get attribution there? Like to all this? How do we, yeah, like how do we bring that into the owned world?

It's several ways. I mean, I think that first of all, it's having that game plan. Right. Saying like, hey, we're going to keep doing stuff on dark social. We think it's great. We believe in it. You know, maybe we're subscribing to, you know, Refined Labs, you know, self-reported attribution thing. Like there's all, you know, there's a bunch of ways to sort of do that. But we're going to commit to producing a ton of content on TikTok and YouTube and all of these things. They're dark because they're rented and we don't have any access to if they're working. But we know inherently that This is generating buzz for the brand, affiliation with the brand, and indirectly a connection point to our services ultimately marketed on our website. So as folks are basically making that bridge from the brand on social, let's say, to the website, we have to give them a compelling event, a compelling reason to reveal themselves, to subscribe.

Mm-hmm.

Now the way we've done that traditionally in B2B is we give them 3 options, talk to sales, get a demo, or start using the product. And they may not—

Or sign up for a newsletter, maybe.

Maybe, but show me where on the website that is. It's either in the footer tucked away or maybe on your blog, 3 clicks away. Like it, it's nowhere near like the footer typically, right? For some companies, for a lot of companies, it's like nowhere to be found. And I think the point that I'm trying to draw here is when we're only giving folks a commercial call to action, even though they're not in market to buy, but they are following you on dark social and on social or whatever, and they're interested, we're seeing pretty low conversion rates from that, frankly. I think the average web conversion rate for SaaS companies is like 1.1%. Now, if you look at consumer media companies who are leading with subscription, they're leading with value, they're leading with sort of like, hey, if you want to learn more about this topic, or if you want to engage and belong to this movement that we're creating, subscribe now. It's a 10% conversion rate. So they're literally seeing a 10x improvement on web conversions for people that are hand raising saying, look, I'm not ready to buy yet, but I want to hear more from you as a brand. And I'm willing to give you my email address or to reveal myself in order to do that. So I'm not suggesting we should toss all of our, uh, You know, commercial CTAs away, but I think we need to build like a compelling value proposition to subscribe, you know, access to our newsletter, exclusive content just for our subscribers. I don't know, events monthly that are only for our subscriber base, merch. I don't know, it sounds kind of silly, but I think, you know, we're all human beings kind of, you know, going to work and being able to kind of help foster this sense of belonging is a powerful one. So I think that's really what it comes down to. deeply believe in the power of dark social and all these things, but you gotta wanna shine a light on it somewhere in the funnel, or you're a creator, you're not a SaaS business at the end of the day. And we need to make sure that we're monetizing to the extent that

we can. I love that. Having a CTA that's like, join my newsletter or be a part of my community or something that's not talk to sales.

Yeah.

get pricing or something like that is an easy way to get people to understand who's interested and know when and know how to get in touch with them and keep in touch.

Now we're bouncing 98 to 99% of all of our web traffic today. Like, why not give them something else to really go and get warmed up around our content? And then when they're ready to buy, you know, the bet is they're gonna think about And they're gonna think about your brand after having invested and creating that value with them.

I like that. Now the future, like what excites you the most about the future of Own3d and like what you're building towards?

You know, I think what excites me the most is, you know, asking myself, why do we go to work as marketers all day? You know, especially in the B2B context, 'cause I think all of us in B2B land, we look to your, you know, your historical past with e-commerce. Yeah, we look to consumer marketing as like the dream, like, you know, Airbnb going off and creating these campaigns. Like, that's so fulfilling.

By the way, my partner was the creative director of Airbnb Magazine under— Amazing. When they launched that and they pulled that back 'cause of cost, but she like literally was part of that brand push. I held that back until now.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

That's incredible, man. Airbnb to me is like the model. They're, they're like the, just so, like, you know, I don't know what the word is, like the human, human kind of focus, the creativity, the, you know, it's really, really, um, inspiring. But as we look kind of with inspiration towards those brands, we then go to work, put our B2B hat on and we're like slinging white papers and cold outbound to try to get people to like buy our thing. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and there's this disconnection between, I think our heart as marketers, you know, in terms of wanting to be creative, wanting to create value, make them, you know, leave a dent in the universe from a, from a, you know, some type of like perspective, build relationships and scale that relationship building through affinity to the brand, all those sort of good things that unfortunately within the B2B context has historically been pinned as like the arts and crafts side of marketing. Like, hey, we're here to drive growth and demand and blah, blah, blah. You can, Put like 5% of the budget towards that stuff and maybe hire like a junior marketer to do it. But we're focused on this side of the house. And what I love about owned is it's, it's sort of the convergence of these 2 things. It's saying, hey, we can actually, you know, express our creativity as a means of building an audience, starting a movement behind our, our point of view. And through that fundamentally drive growth in a much more sustainable way than we've been doing traditionally with some of the older tactics. Yeah. So that's what excites me. It's, it's not only like the right business strategy, but it's like, you know, unleashing, I think, the potential for, for marketing in general and kind of, I think, breathing new life into our practice, um, which is gonna just so much fun to, to, to watch.

Anthony, our time is up for today. Uh, I, I, I look forward to having you back on after the official launch. Nice. Because I think there's gonna be so much more learnings to share. Totally. Totally. Thank you so much for your time and I really appreciate it.

Likewise, man. Thanks for having me on. That was fun.

How could people get in touch with you and learn more about AudiencePlus?

Yeah, best place is audienceplus.com. You know, we have our own kind of, I mentioned some of the things that we do, but you can subscribe there for free and kind of learn more about own media and we're kind of comparing our notes and maybe it's just some of our earlier conversation. You know, we've got, you know, voices in our community that are helping kind of paint this picture for the rest of us. Um, and I'm on LinkedIn and I think that and Twitter and all the other places. So, um, definitely would love to connect with folks.

Anthony, it's been great learning from you. This has been exceptional.

Likewise. Thank you.

And for everyone listening, thank you for, for, for listening. Uh, this has been another episode of Revenue Today. If you learned something or, or you had some fun here, share it. Come back next week. We'll see you then. Thank you again, everybody. Thank you, friends, for joining me. That was another Great episode of Revenue Today. If you're looking to listen to more episodes or for the show notes, go to revgenius.com. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, it was awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback or ideas for future podcasts in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us. It's revgenius.com. It's free and it's fast to join, and really for all levels of revenue professionals. For senior leaders. We just launched a private community just for you called RevRoom. We know it gets lonely out there, and we've built a tight-knit group of senior leaders collaborating on the future of B2B go-to-market. Looking forward to seeing you all there.