Marketing Spark (The B2B SaaS Marketing Podcast)

In an ultra-competitive marketplace, brand differentiation can be the difference between attracting customers and going out of business. In this episode of Marketing Spark, Peep Laja talks about why brand differentiation matters and why companies are afraid to stand apart from the crowd. He also looks at the growing attraction of outsourcing marketing, something Peep describes as "vendor management". 

Sadly, most virtual events are terrible. For whatever reason, virtual events have been unable to replicate in-person conferences, which likely won't happen for another six to 12 months, conservatively speaking. But Narrative Science has cracked the nut. Its most recent virtual event attracted 3,000 (yes, 3,000 registrations). In this Marketing Spark episode, Cassidy Shield, Narrative Science's VP, Marketing, talks about how the company has approached virtual events and made them a core part of its marketing activities.  

In an age of video and photos, words don't get the respect they deserve. Words aren't sexy or glitzy.  But they do matter. Words provide the information, the context, and the guidance for customers to take action. In this episode, I talk with Eden Bidani, a conversion copywriter for SaaS, tech, and direct to consumer brands. One of the things that struck me is Eden's suggestion that the best copy takes time to create and a lot of the time is not writing, but research. 

Every company (well, most companies) wants to tell stories that engage, entertain, educate, and encourage. It's what drives and differentiates their marketing and sales. But developing and delivering stories that make an impact is a challenge. In this episode of Marketing Spark, Jordan Bower and I take an in-depth look at how companies can approach storytelling and why storytelling has everything to do with the customers and the experiences that a product or brand delivers.

You hear a lot of talk about category creation and category design. The terms are often intermingled. In this episode of Marketing Spark, John Rougeux goes into depth about what category design involves and the features it delivers to companies looking to differentiate what they do to drive marketing and sales. Rougeux, VP, Marketing Strategy at BombBomb, provides first-hand insight into how to implement a category design process and, as important, how to get key stakeholders on board. BombBomb is video email platform for medium and large enterprise companies.

Google's algorithm changes on a regular basis, which keeps marketers on their toes and SEO experts happily employed. On this episode of the Marketing Spark podcast, Huckabuy's Geoff Atkinson talks about the impact that Google's next major update, Page Experience, will have on content marketing and SEO.  On the podcast, Geoff and I talked about how B2B companies need to look beyond keyword optimization to drive SEO. They need to focus on technical elements such as dynamic rendering, page speed, and structured data. We also talked about why many companies are wasting time and money on content marketing.

While marketers mostly focus their efforts on attracting prospects, it's also crucial to connect with customers (aka the people paying for your product!). In this episode, Amrita Gurney, VP, Marketing & Community with CrowdRiff, talks about the company has heavily focused on engaging and nurturing its customers over the past six months. Amrita has great insight on best practices to develop a vibrant and active community, as well as thoughts on whether to use a platform.

As more B2B companies embrace content marketing, here's the question: what's more important: quality or quantity content. In other words: is less more or is more more? Dan Sanchez firmly falls into the quantity content camp. He believes that marketing success is driven by brands willing to create lots of content as way to perfect production. Dan also talked about the importance of brand positioning as a pillar for marketing success, and how podcasts are one of the best ways to connect with prospects.

Creating valuable,and interesting content is a huge challenge for B2B companies. There is so much competition that standing out is really difficult. Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO with Casted, says that podcasts are the way that B2B companies can create content that resonates. Podcasts offer companies the ability to connect with experts (customers, employees, analysts, media, investors) to have conversations that deliver amazing insight and information.  These conversations can, of course, be turned into podcasts. But, as important, they offer great content for blog posts, eBooks, social media, and sales collateral. Casted is a SaaS service that allows companies to manage, activate, and measure podcasts from end-to-end while engaging their audience,s increasing sales alignment, and quantifying podcast value with metrics that matter.

Why do so many companies take their customers for granted?  They invest so much time and money to acquire new customers but not nearly enough to keep them happy and loyal? In this episode of the Marketing Spark podcast, Jack Fussell talks about why knowing your customers and communicating with them is so important. "We should be customer-centric all the time. We should have in-depth insight into what our customers want, what their fears are, their aspirations, and their  goals." Jack, the managing partner with Campfire Social and a fractional CMO, also talks about the importance of branding at a time when many companies sound and look the same, as well as the rise of fractional C-suite executives.