Actually,

it's amusing because I often find people in my conversations yearning for a definitive winner, you know, in the inbound versus outbound marketing duel. Now, reality, I agree with you is that both methodologies have their own merits. Inbound excels at long-term nurturing and building trust. Outbound can yield swift results when the targeting is highly effective and the strategy is correct. Now, marketers love new buzzwords. So now there's this new terminology called all bound, which essentially represents a hybrid approach. So what's your take on this terminology? And do you think this terminology makes any sense? I

do. In fact, we had someone on my podcast recently, actually, to talk about a similar kind of term. And I'm all for it, really. It's like I said, I mean, often, us marketers go wrong is we we try to spread ourselves too thin especially in the tech world like marketing teams are often quite small unless we get to kind of mid-market and enterprise level companies we're kind of tons of marketers on the team but then of course there's a lot more red tape i'm used to working with kind of small marketing teams of two three similar well they've got to get super scrappy so sometimes it is an easy mistake to spread yourself too thin in the sense that you're trying to do all these channels and as a result the amount of content that you put out is perhaps limited on each channel and maybe not the best quality not really resonating with your target clients aka the folks you want to build trust in you and buy your stuff so yeah i'm very much of an all bound but a lot of it comes back to the fundamentals so doing prospect doing customer research really taking the time to understand where they get their trusted information and those instant no-brainer channels so are your prospects going to google search are they hanging out on linkedin are they at trade events do they maybe hang out in Slack communities or go somewhere else? Once you can get those three, four main pillars and kind of start working off that, if you're, yes, by all means, if you're nailing those three or four fundamental channels that your prospects are really receptive to and that they trust, brilliant. for go for all bound start firing up an outbound campaign start doing extra additional channels but i think all bounds great in theory by all means try and be everywhere that your prospects are but at the same time be realistic but if you're trying to do all these channels and spread yourself or your team super thin you've got to be a bit mindful that you're probably not going to have the impact that you might want so it's getting the best of both worlds really true

um so you know while i was reading up and researching for our conversation today i even came across the data that said you know there's a recent hubspot study that revealed the companies employing all-bound marketing strategies witness of 20 uptick in lead conversion rates compared to those that just rely on one method. Now, of course, it has too many riders attached. And like you said, it shouldn't be that you, you know, basically just exhaust all your resources and you're not doing one thing correctly. But the essence of all-bound, of course, is to draw in prospects with valuable content while simultaneously being proactive in reaching out to decision makers. It's about fostering relationships, creating comprehensive, engaging experience for your target audience. So very much in line with what you just said. Now it's time for us to just dive into the specifics. And Dene, of course, we firmly believe in the effectiveness of time tested B2B marketing strategies. What are some of your tried and tested true tactics that you definitely rely on when it comes to the B2B side of things?

yeah i mean i can i can share what we do ourselves and share what we're doing for some clients and share personally what i do for for my brand breaking b2b so i i'm naturally going to be biased as as i provide seo to b2b and sas companies so seo is is kind of our main one when it comes tactically speaking why well I suppose because I've been messing around with websites and organic search for 11, 12, maybe in 13 years. It's just what I know. And I've been through the pain myself as a solo founder. I've been through the pain of dealing with tons of terrible leads that come, whether that's from my own self-generation, whether that's from marketing, that's from ads and I've been through the time wasting of kind of cooling up these leads or scheduling zooms with these leads and then just not being fruitful or resulting in a solid sales conversation so having been through the hardships I've learned kind of what works and what doesn't when it comes to driving inbound opportunities so I mean SEO is great but it's got to have a targeted approach, aka so many SEO mistakes perhaps we can chat about in a bit where kind of folks go for two top funnel terms or two broad terms. And as a result, they're driving traffic to their website, but it's not targeted. So it's not niche enough to the actual kind of target prospects they actually want to engage with, aka the people that have the problem they fix, appreciate the impact of not fixing it and actually have the cash and desire to invest in the offer. So getting really specific with that with your SEO campaign is something that a lot neglect. So that's something we do kind of make sure we're drilling down to the folks that are most likely to have an appetite for our offerings. that's a big part of our strategy and likewise for clients and then i suppose the website itself is the foundation of everything so actually having a website that's truly your best salesperson and the fact and the fact that it's it's built on solid customer research so a big thing when it comes to B2B websites is so many teams actually neglect to do prospect or customer research. So basically guessing what they think is going to look good or sound good or resonate with target clients, especially on messaging and copy for their website homepage. So, I mean, I don't know about yourself, Shuba, but how many times have I been on perhaps a technology website or a SaaS website and I've read their headline and it's been something like, we're an all-in revenue generating 100x platform for wizardry to turbo drive your revenues today. And I've read their headline and I've scrolled down, probably past the hero area, scrolled down two-thirds down their homepage and I'm still not actually sure what they do,

how

it's going to help me or the problem that they're going to solve for me. And if I'm finding them perhaps for an ad or for a referral or through social, wherever I stumble upon them and I'm unclear as to what they do, I'd imagine a lot of their target prospects are the same. So I'm just going to bounce off and head to a competitor that's a lot clearer and crisper with their messaging and really shares what they do. So having a website that kind of attracts, resonates, clearly shares what you do, why you problem you solve, shares kind of proof of results, pricing. Ideally, you're offering action. It's like a live demo or at least screenshots or walk through videos or similar answers common questions shares proof of impact that you've had for clients and makes it super easy for folks to book schedule that time with a sales expert or an engineer through some kind of calendar tool it's just just table stakes B2B. Yeah, still many B2B folks just kind of work their website off guesswork or what the exec team thinks looks good or maybe what their VCs are telling them to do from the funding side. So as a result, it's just not resonating properly with prospects. And when you don't resonate with kind of problems, desires, goals, motivations of target clients, you just ain't going to convert at the levels you want to be converting at um so those two fundamental ones and then i suppose a big one for for myself and breaking b2b is linkedin so i'm i was waiting for

that i'm

posting all kinds of crazy stuff on linkedin so again i've got the freedom to do this being a founder. So I'll post anything from gits to long form posts to how to's. But a lot of my strategy on LinkedIn these days is grab someone's attention first. So in this case, it might be making myself into a common meme, sticking my head on there. And then maybe it's me digging out a grave and then people watching me saying SEO is dead. And then it's me with a shovel saying, this is me grabbing inbound leads for my clients, like shoveling out. It's something stupid that catches the attention. But then I'll mix that with like a long form text post where I'll break down like the exact strategies we're using for clients step by step to kind of rank on Google and build pages that that convert um or I do kind of experiments as well on LinkedIn so some of our recent series have been things like asking the public b2b marketing questions where I just grab my portable microphone go out with my videographer friend and go to local towns and cities and ask folks like what do you think SEO is or what do you think an mql is or what is the point of linkedin just to to get funny funny reactions i've seen similar in b2c and i thought it'd be quite fun to try and b2b um yeah and aside from that most of my time on linkedin content is either kind of standing out doing something a bit different and then also educating of course sharing the strategies we use for for clients so builds a bit of trust builds a bit of proof um so those are three core fundamental channels but then i also have as you touched on the podcast breaking b2b right

so

a bit like this i think we're roughly 403 episodes and four years in, so I've been doing it a little while, and that is a solid way to get pillar content in the sense that each week I ever do a guest episode every Monday. So I'll interview a bit like this, a marketing leader, and I'll just get them to deep dive into one strategy that's working really well for them, and then we'll break that down for the audience step by step with actionable tips. Or I'll do a solo episode. And that could be a weird SEO strategy. It could be one of the experiments I'm running at Breaking B2B and how that fared, whether it was good, whether it was bad, whether it was messy, cold calling, cold email, weird SEO ranking strategy, whatever. And that's the format, really. And that gives us a long format episode every Monday that we put out. And then I'll also, like yourself, snip that up into video clips and post it on the website and post it on LinkedIn and such. So those are the core ones. But then I also run experiments. So like I was saying earlier, we'll trial out a bit unusual cold email campaigns. We've tried cold call campaigns. We do some of the funny and unusual video series. And I suppose one of the other fundamentals is we do quite a lot of partnerships. Partnerships in the sense that this is really good for any B2B company, finding folks that are going after the same ICP, the same adult client profile as you, but in non-competitive industries. So for example, I partner with a company called Impactable. You might have seen the founder, Justin Rowe, talking about LinkedIn ads on LinkedIn. And essentially, anytime someone needs LinkedIn ads, I'll send them their way. And anytime someone needs SEO, they'll send them my way. But it's not just for passing business each way we also create content together we've built backlinks together we've built articles on each other's websites we've created podcasts and stuff so these kind of relationships are a really good way to kind of strike up conversations with with folks that are going after similar clients send business each way each other's way build content together and also get some seo bang for buck by kind of building links building decent media and all that good stuff so i'll take a breath there as i know i've shared a few but i'm happy to go deeper on any of those uh

that was that was very very insightful the good part is that you've mostly kind of broken it down each but we'll deep dive a little more into each of these especially the website and the seo piece as we go along i think one of the key strategies that we at dane we also employ is um uh you know merging data driven insights with highly targeted messaging so when you talk about email messaging or uh you know even linkedin outreach and stuff eventually it's just not merely just sending out content or generating content and pushing it out it's about ensuring that these touch points reach the right audience at the right moment that moment is also very important which pretty much is what the whole sales intelligence piece or the data intelligence is what throws it to you. And, you know, when it comes to understanding needs, a website often serves as the first impression a prospect has with your company. Now, Sam, you're, of course, known for crafting high conversion websites. And so based on your experience, what are some of the major pitfalls marketers encounter when they're designing the websites? Pretty

much the opposite of what I said just now. So, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's ego and guesswork. Those are probably the two killers of websites and also pleasing the

management.

exactly so and that could be higher up that could be exec ego or it could be funding vcs ego or whatever it may be and and that can be good for certain levels and that sometimes in certain businesses you have to play by those rules but the problem is when a target client might land on your website and might read something like we've just raised 100 million found 100 million round funding or we're the number one tool in this category for doing this we're the best ever or something like that it's like best to who like there's so many technology b2b websites in general on the headline that just says we're the best like where's the proof why should i believe you like why are you um and that that's what happens often as a result as b2b execs or similar kind of a going building out their content their messaging strategy based on kind of their own personal beliefs or what they think is going to be look good sound good look cool when as i touched on a little bit earlier, the crux and the fundamentals of where websites go wrong is they just completely neglect customer research or they did it, but it's about five, 10 years out of date. And there's a really useful exercise that I'd encourage folks to do if you've got access to it. And that is to grab ideally five to 10, but I think the sweet spot's about eight of recently won customers. So recently onboarded clients. And the reason you want recently won ones is they're going to have less of a bias to you. Because if you interview kind of established customers, they're going to love you. They're not going to say anything wrong. And the reason you want recently won clients is so you can, this is good, not just for the website but for general b2b marketing and messaging know-how is you can ask them questions like understanding the problem they're facing like what what was the problem or frustration that you you were facing that made you realize that you had to do something about it and once you once you lean into that you could say well what was the tipping point where that that issue was getting so annoying that you then realized that you had to actually do something about it now and let's let's pretend maybe you're a crm software provider maybe it was we're doing stuff manually in spreadsheets and we're trying to input all the data from our finance team to our sales team and we're burning like two hours every day and as a result staff started to churn because they got so frustrated with this process and they started to move over to competitors not only that but they were losing time we were losing cash flow because we couldn't process invoices quick enough and all this kind of stuff and once you kind of learn that and you learn common problems that are fluent throughout prospects you can start to dive into what's actually useful for your messaging not just for your website but