Blind Faith

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Hello there!

I probably don’t need to point this out to you, partly because I keep banging on about it here and on the podcast, but B2B marketing is undergoing a significant transformation driven by changes in technology and buyer behavior.

You know, the changes to social media algorithm shifts, zero-click search results, Apple's email privacy updates, voice search, increased privacy concerns, and the increasing use of ChatGPT for research are all chipping away at the new (now old) rules of digital marketing.

It’s not just technology changes, but research (such as this from 6Sense) suggests that buyers are often well along in their decision-making process before they show up in our marketing web. And, of course, in B2B, you may have an addressable audience, but only a small proportion are in market at any one time (as low as 5% according to LinkedIn).

In summary - it’s getting increasingly dark out there; hence my song and email title pick for this week; Blind Faith by Chase and Status.

Even if you don't like British dance music, the performance I’ve picked in the video below will definitely get your marketing mojo working. I can say this from experience: I have started running again, and Spotify suggested I drop this into my running playlist.

So, with the title of Blind Faith and the topic of marketing, you are probably expecting me to trot out the old Wannamaker quote

“I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half.”

Errr….

Maybe…..

As, right now, we spend an awful lot of our B2B marketing resources on the small slither of the 5% of buyers that we can see, address, send personalised nurture messages to and all the B2B digital marketing things.

But to address the 95%, the potential future buyers, requires us to grope around a bit in the dark. Dark not just because these folks aren’t in our fabled funnel, but dark because it seems, as I mentioned earlier, big tech, their algorithms, and privacy are keeping things dim.

In the last newsletter I wrote about how we needed to overcome our fear of the monster that is brand marketing in order to reach that 95%. This week I think content marketing is key to shining a light into the darkness, and I wrote about this on CMSWire.

I suspect that, as many of you are in the US, you are not getting your marketing mojo working today. I hope you are enjoying the holiday, but wherever you are reading this, have a great week.

And thanks for reading this far!

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Say hello, reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn or my personal website.

On the Podcast

Street Knowledge

From around the Rockstar CMO community and stuff I like :-)

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

I can feel my marketing mojo wanting to run…