Heroes

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

I’ve gone solo a couple of times on my podcast recently, with my regular collaborator Jeff Clark on extended holidays, and I got some good feedback when I did the first one, and trust me you don’t get a lot of feedback as a podcaster, you really are shouting into the void, so when you do, you cling onto it! So, I did another one and I thought I’d expand on the topic a bit here.

The topic I picked was the dark funnel, how B2B buyers are making their decisions based on their own research, before they show up on our marketing automation radar, they have a short list, and influencing that buyer once they’ve made contact with our sales team is more difficult.

I shared a few things that B2B marketers can do to influence the buyer at this stage, this is where your brand and your content marketing are doing their work, and one of the things I talked about was cultivating internal thought leaders and influencers.

Or, for the purposes of this newsletter our heroes.

Normally I support this sort of hypothesis with some proof, and I started down a rabbit hole of finding research that supports the fact the buyers want to engage with content from people, rather than companies. But you only need to spend 2 minutes reflecting on your own use of LinkedIn or if you’ve ever managed a company page to know that the algorithms favor content that gets engagement, and it’s not going to be a company post about a press release, it’ll be a human story.

Investing resources into building internal thought leaders is clearly a good thing and needs to be approached in a structured way, like a mini-content marketing project, in finding these voices, understanding what content is appropriate for their audience in their voice, and setting a meaningful goal or metrics, that in my world means asking does it create ART, Awareness, Revenue or Trust?

Failure to have an idea of why you are doing it, ends up with people measuring success by rudimentary metrics like how often they post on LinkedIn and vanity metrics of views, rather than whether it has helped brand penetration into the potential buying community.

On the topic of LinkedIn, there is a lot of talk about employees having almost an obligation to be cheerleaders for their company's product on that platform. I’m a fan of employee engagement, especially when it helps with hiring and retention, but to create awareness and demand within a buyer community, I am not so sure it’s always appropriate.

For example, if my next marketing gig were working for an industrial aeronautical widget manufacturer, my current network is of no value to this company. Me banging on about industrial aeronautical widgets is just going to piss off my network and won’t reach the buyers of these widgets.

Of course, I could nurture or find an audience that buys industrial aeronautical widgets, but that would be equally ineffective as I, a marketer, would not have the engineering gravitas to be credible on the topic of the efficacy of these widgets. To build brand trust, I presume that buyers of aeronautical widgets (if there is such a thing) would want to hear from one of our engineers.

But on the other hand, if I am working for a MarTech vendor my network is more useful and relevant. It would be the same if you sell a cool doohickey (that’s no doubt AI powered) that helps developers, having your developers talk about its virtues, is great.

Maybe in your category, the marketers or developers are not the right people, but whatever business you are in, there will almost certainly be someone who has the right profile and audience (or the potential for you to grow the right audience) to develop as an internal influencer, credible evangelist, and thought leader.

And of course, in B2B we are talking about buying groups, so when we focus our self-made influencers on an audience, they will be relevant to different personas and needs.

Maybe it’s the visionary founder, who feels solving this business problem is a cause, and that resonates with the senior sponsor and builds trust.

Or a Chief Engineer, who can talk about the challenge of solving the problem and the technical rigor that went into the product that adds credibility to the idea that buying is better than building for the practitioners currently solving the problem.

Or a senior person in the customer care team, a former practitioner, or that former analyst you’ve hired that can talk about business problem from the trenches, who brings to life the change your solution will bring, that it’s not so hard, that wins the battle with “do nothing” which as we all know is the #1 competitor in B2B procurement.

Or… you get the idea, I could go on and probably already have :-)

As I say, this nurturing of our internal thought leaders needs to be guided by our central content marketing strategy and is a mini-content marketing project in itself, which includes our ICP, the buyers, their needs, our messaging mapped against them, and how this spokesperson can help tell that story.

The quid pro quo here is that as a marketing team, investing in growing someone’s personal brand, you are adding value to the company's marketing strategy and in return you are adding value to them as an individual, giving them greater visibility and credibility.

The next obvious question is, what if they leave? You might have built a monster who chooses to escape the castle and terrorize the villagers, well, we need to be prepared for that with a panel of great thought leaders and err, pitchforks.

You need to think of influencers and their audience, internal or otherwise, as “rented land”, a channel you are utilizing to promote a message, like any other marketing platform and audience that you don’t own, like social media. And you need to have a plan or when that channel is no longer available.

But, you need to find your heroes, hence the subject line of this newsletter, as is the policy around here, it comes from a song title. Now you may be thinking David Bowie, but I am going with something slightly more contemporary (1997) and dancey with Heroes by Roni Size (link below).

That’s The Beat for this week, a bit of a longer one than usual, so thanks for reading this far!

Cheers!

Ian

—

Ian Truscott | Managing Partner | Velocity B

What caught my eye on the topic and a bit more from me…

Maybe you were expecting Bowie, the obvious Heroes choice, but this will get that marketing mojo working.